of the multitude, whose voices he had always shown himself so anxious to secure. Even his darling popularity must have suffered no little diminution by the state to which the affairs of the kingdom had been brought by his administration both at home and abroad. Then his as sumption and rapacity were every day becoming more inordinate and glaring, and had now reached a height that shocked the public sense of decency as well as of justice. Burnet admits that "many bishops and cathedrals had resigned many manors to him for obtaining his favour." He had got a patent, it seems, authorizing him to take possession of such church lands, on pretence of rewarding him for his services in the Scottish war-in which patent, by the by, drawn up of course by his own directions, the vain man had caused himself to be styled "Duke of Somerset by the grace of God," as if he had been a sovereign prince. It was also said, Burnet tells us, that many of the chantry lands had been sold to his friends at easy rates, for which it was concluded he had great presents. But the most obtrusive exhibition he made at once of his vanity and of his grasping and unscrupulous practice of appropriation, was in the erection of a new palace for himself in London-the same that has bequeathed his name to the present Somerset House, in the Strand, nation was excited by many arbitrary exertions of power, in violation both of public and of private rights, to which he did not hesitate to resort in rearing this superb monument of his greatness. Besides compelling three bishops to surrender to him their episcopal mansions, he had removed altogether a parish church which stood in the way of his plans, and had not only pulled down many other religious buildings in the neighbourhood for the sake of their materials, but had, with barbarous recklessness, defaced and broken to pieces the ancient monuments they contained, and even irreverently removed and scattered the bones of the dead. It was impossible that such proceedings should not expose the protector's Protestantism to the imputation of being at least as profitable as it was conscientious. During all the month of September (1549) there were great heats in the council; the enemies of the protector now no longer shrunk from speaking out, and avowing their determination to strip him of his exorbitant power. By the beginning of October the quarrel had arisen almost to a contest of arms. "The council," says the graphic account given by the king in his journal, "about nineteen of them, were gathered in London, thinking to meet with the lord-protector, and to make him amend some of his dis orders. He, fearing his state, caused the secretary, in my name, to be sent (from Hampton Court, where Edward then was, along with Somerset, Cranmer, and Paget) to the lords (of the council in London), to know from what cause they gathered their powers together; and if they meant to talk with him, that they should come in a peaceable manner. The next morning, being the 6th of October, and Saturday, he commanded the armour to be brought down out of the armoury of Hampton Court -about 500 harnesses, to arm both his and my men, with all the gates of the house to be rampired, people to be raised: people came abundantly to the house." While the protector was making these preparations at Hampton Court, Warwick and the other lords of the council were assembled at Ely Place, in London, from which they despatched orders for the attendance of the lieutenant of the Tower, and of the lord-mayor and aldermen, all of whom appeared and consented to submit to their orders. They also wrote to the nobility and gentry in SOMERSET PLACE, from the River.-From a print by Hollar. 111 the different parts of the kingdom, informing | since conferred upon him; but Warwick was not them of their designs and motives. "That night," the man to be drawn off from his object by such continues the king, "with all the people, at nine sentimentalities. At length, finding all negotiaor ten of the clock of the night, I went to Wind- tion hopeless, he consented that a warrant should sor, and there was watch and ward kept every be sent to London, under the king's hand, invitnight." In point of fact, Edward was carried to ing the council to come to Windsor. On the 12th Windsor by his uncle, with an escort of 500 men, of October, accordingly, the whole of the lords, both Cranmer and Paget accompanying them. now twenty-two in number, repaired thither: on Somerset's first impulse was to set his enemies at the 13th they assembled in council, and examined defiance; besides surrounding himself with an Secretary Smith and others of Somerset's adarmed force, as here related, and securing the herents or servants, who, as well as himself, had king's person, before leaving Hampton Court he been previously placed under arrest; on the 14th wrote to his friend Lord Russell, who was still the protector was called before them, when the in the west country, calling upon him to hasten treasons and misdemeanours with which he was to the defence of the king's majesty in his castle charged were formally exhibited to him drawn of Windsor. But this bold