On the other hand, the friends of the Reformation, reading these prognostics the other way, had fearful forebodings of evils to come, and were naturally cast down. The feverish condition of the public mind is seen in the restless solicitude with which they treasured such omens up. The execution of the Protector; the death of the Duke of Suffolk and his brother by the sweating sickness, the sons of a father who was Cranmer’s good friend, and themselves children of great hope; the loss of Fagius and Bucer at a critical moment, were all accounted harbingers of ill.[414] John Knox, too, like another son of Ananus, lifted up his voice in various parts of England; and as he marked the tide again setting in towards Rome, foretold for England unquiet times, hiemem instare:[415] and, indeed, the general agitation of those days, that feeling so forcibly expressed in the language of Scripture by “distress of nations with perplexity,” is strongly portrayed by an act of parliament which was passed in 1550, “Against spreading of Prophecies,” as well as by the numbers of idle stories of unnatural births and sea-monsters which were then propagated, and which are faithfully preserved in the pages of the Chroniclers.[416] Charity leads us to trust that the dark insinuations against the Duke of Northumberland (as though he hastened the end of Edward for the purpose of setting the crown on the head of Lady Jane Grey, who had married his son,) had no other foundation than the intense anxiety with which the life of the King was thus regarded by multitudes of his subjects, who saw no other hope for themselves or for their cause than the frail one its continuance afforded. Certain it is, that the extracts given by Strype from Cranmer’s letters, to Cecil, who was in attendance upon the court in a progress to England, the year before the King’s death, cannot be fairly interpreted (though the honest annalist is of a contrary opinion) as implying that the Archbishop was then under any apprehensions for Edward’s personal safety.[417] And it is very possible, that when the “wise woman” was called in at last (the case becoming desperate,) the patient should have grown rapidly worse, without any further imputation upon the empiric than presumption for having attempted the cure, or upon the Protector than folly for having permitted the attempt to be made.[418] But if we acquit Northumberland of treason, it is not so easy to acquit him of treachery; for that the dying prince should have made a will, not merely withholding the crown from its rightful owner, the Princess Mary, (for considering the hearty desire he entertained for the maintenance of the Protestant cause this might have been his own act and deed,) but from his sister Elizabeth, herself a Protestant, and to settle it upon a cousin who happened to be the duke’s daughter-in-law, this looks like the machination of another head than his own. This will Cranmer long refused to subscribe; but