ut the obvious inconveniences and dangers attending the exercise of
this power of choice, had induced the parliaments of Henry VIII. to join
with him in various acts for the regulation of the succession. It was
probably with the concurrence of this body, that in 1532 he had declared
his cousin, the marquis of Exeter, heir to the crown; yet this very
act, by which the king excluded not only his daughter Mary, but his two
sisters and their children, every one of whom had a prior right
according to the rules at present received, must have caused the
sovereignty to be regarded rather as elective in the royal family than
properly hereditary--a fatal idea, which converted every member of that
family possessed of wealth, talents, or popularity, into a formidable
rival, if not to the sovereign on the throne, at least to his next heir,
if a woman or a minor, and which may be regarded as the immediate
occasion of those cruel proscriptions which stained with kindred blood
the closing years of the reign of Henry, and have stamped upon him to
all posterity the odious character of a tyrant.

The first sufferer by the suspicions of the king was lord Thomas Howard,
half-brother to the duke of Norfolk, who was attainted of high treason
in the parliament of 1536, for having secretly entered into a contract
of marriage with lady Margaret Douglas, the king's niece, through which
alliance he was accused of aiming at the crown. For this offence he was
confined in the Tower till his death; but on what evidence of traitorous
designs, or by what law, except the arbitrary mandate of the monarch
confirmed by a subservient parliament, it would be difficult to say.
That his marriage was forbidden by no law, is evident from the passing
of an act immediately afterwards, making it penal to marry any female
standing in the first degree of relationship to the king, without his
knowledge and consent.

The lady Margaret was daughter to Henry's eldest sister, the
queen-dowager of Scotland, by her second husband the earl of Angus. She
was born in England, whither her mother had been compelled to fly for
refuge by the turbulent state of her son's kingdom, and the ill success
of her own and her husband's struggles for the acquisition of political
power. In the English court the lady Margaret had likewise been
educated, and had formed connexions of friendship; whilst her brother
James V. laboured under the antipathy with which the English then
regarded those