Note 369 — Chapter XV

Madame de Montreuil, though a Frenchwoman and a good Catholic, had caught the infection of the prevailing unbelief in saints and saintly relics. “I showed her St. Thomas’s shrine,” writes an attendant, “and all such other things worthy of sight, of the which she was not little marvelled of the great riches thereof, saying it to be innumerable, and that if she had not seen it all the men in the world could never have made her to believe it. Thus overlooking and viewing more than an hour as well the shrine as St. Thomas’s head, being at both set cushions to kneel, the prior, opening St. Thomas’s head, said to her three times, this is St. Thomas’s head, and offered her to kiss it, but she neither kneeled nor would kiss it, but (stood), still viewing the riches thereof.”—Penison to Cromwell: State Papers, Vol. I. p. 583.