ave been in his present
calamity.

He then knelt; "I beseech you all," he said again, "to believe that I
die in the Catholic faith." He repeated the _Miserere_ psalm, the
psalm _De Profundis_, and the _Paternoster_. The executioner, as
usual, begged his pardon. "I have deserved a thousand deaths," he
muttered. He made the sign of the cross upon the saw-dust, and kissed
it, then laid down his head, and perished.

The shame of the apostasy shook down the frail edifice of the
Protestant constitution, to be raised again in suffering, as the first
foundations of it had been laid, by purer hands and nobler
spirits.[98] In his better years Northumberland had been a faithful
subject and a fearless soldier, and, with a master's hand over him, he
might have lived with integrity, and died with honour. Opportunity
tempted his ambition--ambition betrayed him {p.045} into crime--and,
given over to his lower nature, he climbed to the highest round of the
political ladder, to fall and perish like a craven. He was one of
those many men who can follow worthily, yet cannot lead; and the
virtue of the beginning was not less real than the ignominy of the
end.

[Footnote 98: Lady Jane Grey spoke a few memorable
words on the duke's conduct at the scaffold. "On
Tuesday, the 29th of August," says the writer of
the _Chronicle of Queen Mary_, "I dined at
Partridge's house (in the Tower) with my Lady Jane,
she sitting at the board's-end, Partridge, his
wife, and my lady's gentlewoman. We fell in
discourse of religion. I pray you, quoth she, have
they mass in London. Yea, forsooth, quoth I, in
some places. It may so be, quoth she. It is not so
strange as the sudden conversion of the late duke;
for who could have thought, said she, he would have
so done? It was answered her, perchance he thereby
hoped to have had his pardon. Pardon! quoth she,
woe worth him! He hath brought me and our stock in
most miserable calamity by his exceeding ambition;
but for the answering that he hoped for life by his
turning, though other men be of that opinion, I
utterly am not. For what man is there living, I