derstanding; and these
instincts, powerful as they are, may be found often in minds wild and
chaotic, which, although they vaguely foresee the future, yet have no power
of sound judgment, and know not what they foresee, or how wisely to
estimate it. Their wisdom, if we may so use the word, combines crudely with
any form of superstition or fanaticism. Thus in England, at the time of
which we are speaking, Catholics and Protestants had alike their horoscope
of the impending changes, each nearer to the truth than the methodical
calculations of the statesmen; yet their foresight did not affect their
convictions, or alter the temper of their hearts. They foresaw the same
catastrophe, yet their faith still coloured the character of it. To the one
it was the advent of Antichrist, to the other the inauguration of the
millennium. The truest hearted men on all sides were deserted by their
understandings at the moment when their understandings were the most deeply
needed: and they saw the realities which were round them transfigured into
phantoms through the mists of their hopes and fears. The present was
significant only as it seemed in labour with some gigantic issue, and the
events of the outer world flew from lip to lip, taking as they passed every
shape most wild and fantastical. Until "the king's matter" was decided,
there was no censorship upon speech, and all tongues ran freely on the
great subjects of the day. Every parish pulpit rang with the divorce, or
with the perils of the Catholic faith; at every village ale-house, the talk
was of St. Peter's keys, the sacrament, or of the pope's supremacy, or of
the points in which a priest differed from a layman. Ostlers quarrelled
over such questions as they groomed their masters' horses; old women
mourned across the village shopboards of the evil days which were come or
coming; while every kind of strangest superstition, fairy stories and witch
stories, stories of saints and stories of devils, were woven in and out and
to and fro, like quaint, bewildering arabesques, in the tissue of the
general imagination.[305]

These were the forces which were working on the surface of the English
mind; while underneath, availing themselves skilfully of the excitement,
the agents of the disaffected among the clergy, or the friars mendicant,
who to a man were devoted to the pope and to Queen Catherine, passed up and
down the country, denouncing the divorce, foretelling ruin, disaster, and
the w