When Hempe Is Spun

Bacon recalled a prophecy he heard as a child, when Queen Elizabeth was in the flower of her years: when hempe is spun, England is done. It was generally taken to mean that after the princes whose initials made up the word had reigned, Henry, Edward, Mary, Philip and Elizabeth, England would come to utter confusion. Bacon said it was fulfilled only in the change of the king’s style from England to Britain when James came to the throne. The Year Book gives it in an account of the fortunes of the house of Stuart, under 31 August, which it gives as the day Cardinal York, the last of the Stuarts, died in 1807.