out of it, and are now so vast and of so ill example that I know not whether this or the Turk be the worst.  Sorry am I to have been compelled to importune your Majesty so often in this matter, for sure I am you do not need my pressing.  But I see delay to be so calamitous, my own life is so unquiet and so painful, and the opportunity to make an end now so convenient, that it seems as if God of his goodness had brought his Holiness and your Majesty together to bring about so great a good.  I am forced to be importunate, and I implore your Highness for the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, that in return for the signal benefits which God each day is heaping on you, you will accomplish for me this great blessing, and bring his Holiness to a decision.  Let him remember what he promised you at Bologna.  The truth here is known, and he will thus destroy the hopes of those who persuade the King my Lord that he will never pass judgment.”—­Queen Catherine to Charles V.:  MS. Simancas, November 15, 1533.

[640] Letter to the King, giving an account of certain Friars Observants who had been about the Princess Dowager:  Rolls House MS.

[641] We remember the northern prophecy, “In England shall be slain the decorate Rose in his mother’s belly,” which the monks of Furness interpreted as meaning that “the King’s Grace should die by the hands of priests.”—­Vol. i. cap. 4.

[642] Statutes of the Realm, 25 Henry VIII. cap. 12.  State Papers relating to Elizabeth Barton:  Rolls House MS. Prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, to Cromwell:  Suppression of the Monasteries, p. 20.

[643] Thus Cromwell writes to Fisher:  “My Lord, [the outward evidences that she was speaking truth] moved you not to give credence to her, but only the very matter whereupon she made her false prophecies, to which matter ye were so affected—­as ye be noted to be on all matters which ye once enter into—­that nothing could come amiss that made for that purpose.”—­Suppression of the Monasteries, p. 30.

[644] Papers relating to the Nun of Kent:  Rolls House MS.

[645] Ibid.

[646] Ibid.

[647] 25 Hen.  VIII. cap. 12.

[648] Papers relating to the Nun of Kent:  Rolls House MS. 25 Hen.  VIII. cap. 12.  The “many” nobles are not more particularly designated in the official papers.  It was not desirable to mention names when the offence was to be passed over.

[649] Report of the Commissioners—­Papers relating to the Nun of Kent:  Rolls House MS.

[650] Goold, says the Act of the Nun’s attainder, travelled to Bugden, “to animate the said Lady Princess to make commotion in the realm against our sovereign lord; surmitting that the said Nun should hear by revelation of God that the said Lady Catherine should prosper and do well, and that her issue, the Lady Mary, should prosper and reign in the realm.”—­25 Henry VIII. cap. 13.