  1549 TO 1553. Decline of the protector's authority.—He is imprisoned—accused of misdemeanors—loses his office—is liberated—reconciled with Dudley, who succeeds to his authority.—Dudley pushes on the reformation.—The celebration of mass prohibited.—Princess Mary persecuted.—The emperor attempts to get her out of the kingdom, but without success—interferes openly in her behalf.—Effect of persecution on the mind of Mary.—Marriage proposed for Elizabeth with the prince of Denmark.—She declines it.—King betrothed to a princess of France.—Sweating sickness.—Death of the duke of Suffolk.—Dudley procures that title for the marquis of Dorset, and the dukedom of Northumberland for himself.—Particulars of the last earl of Northumberland.—Trial, conviction, and death of the duke of Somerset.—Christmas festivities of the young king.—Account of George Ferrers master of the king's pastimes, and his works.—Views of Northumberland.—Decline of the king's health.—Scheme of Northumberland for lady Jane Grey's succession.—Three marriages contrived by him for this purpose.—He procures a settlement of the crown on the lady Jane.—Subserviency of the council.—Death of Edward concealed by Northumberland.—The princesses narrowly escape falling into his hands.—Courageous conduct of Elizabeth.—Northumberland deserted by the council and the army.—Jane Grey imprisoned.—Northumberland arrested.—Mary mounts the throne. It was to little purpose that the protector had stained his hands with the blood of his brother, for the Other causes conspired to undermine his credit and prepare his overthrow. The hatred of the great nobles, which he augmented by a somewhat too ostentatious patronage of the lower classes against the rich and powerful, continually pursued and watched the opportunity to ruin him. Financial difficulties pressed upon him, occasioned in great measure by the wars with France and Scotland which he had carried on, in pursuance of Henry's design of compelling the Scotch to marry their young queen to his son. An object which had finally been frustrated, notwithstanding the vigilance of the English fleet, by the safe arrival of Mary in France, and her solemn betrothment to the dauphin. The great and glorious work of religious reformation, though followed by Somerset, under the guidance of Cranmer, with a moderation and prudence which reflect the highest honor on both, could not be brought to perfection without exciting the rancorous hostility of thousands, whom various motives and interests attached to the cause of ancient superstition; and the abolition, by authority, of the mass, and the destruction of images and crucifixes, had given birth to serious disturbances in different parts of the country. The want and oppression under which the lower orders groaned,—and which they attributed partly to the suppression of the monasteries to which they had been accustomed to resort for the supply of their necessities, A party was now formed in the council, of which Warwick, Southampton, Arundel, and St. John, were the chiefs; and strong resolutions were entered into against the assumed authority of the protector. This unfortunate man, whom an inconsiderate ambition, fostered by circumstances favorable to its success, had pushed forward into a station equally above his talents and his birth, was now found destitute of all the resources of courage and genius which might yet have retrieved his authority and his credit. He suffered himself to be surprised into acts indicative of weakness and dismay, which soon robbed him of his remaining partisans, and gave to his enemies all the advantage which they desired. His committal to the Tower on several charges, of which his assumption of the whole authority of the state was the principal, soon followed. A short time after he was deprived of his high office, which was nominally vested in six members of the council, but really in the earl of Warwick, whose private ambition seems to have been the main-spring of the whole intrigue, That poorness of spirit which had sunk the duke of Somerset into insignificance, saved him at present from further mischief. In the beginning of the ensuing year, 1550, having on his knees confessed himself guilty of all the matters laid to his charge, without reservation or exception, and humbly submitted himself to the king's mercy, he was condemned in a heavy fine, on remission of which by the king he was liberated. Soon after, by the special favor of his royal nephew, he was readmitted into the council; and a reconciliation was mediated for him with Warwick, cemented by a marriage between one of his daughters and the son and heir of this aspiring leader. The catholic party, which had flattered itself that the earl of Warwick, from gratitude for the support which some of its leaders had afforded him, and perhaps also from principle, no less than from opposition to the duke of Somerset, would be led to embrace its defence, was now destined to deplore its disappointment. Determined to rule alone, he soon shook off his able but too aspiring colleague, the earl of Southampton, and disgraced, by the imposition of a fine for some alleged embezzlement of public money, the earl of Arundel, also a known assertor of the ancient faith, finally, having observed how closely the principles of protestantism, which Edward had derived