PRliDECESSORS 229 



Boleyn family compact had become a danger to the State, and 

 that the pubhc welfare pointed out his duty. Before all, the 

 king was a man of conscience, and in the words Shakespeare 

 puts into the mouth of the Duke of Suffolk, his conscience 

 had again crept near another lady. The Boleyns must 

 go. Lord Eochford was found guilty by a large majority. 

 His friends were kept away ; his enemies gathered together. 

 Like his sister Anne, and in the fashion of the day, Eochford 

 was versed in the controversies raised by the Eeformation, and 

 had identified himself actively with the new ideas. 



The Catholic peers, led by his own kinsman, the Duke of 

 Norfolk, who, it is said, had sworn to break him, voted solid. 

 He was sentenced to be hanged, cut down ahve, ripped 

 up, drawn and quartered. Mindful, perhaps, of the rather 

 dismal consideration shown by Henry IV. to Sir Bernard 

 Brocas, who, though beheaded at Tyburn, was excused the 

 preliminaries of being hanged and drawn, Henry VIII. com- 

 muted the more savage parts of the sentence, and he was 

 executed by the headsman on Tower Hill on May 17, 1536. 



Lord Leicester we all know a great deal about from 

 ' Kenilworth.' But a letter of Castelnau's to Henry III. of 

 France describes the sort of hunting which Queen Elizabeth 

 and Lord Leicester enjoyed together. 



After telling his sovereign that he had received a hospit- 

 able invitation from Lord Leicester, on behalf of the queen, 

 to come and stay with him and have a hunt at Windsor, he 

 goes on to relate the pleasures of the actual hunt, which 

 appears to have consisted in driving a number of deer up and 

 down inside a netted space in front of a well-screened butt 

 (feuillade), in which Queen Elizabeth was stationed with her 

 arblast. The sport then became varied by some coursing. 

 ' Et tout le reste du jour jusques au soir, sortirent des 

 thoilles (toils), ung, deux, trois, et a diverses fois, phisieurs 

 grandz cerfs passant par la dicte feuillade, entreprenant deux 



