Northumberland directed his first efforts to seize the person of the Princess Mary. He sent his son, the Earl of Warwick, to lay hands on her, but she escaped and fled into the Eastern Counties, where the gentry of Norfolk and Suffolk, the most Protestant shires in the kingdom, hailed her as queen, and armed to defend her. Warwick's troops dispersed when he strove to induce them to attack the followers of the rightful heiress. This alarming symptom startled the Protector out of his security; he raised a larger force and set out at once to suppress the rising. But the moment that he had left London there was an outbreak in the capital itself. The majority of the royal council, when Northumberland's eye was off them, threw in their lot with the rioters, and London fell into the hands of Mary's partisans. Nor was this all. The whole of the shires from north to south rose in Mary's favour, and the Protector, who had marched as far as Cambridge, saw his army melt away from him. When the Earl of Arundel came against him in the name of the rightful queen, he was constrained to give up his sword and yield himself a prisoner. He was brought back to London, tried, and condemned for high treason. His last days showed the meanness of his character; for, in the hope of propitiating the queen, he declared himself a Catholic, heard Mass, and made fulsome and degrading protestations of contrition and humility. They did not save his life, for he was beheaded, to the great joy of all England, only six weeks after the death of Edward VI. (August 22, 1553). Mary cast into prison all Northumberland's tools: the unfortunate Lady Jane--queen for just thirteen days--her husband Lord Guildford Dudley, her father the Duke of Suffolk, and most of the Dudley kin. For the present they suffered no further harm. [Sidenote: =The fanaticism of Mary.=]