from instructors equally learned and zealous, had interwoven themselves A confession of faith was now drawn up by commissioners appointed for the purpose, and various alterations were made in the Liturgy, which had already been translated into the vulgar tongue for church use. Tests were imposed, which Gardiner, Bonner, and several others of the bishops felt themselves called upon by conscience, or a regard to their own reputation, to decline subscribing, even at the price of deprivation; and prodigious devastations were made by the courtiers on the property of the church. To perform or assist at the performance of the mass was also rendered highly penal. But no dread of legal animadversion was capable of deterring the lady Mary from the observance of this essential rite of her religion; and finding herself and her household exposed to serious inconveniences on account of their infraction of the new statute, she applied for protection to her potent kinsman the emperor Charles V., who is said to have undertaken her rescue by means which could scarcely have failed to involve him in a war with England. By his orders, or connivance, certain ships were prepared in the ports of Flanders, manned and armed for an attempt to carry off the princess either by stealth or open force, and land her at Antwerp. In furtherance of the design, several of her gentlemen had already taken their departure for that city, and Flemish light vessels were observed to keep watch on the English A violent alarm was immediately sounded through the nation, of foreign invasion designed to co-operate with seditions at home; bodies of troops were dispatched to protect different points of the coast; and several ships of war were equipped for sea; while a communication on the subject was made by the council to the nobility throughout the kingdom, in terms calculated to awaken indignation against the persecuted princess, and all who were suspected, justly or unjustly, of regarding her cause with favor. A few extracts from this paper will exhibit the fierce and jealous spirit of that administration of which Dudley formed the soul. "So it is, that the lady Mary, not many days past, removed from Newhall in Essex to her house of Hunsdon in Hertfordshire, the cause whereof, although we knew not, yet did we rather think it likely that her grace would have come to have seen his majesty; but now upon Tuesday last, she hath suddenly, without knowledge given either to us here or to the country there, and without any cause in the world by us to her given, taken her journey from Hunsdon towards Norfolk" &c. "This her doing we be sorry for, both for the evil opinion the king's majesty our master may conceive thereby of her, and for that by the same Thus did the fears, the policy, or the party-spirit, of the members of the council lead them to magnify the peril of the nation from the enterprises of a young and defenceless female, whose best friend was a foreign prince, whose person was completely within their power, and who, at this period of her life "more sinned against than sinning," was not even suspected of any other design than that of withdrawing herself from a country in which she was no longer allowed to worship God according to her conscience. Some slight tumults in Essex and Kent, in which she was On her arrival she received a reprimand from the council for her obstinacy respecting the mass, with an injunction to instruct herself, by reading, in the grounds of protestant belief. To this she replied, with the inflexible resolution of her character, that as to protestant books, she thanked God that she never had read any, and never intended so to do; that for her religion she was ready to lay down her life, and only feared that she might not be found worthy to become its martyr. One of her chaplains was soon after thrown into prison; and further severities seemed to await her, when a message from the emperor, menacing the country with war in case she should be debarred from the free exercise of her religion, taught the council the expediency of relaxing a little the sternness of their intolerance. But the scruples of the zealous young king on this head could not be brought to yield to reasons of state, till he had "advised with the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops of London and Rochester, who gave their opinion that to give license to sin was sin, but to connive at sin might be allowed in case it were neither long, nor without hope of reformation By this prudent and humane but somewhat jesuitical In order to counterbalance the threatened hostility of Spain, and impose an additional check on the catholic party at home, it was now judged expedient for the king to strengthen himself by an alliance with Christian III. king of Denmark; an able and enlightened prince, who in the early part of his reign had opposed with vigor the aggressions of the emperor Charles V. on the independence of the north of Europe, and more recently had acquired the respect of the whole protestant body by establishing the reformation in his dominions. An agent was accordingly dispatched with a secret commission to sound the inclinations of the court of Copenhagen towards a marriage between the prince-royal and the lady Elizabeth. That this negotiation proved fruitless, was apparently owing to the reluctance