how at Candlemas the young lord and his comrades
"went out with stone bows at midnight," and how next day "there was
great clamour of the breaking of many glass windows both of houses and
churches, and shooting at men that might be in the streets." In spite of
his humorous excuse that the jest only purposed to bring home to men
that "from justice' rod no fault is free, but that all such as work
unright in most quiet are next unrest," Surrey paid for this outbreak
with a fresh arrest which drove him to find solace in paraphrases of
Ecclesiastes and the Psalms. Soon he was over sea with the English
troops in Flanders, and in 1544 serving as marshal of the camp to
conduct the retreat after the siege of Montreuil. Sent to relieve
Boulogne, he remained in charge of the town till the spring of 1546,
when he returned to England to rime sonnets to a fair Geraldine, the
daughter of the Earl of Kildare, and to plunge into the strife of
factions around the dying king.

[Sidenote: Fall of the Howards.]

All moral bounds had been loosened by the spirit of the Renascence, and,
if we accept the charge of his rivals, Surrey now aimed at gaining a
hold on Henry by offering him his sister as a mistress. It is as
possible that the young Earl was aiming simply at the displacement of
Catharine Parr, and at the renewal by his sister's elevation to the
throne of that matrimonial hold upon Henry which the Howards had already
succeeded in gaining through the unions with Anne Boleyn and Catharine
Howard. But a temper such as Surrey's was ill matched against the subtle
and unscrupulous schemers who saw their enemy in a pride that scorned
the "new men" about him and vowed that when once the king was dead "they
should smart for it." The turn of foreign affairs gave a fresh strength
to the party which sympathized with the Protestants and denounced that
alliance with the Emperor which had been throughout the policy of the
Howards. Henry's offer of aid to the Lutheran princes marked the triumph
of this party in the royal councils; and the new steps which Cranmer was
suffered to make towards an English Liturgy showed that the religious
truce of Henry's later years was at last abandoned. Hertford, the head
of the "new men," came more to the front as the waning health of the
king brought Jane Seymour's boy, Edward, nearer to the throne. In the
new reign Hertford, as the boy's uncle, was sure to play a great part;
and he used his new influence to remove