resolution speedily up in no fewer than twenty-eight articles; and evaporated; the next day he wrote to the council on the same day his royal nephew was conveyed at London, informing them, that, provided they back to Hampton Court, and he himself was sent intended no hurt to the king's majesty's person, to the Tower under the conduct of the Earls of touching all other private matters they would Sussex and Huntingdon. find him disposed to agree to any reasonable conditions they might require. The council must have seen from this humble-almost suppliant communication that the late dictator lay at their feet. They took no notice of his proposal for an accommodation, but, proceeding to the lordmayor's house, there drew up and forthwith published a proclamation, in which, after enumerating their several grounds of dissatisfaction with the "malicious and evil government" of the lordprotector the late sedition of which he had been the occasion-the losses in France-his ambition and seeking of his own glory, "as appeared by his building of most sumptuous and costly buildings, and specially in the time of the king's wars, and the king's soldiers unpaid"-his having held in no esteem "the grave counsel of the counsellors"-his having sown sedition between the nobles, the gentlemen, and the commons-and his having slandered the council to the king, and done what in him lay to cause variance between the king and his nobles-they declared him to be "a great traitor," and therefore "desired the city and commons to aid them to take him from the king." The next day, the 8th, they went to the Guildhall, where the common-council being assembled, and having listened to a narrative of all that had been done, "declared they thanked God for the good intentions they had expressed, and assured them they would stand by them with their lives and goods." Meanwhile, Somerset, quailing under the prospect that was becoming darker every hour, had made another effort to save himself by a private appeal to his great rival Warwick, whom he reminded of the friendship of their early days, and of the favours he had See the letter, with the Lord Russell's somewhat ambiguous, but on the whole discouraging, answer, in Fox and Holinshed. 2 Burnet, from Minutes of the Council. This revolution at once placed the government in the hands of Warwick, with almost the same substantial power that had been wielded by the overthrown protector. For a moment Southampton hoped to share the supreme authority with the new lord of the ascendant, whose rise he had so materially assisted-perhaps to continue to direct him as his protegé, or instrument; and the Popish party eagerly expected that a large share in the management of affairs would fall into the hands of one whose attachment to that interest was secured both by the pertinacity of his temper and by the whole course of his life, which had so conspicuously identified him with its maintenance and championship. But the man of intrigue proved no match, in the circumstances in which they were now placed, for the man of the sword; Southampton was not even restored to his former office of chancellor; he and Warwick soon became wholly alienated from each other; he was removed from the council in the beginning of the following year, and soon after died, either of mere vexation and disappointment, or, as it was reported, having terminated his existence by poison. Warwick, too, was held to be inclined in his heart to the old religion; but he had no principles upon this or any other subject that he would allow for a moment to stand in the way of the interests of his ambition, and he very soon not only wholly forsook the Popish party, but took up a profession of zeal for further ecclesiastical changes that outran the views of most Protestants. The parliament re-assembled on the 4th of November; and, before the end of the year, acts were passed for the prevention of unlawful assemblies; against prophecies concerning the king or his council; and for repealing the late law on the subject of vagabonds, which had been found too severe to be carried into effect. It was not till the 2d of January, 1550, that the case of the Duke of Somerset was brought forward, by a bill of pains and penalties being read for the first time against him in the House of Lords, the allegations in which, being the same twenty-eight articles on which he was consigned to the Tower, were supported by a confession, signed with his own hand, which he had made on his knees before the king and the council on the preceding 13th of December. He had submitted to this humiliation, it seems, on an assurance being given to him that he should be gently dealt with if he would submit himself to the king's mercy. The bill, which inflicted deprivation of all his offices, and forfeiture of all his personal property, and of £2000 a year of his revenue from his lands, passed both houses without opposition. He remonstrated against the heavy amount of the fine; but, on receiving a harsh reply from the council, he shrunk back immediately to an attitude of the humblest submission, and expressed his thankful-nation of Christ, to the effect, as