June 10, 1540, Thomas Lord Cromwell, "when he least expected it," was arrested at the council-table by the Duke of Norfolk for high-treason, and on the 28th of July following he was executed. Cromwell, says Lord Herbert of Cherbury, judged "his perdition more certain that the duke was uncle to the Lady Katherine Howard, whom the king began now to affect." Later writers[foot-note] have asserted that Katherine Howard exerted herself to procure Cromwell's death, and we can understand nobody else but her to be doing this in the third stanza of this fragment; nevertheless there is no authority for such a representation. The king had no personal interview with the minister whom he so suddenly struck down, but he did send the Duke of Norfolk and two others to visit Cromwell in prison, for the purpose of extracting confessions pertaining to Anne of Cleves. Cromwell wrote a letter to the king, imploring the mercy which, as well as confession, he refuses in stanza five.
Percy inserted in the Reliques, 1765, II, 58, a song against Cromwell, printed in 1540, and apparently before his death, and he observes, 1767, II, 86, that there was a succession of seven or eight more, for and against, which were then preserved, and of course are still existing, in the archives of the Antiquarian Society.
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