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of Tournay, to which he had laid siege; and every honour which could testify the royal satisfaction, or gratify a victorious commander, was subsequently conferred on the hero of the day. He was restored to the dukedom of Norfolk, acquired immense possessions, filled the highest offices of state, lived in princely splendour at the royal castle of Framlingham, and died at the age of eighty; leaving a numerous family to support his dignities, and share his vast possessions. He was the last of the Dukes of Norfolk buried in the Abbey of Thetford.

1524.

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He eldest daughter, Elizabeth, was the mother of Anne Boleyn, who fell a victim to the very hand which heaped so many honours upon her uncle and his sons. The Duke himself presided as High Steward at her trial; and even her father, " reluctantly it is to be hoped, sat among the judges."

Thomas Howard, Admiral of England, his eldest son and successor, inherited the talents of his father; but with the accumulated honours of his house, and the satisfaction which accompanied him in the discharge of his duties to the sovereign and the state, misfortune was intimately blended. His achievements in the field, his wisdom in the cabinet, his devotion to the throne, appeared merely to hasten a catastrophe, from which he was only saved by the death of his persecutor; but which struck, in the person of his Son, one of the noblest victims that ever sank under the axe of despotism:-

"Who has not heard of Surrey's fame?

His was the hero's soul of fire;
And his the bard's immortal name,
And his was love exalted high
By all the glow of chivalry."

The crime for which this young nobleman was arraigned has never been properly investigated. His biographers and historians of the time, satisfied with the manifest absurdity of the treason alleged against him, have omitted to point out the grounds upon which the inference of Surrey's guilt was founded, namely, the crime of quartering, with his own, the royal arms of England. A few words on this subject, on the authority of a recent biographer, may serve to elucidate some portion of its obscurity.

The arms of Edward the Confessor are said to have been a blue field, charged with a gold cross at the end, flory, between five gold martlets. Royal arms appear to have been used in the time of Richard the First, who bore a red shield, charged with three gold lions, which have ever since been the royal standard of England*. In the reign of Edward the First, and perhaps even in the previous century, the arms of three saints-Saint George,

History of Framlingham and its Lords, p. 89, 90. R. Green.

CASTLE.!

HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY.

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Saint Edmund, and Saint Edward the Confessor-were always borne on the national banner; but none of which were supposed to have any connexion

with the sovereignty of Eng

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land. Richard the Second, however, choosing the Confessor for his patron or saint, impaled his arms with those of England and France; "and granted, at the same time, the Confessor's arms to be borne, per pale, by two or three of the most eminent men of his court, who were descended from the blood royal." One of the noblemen so distinguished was Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk; the right to whose arms and quarterings was indisputably inherited by the Earl of Surrey; but whether the coat or shield of the Confessor was granted to Mowbray for life only, or to him and "his heirs for ever," is a question which remains still unsolved. Surrey, however, conceiving himself entitled to it, obtained the sanction of the heralds, and assumed the distinction among his other armorial quarterings. But the injustice of construing this act into a treasonable design is too glaring to require either comment or exposure. "The King himself, in granting armorial bearings to Anne Boleyn, took especial care to show her royal and illustrious descent through the Howards, by introducing the arms of Thomas de Brotherton, son of Edward the First; and of the Warrens, Earls of Surrey, out of the Howard shield!*" But in that despotic reign, virtue, talent, and integrity were no protection against the highest penalty-the severest sentence which an obsequious legislation could pronounce or inflict. Surrey was too bright an ornament to be endured near the throne. His very accomplishments-his prowess-his high spirit-his sword and pen-his triumphs in the lists-and his success on the lyre, all raised up enemies whose private resentments could only be appeased with blood.

Hist. of Framlingham, note, p. 90.

1547.

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SURREY was brought to trial at the Guildhall on the 13th of January, where he defended himself with singular courage and ability; repelled the charges so insidiously preferred against him; impeached the flimsy evidence set up in support of the trial; appealed to the authority of the heralds for the obnoxious quarterings on his shield; and disclaimed, with all the indignation of conscious innocence, the treasonable imputations so rancorously heaped upon him.

In the course of examination, when a witness stated that, in a former conversation with the accused Earl, he repeated some strong expression used by Surrey, with his own insolent reply-which left it to be inferred that Surrey had tamely brooked his defiance-the young noble fixed his penetrating glance for an instant on the speaker, then turning round to the jury"I leave it to you," he said, " to judge whether it be possible that the man before you should so address the Earl of Surrey, and he not strike him on the spot."

But the die was cast; the sentence of forfeiture was pronounced; the King was deaf to the supplications of his friends-to the last appeal for mercy. The thirst of blood had increased with the last agonies of dissolving nature; and, on the twenty-first morning of the same month, Surrey was hurried to Tower-hill, and there, under the blow of the executioner, bequeathed that name to posterity, around which, poet, painter, historian, and every lover of his country and her literature, have twined the wreaths of immortality.