far as the expresness to them and the king that they had been content with merely fining him, when they might have justly taken his life. On the 6th of February he was released from the Tower; and on the 16th of the same month he received a pardou. "After that," says Burnet, "he carried himself so humbly, that his behaviour, with the king's great kindness to him, did so far prevail, that on the 10th of April after he was restored into favour, and sworn of the privy council." Immediately after the rising of parliament, the appointments of great master of the household and lord high-admiral were conferred upon Warwick; and the Lords Russell and St. John were created Earls of Bedford and Wiltshire, and advanced to the offices, the first of lord privy-seal, the second of lord-treasurer. In the end of March, after some weeks of negotiation, a peace was concluded both with France and Scotland; the principal condition of which was the surrender to France of Boulogne-that measure which, when proposed by the late lord-protector, the same members of the council who now assented to it had exclaimed against as the consummation of national disgrace. All that was demanded in return for this concession by England was a payment of 200,000 crowns at the time of the delivery of the town, and of as much more in five months after, under the name of a compensation for the cost of keeping up the fortifications while it had been in the possession of this country. The late French king had, in 1546, agreed to give Henry VIII. 2,000,000 crowns for the surrender of Boulogne at the expiration of eight years. The pension which Francis had bound himself to pay to Henry and his successors, with its ar-posed him to more obloquy than the part he took rears, was also now given up. In truth, how- 1 ever, the discredit of this treaty, though it was concluded by the present, belongs to the former government; for peace upon almost any terms had been rendered absolutely necessary by the losses already incurred, and the exhausted state to which the finances of the kingdom were reduced. The remainder of this and the early part of the following year were principally o cupied with the affairs of religion and of the church. Although no Catholic was burned in this reign, the horrid immolation of men and of women for their opinions in religion, was not altogether laid aside. The 2d of May this year witnessed the execution at Smithfield, by the customary mode of death allotted for heretics, of a female named Joan Bocher,' or Joan of Kent. Joan, who appears to have been a person of some education, and of a respectable rank in life, had been apprehended more than a year before for holding and disseminating certain peculiar notions about the incar sions attributed to her are intelligible, that his body was not really, but only apparently of human flesh. Being brought before a commission appointed to examine and search after all Anabaptists and other heretics and contemners of the Common Prayer, of which Cranmer was the head, she rejected all their persuasions to recant her opinions; and was thereupon condemned as an obstinate heretic, and delivered over to the secular power. The young king, however, with the unperverted feeling natural to his years. shrunk from signing the warrant for burning her, on which Cranmer was appointed to reason him out of his scruples; but all the elaborate arguments of the archbishop failed to satisfy him; and although he at last consented, with tears in his eyes, to set his hand to the paper, he told Cranmer that, if the act was wrong, it was he (Cranmer) who must answer for it to God, since it was done only in submission to his authority. It is supposed that, struck with some uncomfortable feelings by this solemn admonition, Cranmer would gladly have escaped from the execution of the sentence; and both he and Ridley took great pains to prevail upon Joan to save her life by abjuration: But the enthusiast, courting martyrdom, treated all their exhortations with contempt; and she was at last consigned to the flames. About a year after (6th April, 1551), another heretic was burned in the same place—a Dutchman, named Von Paris, who resided in London in the practice of nis profession of a surgeon; his crime was the denial of the divinity of Christ. He underwent his death with great firmness. Burnet admits that no part of Cranmer's life ex Strype gives her name Joan Bocher, or Knel. in these executions: "it was said he had consented | those views in religion, afterwards known by the both to Lambert's and Anne Askew's death in the former reign, who both suffered for opinions which he himself held now; and he had now procured the death of these two persons; and when he was brought to suffer himself afterwards, it was called a just retaliation on him." In In August, 1549, Bonner, Bishop of London, was summoned before the council, and after being sharply reprimanded for his contumacy, was directed to preach at Paul's Cross on the 1st of September, that he might give proof of his or thodoxy and submission to the established order of things both in church and state. His sermon did not give satisfaction: being appointed to appear before Cranmer, Ridley, and others, to answer for what he had said, or had omitted to say, he conducted himself with extraordinary boldness, and, indeed, set his judges at defiance; and the affair ended by sentence of deprivation being pronounced upon him, and his being consigned to the Marshalsea, where he remained a prisoner throughout the remainder of this reign. April, 1550, the vacant see of London was filled by the transference of Ridley from Rochester. The council next proceeded to deal with the cases of three other recusant bishops who lay imprisoned in the Tower-Gardiner of Winchester, Heath of Worcester, and Day of Chichester, all of whom refused to make submission, and were eventually deprived, and remanded into confinement, as Bonner had been, in the course of this and the two following years. In most of the re-arrangements that took place in consequence of these ejections, the opportunity was taken of obtaining something more from the wealth of the church for the members of the government and their friends. Thus, when Ridley went to London, the lately established bishopric of Westminster was suppressed; its revenues, amounting to £526, were made over to the see of London, with the exception of rents to the amount of £100 reserved by the king; and the lands which had hitherto belonged to the latter see, yielding a rent of £480, were immediately granted to certain of the king's ministers and officers of the household: Lord Wentworth, the chamberlain, had £245; Sir Thomas Darcy, the vice-chamberlain, £194; and Rich, the chancellor, £39.1 One of the new episcopal appointments occasioned for some time no little trouble and disputation that of the celebrated preacher John Hooper, afterwards the illustrious martyr, to the see of Gloucester, to which he was nominated in July, 1550. Hooper, however, who had imbibed from an intercourse with certain Calvinistic and other foreign divines, a predilection for Strype, Eccles. Mem. ii. 354. name of Puritanism, at first obstinately refused to receive consecration in the canonical habits; nor could all the logic and eloquence of Cranmer and Ridley, nor even the persuasion of his friends Bucer and Peter Martyr, who in great part shared his own peculiar opinions, for a long time induce him to yield the point. At last, in January, 1551, he was, by royal warrant, committed for his contumacy to the Fleet; and here he lay till he consented to the compromise that he should be attired in the prescribed vestments at his ordination, and when he preached before the king, or in his cathedral, or in any public place, but should be excused from wearing them upon other occasions. On these conditions he was consecrated bishop. Another affair that considerably embarrassed the government, was the contumacy of the Lady Mary, the king's eldest sister, and the heiress presumptive to the crown. Soon after the com mencement of the present reign this princess had written to Somerset, expressing her opinion that all further changes in religion, till her brother should be of age, were contrary to the respect he and his colleagues in the government owed to the memory of the late king, and could only have the effect of endangering the public peace. In reply, the protector addressed a long and earnest exhortation to her, in which he intimated that he believed her letter had not proceeded from herself. After the passing of the statute for uniformity of worship, Mary was informed by the council (in June, 1549) that her chaplains could no longer be suffered to perform mass even in her private chapel; but after some controversy, on the interposition of her uncle the emperor, whose assistance the government was at this time soliciting, it was agreed that the new law should not be enforced in her case, at least for the present. The agitation of the subject, however, was renewed after the conclusion of the peace with France. All the applications of the emperor's ambassadors, in favour of his niece, were for many months met by the government with a peremptory refusal. It was then rumoured that she designed to quit the kingdom, on which, in August, 1550, a fleet was sent to sea to prevent her escape. In December following two of her chaplains were indicted. At last, in March, 1551, she appeared personally before the council, when her royal brother himself brought all his stores of theological learning and powers of reasoning to bear upon her obstinacy; but still her resolution remained unshaken. The next day (19th March) the imperial ambassador delivered a mes sage from his master, that if the requested indulgence should not be granted to the princess, the Burnet, Records. emperor would immediately declare war. This Somerset protector at the next parliament, and intimation staggered the council, and at the mo- stood to the denial, the Earl of Rutland affirming ment no answer was returned. But, on the fol- it manifestly." On this investigation being inlowing day (the 20th), Cranmer, along with Rid- stituted, Somerset's friend, Lord Gray, hastily ley and Poynet, having come to the king, and, as took his departure for the north, probably with