to the connexion manifested by Elizabeth; of whom it is observable, that she never could be prevailed upon to afford the smallest Disappointed in this design, Edward lost no time in pledging his own hand to the infant daughter of Henry II. of France, which contract he did not live to complete. The splendid French embassy which arrived in England during the year 1550 to make arrangements respecting the dower of the princess, and to confer on her intended spouse the order of St. Michael, was received with high honors, but found the court-festivities damped by a visitation of that strange and terrific malady the sweating sickness. This pestilence, first brought into the island by the foreign mercenaries who composed the army of the earl of Richmond, afterwards Henry VII., now made its appearance for the fourth and last time in our annals. It seized principally, it is said, on males, on such as were in the prime of their age, and rather on the higher than the lower classes: within the space of twenty-four hours the fate of the sufferer was decided for life or death. Its ravages were prodigious; and the general consternation was augmented by a superstitious idea which went forth, that Englishmen alone, were the destined victims of this mysterious minister of fate, which tracked their steps, with the malice and Two of the king's servants died of this disease, and he in consequence removed to Hampton Court in haste and with very few attendants. The duke of Suffolk and his brother, students at Cambridge, were seized with it at the same time, sleeping in the same bed, and expired within two hours of each other. They were the children of Charles Brandon by his last wife, who was in her own right baroness Willoughby of Eresby. This lady had already made herself conspicuous by that earnest profession of the protestant faith for which, in the reign of Mary, she underwent many perils and a long exile. She was a munificent patroness of the learned and zealous divines of her own persuasion, whether natives or foreigners; and the untimely loss of these illustrious youths, who seem to have inherited both her religious principles and her love of letters, was publicly bewailed by the principal members of the university. But by the earl of Warwick the melancholy event was rendered doubly conducive to the purposes of his ambition. In the first place it enabled him to bind to his interests the marquis of Dorset married to the half-sister of the young duke of Suffolk, by procuring a renewal of the ducal title in his behalf, and next authorized him by a kind of precedent to claim for himself the same exalted dignity. The circumstances attending Dudley's elevation to the ducal rank are worthy of particular notice, The last of this house who had borne the title of earl of Northumberland was that ardent and favored suitor of Anne Boleyn, who was compelled by his father to renounce his pretensions to her hand in deference to the wishes of a royal competitor. The disappointment and the injury impressed themselves in indelible characters on the heart of Percy: in common with the object of his attachment, he retained against Wolsey, whom he believed to have been actively instrumental in fostering the king's passion, a deep resentment, which is said to have rendered peculiarly acceptable to him the duty afterwards imposed upon him, of arresting that celebrated minister in order to his being brought to his trial. For the lady to whom a barbarous exertion of parental authority had compelled him to give his hand, while his whole heart was devoted to another, he also conceived an aversion rather to be lamented than wondered at. Unfortunately, she brought him no living offspring; and after a few years he separated himself from her to indulge his melancholy alone and without molestation. In this manner he spun out a suffering existence, oppressed with sickness of mind and body, disengaged from public life, and neglectful of his own embarrassed affairs, till the fatal catastrophe of his brother, brought to the scaffold in 1537 for his share in the popish rebellion under Aske. By this event, and the attainder of sir Thomas Percy's children which This done, he yielded his weary spirit on the last day of the same month which had seen the fatal catastrophe of his misguided brother. From this time the title had remained dormant, till the earl of Warwick, untouched by commiseration or respect for the misfortunes of so great a house, cut off for the present all chance of its restoration, by causing the young monarch whom he governed to confer upon himself the whole of the Percy estates, with the new dignity of duke of Northumberland; an honor undeserved and ill-acquired, which no son of his was ever permitted to inherit. But the soaring ambition of Dudley regarded even these splendid acquisitions of wealth and dignity only as steps to that summit of power and dominion which he was resolved by all means and at all hazards to attain; and his next measure was to procure the removal of the only man capable in any degree of obstructing his further progress. This was the late protector, by whom some relics of authority were still retained. At the instigation of Northumberland, a law was passed making it felony to conspire against the life of After his condemnation, Somerset acknowledged with contrition