It was with the Lollards, however, that the spiritual awakening began and was continued until its effects, when they came, were marked by surprising maturity and suddenness.  Because the Lollards were not a clearly defined sect, it was hard to trace the manifold ramifications of their work.  During the terrible Wars of the Roses, contemporary chroniclers had little or nothing to say about the labours of these humble men, which seemed of less importance than now, when we read them in the light of their world-wide results.  From this silence some modern historians have carelessly inferred that the nascent Protestantism of the Lollards had been extinguished by persecution under the Lancastrian kings, and was in nowise continuous with modern English Protestantism.  Nothing could be more erroneous.  The extent to which the Lollard leaven had permeated all classes of English society was first clearly revealed when Henry viii. made his domestic affairs the occasion for a revolt against the Papacy.  Despot and brute as he was in many ways, Henry had some characteristics which enabled him to get on well with his people.  He not only represented the sentiment of national independence, but he had a truly English reverence for the forms of law.  In his worst acts he relied upon the support of his Parliament, which he might in various ways cajole or pack, but could not really enslave.  In his quarrel with Rome he could have achieved but little, had he not happened to strike a chord of feeling to which the English people, trained by this slow and subtle work of the Lollards, responded quickly and with a vehemence upon which he had not reckoned.  As if by magic, the fabric of Romanism was broken to pieces in England, monasteries were suppressed and their abbots hanged, the authority of the Pope was swept away, and there was no powerful party, like that of the Guises in France to make such sweeping measures the occasion for civil war.  The whole secret of Henry’s swift success lay in the fact that the English people were already more than half Protestant in temper, and needed only an occasion for declaring themselves.  Hence, as soon as Catholic Henry died, his youthful son found himself seated on the throne of a Protestant nation.  The terrible but feeble persecution which followed under Mary did much to strengthen the extreme Protestant sentiment by allying it with the outraged feeling of national independence.  The bloody work of the grand-daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the doting wife of Philip ii., was rightly felt to be Spanish work; and never, perhaps, did England feel such a sense of relief as on the auspicious day which welcomed to the throne the great Elizabeth, an Englishwoman in every fibre, and whose mother withal was the daughter of a plain country gentleman.  But the Marian persecution not only increased the strength of the extreme Protestant sentiment, but indirectly it supplied it with that Calvinistic theology which was to make it indomitable.