It does not appear that the breach between the brothers was irreparable until about 1535, in which year the King gave the childless Earl licence to appoint any one of the Percy name and blood heir to all his lands[120]. But when Sir Thomas, his natural successor, was proposed, the King raised objections[121]. The result was that in February 1535 the Earl made the King his sole heir, and an Act of Parliament was passed “concerning the assurance of the possessions of the Earl of Northumberland to the King’s Highness and his heirs[122].” Nothing could have made the Earl more unpopular, and it was probably this alienation of the family property rather than his personal extravagance and inherited debts that earned him his surname “the Unthrifty.”[123] Sir Thomas was provided for in the Act, but he could hardly be grateful for a pension when he felt himself heir by right to an earldom and the broadest lands in the north[124]. No appeal was possible when the King gained by his loss. A petition which he sent to Cromwell in July 1535 shows his helplessness. In this he related how the lands at Corbridge so tardily allowed him, which he “with great labour” had defended from the Scots, had now been granted by his brother to Sir Reynold Carnaby. Sir Thomas naturally refused to give them up, and went to remonstrate with his brother in person. But he was not allowed even to see the Earl and was rudely turned from his house. He concluded by begging that Carnaby might be removed from the Earl’s service, as he was the cause of his master’s quarrels with his wife, brothers and nearest relatives[125]. Cromwell was not likely to remove Carnaby from the place where he had been of so much use; and it was Cromwell and Carnaby whom Sir Thomas secretly denounced as the authors of his wrongs when he, with Sir Ingram, swore to be revenged on the Earl’s favourite as “the destruction of all our blood.”