that he had once mentioned to certain persons an intention of assassinating these lords; but he protested that he had never taken any measures for carrying this wicked purpose into execution. However this might be, no act of violence had been committed, and it was hoped by many and expected by more, that the royal mercy might yet be extended to preserve his life: but Northumberland spared no efforts to incense the king against his unhappy uncle; he also contrived by a course of amusements and festivities to divert him from serious thought; and on January 21st 1552, to the great regret of the common During the whole interval between the condemnation and death of his uncle, the king, as we are informed, had been entertained by the nobles of his court with "stately masques, brave challenges at tilt and at barriers, and whatsoever exercises or disports they could conjecture to be pleasing to him. Then also he first began to keep hall We learn that it was an ancient custom, not only with the kings of England but with noblemen and "great housekeepers who used liberal feasting in that season," to appoint for the twelve days of the Christmas festival a lord of misrule, whose office it was to provide diversions for their numerous guests. Of what nature these entertainments might be we are not exactly informed; they probably comprised some rude attempts at dramatic representation: but the taste of an age rapidly advancing in literature and general refinement, evidently began to disdain the flat and coarse buffooneries which had formed the solace of its barbarous predecessors; and it was determined that devices of superior elegance and ingenuity should distinguish the festivities of the new court of Edward. "On Monday the fourth day of January," pursues our chronicler, whose circumstantial detail is sometimes picturesque and amusing, "the said lord of merry disports came by water to London, and landing at the Tower wharf entered the Tower, then rode through Tower-street, where he was received by Vause, lord of misrule to John Mainard, one of the sheriffs of London, and so conducted through the city with a great company of young lords and gentlemen to the house of sir George Burne lord-mayor, where he with the chief of his company dined, and after had a great banquet, and at his departure the lord-mayor gave him a standing cup with a cover of silver and gilt, of the value of ten pounds, for a reward, and also set a hogshead of wine and a barrel of beer at his gate, for From this time Ferrers became "a composer almost by profession of occasional interludes for the diversion of the court Happy would it have been for England in more ages than one, had the sentiment of the following humble "Some haply here will move a further doubt, This estimable writer had been a member of parliament in the time of Henry VIII., and was imprisoned by that despot in 1542, very probably without any just cause. He about the same time translated into English the great charter of Englishmen which had become a dead letter through the tyranny of the Tudors; and he rendered the same public service respecting several important statutes which existed only in Latin or Norman French; proofs of a free and courageous spirit extremely rare in that servile age! Ferrers lived far into the reign of Elizabeth, finishing his career at Flamstead in his native county of Herts in 1579. From the pleasing contemplation of a life devoted to those honorable arts by which society is cultivated, enlightened and adorned, we must now return to tread with Northumberland the maze of dark and crooked politics. By many a bold and many a crafty step this adept in his art had wound his way to the highest rank of nobility attainable by a subject, and to a station of eminence and command scarcely compatible One scheme alone suggested itself for the preservation of his authority: it was dangerous, almost desperate; but loss of power was more dreaded by Dudley than any degree of hazard to others or himself; and he resolved at all adventures to make the attempt. By means of the new honors which he had caused to be conferred on the marquis of Dorset, now duke of Suffolk, he engaged this weak and inconsiderate man to give his eldest daughter, the lady Jane Grey, in marriage to his fourth son Guildford Dudley. At the same time he procured an union between her sister, the lady Catherine, and the eldest son of his able but mean-spirited and time-serving associate, the earl of Pembroke; and a third between his own daughter Catherine and lord Hastings, son of the earl of Huntingdon by the eldest daughter and co-heir of Henry These nuptials were all celebrated on one day, and with an ostentation of magnificence and festivity which the people exclaimed against as highly indecorous in the present dangerous state of the king's health. But it was not on their good will that Northumberland founded his hopes, and their clamors were braved or disregarded. His next measure was to prevail upon the dying king to dispose of the crown by will in favor of the lady Jane. The animosity against his sister Mary, to which their equal bigotry in opposite modes of faith had given birth in the mind of Edward, would naturally induce him to lend a willing ear to such specious arguments as might be produced in justification of her exclusion: but that he could