The Virgin now desired her to repair to the Priory of St. Sepulchre at Canterbury, and to assume the name of Sister Elizabeth and take Dr. Bocking for her spiritual instructor. There she was gradually coached into religious and political prophecies, and began to launch threats against the King in respect of his divorce and of his proposed marriage with Anne Boleyn. She declared--and forced her way into his presence at Canterbury, on his return from France, to declare it--that he should not reign a month after that marriage and should die “a villain’s death.” But the King, quite unmoved, married as he had intended, and a month passed, and he seemed none the worse. The Holy Maid, like many another prophet before and since, was obliged to move the date of the anticipated retribution forward, and still the vengeance of Heaven did not descend. The obvious inference is that Elizabeth was not in the confidence of Providence; but through the reports of the monks of Canterbury, who spread the most extraordinary accounts of her life in the Priory, in which the devil in person was said to have appeared, in an attempt to commit an indecent assault upon her, she was widely looked upon as divinely inspired. Sir Thomas More, regarded by all competent persons as one of the most learned and cultured persons of that age, believed in her. For three years she continued her extraordinary career of fraud and blasphemy, and then the heavy hand of the King descended upon her and her accomplices. One can only feel surprised that it had been delayed so long, for Henry the Eighth was not usually long-suffering under insult. She was hanged, with Doctor Bocking and others of her accomplices in religious deceptions and political offences, April 21st, 1534, at Tyburn. “Hither,” said she, in her dying speech and confession, “I am come to die. I have been not only the cause of mine own death, which most justly I have deserved, but am also the cause of the death of all these persons who at this time here suffer. And yet I am not so much to be blamed, considering that it was well known unto these learned men that I was a poor wench without learning, and therefore they might have easily perceived that the things which were done by me could not proceed in no such sort; but their capacities and learning could right well judge that they were altogether feigned. But because the things which I feigned were profitable unto them, therefore they much praised me, and bare me in hand that it was the Holy Ghost, and not I that did them.” This, with much else, she confessed, admitting among other things that a letter purporting to have been written by the Virgin Mary, in heaven, and sent to a widow in London, was written by a St. Augustine’s monk named Hawkhurst.