Rich and poor were equally victims. Rank claimed for its possessor no exemption; poverty was no shield. The deserted palace no longer echoed the sounds of mirth; the low wail of the mourner interrupted the silence of the streets. Henry VIII, a prince who, like Leviathan in the deep, seemed to consider the earth as merely formed to take his pastime therein, leaving the city, retreated with a few followers from place to place before the advancing waves of pestilence. His Court had been the seat of its triumphs. His private secretary, the learned Italian, Ammonius of Lucca, died a few hours after he had boasted to Sir Thomas More that by abstinence and regimen he had shielded himself and family. The Lord Grey of Wilton, the Lord Clinton, and many other of his knights, gentlemen, and officers, were no more. Michaelmas and Christmas passed without their usual festivities. No gathering of people was permitted, for fear of infection. Oxford and Cambridge, crowded with eager students, amongst whom were already germinating seeds which produced the Reformation, were again attacked, and the former was again deserted. The sweat continued until the middle of December; and its horrors were heightened by the supervention towards the winter of plague. In Chester the mortality from the combined diseases was so great, that grass grew a foot high at the town cross. England, again, with one remarkable exception, was _alone_ the land of the shadow of death. The pestilence passed over to the town of Calais, at that period belonging to the British Crown. But here it is said to have attacked principally the English inhabitants; and we know that it not only did not spread through France, but (from a reliable source) that it did not even reach to Graveling. It must have been during one of these earlier irruptions of the sweating disease, that a Latin prayer was composed, of which a copy has been preserved. It is addressed “ad beatum Henricum,” either Henry the Emperor, who with his wife Cunegunde, were saints of the Romish calendar, or Henry VI. of that name is intended, who was claimed as uncle by Henry VII., and who, his piety having nearly procured him canonization, was highly revered by the people. In it occurs the petition so characteristic of the period:-- “Non sudore, Vel dolore, Moriamur subito.” The whole is to be found in the _Gent. Mag._ for 1786, p. 747.