“Sister,” he said, “I am very sorry to hear what I do about you; and if it be true, I will never speak to you again, but will be your mortal enemy.”[40]
The Duchess was not a woman to accept the admonition meekly, and it was she who was to prove, in the sequel, the more dangerous foe of the two.
The offence for which Surrey nominally suffered the capital penalty seems trivial enough. According to the story told by contemporary authorities—and it suits well with his overweening pride in his ancient blood and royal descent—he caused a painting to be executed wherein the Norfolk arms were joined to those of the royal house, the motto Honi soit qui mal y pense being replaced by the enigmatical device Till then thus, and the whole concealed by a canvas placed above it.
From an engraving by Scriven after a painting by Holbein.
HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY.
The very fact of the secrecy observed betrays the Earl’s consciousness that he had committed an imprudence. He was guilty of a worse when, notwithstanding the terms upon which he stood with his sister, he made her his confidant in the matter. The Duchess, in her turn, informed her father of what had been done, but to the Duke’s remonstrances Surrey turned a deaf ear. His ancestors, he replied, had borne these arms, and he was much better than they. Powerless to move him, his father, reiterating his fears that it might furnish occasion for a charge of treason, begged that the affair might be kept strictly private, to which Surrey readily agreed. Both men, however, had reckoned without the woman who was daughter to the one, sister to the other. Whether, as some aver,[41] the Duchess took the step of betraying her brother directly to the King, or merely corroborated the accusations preferred against him by others—Sir Richard Southwell, a friend of Surrey’s childhood, being the first to denounce him[42]—the matter soon became known, the Earl was examined at length, and by the middle of December was, with his father, lodged in the Tower on the charge of treason, the assumption of the royal arms being viewed as an implied claim to the succession to the throne, and as a menace to the little heir. Hertford and his brother were at hand to exaggerate the peril to be feared from his ambition; and the affection of the populace, who, as he was taken through the city to his place of captivity, made great lamentation,[43] was not fitted to allay apprehension. A month later the Earl’s trial took place at the Guildhall, crowds filling the streets as he went by. Brought before his judges, he made so spirited a defence that Holinshed admits that “if he had tempered his answers with such modesty as he showed token of a right perfect and ready wit, his praise had been the greater”; and though neither wit nor modesty was likely to avail to save him, it was not without long deliberation that the jury agreed to declare him guilty.
Their verdict was pronounced by his implacable enemy, Hertford; being greeted by the people with “a great tumult, and it was a long while before they could be silenced, although they cried out to them to be quiet.”[44]
The prisoner received what was practically sentence of death in characteristic fashion. His enemies might have vanquished him, but he could still despise them, still assert his inborn superiority to his victors.
“Of what have you found me guilty?” he demanded. “Surely you will find no law that justifies you; but I know that the King wants to get rid of the noble blood around him, and to employ none but low people.”[45]