This position the Nun of Kent, as she was now called, had achieved for herself, when the divorce question was first agitated.  The monks at the Canterbury priory, of course, eagerly espoused the side of the queen, and the Nun’s services were at once in active requisition.  Absurd as the stories of her revelations may seem to us, she had already given evidence that she was no vulgar impostor, and in the dangerous career on which she now entered, she conducted herself with the utmost skill and audacity.  Far from imitating the hesitation of the pope and the bishops, she issued boldly, “in the name and by the authority of God,” a solemn prohibition against the king; threatening that, if he divorced his wife, he should not “reign a month, but should die a villain’s death."[326] Burdened with this message, she forced herself into the presence of Henry himself;[327] and when she failed to produce an effect upon Henry’s obdurate scepticism, she turned to the hesitating ecclesiastics, and roused their flagging spirits.  The archbishop bent under her denunciations, and at her earnest request introduced her to Wolsey, then tottering on the edge of ruin.[328] He, too, in his confusion and perplexity, was frightened, and doubted.  She made herself known to the papal ambassadors, and through them she took upon herself to threaten Clement,[329] assuming, in virtue of her divine commission, an authority above all principalities and powers.  If it were likely that she could have heard the story of the Maid of Orleans, it might be supposed that her imagination tempted her to play again a similar career on an English stage, and that she fancied herself the destined saviour of the Church of Christ, as the Maid had been the saviour of France.

It would indeed be a libel on the fair fame of Joan of Arc, if she were to be compared to a confessed impostor; but Joan of Arc might have been the reality which the Nun attempted to counterfeit; and the history of the true heroine might have suggested easily to the imitator the outline of her part.  A revolution had been effected in Europe by a somnambulist peasant girl; another peasant girl, a somnambulist also, might have seen in the achievement which had been already accomplished, an earnest of what might be done by herself.  While we call the Nun, too, an impostor, we are bound to believe that she first imposed upon herself, and that her wildest adventures into falsehood were compatible with a belief that she was really and truly inspired.  Nothing short of such a conviction would have enabled her to play a part among kings and queens, and so many of the ablest statesmen of that most able age.  Nothing else could have tempted her, on the failure of her prophecies, into the desperate career of treason into which we are soon to see her launched.