Such disasters had to be reckoned upon as possible chances by any one who ventured into public life.

Montaigne advises that the discipline of pain should be part of every boy's education, for the reason that every one in his day might be called upon to undergo the torture.

And so every public man, in the England of the Tudors and Stuarts, entered on his career with the perfectly familiar expectation of possibly closing it--it might be in an honourable and ceremonious fashion, in the Tower and on the scaffold--just as he had to look forward to the possibility of closing it by small-pox or the plague.

So that when disaster came, though it might be unexpected, as death is unexpected, it was a turn of things which ought not to take a man by surprise.

But some premonitory signs usually gave warning.