in Norfolk. These topics of panegyric were sure not to be overlooked by our writers of genealogies, who winnow the characters of all mankind, and take due care not to lay up any of the chaff.-But what have our historians to say of this man! What a tale have they to tell of murder!-But it is necessary to take up his character a little higher. On his father's death he appears to have been left in very scanty circumstances; and though there is no doubt of his having parts, and very flexile ones too, they carried him no great lengths during the long reign of Elizabeth in her successor's they produced tenfold. Antony Bacon (giving an account of a conference he had with his aunt about the Cecils) wishes for the genius of the lord Henry Howard, or that of Signor Perez, to assist him with the facility and grace which they had in relating their own actions". Lady Bacon", the severe and froward, but upright * Dugdale's Baronage, vol. ii. p. 27. ' [Lloyd says, that once being in London, he was fain to dine with the chair of duke Humphrey, that is, to go without his dinner, and to pass his meal-time in reading of books in the stationers' shops in St. Paul's churchyard. Lloyd's Statesmen, &c. p. 557.] Bacon Papers, vol. ii. P. 132. ' [Lady Bacon was one of the learned daughters of sir Anthony Cooke, and equally distinguished for her piety, prudence, mother of Anthony and sir Francis, had no such favourable impressions of lord Henry, against whom, as he was an intimate of Anthony and the earl of Essex, she often warns her son: calling Howard," a dangerous intelligencing man, and no doubt a subtile papist inwardly; a very instrument of the Spanish papists." No mistaken judgment: he had been bred a papist; and though at this time he seems to have acted protestantism, he openly reverted to popery in the next reign, which at the king's request he again abandoned, and yet at his death avowed himself a catholic'. The same lady apprehends his betraying his brother Norfolk, whom he was still soliciting to his ruin; "for he (lord Henry) pretending courtesy, worketh mischief perilously:-I have long (says she) known him, and observed him; his workings have been stark and erudition. Though her rank did not entitle her to a place in the body of this work, she justly merits an incidental notice for having translated, from Italian into English, "Twenty-five sermons by Bernardine Ochine;" and from the Latin, bishop Jewell's "Apologie of the Church of England," which was published by archbishop Parker in 1564, and reprinted in 1600, with "A breife and plaine Declaration of the true Religion professed and used in the same." See Gen. Dict. and Herbert's Ames.] 8 * He had even been a competitor with Grindal for the archbishopric of York, but miscarried from the doubtfulness of his religion. Vide Life of Grindal in the Biograph. p. 2432. • Lord Brooke's Five Years of King James, p. 57. |