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 wrath of God; and mingling with their prophecies more than dubious language on the near destruction or deposition of a prince who was opposing God and Heaven.  The soil was manured by treason, and the sowers made haste to use their opportunity.  Thus especially was there danger in those wandering encampments of “outlandish people,” whose habits rendered them the ready-made missionaries of sedition; whose swarthy features might hide a Spanish heart, and who in telling fortunes might readily dictate policy.[306] Under the disguise of gipsies, the emissaries of the emperor or the pope might pass unsuspected from the Land’s End to Berwick-upon-Tweed, penetrating the secrets of families, tying the links of the Catholic organisation:  and in the later years of the struggle, as the intrigues became more determined and a closer connection was established between the Continental powers and the disaffected English, it became necessary to increase the penalty against these irregular wanderers from banishment to death.  As yet, however, the milder punishment was held sufficient, and even this was imperfectly enforced.[307] The tendencies to treason were still incipient—­they were tendencies only, which had as yet shown themselves in no decisive acts; the future was uncertain, the action of the government doubtful.  The aim was rather to calm down the excitement of the people, and to extinguish with as little violence as possible the means by which it was fed.