In my relation of the affairs of Italy[506], I have mentioned a Jacobite friar who lived at Florence for the space of fifteen years, in great reputation for the sanctity of his life, and whom I saw and conversed with in the year 1495. His name was Jerome, and he had foretold several things which afterwards came to pass. He had always affirmed that the king would make a voyage into Italy, declaring it publicly in his sermons, and asserting he had both that and other things by revelation from God, by whom he pronounced our king to have been chosen to reform the Church by the sword, and chastise the insolence of tyrants. But his pretending to revelation created him many enemies, made him incur the displeasure of the Pope, and gained him ill-will from several in Florence. His life and discourses (as far as could be discovered) were the severest and most holy in the world, for he was declaiming perpetually against sin, and making many proselytes in that city. In the same year 1498, and within four or five days after the death of King Charles VIII., died Friar Jerome also[507]; which I mention the rather, because he had always publicly asserted that the king should return again into Italy, to accomplish the commission which God had given him for the reforming of the Church by the sword, and the expulsion of tyrants out of Italy; and that in case the king refused or neglected it, God would punish him severely; all which former sermons and those which he preached at this time, he caused to be printed, and they are to be purchased at this day. His threats to the king of God’s severe anger if he returned not into Italy, he wrote several times to his majesty a little before his death; and he told me as much at my return from Italy, assuring me that sentence was pronounced in heaven against the king, provided he refused to observe what God had commanded, and did not keep his soldiers from plundering.