have gone to hinder than to prepare for it; but he did as she was commanded (ib. p. 592). In much the same spirit doubtless, when Anne Boleyn was proclaimed queen next year, he tourneyed at her coronation (ib. vi. p. 266). In this year (1533) Francis wrote to Henry VIII requested him to confer upon Carew the order of the Garter, which the king apparently promised to do on some future occasion (ib. Nos. 555, 707). Shortly afterwards he obtained a grant in reversion of the offices of the king's otter hunter (ib. p. 496). Next year the French king again wrote to Henry in Carew‘s favour that a Garter might be conferred on him, and, if convenient, the chancellorship of the order. Henry replied to the envoy who presented the letter that the chancellorship of the order had been already conferred upon the king of Scots, but that he would remember Carew for a Garter en the first vacancy (ib. viii. p. 61). Accordingly, on St. George‘s day, 28 April 1636, a chapter being held at Greenwich, votes were taken to fill a vacancy among the knights, and the king on the following day declared that the election had fallen on Carew. According to the Black Book of the order he was elected ‘in regard of the majority of votes, the eminence of his extraction, his own fame, and the manly and noble actions he had performed; which ample relation was unanimous; applauded by the knights companions.' He was installed at St. George’s feast, 21 May following (Anstis, Order of the Garter, i. 249, ii. 398).
He was still, to all appearance, in high favour in October 1537, when at the christening of Prince Edward (afterwards Edward VI) he, with three others of high standing at the court, ‘in aprons and towels, took charge of the font, and kept the same till they were discharged thereof by the lord steward or treasurer of the king's house in his absence’ (Strype, Eccl. Memorials, ii. i. 4). But little more than a year afterwards a cloud passed over his fortunes. In November 1538 Lord Montague and the Marquis of Exeter were sent to the Tower, and next month they were found guilty of high treason on the ground that they had expressed approval of the proceedings of Montague‘s brother, Cardinal Pole, and hoped to see a change in the realm. Early in 1539 Carew was also apprehended. On 14 Feb. he was arraigned as an adherent of the Marquis of Exeter, and for having spoken of his prosecution as arbitrary and unjust. Of this he was certainly a very competent judge, as he had been a member of the special commission which received the indictment (Third Report of Dep. Keeper of Public Records, App. ii. 256). To have said so, however, was in itself almost sufficient to brand him as a traitor. But it had been found, besides, since Exeter's attainder, that Carew had been privy to a number of the ‘traitorous discourses’ of the marquis in past years, and had kept up a treasonable correspondenoe with him, the letters on both sides having been burnt by mutual agreement to avoid disclosure. The treason, of course, was of the same character as that of the marquis himself, the expression of a desire to see a Carew was condemned as a matter of course, and on 3 March was beheaded on Tower Hill. On the scaffold, if we may believe the puritanical testimony of Hall, he made a goodly confession, both of his folly and superstitious faith, giving God most hearty thanks that ever he came in the prison of the Tower, where he first savored the life and sweetness of God's most holy Word, meaning the Bible in English, which there be read by the mean of one Thomas Phelips, then keeper of that prison.’ Hall adds that Phelips himself had been a prisoner there two years before, and had suffered persecution for his opinions from Sir Thomas More and Stokesley, bishop of London—that is to say, he had been prosecuted in the bishop's court and under a royal commission for heresy.
A family tradition, mentioned by Fuller, gives as the cause of his fall an indiscreet answer that he gave to the king when the latter, between jest and earnest, at a game at bowls, used opprobrious language towards him. ‘The king,' according to Fuller ‘in this kind would give and not take' and Carew accordingly ‘fell from the top of his favour to the bottom of his displeasure,' It is possible, and not altogether inconsistent with the Tudor character, that a game of bowls was the occasion made use of to let Carew know he had fallen from favour; but that it was not the cause of the king's displeasure we have pretty sufficient evidence. The tradition, however, may perhaps refer to the temporary disgrace which Carew, as we have seen, had incurred at an earlier period. It may at least he accepted as showing that he was a man of quick temper, who could not easily bear indignities even from a king. We learn also from Fuller that he built a fine manor house at Beddington.
He was buried in the church of St. Botolph; Aldersgate, in the same tomb in which wife Elizabeth, his daughter Mary, and her husband, Sir Arthur Darcy, were afterwards interred. His property of course was seized by the crown, and, though his attainder was afterwards reversed (2 & 3 Edw. VI, c. 42), there is still preserved an interesting
