after-roll of the insurrection, and Pole's expectations of a third commotion, it is likely, were as well known to the privy council as they were known to the Pope. Symptoms had appeared in the western counties strikingly resembling those, which had preceded the Yorkshire rising, when Cromwell's innocent order was issued for the keeping of parish registers.[1] Rumours were continually flying that the Emperor would come and overthrow all things; and the busy haste with which the coast was being fortified seemed to sanction the expectation. The Pope had made James of Scotland Defensor fidei. Fleets were whispered to be on the seas. Men would wake suddenly and find the Spaniards arrived; and 'harness would again be occupied.'[2] Superstition on one side, and iconoclasm on the other, had dethroned reason, and raised imagination in its place; and
- ↑ 'There is much secret communication among the King's subjects, and many of them in the shires of Cornwall and Devonshire be in great fear and mistrust what the King's Highness and his council should mean, to give in commandment to the parsons and vicars of every parish, that they should make a book wherein is to be specified the names of as many as be wedded and buried and christened. Their mistrust is, that some charges more than hath been in times past shall grow to them by this occasion of registering.'—Sir Piers Edgecombe to Cromwell: State Papers, vol. i. p. 612.
- ↑ 'George Lascelles showed me that a priest, which late was one of the friars at Bristol, informed him that harness would yet be occupied, for he did know more than the King's council. For that at the last council whereat the Emperor, the French King, and the Bishop of Rome met, they made the King of Scots, by their counsel, Defensor fidei, and that the Emperor raised a great army, saying it was to invade the great Turk, which the said Emperor meaned by our sovereign lord.'—John Babington to Cromwell MS. State Paper Office, second series, vol. iii.
