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Actuated by all these motives, and perhaps influenced by that old disgust with which the ill conduct of Catharine Howard had inspired him against her whole family, he gave private orders to arrest Norfolk and Surrey; and they were on the same day confined in the Tower. Surrey being a commoner, his trial was the more expeditious; and as to proofs, neither parliaments nor juries seem ever to have given the least attention to them in any cause of the crown during this whole reign.

1547.

He was accused of entertaining in his family some Italians who were suspected to be spies; a servant of his had paid a visit to Cardinal Pole in Italy, whence he was suspected of holding a correspondence with that obnoxious prelate; he had quartered the arms of Edward the Confessor on his scutcheon, which made him be suspected of aspiring to the crown, though both he and his ancestors had openly, during the course of many years, maintained that practice, and the heralds had even justified it by their authority. These were the crimes for which a jury, notwithstanding his eloquent and spirited defence, condemned the earl of Surrey for high treason; and their sentence was soon after executed upon him.

The innocence of the duke of Norfolk was still, if possible, more apparent than that of his son; and his services to the crown had been greater. His duchess, with whom he lived on bad terms, had been so base as to carry intelligence to his enemies of all she knew against him: Elizabeth Holland, a mistress of his, had been equally subservient to the designs of the court; yet with all these advantages, his accusers discovered no greater crime than his once saying, that the king was sickly, and could not hold out long; and the kingdom was likely to fall into disorders, through the diversity of religious opinions. He wrote a pathetic letter to the king, pleading his past services and protesting his innocence: soon after, he embraced a more proper expedient for appeasing Henry, by making a submission and confession, such as his enemies required; but nothing could mollify the unrelenting temper of the king. He assembled a parliament, as the surest and most expeditious instrument of his tyranny; and the house of peers, without examining the prisoner, without trial or evidence, passed a bill of attainder against him, and sent it down to the commons. Cranmer, though engaged for many years in an opposite party to Norfolk, and though he had received many and great injuries from him, would have no hand in so unjust a prosecution; and he retired to his seat at Croydon.[*] The king was now approaching fast towards his end; and fearing lest Norfolk should escape him, he sent a message to the commons, by which he desired them to hasten the bill, on pretence that Norfolk enjoyed the dignity of earl marshal, and it was necessary to appoint another, who might officiate at the ensuing ceremony of installing his son prince of Wales. The obsequious commons obeyed his directions, though founded on so frivolous a pretence; and the king having affixed the royal assent to the bill by commissioners, issued orders for the execution of Norfolk on the morning of the twenty-ninth of January. But news being carried to the Tower that the king himself had expired that night, the lieutenant deferred obeying the warrant; and it was not thought advisable by the council to begin a new reign by the death of the greatest nobleman in the kingdom, who had been condemned by a sentence so unjust and tyrannical.

The king’s health had long been in a declining state; but for several days all those near him plainly saw his end approaching. He was become so froward, that no one durst inform him of his condition; and as some persons during this reign had suffered as traitors for foretelling the king’s death,[**] every one was afraid lest, in the transports of his fury, he might on this pretence punish capitally the author of such friendly intelligence. At last, Sir Anthony Denny ventured to disclose to him the fatal secret, and exhorted him to prepare for the fate which was awaiting him. He expressed his resignation, and desired that Cranmer might be sent for; but before the prelate arrived, he was speechless, though he still seemed to retain his senses. Cranmer desired him to give some sign of his dying in the faith of Christ. He squeezed the prelate’s hand, and immediately expired, after a reign of thirty-seven years and nine months; and in the fifty-sixth year of his age.

* Burnet, vol. i. p. 348. Fox.

** Lanquet’s Epitome of Chronicles in the year 1541.

The king had made his will near a month before his demise; in which he confirmed the destination of parliament, by leaving the crown first to Prince Edward, then to the lady Mary, next to the lady Elizabeth: the two princesses he obliged, under the penalty of forfeiting their title to the crown, not to marry without consent of the council which he appointed for the government of his minor son. After his own children, he settled the succession on Frances Brandon, marchioness of Dorset, eldest daughter of his sister, the French queen; then on Eleanor, countess of Cumberland, the second daughter In passing over the posterity of the queen of Scots, his eldest sister, he made use of the power obtained from parliament, but as he subjoined that, after the failure of the French queen’s posterity, the crown should descend to the next lawful heir, it afterwards became a question, whether these words could be applied to the Scottish line. It was thought that these princes were not the next heirs after the house of Suffolk, but before that house; and that Henry, by expressing himself in this manner, meant entirely to exclude them. The late injuries which he had received from the Scots, had irritated him extremely against that nation; and he maintained to the last that character of violence and caprice by which his life had been so much distinguished. Another circumstance of his will may suggest the same reflection with regard to the strange contrarieties of his temper and conduct: he left money for masses to be said for delivering his soul from purgatory; and though he destroyed all those institutions established by his ancestors and others for the benefit of their souls, and had even left the doctrine of purgatory doubtful in all the articles of faith which he promulgated during his later years, he was yet determined, when the hour of death was approaching, to take care at least of his own future repose, and to adhere to the safer side of the question.[*]

* See his will in Fuller, Heylin, and Rymer, p. 110. There
is no reasonable ground to suspect its authenticity.

It is difficult to give a just summary of this prince’s qualities: he was so different from himself in different parts of his reign, that, as is well remarked by Lord Herbert, his history is his best character and description. The absolute, uncontrolled authority which he maintained at home, and the regard which he acquired among foreign nations, are circumstances which entitle him, in some degree, to the appellation of a great prince; while his tyranny and barbarity exclude him from the character of a good one. He possessed, indeed, great vigor of mind, which qualified him for exercising dominion over men; courage, intrepidity, vigilance, inflexibility; and though these qualities lay not always under the guidance of a regular and solid judgment, they were accompanied with good parts and an extensive capacity; and every one dreaded a contest with a man who was known never to yield or to forgive, and who, in every controversy, was determined either to ruin himself or his antagonist. A catalogue of his vices would comprehend many of the worst qualities incident to human nature, violence, cruelty, profusion, rapacity, injustice, obstinacy, arrogance, bigotry, presumption, caprice: but neither was he subject to all these vices in the most extreme degree, nor was he, at intervals, altogether destitute of virtues: he was sincere, open, gallant, liberal, and capable at least of a temporary friendship and attachment. In this respect he was unfortunate, that the incidents of his reign served to display his faults in their full light: the treatment which he met with from the court of Rome provoked him to violence; the danger of a revolt from his superstitious subjects seemed to require the most extreme severity. But it must at the same time be acknowledged, that his situation tended to throw an additional lustre on what was great and magnanimous in his character; the emulation between the emperor and the French king rendered his alliance, notwithstanding his impolitic conduct, of great importance in Europe; the extensive powers of his prerogative, and the submissive, not to say slavish, disposition of his parliaments, made it the more easy for him to assume and maintain that entire dominion by which his reign is so much distinguished in the English history.