For the first twenty years of her reign mass was celebrated in private houses with impunity, though to celebrate it was against the law.

No part of her policy is more odious to modern notions of tolerance and enlightenment than prohibition of the mass.

Nothing shows more clearly the importance of understanding the mental atmosphere of a past age before we attempt to judge those who lived in it.

Even Oliver Cromwell, fifty years after Elizabeth's death, declared that he would not tolerate the mass, and in general principles of religious freedom he was far ahead of his age.

Cromwell no doubt, unlike Elizabeth, was a Protestant in the religious sense.