h
Viceroy, he contrasts it with the liberal rewards granted to him in what
must then have been the poorest of the European kingdoms;[153] and in the
Preface of the _De Astrorum Judiciis_ (Basel, 1554) he writes in
sympathetic and grateful terms of the kind usage he had met in the
North.[154] It must have been a severe disappointment to him that he was
unable to revisit Paris on his way home, for letters from his friend
Ranconet told him that a great number of illustrious men had proposed to
repair to Paris for the sake of meeting him; and many of the nobles of
France were anxious to consult him professionally, one of them offering a
fee of a thousand gold crowns. But Cardan was so terrified by the report
given by Gasparo of the state of France, that he made up his mind he would
on no account touch its frontiers on his homeward journey.

Before he quitted Scotland there had come to him letters from the English
Court entreating him to tarry there some days on his way home to Italy,
and give his opinion on the health of Edward VI., who was then slowly
recovering from an attack of smallpox and measles. The young King's
recovery was more apparent than real, for he was, in fact, slowly sinking
under the constitutional derangement which killed him a few months later.
Cardan could hardly refuse to comply with this request, nor is there any
evidence to show that he made this visit to London unwillingly. But he
soon found out that those about the Court were anxious to hear from him
something more than a statement of his opinion as to Edward's health. They
wanted, before all else, to learn what the stars had to say as to the
probable duration of the sovereign's life. During his stay in Scotland
Cardan would certainly have gained some intelligence of the existing
state of affairs at the English Court; how in the struggle for the custody
of the regal power, the Lord High Admiral and the Lord Protector, the
King's uncles, had lost their heads; and how the Duke of Northumberland,
the son of Dudley, the infamous minion of Henry VII. and the destroyer of
the ill-fated Seymours, had now gathered all the powers and dignities of
the kingdom into his own hands, and was waiting impatiently for the death
of Edward, an event which would enable him to control yet more completely
the supreme power, through the puppet queen whom he had ready at hand to
place upon the throne. An Italian of the sixteenth century, steeped in the
traditions of the blo