But all these accomplishments, and the popularity that attended them, laid the foundation of a fatal death for this illustrious nobleman. They excited the jealousy of his capricious monarch Henry VIII. Lord Orford says “The unwieldy king growing distempered and froward, and apprehensive for the tranquillity of his boy-successor, easily conceived or admitted jealousies infused into him by the Earl of Hertford and the Protestant party, though one of the last acts of his fickle life was to found a convent.” Treason was therefore objected to the Earl of Surrey upon the most frivolous pretences; of which the principal was, his quartering the arms of Edward the Confessor with those of Howard, though even this insignificant fact had been justified by the practice of his family, and the sanction of the heralds. He was arraigned in the Guildhall, London, found guilty by a jury, and judgment of death being given, he was beheaded on Tower Hill, in January, 1547. The Earl of Surrey was professedly a man of gallantry and pleasure, possessing a highly cultivated mind, and excelling in all the polite and elegant accomplishments of the age in which he lived. The flattery which has been bestowed upon his character by Poets, Heralds, and Genealogists, has not ceased to flow from his death to the present hour. A recent genealogical writer has been superlatively lavish of his panegyrics upon the excellencies and even upon the morals of the gallant Earl. There is, however, one extraordinary circumstance in the life of this nobleman which has been entirely overlooked by all his encomiasts. This is, that while his father urged him to connect himself in marriage with one lady; while the king was jealous of his designs upon a second; and while he himself as may be collected from his poem “To a Lady who refused to dance with him,” made proposals of marriage to a third, he was during all this time married to the lady Frances,[6] daughter of John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, by whom he had five children, namely, two sons and three daughters. The sons were Thomas, afterwards fourth Duke of Norfolk, and Henry, created Earl of Northampton, by king James the First. To this lady the Earl of Surrey was united at the age of fifteen, and several years after his premature death, we find her bearing the title of Countess of Surrey, and possessing the guardianship of his children, therefore it is apparent they were never divorced. Can it be supposed that the example of a lustful king had instructed his courtiers, among their other accomplishments, to find pretexts for the dissolution of the marriage tie, whenever interest or their guilty passions prompted them to such baseness? Yet this is the man whose moral, as well as poetical and literary character, we are told “it is delightful to contemplate.”