"Thou jealous ruthless tyrant, Heaven repay

On thee, and on thy children's latest line,

The wild caprice of thy despotic sway;

The gory bridal bed; the plundered shrine;

The murdered Surrey's blood; the tears of Geraldine!"

Of the lives of Surrey and fair Geraldine, and the tournament in which his knights carried away the prize in the Tuscan capital, we adopt the following short sketch from the "Loves of the Poets:"

"In the reign of Cosmo the First, the second Grand Duke of Tuscany o Lorenzo's family, Florence, it is said, beheld a novel and extraordinary spectacle. A young traveller, from a court and a country which the Italians of that day seemed to regard much as we now do the Esquimaux, combining the learning of the scholar, and the amiable bearing of the courtier, with all the rash bravery of youthful romance, astonished the inhabitants of that queenly city, first by rivalling her polished nobles in the splendour of his retinue the gallantry of his manners; and next, by boldly proclaiming that his 'Ladye-love' was superior to all that Italy could vaunt of beauty. That she was 'Oltre le belle, bella,'-fair beyond the fairest; and maintaining his

CASTLE.)

TOURNAMENT.-SURREY AT FLORENCE.

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boast is a solemn tourney, held in her honour, to the overthrow of all his opponents. This was our English Surrey, one of the earliest and most elegant

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of our amatory poets, and the lover of the fair Geraldine. According to the old tradition repeated by all Surrey's biographers, he visited on his travels the famous necromancer Cornelius Agrippa, who, in a magic mirror, revealed to him the fair figure of his Geraldine, lying dishevelled on a couch, and, by the light of a taper, reading one of his tenderest Sonnets."

"Dark was the vaulted room of gramarye,*

To which the wizard led the gallant knight,
Save that before a mirror, huge and high,
A hallow'd taper shed a glimmering light
On mystic implements of magic might;
On cross, and character, and talisman,
And almagest, and altar, nothing bright:
For fitful was the lustre, pale and wan,

As watchlight by the bed of some departing man.

"But soon, within that mirror huge and high,
Was seen a self-emitted light to gleam;
And forms upon its breast the Earl 'gan spy,
Cloudy and indistinct, as feverish dream;
Till, slow arranging, and defined, they seem
To form a lordly and a lofty room,
Part lighted by a lamp with silver beam,

Placed by a couch of Agra's silken loom,

And part by moonshine pale, and part was hid in gloom.

"Fair all the pageant-but how passing fair

The slender form, which lay on couch of Ind!

* Sir Walter Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel.

O'er her white bosom stray'd her hazel hair,
Pale her dear cheek, as if for love she pined;
All in her night-robe loose she lay reclined,

And, pensive, read from tablet eburine,
Some strain that seem'd her inmost soul to find :-
That favour'd strain was SURREY's raptured line,
That fair and lovely form, the LADY GERALDINE.

Within the narrow limits to which this work is necessarily restricted, it is impossible to do justice to this melancholy subject, which of itself has afforded, and would again afford, matter sufficient to form a volume of the deepest interest. It has, however, long since engaged the genius of Campbell and some of the best spirits of our literature, in whose works the name and fame of Henry Howard are embalmed.

Thomas, the eldest son of the "murdered Surrey," was restored to the dukedom of Norfolk by Queen Elizabeth. Loaded with many honours and dignities which evinced the entire confidence she reposed in him, all appeared to augur that so brilliant a career would have closed in a tranquil night. But the evil genius, which presided over his worldly destinies, was yet to be appeased. The orders of knighthood; the captain generalship of the forces; the embassies and commissions, with which he was successively honoured by his sovereign, were only preludes to the last sad history of his life:

He did but dream on sovereignty,

Like one that stands upon a promontory,

And spies a far-off shore, where he would tread,
Wishing his foot were equal with his eye,

And chides the sea that sunders him from thence.

KING HENRY VI.

Having received his early education under Fox, the martyrologist, then tutor in the family of his aunt, the Duchess of Richmond, he took the degree of master of arts at Cambridge, on the grand reception and entertainment of Queen Elizabeth at that University.

After discharging with fidelity and éclat the high posts of trust already mentioned; he was at last entangled by the snares of flattery and overweening ambition, and charged with treasonable designs entered into by him to forward the schemes of Mary Queen of Scots, with the view of allying himself with that ill-fated Princess by marriage,-views in which his ambition or his sympathy had got the better of his deliberate judgment, and in which he appears to have been encouraged by those hollow friends, who sought not his honour but his disgrace. He was accordingly arraigned, tried; and confessing his wilful participation in the plot, expiated his offence on the scaffold with characteristic firmness and composure.

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