Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, was Protector and the most prominent personality in English politics for a period only just exceeding two years and a half. As Earl of Hertford, he grasped the reins of power when Henry VIII. died; but since the fall of Thomas Cromwell, Henry had reigned without allowing any of his servants to occupy a pre-eminent position, and the Earl of Hertford had certainly not been an exception. After his overthrow in the autumn of 1549, his political influence was never strong enough to affect the measures of his successor: it sufficed merely to bring about his own execution as a preventive measure. The whole reign of Edward VI. is, in fact, quite sharply divided into the two periods of the Seymour ascendency and the Dudley ascendency; but the distinction somehow seems to be very commonly overlooked, and Somerset is not only credited with his own doings or misdoings, but with a goodly share of those for which Northumberland was responsible, and with which Somerset was entirely out of sympathy.

It would appear, however, that it would be difficult to find two men whose ideas were more thoroughly antagonistic than those of Somerset and Northumberland: a view not very easily reconcilable with the popular verdict, which seems to regard Somerset as being a weaker if rather more amiable edition of his rival. It is certainly well that the latest detailed study of the Protector’s career should have at least sufficed to make the old method of treating him inexcusable for the future. Without accepting all Mr. Pollard’s inferences as to his subject’s abilities and character, it must be recognised that the portrait presented in his England under Protector Somerset, if somewhat “flattered,” will have to be seriously reckoned with by all future historians of the period.

Nevertheless, it may be doubted whether the impression left by that volume is quite what the author intended to convey. The suggestion certainly is that the Protector was really a great man who only failed because he was too much in advance of his age. But in fact, while he possessed certain qualities essential to the great statesman though by no means requisite for a successful politician, he lacked others which are necessary to either character. Some of the projects for which he laboured most strenuously were wrecked, not because they were out of reach, but because of his own inherent incapacity for adapting means to ends; and the general effect of his efforts was not to bring the objects he had in view within nearer reach, but to make them more difficult of attainment than they were before. Failure is no condemnation. Wiclif failed, and Huss failed; but they made the Reformation possible. Somerset failed, and there was hardly one of his aims which had been advanced a single step by his action. A statesman, to deserve the title in its full sense, must be an idealist in his aims, but practical in his methods. The unpractical statesman may deserve our sympathy and our admiration; but we may not therefore give him the full meed of applause which belongs to the benefactors of the race or nation. The unpractical idealist may be invaluable when he is a voice only. When the control of public affairs falls into his hands, he is a public danger.

II
THE PROTECTOR AND HIS PROBLEMS

Edward Seymour was born about 1505: of good family, but not of high rank, though there was a strain of Plantagenet blood on the mother’s side. At any rate, the Seymours were connected with the Court, and the future Protector was still a boy when he was holding offices associated with Royalties. When Henry VIII. tired of Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour was the new spouse on whom his choice fell. The marriage naturally brought advancement to her brother; and though she did not long survive the birth of her son, Seymour, who had by this time been appointed to the Privy Council and raised to the earldom of Hertford, continued to enjoy favours as a man of undoubted talents and attractive personality—and uncle of the heir apparent. Favours, however, meant very little in the way of power. He discharged various functions and took part in sundry military operations in France and Scotland; but apart from one smart action near Boulogne, very little real credit attaches to his performances, which consisted for the most part in sacking the city of Edinburgh, and laying waste the Scottish border with rather more than usual in the way of burning and devastation.

Such as they were, however, these achievements sufficed to bring him some prestige as a commander. If there was nothing particularly brilliant about them, the same comment applies generally to those of his fellows and rivals. There was no one marked out by his talents to take up the reins of government when the king should die and be succeeded by a nine-year-old son. But it was fairly obvious that either the Howards, or Hertford in virtue of his relationship to the young Edward, must occupy the leading position. Intrigues and the folly of Surrey turned the scale against the Howards; Surrey and his father were both attainted; the former was executed and the latter escaped only through Henry’s death. Hertford was inevitably the man of the hour.

