On the 2nd of March it passed the Commons, and three days later received the royal assent; on the 15th, Goodriche, Bishop of Ely, communicated to Seymour that he was to suffer death on the 20th. The Protector has naturally been greatly blamed for the part he took in bringing his brother to the scaffold, and there is a curious passage in a letter written by the Princess Elizabeth to her sister Queen Mary, shortly after she herself was sent a prisoner to the Tower, in which she says, “In late days I hearde my Lorde Somerset say, that if his brother had bine suffered to speke to him, he had never suffered; but the persuasions were made to him so gret, that he was brought in beleafe that he could not live safely if the admirall lived; and that made him give his consent to his dethe.” The young King’s entry in his diary regarding his uncle’s death is extremely laconic: “The Lord Sudley, admiral of England, was condemned to death, and died in March ensuing.” Burnet in his “History” says, “What his behaviour was on the scaffold I do not find,” and indeed no record, as was the case with so many of his distinguished contemporaries, has come down to us of his last moments, except that Strype in his “History” says, that just before the end the Admiral bade his servant, “speed the thing that he wot of.” This last message appears to have regarded two letters which he had written in the Tower, one to the Princess Elizabeth, and the other to the Princess Mary. They had been written in some kind of invisible ink, and, having no pen, he had written them with the point of an “uglet” which “he had plucked from his hose,” and they had been sewn between the sole of one of his velvet shoes. “By this means these letters came to light, and fell into the hands of the Protector and Council. The contents of these tended to this end, that the two sisters should conspire together against the Protector, enforcing many matters against him, to make these ladies jealous of him, as though he had, it may be, estranged the King their brother from them, or to deprive them of the right of their succession. Both these papers Latimer himself saw, and repeated publicly in his fourth sermon before the King, though in the last edition of his sermons the passage is left out.” The following, however, is the passage from Latimer’s most strange discourse on the death of the Lord High Admiral, which he preached before the King regarding his uncle’s death; a less charitable or courtly address is not often met with: “As touching the kind of his death, whether he be saved or no, I refer that to God. In the twinkling of an eye He may save a man or turn his heart. What he did I cannot tell, and when a man hath two strokes with an axe, who can tell but between two strokes he doth repent? It is hard to judge, but this I will say, if they will ask me what I think of his death, that he died very dangerously, irksomely and horribly. He was a wicked man and the realm is well rid of him”