CARDAN ON ENGLISH POLITICS. 141 



but the following passage is not iminstructive as showing 

 the opinion formed by that philosopher of English politics, 

 after a week or two of Court experience in London. He 

 chronicles impressions formed during the autumn that 

 preceded the king's death. The passage also, in the final 

 sentence, illustrates very completely the candour with 

 which Jerome spoke always the truth about himself. He 

 is speaking of his false prediction 1 : "I could indeed, 

 after the manner of some astrologers, affect to have known 

 what was about to happen, and to have been silent through 

 fear, an easy thing in so conspicuous a case, but I was so 

 far even from thinking of such an event, that I was far 

 enough surely from foreseeing it. I did, indeed, foresee 

 it, but in another way, when I perceived that everything 

 lay in the power of one man, the boy, the fortresses, 

 the exchequer, the parliament, the fleet. Children whom 

 he could not rule he made rulers; and the power was 

 with him whose father the king's father had beheaded, 

 while he who had lost also two uncles by the mother's 

 side successively condemned and executed, was misguiding 

 everything, being urged, not more by hate than fear, to 

 plot the king's destruction. And when all were silent 

 through dread (for he condemned judicially as many as 

 he chose), and he had conciliated to himself most of the 

 nobles by distributing Church property among them, so 

 1 Geniturarum Exemplar, p. 23. 



