486 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [en. 45. learned or wiser, yet I assure you, none more careful over you ; and therefore henceforth, whether I live to see the like assembly or no, or whoever it be, yet beware how you prove your prince's patience as you have now done mine. 1 And now to conclude all this ; notwithstanding, not meaning to make a Lent of Christmas, the most part of you may assure yourselves that you depart in your prince's grace. 1 My Lord Keeper, you will do as I bid you.' Again Bacon rose and in a loud voice said, ' The Queen's Majesty doth dissolve this Parliament. Let every man depart at his pleasure.' Elizabeth swept away in the gloom, passed to her barge, and returned to the palace. The Lords and Com- mons scattered through the English counties, and five years went by before another Parliament met again at Westminster in a changed world. On that evening the immediate prospect before Eng- land was the Queen's marriage with an Austrian Catholic prince, the recognition more or less distant of the Ca- tholic Mary Stuart as heir-presumptive, the establish- ment with the support and sanction of the Catholic powers of some moderate form of Government, under which the Catholic worship would be first tolerated and then creep on towards ascendency. It might have ended, had Elizabeth been strong enough, in broad in- tellectual freedom ; more likely it would have ended in the reappearance of the Marian fanaticism, to be en- countered by passions as fierce and irrational as itself;
