To complete this gloomy picture, there only remains to be added the story of the king's last outburst of suspicion and cruelty. Conceiving that the Duke of Norfolk and his son, the Earl of Surrey, were counting on his approaching death to make an attempt to seize the regency, he had them both apprehended, though nothing definite could be alleged against them, save that of late they had taken to quartering the royal arms in their family shield--a distinction to which they were entitled as descended from Edward III. Surrey, a soldier of great promise and a poet of considerable power, was beheaded; his father was doomed to follow him, had not the king's death intervened. It is even said that Henry, in one of his more irritable moods, was threatening to try his blameless wife, Queen Catherine, for concealed Protestantism. [Sidenote: =Death of Henry.--Condition of England.=] But to the general relief of England, Henry died before this last crime could be consummated (January 28, 1547). He left his realm in a condition of great misery, and for all its troubles he was personally responsible. His breach with the papacy had been the result of private pique, not of conscience or principle. When committed to the anti-Roman cause, he had refused to move forward with the one half of his subjects, or to remain behind with the other. He had anchored the English Church for a time in a middle position, intolerable alike to Protestant Reformers and to the Partisans of the Papacy and subjection to Rome. If the nation owed him a certain debt of gratitude for not committing England to some of the excesses of Continental Protestantism, yet it owed him no thanks for officering the Church with a hierarchy of bishops, some of whom, like Cranmer, were meanly timid and pliant, while others were men of low ideals and unworthy lives, the mere creatures of court favour. Nor is it possible to view with equanimity the way in which Henry wasted on pageants, foreign intrigues, and fawning courtiers, the vast sums which the State had acquired by the very proper and necessary abolition of the monasteries. Of Henry's unbounded selfishness, of his ingratitude to those who had served him best, of his ruthless cruelty to all who stood in his way, we need not further speak. The story of his reign develops each of these traits in its own particular blackness. [Sidenote: =Henry's foreign policy.=]