“Then was the Duke brought to the bar to hear his sentence. For a few moments he was overpowered by his situation. In the extremity of his agony, he chafed and sweat violently.[8] Recovering himself after a while, he made his obeisance to the court. After a short pause, a death-like silence! ‘Sir Edward,’ said the Duke of Norfolk, ‘you hear how you be indicted of high treason, you pleaded thereto not guilty, putting yourself to the judgment of your peers, the which have found you guilty.’ Then bursting into tears (he was an old man, and had faced death unmoved in the field of Flodden), he faltered out: ‘Your sentence is, that you be led back to prison; laid on a hurdle, and so drawn to the place of execution; there to be hanged, to be cut down alive, your members cut off and cast into the fire, your bowels burnt before your eyes, your head smitten off, your body quartered and divided at the King’s will. God have mercy on your soul. Amen.’ The Duke heard this horrible sentence with proud dignity and composure. Turning to the Duke of Norfolk, he quietly replied, ‘You have said, my lord, as a traitor should be said unto; but I was never one.’ Then addressing the court, he requested that those present would pray for him, assuring them that he forgave them his death, and expressing his determination not to sue for mercy. In compliance with the custom of the time he entered his barge at Westminster stairs, and was delivered, on landing at the Temple, to Sir Nicholas Vaux and Sir William Sandys, by whom he was conducted through the city to the Tower. This was about 4 P.M. The trial had lasted some days, having commenced on a Monday, and on the following Friday (17th of May), between eleven and twelve in the forenoon, when the hills of Surrey were cloathed in their freshest verdure, and the then unoccupied banks of the Thames, steeped to the water’s edge with the tender green and delicate blossom of the white thorn, the Duke’s favourite flower, the sombre procession threaded its way through the dark passages of the Tower, and emerged upon the Green. Amidst the sobs and tears of the spectators, the Duke, led by the Sheriffs, mounted the scaffold with a firm and composed step. Turning himself to the crowd, he requested all men to pray for him, ‘trusting,’ he said, ‘to die the King’s true man; whom through his own negligence and lack of grace he had offended.’ With this brief request, he kneeled at the block. There was a sudden glimmer for an instant in the air, then a dull thud, and the head rolled heavily from the body. The headsman wiped his axe; the attendants threw a cloak over the headless trunk, to conceal the blood which streamed in a torrent over the scaffold and dripped through the platform on the grass beneath. In rough frieze, barefooted and bareheaded, six poor Augustinian friars, shouldering a rude coffin, emerged from the shuddering and receding crowd. Gathering up the remains of the once mighty Duke of Buckingham, for the King, satisfied with his condemnation, had commuted the last extremities of the sentence, they carried the corpse to the church of the Austin Friars. The Duke in his lifetime had been kind to poor religious men, and this was the last and only office they could render him.”