er is the authority of a poet in matters of history! It is
quite certain that Richard Norton did not perish by the hands of the
executioner, and it is uncertain whether any one of his sons did. It is
true that the old man with three more of the family was attainted, that
his great estates were confiscated, and that he ended his days a
miserable exile in Flanders. We also know that two gentlemen of the name
of Norton were hanged at London: but some authorities make them brothers
of the head of the family; and two of the sons of Richard Norton,
Francis, and Edmund ancestor of the present lord Grantley, certainly
lived and died in peace on their estates in Yorkshire.

It is little to the honor of Elizabeth's clemency, that a rebellion
suppressed almost without bloodshed should have been judged by her to
justify and require the unmitigated exercise of martial law over the
whole of the disaffected country. Sir John Bowes, marshal of the army,
made it his boast, that in a tract sixty miles in length and forty in
breadth, there was scarcely a town or village where he had not put some
to death; and at Durham the earl of Sussex caused sixty-three constables
to be hanged at once;--a severity of which it should appear that he was
the unwilling instrument; for in a letter written soon after to Cecil he
complains, that during part of the time of his command in the north he
had nothing left to him "but to direct hanging matters." But the
situation of this nobleman at the time was such as would by no means
permit him at his own peril to suspend or evade the execution of such
orders as he received from court. Egremond Ratcliffe his half-brother
was one of about forty noblemen and gentlemen attainted for their
concern in this rebellion; he had in the earl of Leicester an enemy
equally vindictive and powerful; and some secret informations had
infused into the mind of the queen a suspicion that there had been some
wilful slackness in his proceedings against the insurgents. There was
however at the bottom of Elizabeth's heart a conviction of the truth and
loyalty of her kinsman which could not be eradicated, and he soon after
took a spirited step which disconcerted entirely the measures of his
enemies, and placed him higher than ever in her confidence and esteem.
Cecil thus relates the circumstance in one of his letters to Norris,
dated February 1570.

"The earl of Sussex... upon desire to see her majesty, came hither
unlooked for; and al