There was no manner of doubt about the succession. Henry left only one son, and that son’s legitimacy was unchallenged. But by a wholly unique measure, Henry had been empowered to fix by will not only the course of succession after his son but the method of carrying on the government during Edward’s minority. The will, when produced, was found to vest the control in a council of executors, giving priority to none, but remarkable as excluding Bishop Gardiner from the list. The genuineness of the document has been disputed, but probably without sufficient reason. At any rate, as it stood, its provisions were very far from satisfying Hertford’s ambitions, and it is hard to see how any one could have had a personal interest in giving it such a shape. Certainly he had none, and his immediate efforts were directed to inducing the new Council to alter its own constitution fundamentally. For two days the king’s death was kept secret, while Hertford laid his plans in conjunction with Paget, who had possession of the will. When the Council was summoned and the will produced, a proposal was immediately sanctioned appointing Hertford Lord Protector of the realm and of the king’s person. The assent of the king and the peers was formally obtained, and a few weeks later the appointment was confirmed by the king’s authority under the Great Seal. In the interval there had been a general distribution of honours, Hertford himself being made Duke of Somerset. Also the one member of the Council from whom serious opposition was to be feared, Wriothesley the Lord Chancellor (now made Earl of Southampton), justified his own removal by transgressing his powers. Somerset’s position was thus for the time at least made impregnable.

Henry VIII. himself and his second great minister Cromwell had conducted the government of the country on autocratic lines under colour of parliamentary forms, until Parliament itself assigned, not to the Crown as such, but to Henry personally, what amounted to the power of legislation by Royal Proclamation. Somerset, though without this statutory power, continued to make a free use of proclamations, such being in effect the system to which the country had become accustomed. He did not appreciate the change which had taken place. For the successful exercise of those powers a personality was needed which commanded unquestioning obedience, coupled with an unerring sense of the limits of endurance in the subjects. In neither respect was the Protector endowed with the necessary qualities.

There were problems enough to be dealt with to have daunted a master of statecraft. Over the Channel, there was France, aggrieved because England was just now holding Boulogne in pawn. The veteran Francis I. followed his English contemporary and rival to the grave in a very few weeks, and the son who succeeded him was by no means friendly to England. Across the northern border there was Scotland, with a baby queen, a queen-mother who was one of the Guise family who were in the ascendant in France, and a dominant party which in its national sympathies was French, and, in the religious point of view, regarded Henry as a schismatic and all advocates of the Reformation as heretics. At home, it was quite certain that the removal of Henry’s heavy hand would be followed by a renewal of the strife in the Church between the followers of the “Old Learning,” headed by Gardiner, Bonner and Tunstal, and those of the New, whose chief was Archbishop Cranmer. In addition, there was a grave social problem.

For a full half century a steady process had been at work throughout rural England of extending sheep-farming at the expense of cultivation. It was a process which paid the land-owners, owing to the large demands from abroad for English wool. But it was not equally satisfactory to the agricultural labourer, who was deprived of his customary employment (since sheep-farming required far fewer hands) and found no adequate compensation as yet in the industrial growth of towns. The evil was aggravated by the iniquitous manner in which landholders systematically seized every opportunity of appropriating common lands. In the main, this was the outcome of natural economic tendencies, which repeated attempts at legislative interference entirely failed to hold in check. But these troubles had been directly intensified by the action of Henry’s government for more than ten years past. The dissolution of the monasteries had deprived the peasantry of an easy-going and on the whole kindly group of landlords, and replaced these by another group who were generally greedy and rapacious. Moreover, the wholesale and monstrous debasement of the coinage, an expedient to which Henry had been driven by the depletion of the exchequer caused by his extravagance, had brought about a corresponding drop in effective wages, besides shaking financial stability and commercial confidence, with the unfailing disastrous results. From all of which, wide-spread misery and want were prevalent, more particularly in the rural districts.

