ecline of his health, which brought into immediate
prospect the accession of young Edward under the tutelage of his uncle,
had now conspired to give a decided preponderancy. The aged duke,
sagacious, politic, and deeply versed in all the secrets and the arts of
courts, saw in a coalition with the Seymours the only expedient for
averting the ruin of his house; and he proposed to bestow his daughter
the duchess of Richmond in marriage on sir Thomas Seymour, while he
exerted all his authority with his son to prevail upon him to address
one of the daughters of the earl of Hertford. But Surry's scorn of the
new nobility of the house of Seymour, and his animosity against the
person of its chief, was not to be overcome by any plea of expedience or
threatening of danger. He could not forget that it was at the instance
of the earl of Hertford that he, with some other nobles and gentlemen,
had suffered the disgrace of imprisonment for eating flesh in Lent; that
when a trifling defeat which he had sustained near Boulogne had caused
him to be removed from the government of that town, it was the earl of
Hertford who ultimately profited by his misfortune, in succeeding to the
command of the army. Other grounds of offence the haughty Surry had also
conceived against him; and choosing rather to fall, than cling for
support to an enemy at once despised and hated, he braved the utmost
displeasure of his father, by an absolute refusal to lend himself to
such a scheme of alliance. Of this circumstance his enemies availed
themselves to instil into the mind of the king a suspicion that the earl
of Surry aspired to the hand of the princess Mary; they also commented
with industrious malice on his bearing the arms of Edward the
Confessor, to which he was clearly entitled in right of his mother, a
daughter of the duke of Buckingham, but which his more cautious father
had ceased to quarter after the attainder of that unfortunate nobleman.

The sick mind of Henry received with eagerness all these suggestions,
and the ruin of the earl was determined[9]. An indictment of high
treason was preferred against him: his proposal of disproving the
charge, according to a mode then legal, by fighting his principal
accuser in his shirt, was overruled; his spirited, strong and eloquent
defence was disregarded--a jury devoted to the crown brought in a
verdict of guilty; and in January 1547, at the early age of
seven-and-twenty, he underwent the fatal sentence of