“More butcher than king in England, a man of obscure birth [né en lieu obscur] by force shall obtain the Empire. Unprincipled, restrained by neither faith nor law, he will drench the earth with blood. His time approaches so near as to make me heave a sigh.”
This is an announcement of such unparalleled and terrific import that Nostradamus exhibits more feeling over it than he does usually over his prognostications. The butcher-like face of Cromwell, with its fleshy conch and hideous warts, seems to have been visually present to him, and to have struck him with such a sense of terror and vividness that he imagines the time must be very near at hand. Though a full century had to elapse, he sighs with a present shudder, and the blood creeps. One of the remarkable features throughout the work of Nostradamus is the general absence of any sense of time apart from the mere enumeration of years as an algebraic or arithmetical sign; on this momentous occasion he departs from his usual practice, and stands horror-stricken as in a fearful vision.
Century X. Quatrain 100.
“Le grand Empire sera par Angleterre
Le Pempotan des ans plus de trois cens:
Grandes copies passer par mer et terre,
Les Lusitains n’en serons par contens.”
“The great empire of England shall be all-powerful ( πᾶν-potens) for more than 300 years.[67] Then great armies shall come by sea and land, and the Portuguese shall not be satisfied therewith.”
This seems to foreshadow that the naval power of England will be suppressed by sea-borne armies overwhelming her on her own shores, and the Lusitanians, or Portuguese, the oldest allies of England, will not be content, because, probably, Portugal at the same instant will be overwhelmed by Spain simultaneously.
This is as far as we can go in English history under the guidance of Le Pelletier. But, nevertheless, I shall adduce several more quatrains, bringing the sequence down at least to the establishment of the House of Hanover on the English throne in the person of George I.
(To be continued.)