be brought with equal facility to disinherit also Elizabeth, a sister whom he loved, a princess judged in all respects worthy of a crown, and one with whose religious profession he had every reason to be perfectly satisfied, appears an indication of a character equally cold and feeble. Much allowance, however, may be made for the extreme youth of Edward; the weakness of his sinking frame; his affection for the pious and amiable Jane, his near relation and the frequent companion of his childhood; and above all, for the importunities, the artifices, of the practised intriguers by whom his dying couch was surrounded. The partisans of Northumberland did not fail to urge, that if one of the princesses were set aside on With regard to the other claimants who might still be interposed between Jane and the English throne, it was pretended that the Scottish branch of the royal family was put out of the question by that clause of Henry's will which placed the Suffolk line next in order to his own immediate descendants; as if an instrument which was set aside as to several of its most important provisions was necessarily to be held binding in all the rest. Even admitting this, the duchess of Suffolk herself stood before her daughter in order of succession; but a renunciation obtained from this lady by the authority of Northumberland, not only of her own title but of that of any future son who might be born to her, was supposed to obviate this objection. The right of the king, even if he had attained the age of majority, to dispose of the crown by will without the concurrence of parliament, was absolutely denied by the first law authorities: but the power and violence of Northumberland overruled all objections, and in the end the new settlement received the signature of all the privy council, and the whole bench of judges, with the exception of justice Hales, and perhaps of Cecil, then secretary of state, who afterwards affirmed that he put his name to this instrument only as a witness to the signature of the king. Cranmer Notwithstanding this general concurrence, it is probable that very few of the council either expected or desired that this act should be sanctioned by the acquiescence of the nation: they signed it merely as a protection from the present effects of the anger of Northumberland, whom most of them hated as well as feared; each privately hoping that he should find opportunity to disavow the act of the body in time to obtain the forgiveness of Mary, should her cause be found finally to prevail. The selfish meanness and political profligacy of such a conduct it is needless to stigmatize; but this was not the age of public virtue in England. A just detestation of the character of Northumberland had rendered very prevalent an idea, that the constitution of the king was undermined by slow poisons of his administering; and it was significantly remarked, that his health had begun to decline from the period of lord Robert Dudley's being placed about him as gentleman of the bed-chamber. Nothing, however, could be more destitute both of truth and probability than such a suspicion. Besides the satisfactory evidence that Edward's disease was a pulmonary consumption, such as no poison could produce, it has been well remarked, that if Northumberland were a sound politician, there could be no man in England more sincerely desirous, for his own sake, of the continuance of the life and reign of this young prince. By a change he had every thing to lose, and nothing to Here she was soon after waited upon by messengers from Northumberland, who apprized her of the accession of the lady Jane, and proposed to her to resign her own title in consideration of a sum of money, and certain lands which should be assigned her. But Elizabeth wisely and courageously replied, that her elder sister was first to be agreed with, during whose lifetime she, for her part, could claim no right at all. And determined to make common cause with Mary The event quickly proved that she had taken the right part. Though the council manifested their present subserviency to Northumberland by proclaiming queen Jane in the metropolis, and by issuing in her name a summons to Mary to lay aside her pretensions to the crown, this leader was too well practised in the arts of courts, to be the dupe of their hollow professions of attachment to a cause unsupported, as he soon perceived, by the favor of the people. The march of Northumberland at the head of a small body of troops to resist the forces levied by Mary in Norfolk and Suffolk, was the signal for the defection of a great majority of the council. They broke from the kind of honorable custody in the Tower in which, from a well-founded distrust of their intentions, Northumberland had hitherto held them; and ordering Mary to be proclaimed in London, they caused the hapless Jane, after a nominal reign of ten days, to be detained as a prisoner in that fortress which she had entered as a sovereign. Not a hand was raised, not a drop of blood was shed, in defence of this pageant raised by the ambition of Dudley. Deserted by his partisans, his soldiers and himself, the guilty wretch sought, as a last feeble resource, to make a merit of being the first man to throw up his cap in the market-place of Cambridge,
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