But she was not a private individual.

She was an English sovereign, and the keynote of all her subtle, intricate, tortuous policy was the resolute determination, from which she never flinched, that England should be independent, spiritually as well as politically independent, of a foreign yoke.
Her connection with the Protestants was political, not theological, for doctrinally she was farther from Geneva than from Rome.

Her own Bishops she despised, not unjustly, as time-servers, calling them "doctors," not prelates.

Although she did not really believe that any human person, or any human formula, was required between the Almighty and His creatures, she preferred the mass and the breviary to the Book of Common Prayer.

The Inquisition was the one part of the Catholic system which she really abhorred.