These problems, we have said, might well have daunted even a master of statecraft. But for each of them the sanguine duke had his solution. It was with no mere paltry self-seeking designs that he had grasped at power. He had elected himself to the office of saviour of society: to the great disgust of some of those members of the Council who had connived at his elevation, in the confident belief that his interests and their own were identical, and would be the first objects at which his government would aim.

III
SOMERSET AND SCOTLAND

At the outset, it was to Scotland that the Protector gave his attention.

Two hundred years before the first Tudor ascended the throne of England, one of the ablest rulers this country has known realised that the union of England and Scotland as a single nation was an eminently desirable object. He sought to achieve that object by force of arms. He conquered Scotland, and Scotland rebelled. Every time he reconquered her, she rebelled again. His last attempt at invasion was foiled by his own death, and during the reign of his incompetent son, Scotland finally and decisively threw off the yoke he had attempted to impose. Every subsequent attempt to reimpose that yoke was foiled. Scottish barons might and did take pay from English kings, but in general terms it is safe to say that the expectation of an attempt at the armed conquest of the northern country was the one thing which could effectively, if only temporarily, induce the factions of the Scottish nobility to lay aside their personal and family feuds, and unite in resistance to the Southron. Another method of reconciliation had attracted the astute Henry VII., who married his eldest daughter to the Scots king—not indeed with the definite expectation that a union of the two crowns would result, but still with the arriÈre pensÉe that such a result was not impossible. From the fatal day of Flodden till the death of Henry VIII., Scotland had been alternately the prey of rival factions, and the English king had found that the simplest way of keeping his northern neighbours from becoming dangerous was to foster those rivalries. He had gone out of his way to prevent his elder sister’s offspring from inheriting the English throne, by postponing their claims in his will to those of her younger sister’s descendants. But he had on the one hand been favourably disposed to the idea that his own boy should marry the infant queen of Scots when the two were old enough; and he had more than once implicitly, if not quite explicitly, asserted the old claim of English suzerainty, with a view to the ultimate subjection of the Scottish to the English crown if it should prove convenient to try enforcing it.

Now at the moment of Henry’s death there was a party in Scotland which depended for its chance of success very largely on English aid. This was the Protestant section, which had just recently accomplished the murder of Cardinal Beton. The Catholics looked to France and the queen-mother’s Guise kinsfolk for support. Various important persons were as usual quite ready to take either side, as opportunity might render convenient. But the assassins of the Cardinal were still in possession of the Castle of St. Andrews. It seemed clear that if England gave active support to this section and prevented the arrival of reinforcements to the other party from France, English influence would predominate. If St. Andrews fell, the French party would acquire complete ascendency.

Somerset had no lack of political imagination. The idea of the union with Scotland appealed to him very strongly indeed. A less enthusiastic advocate of that policy might very well have been content to let things drift, reckoning that at worst Scotland would be no more willing to submit to a French than to an English domination, and that the moment of the almost inevitable anti-French reaction would be the time for a rapprochement. Scotland might after all be postponed to matters that were more immediately pressing. But there was an obvious alternative—to espouse the cause of the Protestant leaders in Scotland, confirm them as a heartily Anglophil party thoroughly committed at least to the English alliance, and establish them in a secure ascendency.

Neither of these courses, however, would achieve the solution on which the Protector was bent—the union of the two countries under a single Crown. It was true that there were plenty of Scots who in the abstract regarded such a union as desirable, and had expressed approval of the particular means proposed to that end—the marriage of Edward and Mary. If the sexes of the children had been reversed, the scheme might have run smoothly enough. But the Scottish idea of a union meant a union on equal terms, and anything which pointed to a danger of the smaller country being subordinated to the larger was apt to kindle a fierce flame of opposition. It would require a great deal of diplomatic tact to convince the Scottish nation at large that the contemplated marriage would not be turned to account so as to subordinate Scotland. If England now took up the cause of the Protestants, it was more than probable that when they were in power they would find sufficient reasons for evading the marriage. The Scots lords who had expressed approval were already making it clear that they did not intend to be bound by their past declarations.

