trade would, as Cromwell admitted, lead to
confusion and insurrection. Ship after ship was built and launched in the
Thames. The busy note of preparation rang over the realm. The clergy, Lord
Darcy had said, were to furnish money for the rising. The King was taking
precautions to shorten their resources, and turn their revenues to the
protection of the realm. Cromwell's visitors were out over England
examining into the condition of the religious houses, exposing their
abuses and sequestrating their estates. These dishonoured institutions had
been found to be "very stews of unnatural crime" through the length and
breadth of England. Their means of mischief were taken away from such
worthless and treacherous communities. Crown officials were left in
charge, and their final fate was reserved for Parliament.

Henry, meanwhile, confident in his subjects, and taking lightly the
dangers which threatened him, went on progress along the Welsh borders,
hunting, visiting, showing himself everywhere, and received with apparent
enthusiasm. The behaviour of the people perplexed Chapuys. "I am told," he
wrote, "that in the districts where he has been, a good part of the
peasantry, after hearing the Court preachers, are abused into the belief
that he was inspired by God to separate himself from his brother's wife.
They are but idiots. They will return soon enough to the truth when there
are any signs of change." They would not return, nor were they the fools
he thought them. The clergy, Chapuys himself confessed it, had made
themselves detested by the English commons for their loose lives and the
tyranny of the ecclesiastical courts. The monasteries, too many of them,
were nests of infamy and fraud, and the King whom the Catholic world
called Antichrist appeared as a deliverer from an odious despotism.

At Rome there was still uncertainty. The Imperial memorandum explains the
cause of the hesitation. The Emperor was engaged in Africa, and could
decide nothing till his return. The great Powers were divided on the
partition of the bear's skin, while the bear was still unstricken. Why,
asked the impatient English Catholics, did not the Pope strike and make an
end of him when even Francis, who had so long stayed his hand, was now
urging him to proceed? Francis was probably as insincere as Cifuentes
believed him to be. But the mere hope of help from such a quarter gave
fresh life to the wearied Catherine and her agents.

"The Pope," wrote