he tells us in his journal, declared it to be their the design of making a stand there; and the opinion that, though to give license to sin was duke himself was making ready to follow him, sin, yet to suffer and wink at it for a time was when he was stopped by being assured that no excusable, Edward was persuaded to give way: injury was intended to him, and the matter was "yet not so easily," says Burnet, "but that he allowed to drop. In a month or two after, howburst forth in tears, lamenting his sister's obsti- ever, Warwick was made uneasy by the report nacy, and that he must suffer her to continue in of the duke being engaged in new intrigues. so abominable a way of worship as he esteemed Burnet admits that Somerset "seemed to have the mass." The attempts to induce the princess designed, in April this year, to have got the king to conform were soon renewed. In August fol- again in his power, and dealt with the Lord lowing the chief officers of her household were Strange, that was much in his (the king's) favour, commanded to prevent the use of the Romish to persuade him to marry his daughter Jane." service in her family, and on their refusal to com- But the gathering storm was again dispersed for ply were committed to the Tower. After that the present by the formality of a fresh reconcilethe lord-chancellor and others of the chief mem- ment between the two parties. In May following bers of the council were sent to hold a conference the Marquis of Northampton was sent as ambaswith her on the subject at her residence of Copt-sador to Paris to demand for Edward the hand hall, in Essex; but she continued, as before, immoveable. of Henry's daughter Elizabeth; this proposal was immediately assented to by the French king: after some negotiation it was settled that the portion of the princess should be 200,000 crowns (which was only about a tenth part of what the English commissioners had asked in the first instance), and that she should be sent over, "at her father's charge, three months before she was twelve, sufficiently jewelled and stuffed."" Since his liberation in February, 1550, the late lord-protector, though stripped of wealth as well as of power, had been restored to as much of court favour as his nephew could venture to show him under the rule of the new dictator. Warwick probably calculated that in reducing him to contempt he had effected his political extinction not less completely than if he had taken his life; and In the following September Warwick procured he appears also to have hoped that, after having for himself the important post of warden of the thus kicked the duke down, he might even be Scottish marches, which enabled him to take able to make out of one so nearly related to the effective measures for cutting off Somerset's retreat crown a useful prop of his own rising fortunes. to the north, in case matters should again come to An apparently complete reconcilement accord- such a pass between them as to drive his adveringly took place between the two; and on the 3d sary into open revolt; and in the beginning of of June the Lord Lisle, the Earl of Warwick's October he got himself created Duke of Northumeldest son, was married at Richmond, in the pre-berland, his friends and dependants, the Marquis sence of the king, to the Lady Ann, one of the daughters of the Duke of Somerset.' It was impossible, however, that the fallen lord-protector and the man who had supplanted him could ever cease to be rivals and enemies at heart so long as either lived. It appears that before the expiration of this same year Somerset had begun to take secret measures for recovering his former office. Under the date of the 16th of February, 1551, the king's journal states that a person named Whaley "was examined for persuading divers nobles of the realm to make the Duke of On this occasion "a fair dinner" was made, which was followed by dancing, and that by foot-races between various noblemen and gentlemen. On the next day, the 4th, Warwick's third son, Sir Robert Dudley, afterwards the famous Earl of Leicester, was married to the daughter of Sir John Robsart; "after which marriage," says the entry in the king's journal, "there were certain gentlemen that did strive who should first take away a goose's head which was hanged alive on two cross-posts." of Dorset, the Earl of Wiltshire, and Sir William Herbert, being at the same time made respectively Duke of Suffolk, Marquis of Winchester, and Earl of Pembroke. Five days after the announcement of these new honours, namely, on Friday the 16th of October, the capital was startled with the sudden intelligence of the arrest of the Duke of Somerset, on a charge of conspiracy and high treason, and his committal to the Tower. He was seized in the afternoon while on his way to the court at Westminster; Lord Gray and others of his friends were apprehended the same day; and the day after, the duchess, some of her female attendants, and a number of other persons, were all made prisoners. Such of the persons apprehended as were willing to give evidence were now called before the council and examined. Among these, according King's Journal. |