champion of their domestic wrongs. Justly and unjustly, he had dragged down upon himself the animosity of peers, bishops, clergy, and gentlemen, and their day of revenge was come.
June 10.On the 10th of June he attended as usual at the morning sitting of the House of Lords. The privy council sat in the afternoon, and at three o'clock the Duke of Norfolk rose suddenly at the table: 'My Lord of Essex,' he said, 'I arrest you of high treason.' There were witnesses in readiness, who came forward and swore to have heard him say 'that, if the King and all his realm would turn and vary from his opinions, he would fight in the field in his own person, with his sword in his hand, against the King and all others; adding that, if he lived a year or two, he trusted to bring things to that frame that it should not lie in the King's power to resist or let it.'[1] The words 'were justified to his face.'[2] It was enough. Letters
- ↑ State Papers, vol. viii. p. 349.
- ↑ A remarkable account of Cromwell's arrest is given by Marillac:—'The arrest took place in the
your lordship to have pity on me, and that through your only goodness ye will cause my husband to use me like his wife, and no otherwise than I have deserved; and to send me money, and to pay such debts as I do owe by reason of my long being sick, and I shall pray for your lordship daily to increase in honour to your noble heart's desire. Scribbled with the hand of your bounden bedewoman, Elizabeth Burgh.'—MS. State Paper Office, first series, vol. xiii.
I should have been glad to have added a more remarkable letter from Lady Hungerford, who was locked up by her husband in a country house for four years, and 'would have died for lack of sustenance,' 'had not,' she wrote, 'the poor women of the country brought me, to my great window in the night, such poor meat and drink as they had, and gave me for the love of God.' But the letter contains other details not desirable to publish.—MS. Cotton. Titus, B 1, 397.