Exeter Place was shortly afterwards rebuilt, but the new house seemed a doomed place, and brought no better fortune to its new owners. Lord Paget, who changed its name to Paget House, fought at Boulogne under the poet Earl of Surrey, was ambassador at the court of Charles V., and on his return obtained a peerage and the garter. He fell with the Protector Somerset, being accused of having planned the assassination of the Duke of Northumberland at Paget House. Released from the Tower, he was deprived of the garter upon the malicious pretence that he was not a gentleman by blood. Queen Mary, however, restored the fallen man to honour, made him Lord Privy Seal, and sent him on an embassy. The next occupier of the unlucky house, Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk, and son of the poet Earl of Surrey, maintained in its chambers an almost royal magnificence. It was here he was arrested for conspiring, with the aid of Mary Queen of Scots, the Pope, and the King of Spain, to marry Mary and restore the Popish religion. The duke’s ambition and treason were fully proved by his own intercepted letters; indeed, he himself confessed his guilt, though he had denounced Mary to Elizabeth as a “notorious adulteress and murderer.” To crown his rashness, meanness, and treason, he wrote from the Tower the most abject letters to Elizabeth, imploring her clemency. He was privately beheaded in 1572, but his estates were restored to his children.[37] It was under the mat, hard by a window in the entry towards the duke’s bedchamber, that the celebrated alphabet in cipher[38] was hidden, which the duke afterwards concealed under a roof tile, where it was found, unmasking all his plans. In the Tower the unhappy plotter had written affecting letters to his son Philip, bidding him worship God, avoid courts, and beware of ambition.[39] The warning of the man whose eyes had been opened too late is touching. The writer, speaking of court life, remarks, “It hath no certainty. Either a man, by following thereof, hath too much worldly pomp, which in the end throws him down headlong, or else he liveth there unsatisfied, either that he cannot obtain to himself that he would, or else that he cannot do for his friends as his heart desireth.” Poor Philip did not benefit much by these lessons, but remained simple Earl of Arundel, was repeatedly committed to the Tower, as by necessity an ill-wisher to Elizabeth, and eventually died there after ten weary years of imprisonment. His initials are still to be found on the walls of one of the chambers in the Beauchamp Tower. Fools never learn the lessons which Time tries so hard to beat into them. Plotter succeeds plotter, and the rough lesson of the headsman seldom teaches the conspirator’s successor to cease from conspiring.