Somerset desired the union by assent. But if the Scots would not assent, he meant to enforce it. The object in view was excellent, the method was ruinous. He saw nothing for it but invasion. The castle of St. Andrews fell, and the party friendly to England lost ground. Somerset dropped hints about the old claim of suzerainty, and Scottish indignation grew. His own previous record in Scotland did not encourage confidence in his good intentions. Early in September, Somerset crossed the border at the head of a large army. It availed nothing that the Scots army was completely shattered at Pinkie Cleugh—a defeat due to the same blunder which had given Surrey the victory at Flodden and was to give Cromwell the victory at Dunbar, as well as to the superiority in artillery of the smaller English army—and that Edinburgh was again sacked. Somerset’s plans had not extended to preparing an army of occupation. The principal effect of the invasion, in strict accordance with unvarying precedent, was to set the whole of Scotland in fierce opposition to the union, with the result that shortly afterwards little Queen Mary was embarked on French ships and carried off to France, to be placed under the care of her Guise uncles and betrothed to the French Dauphin, while the Guise ascendency in Scotland was confirmed.

Had the Protector been actuated mainly by a desire to achieve popularity, the Pinkie campaign would have been a brilliant success. But his aims were far higher. His conception of a union with Scotland was so far in advance of his times that it was not even realised by the union of the crowns in 1603, or until the Treaty of Union in 1707, more than 150 years later. That in itself is sufficient to demonstrate that his statesmanship had its quite admirable side. On the other hand, the means by which he endeavoured to secure those aims were absolutely the worst that could have been devised. The Pinkie campaign placed them more completely and hopelessly out of reach than any inaction or any other measures he could possibly have contrived. That is sufficient to explain why his government was on the whole so disastrous. He had thrown Scotland into the arms of France, and made France herself more instead of less hostile to England.

IV
SOMERSET’S RELIGIOUS POLICY

The Protector’s praiseworthy desire for a union with Scotland was in part at least subsidiary to his enthusiasm for the Reformation. The desire to see Scotland Protestant as well as England was one of his motives, and a strong one. And for his efforts in the cause of the New Learning in England he deserves more praise and less censure than is usually accorded to him. The historians with what may be called the anti-Protestant bias rarely distinguish between what was done under his rule and what was done under that of his successor in power. Those with a Protestant bias are apt to condemn him as lukewarm. Very rarely is it realised that under his government a degree of toleration prevailed such as was never contemplated by other Protestant rulers of his times, still less by Catholic princes. Yet here as in all else his work was marred by his lack of judgment, and still more—unhappily—by personal defects in his character.

The religious problem was obviously the most prominent of those which demanded solution on the death of Henry VIII. That monarch had broken with the Papacy, revolutionised the relations of the State and the ecclesiastical organisation in England, dissolved the monasteries, appropriated their revenues, condemned a few superstitious practices, and authorised a version of the Scriptures in the vernacular. There he had stopped. No dogmatic innovations had been admitted, and a large number of practices which moderate as well as extreme reformers desired to see altered had been retained. Obedience had been enforced by stringent legislation, and the Six Articles Act was a standing menace to innovators. Still, if in his later years Henry refused to go forward, he also declined to go backward. The party of reaction, when they attempted to subvert Cranmer’s position in the royal favour, only got a sharp reprimand for their pains. Yet the Reformation had reached a stage at which standing still had become impossible.

In framing the list of his executors, it seems as though the king’s intention had been to preserve a balance, with a slight leaning towards the forward school; a leaning which would almost have been reversed if Gardiner had been included. Cranmer was balanced by Tunstal, Hertford by Wriothesley. Dudley, Herbert, and Russell, were avowedly on the Protestant side. Others were pronounced supporters of the old order, and others again like Paget would be guided by circumstances. The moment, however, that Hertford’s ascendency was assured, it was quite certain that the forward movement would be set on foot. Cranmer took in the pulpit the earliest opportunity of likening the boy-king to Josiah, thereby very definitely fore-shadowing a war against “images.” Nevertheless, there was nothing in the way of a violent revolution instituted. Broadly speaking, measures of which Cranmer had openly avowed himself in favour during the late king’s reign were resorted to perhaps more hastily than was wise. The Archbishop’s Book of Homilies received the sanction which Henry had refused to it. Injunctions based on those of Thomas Cromwell were issued, chiefly directed against “abused images,” and a visitation by Royal Commission was presently set on foot. While Somerset was still in Scotland, Gardiner and Bonner, the bishops of Winchester and London, offered some opposition on the ground that these measures were inconsistent with the later ecclesiastical legislation of Henry; and both were placed under easy confinement in the Fleet. So far, however, there was nothing which could be called innovation; there was merely a renewal of Cromwell’s activity on the same lines—accompanied in practice by very much the same irreverence and violence.

