monasteries. They had as their great ally Archbishop Cranmer; but though some of them, and Lord Hertford in particular, had shown considerable capacity, their weight in the country was small compared with that of their opponents. Their position as men who had thriven upon the spoils of the Church inclined them naturally to the new order of things; and they were driven still further in the same direction by the fact that the Protestants were the only section of the nation upon whom they could certainly count as supporters. Henry had contrived for some years to keep the peace between these two factions by his own vigorous methods of ruling; but Henry felt that he could not live long, and, in the absence of a man whom he could thoroughly trust, had arranged a council of executors in which the two parties seem to have been carefully balanced, in the hope—it is to be supposed—that they would keep one another in check. All at once however, only about three months before Henry's death, an event occurred which entirely falsified his calculations, and in the end overthrew all his arrangements. Lord Surrey, in many ways the most brilliant and remarkable member of the reactionary party—but, at the same time, the most bitter in his hatred of the new men, and the most unrestrained in his contemptuous expression of it—was accused of having altered his coat of arms, and quartered the royal arms upon it, in a position which could not but suggest a claim on his part to a very near place in the succession to the throne. He was known to have spoken boastfully of his father as being the person most fit to be entrusted with the guardianship of the prince, and to have used vague threats of what the new men should suffer when the King was dead. All these matters, trifling in themselves,
