When Henry VIII's Catholic daughter, 

Mary I, succeeded to the throne in 1553, her hopes for a

revival of English religious life proved a failure. Westminster Abbey, which had been retained as a
cathedral, reverted to being a monastery; while the communities of the Bridgettine nuns and of the
Observant Franciscans, which had gone into exile in the reign of Henry VIII, were able to return to
their former houses at Syon and Greenwich respectively. A small group of fifteen surviving
Carthusians was re-established in their old house at Sheen, as also were eight Dominican
canonesses in Dartford. A house of Dominican friars was established at Smithfield, but this was only
possible through importing professed religious from Holland and Spain, and Mary's hopes of further
refoundations foundered, as she found it very difficult to persuade former monks and nuns to resume
the religious life; consequently schemes for restoring the abbeys at Glastonbury and St Albans failed
for lack of volunteers. All the refounded houses were in properties that had remained in Crown
possession; but, in spite of much prompting, none of Mary's lay supporters would co-operate in
returning their holdings of monastic lands to religious use; while the lay lords in Parliament proved
unremittingly hostile, as a revival of the "mitred" abbeys would have returned the House of Lords to
having an ecclesiastical majority. Moreover, there remained a widespread suspicion that the return
of religious communities to their former premises might call into question the legal title of lay
purchasers of monastic land, and accordingly all Mary's foundations were technically new
communities in law. In 1554 Cardinal Pole, the papal legate, negotiated a papal
dispensation allowing the new owners to retain the former monastic lands, and in return Parliament
enacted the heresy laws in January 1555.[31] When Mary died in 1558 and was succeeded by her
half-sister, Elizabeth I, five of the six revived communities left again to exile in continental Europe.
An Act of Elizabeth's first parliament dissolved the refounded houses. But although Elizabeth offered
to allow the monks in Westminster to remain in place with restored pensions if they took the Oath of
Supremacy and conformed to the new Book of Common Prayer, all refused and dispersed
unpensioned. In less than 20 years, the monastic impulse had effectively been extinguished in
England; and was only revived, even amongst Catholics, in the very different form of the new and
reformed counter-reformation orders, such as the Jesuits.