When Convocation and Parliament met for the winter, there was no appearance of any violence being done to ecclesiastical consciences. All the bishops were Henry’s bishops, not Somerset’s; and though they did not prove unanimous in Parliament, a majority of them were favourable to the reforming measures introduced—with the exception of the Chantries Act, which was in itself quite obviously nothing but the completion of an approved policy. Acts for the suppression of irreverent language about the Sacrament, and enjoining the administration of the Communion in both kinds, were passed actually at the instance of the clergy themselves, while the clerical demand for permission to marry was ignored. The Six Articles Act was repealed, but that was nothing more than an abolition of penalties, like the accompanying repeal of the statutes de heretico comburendo. During 1548, there were proclamations enjoining the Lenten fast, for the sake of the fisheries; an Order of service for Communion was issued, which, however, only gave effect to the recent Act; there was a fresh Injunction against Images; preaching was restricted to the Homilies, except for licensed preachers—a custom frequently enforced in the last reign. In form, there was still no innovation.

In the winter of 1548–9 came the First Prayer Book of Edward VI., and the Act of Uniformity. The Prayer Book was a compromise, which admitted of such divergent interpretation that the most and the least advanced of the bishops could use it without straining their consciences: and the Act of Uniformity, while it penalised disobedience on the part of the clergy, laid no burden whatever upon laymen.

Now we have here reviewed summarily the whole of the ecclesiastical legislation for which Somerset was responsible. On the face of it, the changes he introduced were by no means revolutionary. Even the new Prayer Book in effect required no one to accept any new doctrine. The repeal of penal acts practically permitted but assuredly did not enforce the teaching of the doctrines against which they had been directed. Not a single victim was sent to the stake; not a single bishop was deprived of his See. During Somerset’s absence in Scotland, Gardiner and Bonner were placed in confinement for disobeying the Injunctions. Both were released after some three months. Again, the next year, Gardiner adopted a critical attitude which led to his being imprisoned again in what was no doubt a high-handed fashion; and almost at the moment of the Protector’s fall, Bonner was again sent to prison for disobeying the Act of Uniformity. There is only one other act of persecution charged to Somerset which even calls for comment, the condemnation of Joan Bocher; and that is only to remark that as a matter of fact it was after his fall that her execution was sanctioned. It was not till he had been ousted from power by Dudley that the zealots dominated the reforming party.

Nevertheless, in this field also the Protector failed, and brought discredit both on his measures and his motives. On his measures, because those which were in themselves the most questionable and the most unpopular were, so to express it, not statutory but proclamatory: exercises of a power which was of extremely doubtful legality, arbitrary in their nature. On his motives, because he made large personal profits out of the spoils of the Church (though a far larger proportion of these was appropriated to education than in the preceding reign), and set an evil example of sacrilege by laying hands upon sacred edifices and pulling them down for the building of a palace for himself. In his policy, which was moderate and most unusually tolerant, he worked hand-in-hand with the Archbishop, so that it is difficult to say which of the two was the guiding spirit; yet its effect was in great part—though not, as in the case of Scotland, totally—destroyed by the mistaken methods he chose to adopt for enforcing it.

V
SOMERSET AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM

We have studied the Protector in his character as prophet of the union with Scotland, and as apostle of religious tolerance. We have now to observe him in his third rÔle as friend of the people; wherein again he was equally honest in his pursuit of an ideal, equally satisfied of his own competence to deal with the problem, and equally misguided in his methods.

