ather Goold had hastened down to Bugden,
encouraging Catherine to persevere in her resistance;[202] and while
the imperialists at Rome were pressing the pope for sentence (we cannot
doubt at Catherine's instance), the Nun had placed herself in readiness
to seize the opportunity when it offered, and to blow the trumpet of
insurrection in the panic which might be surely looked for when that
sentence should be published.

[Sidenote: And organizes a corps of Friars to preach insurrection.]

For this purpose she had organized, with considerable skill, a corps of
fanatical friars, who, when the signal was given, were simultaneously to
throw themselves into the midst or the people, and call upon them to
rise in the name of God. "To the intent," says the report, "to set forth
this matter, certain spiritual and religious persons were appointed, as
they had been chosen of God, to preach the false revelations of the said
Nun, when the time should require, if warning were given them; and some
of these preachers have confessed openly, and subscribed their names to
their confessions, that if the Nun had so sent them word, they would
have preached to the king's subjects that the pleasure of God was that
they should take him no longer for their king; and some of these
preachers were such as gave themselves to great fasting, watching, long
prayers, wearing of shirts of hair and great chains of iron about their
middle, whereby the people had them in high estimation of their great
holiness,--and this strait life they took on them by the counsel and
exhortation of the said Nun."[203]

[Sidenote: First Catholic treason.]

Here, then, was the explanation of the attitude of Catherine and Mary.
Smarting under injustice, and most naturally blending their private
quarrel with the cause of the church, they had listened to these
disordered visions as to a message from heaven, and they had lent
themselves to the first of those religious conspiracies which held
England in chronic agitation for three quarters of a century. The
innocent Saint at Bugden was the forerunner of the prisoner at
Fotheringay; and the Observant friars, with their chain girdles and
shirts of hair, were the antitypes of Parsons and Campion. How critical
the situation of England really was, appears from the following letter
of the French ambassador. The project for the marriage of the Princess
Mary with the Dauphin had been revived by the Catholic party; and a
private arrang