Upon assuming the throne, Queen Elizabeth I restored England to Protestantism. This broke with the policy of her predecessor and half-sister, Queen Mary I, a Catholic monarch who ruthlessly tried to eliminate Protestantism from English society. Elizabeth undertook her own campaign to suppress Catholicism in England, although hers was more moderate and less bloody than the one enacted by Mary. In fact, Elizabeth’s religious moderateness earned her the ire of some of the more radical Protestants, who were convinced that her reforms were inadequate for cleansing English society of what they saw as the vestiges of Catholicism. In reality, Elizabeth wasn’t interested in catering to either Protestantism or Catholicism, the zeal of both having the potential to disrupt the kind of law and order she was trying to establish. Her religious policies, such as the Act of Supremacy and the Act of Uniformity, went a lot further to consolidate the power of the church under her and to regularize the practice of the faith.
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