These facts are sufficient for a preliminary sketch of the background on which moved the spectre of England, to which we now return. How long the sweating sickness may have raged there after Henry the VIIIth quitted his secluded place of refuge in order to return to his capital, no one has left any written account to show. That it spread very rapidly over the whole kingdom is decidedly to be presumed, and might probably still be easily ascertainable from the written records of different places. The notion that it did not rage violently in any town more than a few weeks, is justified by corresponding phenomena of more recent occurrence, yet no doubt it continued to exist among the people, though in a mitigated degree, till the mild winter season. But there are not even the slightest data by which it can be made out that it was still in England during the summer of 1529. As an epidemic it certainly existed no longer, yet on a consideration of the state of the air in that year, it is not to be denied that isolated cases of Sweating Fever may have appeared; for in pestilences of this kind, provided their original causes continue, there always occur some straggling cases[571]. The Sweating Sickness did not advance westward to Ireland, nor did it pass the Scottish border; the historians, who would certainly have recorded so calamitous an event, are entirely silent respecting such an occurrence. The tragedy was, however, destined to be enacted elsewhere; other nations were to play their part in it.