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.

For this purpose she had organised, with considerable skill, a corps of
fanatical friars, who, when the signal was given, were simultaneously to
throw themselves into the midst of 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."[651]

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 arrangement, of which this marriage was to form the
connecting link, was contemplated between the Ultramontanes in France, the
pope, and the emperor.

_D'Inteville to Cardinal Tournon._[652]

"MY LORD,--You will be so good as to tell the Mo