er they
were tortured, whether they confessed, or what they confessed; but we may
naturally connect this letter, directly or indirectly, with the events
which immediately followed. In the middle of November we find a commission
sitting at Lambeth, composed of Cromwell, Cranmer, and Latimer, ravelling
out the threads of a story, from which, when the whole was disentangled, it
appeared that by Queen Catherine, the Princess Mary, and a large and
formidable party in the country, the king, on the faith of a pretended
revelation, was supposed to have forfeited the crown; that his death,
either by visitation of God or by visitation of man, was daily expected;
and that whether his death took place or not, a revolution was immediately
looked for, which would place the princess on the throne.

The Nun of Kent, as we remember, had declared that if Henry persisted in
his resolution of marrying Anne, she was commissioned by God to tell him
that he should lose his power and authority. She had not specified the
manner in which the sentence would be carried into effect against him. The
form of her threats had been also varied occasionally; she said that he
should die, but whether by the hands of his subjects, or by a providential
judgment, she left to conjecture;[641] and the period within which his
punishment was to fall upon him was stated variously at one month or at
six.[642] She had attempted no secresy with these prophecies; she had
confined herself in appearance to words; and the publicity which she
courted having prevented suspicion of secret conspiracy, Henry quietly
accepted the issue, and left the truth of the prophecy to be confuted by
the event. He married. The one month passed; the six months passed;
eight--nine months. His child was born and was baptised, and no divine
thunder had interposed; only a mere harmless verbal thunder, from a poor
old man at Rome. The illusion, as he imagined, had been lived down, and had
expired of its own vanity.

But the Nun and her friar advisers were counting on other methods of
securing the fulfilment of the prophecy than supernatural assistance. It is
remarkable that hypocrites and impostors as they knew themselves to be,
they were not without a half belief that some supernatural intervention was
imminent; but the career on which they had entered was too fascinating to
allow them to forsake it when their expectation failed them. They were
swept into the stream which was swelling to resis