In the succeeding century the first line of Earls, consisting of six Henry Percys, came to an end in that childless noble whom Anne Boleyn called ‘the Thriftless Lord.’ He died childless in 1537. He had, indeed, two brothers, the elder of whom might have succeeded to the title and estates; but both brothers, Sir Thomas and Sir Ingram, had taken up arms in the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace.’ Attainder and forfeiture were the consequences; and in 1551 Northumberland was the title of the dukedom conferred on John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who lost the dignity when his head was struck off at the block, two years later. Then the old title, Earl of Northumberland, was restored in 1557, to Thomas, eldest son of that attainted Thomas who had joined the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace.’ Ill-luck still followed these Percys. Thomas was beheaded--the last of his house who fell by the hands of the executioner--in 1572. His brother and heir died in the Tower in 1585. None of these Percys had yet come into the Strand. The brick house there, which was to be their own through marriage with an heiress, was built in the lifetime of the Earl, whose father, as just mentioned, died in the Tower in 1585. The son, too, was long a prisoner in that gloomy palace and prison. While Lord Northampton was laying the foundations of the future London house of the Percys in 1605, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was being carried into durance. There was a Percy, kinsman to the Earl, who was mixed up with the Gunpowder Plot. For no other reason than relationship with the conspiring Percy, the Earl was shut up in the Tower for life, as his sentence ran, and he was condemned to pay a fine of thirty thousand pounds. The Earl ultimately got off with fifteen years’ imprisonment and a fine of twenty thousand pounds. He was popularly known as the Wizard Earl, because he was a studious recluse, companying only with grave scholars (of whom there were three, known as ‘Percy’s Magi’) and finding relaxation in writing rhymed satires against the Scots. There was a stone walk in the Tower which, having been paved by the Earl, was known during many years as ‘My Lord of Northumberland’s Walk.’ At one end was an iron shield of his arms; and holes in which he put a peg at every turn he made in his dreary exercise.