JEROME CARDAN 133 



intelligence of the existing state of affairs at the English 

 Court ; how in the struggle for the custody of the regal 

 power, the Lord High Admiral and the Lord Protector, 

 the King's uncles, had lost their heads ; and how the 

 Duke of Northumberland, the son of Dudley, the in- 

 famous minion of Henry VII. and the destroyer of the 

 ill-fated Seymours, had now gathered all the powers 

 and dignities of the kingdom into his own hands, and 

 was waiting impatiently for the death of Edward, an 

 event which would enable him to control yet more 

 completely the supreme power, through the puppet 

 queen whom he had ready at hand to place upon the 

 throne. An Italian of the sixteenth century, steeped in 

 the traditions of the bloody and insidious state-craft of 

 Milan and the Lombard cities, Cardan would naturally 

 shrink from committing himself to any such perilous 

 utterance: all the more for the reason that he had already 

 formed an estimate of the English as a fierce and cruel 

 people. With his character as a magician to maintain 

 he could scarcely keep entire silence, so he wrote down 

 for the satisfaction of his interrogators a horoscope : a 

 mere perfunctory piece of work, as we learn afterwards. 

 He begins by reciting the extraordinary nature of 

 the King's birth, repeating the legend that his mother 

 was delivered of him by surgical aid, and only lived a 

 few hours afterwards ; and declares that, in his opinion, 

 it would have been better had this boy never been born 

 at all. " Nevertheless, seeing that he had come into this 

 world and been duly trained and educated, it would be 

 well for mankind were he to live long, for all the graces 

 waited upon him. Boy as he was, he was skilled in 

 divers tongues, Latin, English, and French, and not 

 unversed in Greek, Italian, and Spanish ; he had like- 

 wise knowledge of dialectics, natural philosophy, and 



