their descent, sided with the Catholics, and expressed open indignation at the royal ascendancy of the Seymours, whom they denounced as new men, that trampled the ancient nobility in the dust. The feud ran high ; each party aimed at the other's destruction, and as the power of the Seymours proved tho stronger, Norfolk, Surrey, and Gardiner, were thrown into prison for pretended offences. Gardiner, by making an humble submission, soon obtained his release; but as the King had been made to believe that Norfolk and Surrey aspired to rule tho crown and realm, his jealousy was alarmed, and he pursued them with such unrelenting vengeance, that Surrey was brought to the block on the twenty-fifth of January, 1547; and two days afterwards, an order was sent to the lieutenant of the Tower, to execute Norfolk on the following morning. Fortunately, however, for the aged and innocent Duke, ere the sun again rose, the too guilty King was dead; and, although the sentence had proceeded from Henry himself, the execution was stayed, and in Mary's reign the act of attainder was reversed. Henry's petulance and irascibility grew with tho growth of his deathsickness. The accounts, however, of his conduct in his last hours are vague and contradictory. One report makes him calmly enter the sleep of death a devout, penitent sinner; another represents him expiring in the maddening anguish of hopeless despair; whilst, according to a third, when informed of his approaching dissolution, by Sir Antony Denny, the only person who dared whisper the awful denouncement in the royal ears, he sternly repelled his physicians, would take no more medicine, and refused spiritual aid, till ho could onlv reply to Craiimer's exhortation, to die in the faith of Christ, by a squeeze of the band. Henry the Eighth breathed his last at about a quarter to two o'clock, on the morning of Friday, the twenty-eighth of January, 1547, at Westminster, in the fifty-sixth year of his age, and the thirty-eighth of his reign.* We have no account of Kath * About a month before his death, Henry erine's proceedings at the time ; and, as at least one author assures us that Henry's death alone saved lier from being, for a second time, accused of heresy, it is probable that she did not witness the last moments of that cruel, tyrannical husband, by whose side, we may fairly presume, she did not attempt to pass a single night, without a dread of beholding, in the visions of sleep, the spectres of Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, or of feeling the i'atal axe upon her own innocent neck. By his will, Henry the Eighth deprived Katherine, much to her annoyance, of any share in the regency; but be bequeathed to her three thousand pounds' worth of plate, jewellery, and household goods ; one thousand pounds in cash, and her dower and jointure as granted by parliament—a tolerable legacy, considering the relative value of money ; and that she was also the mistress of two valuable dowers, as the widow of Lords Borough and Latimer. Henry also bequeathed a large sum for masses, to be said, for delivering his soul from purgatory ; and thus, singular to relate, the monarch who had destroyed all those institutions established by his ancestors, and others, for "the benefit of their souls," and had even left the doctrine of purgatory doubtful in all the articles of faith which he promulgated during his latter years, was yet determined, when the hour of death was approaching, to take care at least of his own future repose, and to adhere to what he evidently believed to be tho safer side of the question. The King's death was kept a profound secret till the Earl of Hertford had secured the person of his royal nephew, Edward the Sixth, and arranged with his associates the plan of their future operation. On the twenty-ninth of Jannary the parliament met, and transacted business, but received no intimation of Henry's demise till the following Monday, when it was made known to the endowed the magnificent establishment of Trinity College, in Cambridge, for a master and sixty fellows and KcholaTs, ami re-openedttie Church of Grey Fri:trs, which, with St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and a handsome revenue, he gave to the city of London.