All moral bounds had been loosened by the spirit of the Renascence, and, if we accept the charge of his rivals, Surrey now aimed at gaining a hold on Henry by offering him his sister as a mistress. It is as possible that the young Earl was aiming simply at the displacement of Catharine Parr, and at the renewal by his sister's elevation to the throne of that matrimonial hold upon Henry which the Howards had already succeeded in gaining through the unions with Anne Boleyn and Catharine Howard. But a temper such as Surrey's was ill matched against the subtle and unscrupulous schemers who saw their enemy in a pride that scorned the "new men" about him and vowed that when once the king was dead "they should smart for it." The turn of foreign affairs gave a fresh strength to the party which sympathized with the Protestants and denounced that alliance with the Emperor which had been throughout the policy of the Howards. Henry's offer of aid to the Lutheran princes marked the triumph of this party in the royal councils; and the new steps which Cranmer was suffered to make towards an English Liturgy showed that the religious truce of Henry's later years was at last abandoned. Hertford, the head of the "new men," came more to the front as the waning health of the king brought Jane Seymour's boy, Edward, nearer to the throne. In the new reign Hertford, as the boy's uncle, was sure to play a great part; and he used his new influence to remove the only effective obstacle to his future greatness. Surrey's talk of his royal blood, the Duke's quartering of the royal arms to mark his Plantagenet descent, and some secret interviews with the French ambassador, were adroitly used to wake Henry's jealousy of the dangers which might beset the throne of his child. Norfolk and his son were alike committed to the Tower at the close of 1546. A month later Surrey was condemned and sent to the block, and his father was only saved by the sudden death of Henry the Eighth in January, 1547.
By an Act passed in the Parliament of 1544 it had been provided that the crown should pass to Henry's son Edward, and on Edward's death without issue to his sister Mary. Should Mary prove childless it was to go to Elizabeth, the child of Anne Boleyn. Beyond this point the Houses would make no provision, but power was given to the king to make further dispositions by will. At his death it was found that Henry had passed over the line of his sister Margaret of Scotland, and named as next in the succession to Elizabeth the daughters of his younger sister Mary by her marriage with Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. As Edward was but nine years old Henry had appointed a carefully-balanced Council of Regency; but the will fell into Hertford's keeping, and when the list of regents was at last disclosed Gardiner, who had till now been the leading minister, was declared to have been excluded from the number of executors. Whether the exclusion was Henry's act or the act of the men who used his name, the absence of the bishop with the imprisonment of Norfolk threw the balance of power on the side of the "new men" who were represented by Hertford and Lisle. Their chief opponent, the Chancellor Wriothesley, struggled in vain against their next step towards supremacy, the modification of Henry's will by the nomination of Hertford as Protector of the realm and governor of Edward's person. Alleged directions from the dying king served as pretexts for the elevation of the whole party to higher rank in the state. It was to repair "the decay of the old English nobility" that Hertford raised himself to the dukedom of Somerset and his brother to the barony of Seymour, the queen's brother Lord Parr to the marquisate of Northampton, Lisle to the earldom of Warwick, Russell to that of Bedford, Wriothesley to that of Southampton. Ten of their partizans became barons, and as the number of peers in spite of recent creations still stood at about fifty such a group constituted a power in the Upper House. Alleged directions of the king were conveniently remembered to endow the new peers with public money, though the treasury was beggared and the debt pressing. The expulsion of Wriothesley from the Chancellorship and Council soon left the "new men" without a check; but they were hardly masters of the royal power when a bold stroke of Somerset laid all at his feet. A new patent of Protectorate, drawn out in the boy-king's name, empowered his uncle to act with or without the consent of his fellow-executors, and left him supreme in the realm.