k to Scotland,
without further punishment.[309]

Another more famous prophetess was then in the zenith of her
reputation--the celebrated Nun of Kent--whose cell at Canterbury, for some
three years, was the Delphic shrine of the Catholic oracle, from which the
orders of Heaven were communicated even to the pope himself. This singular
woman seems for a time to have held in her hand the balance of the fortunes
of England. By the papal party she was universally believed to be inspired.
Wolsey believed it, Warham believed it, the bishops believed it, Queen
Catherine believed it, Sir Thomas More's philosophy was no protection to
him against the same delusion; and finally, she herself believed the world,
when she found the world believed in her. Her story is a psychological
curiosity; and, interwoven as it was with the underplots of the time, we
cannot observe it too accurately.

In the year 1525, there lived in the parish of Aldington, in Kent, a
certain Thomas Cobb, bailiff or steward to the Archbishop of Canterbury,
who possessed an estate there. Among the servants of this Thomas Cobb was a
country girl called Elizabeth Barton--a decent person, so far as we can
learn, but of mere ordinary character, and until that year having shown
nothing unusual in her temperament. She was then attacked, however, by some
internal disease; and after many months of suffering, she was reduced into
that abnormal and singular condition, in which she exhibited the phenomena
known to modern wonder-seekers as those of somnambulism or clairvoyance.
The scientific value of such phenomena is still undetermined, but that they
are not purely imaginary is generally agreed. In the histories of all
countries and of all times, we are familiar with accounts of young women of
bad health and irritable nerves, who have exhibited at recurring periods
certain unusual powers; and these exhibitions have had especial attraction
for superstitious persons, whether they have believed in God, or in the
devil, or in neither. A further feature also uniform in such cases, has
been that a small element of truth may furnish a substructure for a
considerable edifice of falsehood; human credulity being always an
insatiable faculty, and its powers being unlimited when once the path of
ordinary experience has been transcended. We have seen in our own time to
what excesses occurrences of this kind may tempt the belief, even when
defended with the armour of science. In the sixte