he had himself treasonably borne on his shield the said arms of England, with the difference of labels of silver, which of right belonged only to Prince Edward; and finally that for these heinous offences he had deserved by the laws of the realm to be attainted of high treason, and to suffer the punishment, losses, and forfeitures that appertain thereunto; although he most humbly, and with a most sorrowful and repentant heart, did beseech his highness the king to have mercy, pity, and compassion on him. To complete the old man's degradation, one of the witnesses to the signing of this paper in the Tower was Lord Hertford.

The Seymours had no time to lose, for the life of the king was hanging by a thread. Instead of arraigning Norfolk before his peers, they proceeded according to the iniquitous system which Thomas Cromwell had introduced, and by which, in retributive justice, he had been himself hurled to the block. A bill of attainder, founded on the confession, was brought into the House of Lords, and read three times on three successive days, Archbishop Cranmer being present at every reading. The Commons did their work with equal despatch, returning the bill, passed, in three days more. This was done by the 25th of January, and on the 27th Wriothesly the Chancellor informed the two houses that his majesty, being not sufficiently well to attend himself, had been pleased to appoint certain lords to signify his assent to the bill. And therefore the commission, which was said to be under the sign manual, but to which Henry's stamp no doubt had been put without his knowledge, was read; the pretended royal assent was given by the lords who had appointed themselves, or who had been appointed by Hertford; and, without losing precious moments, an order was despatched to the lieutenant of the Tower to execute the Duke of Norfolk at an early hour on the following morning. During these last precipitate and most illegal measures, Archbishop Cranmer was again in the House of Lords.* The thing was done

* Journals of the Lords. Upon this unquestionable autho

act.

in such hurry and confusion that the bill was never enrolled, and consequently was not to be considered as an But during that very night of the 27th of January, or at a very early hour on the morning of the 28th, the king died. It has been said that the Lieutenant of the Tower, believing the warrant to be informal, as it could not have received the king's signature, or knowing by secret information that the king was actually dead, refused to proceed to the execution. We think it rather more probable that the order was countermanded by the Lords of the Council as soon as Henry had breathed his last. Most of our annalists have set it down, somewhat vaguely, that the Seymour party, which succeeded to almost absolute power, did not think it advisable to begin a new reign by shedding the blood of the first nobleman of England; but, from the character of the majority of those men, we may be justified in believing that they were deterred merely by the dread of odium and of afterconsequences to themselves, in case of a failure of the schemes and forgeries which they were committing in order to secure their, as yet, unstable power. They concealed the death of the king from Friday the 28th till Monday the 31st; but they must have known it to be impossible to disguise for any length of time that Henry had expired before the hour which had been fixed for Norfolk's execution. If the king had lived two or three hours longer, no doubt, the head of Norfolk would have been upon the block; but, then, it might have been made to pass as the deed of a living king, and not as the unauthorized vengeance of personal enemies. The interval between Henry's death on the night of the 27th or morning of the 28th, and the disclosure of the fact on the 31st, is said to have been spent in debating upon what was to be done with the Duke of Norfolk. This subject may have occupied a part, and that a very

rity Bishop Burnet is convicted of error or misrepresentation in stating that Cranmer, to avoid concurring in the guilt of this act of attainder, withdrew to Croydon before the bill was introduced.

serious part of their attention; but they had many other things to think about; and much of that time must have been spent in forging the clauses of the king's will upon which they rested all their claim to all the powers and offices of the state, and their claim to the partition among them of the estates and property of the Howards and of other victims to bills of attainder. But whatever were the lucky accidents, or the motives in the hearts of his enemies, that stayed the execution, Norfolk was certainly reprieved, being left in the Tower with the iniquitous sentence hanging over him; the Seymours neither annulling that sentence, nor taking any pains to give it a greater appearance of regularity and justice. On the 20th of February, when the child Edward VI. had been crowned in Westminster Abbey, and when Lord Hertford had taken into his own hands the high state offices which had been held by Norfolk, and had made himself Duke of Somerset, Governor of the person of the king's majesty, and Protector of all his realms, a general pardon for state offences was proclaimed, but in this the Duke of Norfolk, as well as Cardinal Pole, and a few others, were excepted. The old duke lay a close prisoner in the Tower, from December, 1546, till the 3rd of August, 1553, when the accession of Queen Mary restored him to liberty and to his honours and estates. Before Mary's first parliament was dissolved the attainders were legally reversed, it being declared that no special matter had been proved either against the Duke of Norfolk, or his son the Earl of Surrey, except the wearing of part of the royal coat of arms. The old duke died in the following year, 1554.

Biographers have been accustomed to represent the Earl of Surrey as a man whose character was almost without spot or blemish, and to give him credit for qualities and virtues which have no recognizable existence in the period in which he lived. The facts which we have stated upon the best existing evidence will enable the reader to form a correcter notion of him. But the defects of the man, whatever they may have been, cannot be pleaded in extenuation of the lawless way in which

he was cut off by his enemies, nor can they obscure his fame as a poet, scholar, and refiner of the language or rhythm of English verse. The delicacy which we vainly look for in his portrait is to be found in much of his poetry. Except in some passages in his version of the second and fourth books of the Eneid, which seem to us remarkable for their power, he is seldom very powerful; but he is almost everywhere neat and delicate, and is not unfrequently tender. But at times his delicacy becomes absolute weakness. He is entitled to high praise as being the first to introduce the use of blank verse. This he borrowed from the Italian writers, with whom it was a novel experiment in his day. From the same rich school of verse he introduced the sonnet. He was also the first Englishman who used the elegiac quatrain, which was admired and used by Dryden, and brought to perfection by Gray in his Elegy. His best sonnet, and perhaps the best piece he ever produced in any form, measure, or style, is his address to Spring. We subjoin it as a gentle and soothing conclusion to the harsh and tragical story of his life. We have slightly modernized the orthography, but have not otherwise altered the sonnet.

The sweet season that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill, and eke the vale,
The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her mate hath told her tale:
Summer is come, for every spray now springs.
The hart hath hung his old head on the pale,
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings,
The fishes fleet with new repaired scale,
The adder all her slough away she flings,
The swift swallow pursueth the flies small,
The busy bee her honey how she mings;
Winter is worn that was the flower's bale:
And thus I see among these pleasant things
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs.

OUR memoir of the Earl of Surrey shows in what manner the old family of the Howards was sacrificed to secure the political ascendancy of the new family of the Seymours. Hertford, the mortal foe of the poet, had scarcely attained to his high eminence as Duke of Somerset, Protector of the Kingdom, Governor of the person of the King's Majesty, Lieutenant-General of all his Majesty's Forces by land and by sea, Lord High Treasurer, and Earl Marshal of England, ere he became jealous of the ambition, and alarmed at the daring intrigues of his own brother Sir Thomas Seymour, who, since the death of Henry VIII., had been raised to the peerage by the title of Baron Seymour, of Sudley, and had been appointed Lord High Admiral. This Thomas Seymour, it will be remembered, was the man to whom the Duke of Norfolk had wished to marry his daughter, the Duchess of Richmond-a match which Surrey himself is said to have strongly recommended to his sister.