the christian religion. The bloody 'Act of the Six Articles' was the result. Next year, on 24 April, Audley was made a knight of the Garter, and within less than three months after it became his duty to carry through parliament an act for the attainder of Cromwell, earl of Essex, the hitherto powerful minister, on whom he had been for eight years dependent, and another for the dissolution of the king's marriage with Anne of Cleves. In 1541 he was again appointed lord steward for the trial of a peer— Lord Dacres of the South, who confessed a homicide he had committed while hunting in Kent, and was accordingly hanged. In December of the same year he passed judgment on the paramour of Queen Katharine Howard, the queen's own case being reserved for the parliament which met in January following, which the lord chancellor opened with a very long speech.
In the spring of 1542 a remarkable case involving the privileges of the House of Commons was brought before the lord chancellor. George Ferrers, member for Plymouth, was arrested in London on some private suit in which judgment was passed against him, and he was committed to the Counter. The Commons sent their serjeant-at-arms to fetch him out of prison; but he was resisted, and a scuffle took place in the streets with the sheriffs' officers. The house, on this, refused to attend to other business till their member was delivered, and desired a conference with the lords. The lord chancellor declared it a flagrant contempt, and left the punishment to the House of Commons, on which the sheriffs and their officers were committed to the Tower by the speaker's warrant. It was a precedent of some importance in parliamentary history. Yet even here the conduct of Audley was governed simply by the convenience of the court, which required a subsidy of the House of Commons; for it seems to have been the opinion of good authorities that the commitment was strictly legal, and the privilege unjust.
Nothing more is known of the public life of Audley. He may have opened the session of 1543, and even that of January 1544; but in all probability he was prevented, at least as regards the latter, by increasing infirmity. On 21 April in that year he sent the great seal to the king, praying his majesty to accept his resignation of an office which he was now unable to discharge from mere physical weakness, and on the 30th of the same month he breathed his last. His remains were deposited in the magnificent tomb which he had erected for himself at Saffron Walden, and a doggrel epitaph engraved upon it is believed to have been his own composition also. Beneath the verses is given the date of his death, which is said to have been in the thirteenth year of his chancellorship and the fifty-sixth of his age (Weever, Fun. Mon. 624).
In person he is said to have been tall and majestic — the sort of man Henry VIII loved to see at his court. He was twice married but left no son to succeed him. His first wife was a Suffolk lady, daughter of Sir Thomas Barnardiston, by whom he had no children. His second, whom he married in April 1538, was Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Grey, marquis of Dorset. By her he had two daughters, of whom the elder, Mary, died unmarried; the second, Margaret, married, first, a son of Dudley, duke of Northumberland, and afterwards Thomas, duke of Norfolk, who was beheaded in the time of Queen Elizabeth. The nobleman who built Audley End was a son of this duke of Norfolk and of Margaret Audley.
[Wriothesley's Chronicle; Hall's Chronicle; Dugdale's Baronage; Lloyd's State Worthies, 72 (a rather doubtful authority, being mainly an encomium which has the effect of a satire); Biographia Britannica; Campbell's Lord Chancellors; Foss's Judges.]
AUFRERE, ANTHONY (1756–1833), antiquary, of Old Foulsham Hall, Norfolk, born in 1756, was the eldest son of Anthony Aufrere, of Hoveton Hall, Norfolk, who died in 1814. His mother was Anna, only daughter of John Norris, of Witton, in the same county, and sister to John Norris, founder of the Norrisian professorship at Cambridge. On 19 Feb. 1791 he married Matilda, youngest daughter of General James Lockhart, of Lee and Carnwath, by whom he had a son and daughter, the former marrying the youngest daughter of a Hamburg merchant, named Whertman, and the latter George Barclay, a merchant of New York. To Anthony Aufrere, who had a great taste for literature, the task of editing the 'Lockhart Letters' (1817, 2 vols. 4to) was entrusted by his brother-in-law, Charles Count Lockhart, three years before his death, which took place in August 1802. These letters contain much curious correspondence between the ancestors of the Lockhart family and the confidential supporters of the Pretender, previous to and during the rebellions of 1715 and 1745, the publication of which was delayed for more than half a century, in order that every one concerned in it might be dead before it became public property. In early life Anthony Aufrere showed a great aptitude for learning foreign languages, and among