No man, whatever his office, can be reproached for having failed to solve the eternal problems of poverty and unemployment. The enormous discrepancies in the distribution of wealth may appeal to the wealthy as evidence of divine justice; by the poor they are more apt to be attributed to human injustice. Yet it is not always apparent on the face of things that the rich man has become rich or the poor man poor through any misdoings. Natural forces operate without any regard to abstract equity. There are always, however, those who, passionately alive to the unfairness of the inequalities around them, are convinced that there is nothing to prevent the realisation of a Utopian rectification except the selfish greed of the propertied classes, and imagine that an adequate remedy can be found in the imposition of paper rules and regulations. Selfish greed is always one of the factors in the problem, of varying magnitude, and regulations which effectively protect the weak instead of strengthening the strong may have most beneficial results; but they must have a power behind them which is capable of enforcing them, and they must be in themselves capable of being enforced.

The social disorganisation at this period was exceptionally acute. For the agricultural depression, we have already noted as the most vital cause the conversion of arable land into pasture—the growing substitution of a highly remunerative industry demanding little labour for a less remunerative industry requiring more labour. Next to this was the disappearance of small holdings, owing to their accumulation into single large estates—the substitution in effect of large farms worked by farm servants for petty cultivation by peasant households. Third stands the enclosing and appropriation of common lands by large landholders. The demand for labour sinking from these causes out of all proportion to the supply, cheapened labour excessively. There was an army of men who could find no employment, and those who obtained employment were miserably paid. Of the three causes named, only the third can be attributed to the moral obliquities of the wealthy. The other two were natural economic developments which would in the course of time find their natural remedy in the growth of new industries which would absorb the displaced labour. That, however, did not make the existing distress less painful, since the new industries had not yet come into being. Moreover, whereas in the old days the monasteries had at least played some part in the immediate relief of distress, though they had not mitigated its causes, their destruction had abolished this source of relief. We have in our own day an analogous movement in the industrial world, public companies and trusts absorbing the business of the small traders, while the channels into which capital flows are decided by considerations not of philanthropy but of dividends.

The true remedy was to be found—and was found in the course of Elizabeth’s reign—in the development of new industries; and the condition of developing new industries was the restoration of public credit: to be achieved primarily by steady government, establishing general confidence, and by ending one grave cause of the existing lack of credit for which the recent government had been directly responsible, namely, the debasement of the coinage. It was also not impracticable, though exceedingly difficult, to deal with the thievery of common lands. Incidentally, it was necessary to find a substitute which should discharge the charitable functions of the monasteries, as well as to hold in check the vagabondage which, owing to the great number of the unemployed, was a daily increasing danger.

There were, then, certain practical steps to be taken which would not indeed cure the existing evils, but would serve directly to mitigate them and to restore the body politic to a condition in which the only effective remedy could be applied. But in the sixteenth century, even the most scientific thinkers believed that human nature could be “expelled with a fork” by statute: and it is small blame to Somerset that he sought to stay the economic tide and to forbid the inevitable. The attempt was very much more than anything else the cause of his ruin; and as usual it was dictated by the most excellent motives. But it is very much to be lamented that while he attempted the impracticable, he left what was practicable alone, or mismanaged it so far as he did try it. He could not provide the country with a steady government: he did not restore the currency: public credit sank. He pinned his faith on legislation which was either flatly rejected or became a dead letter the moment it was passed. He made an attempt to deal with vagabondage by converting vagabonds into slaves, which was merely grotesque. Dissatisfied—quite properly—with the courts which dealt with the land questions, he established a “Court of Requests” in his own house, and proposed on his own responsibility to overrule their decisions. As for the enclosure business, the Council was not merely unsympathetic; half its members were more or less flagrant enclosers themselves. For Somerset to make a direct frontal attack on the system on which they were battening was creditable to his courage, but it was not politics. When they found that the Protector was not merely playing at being a popular ruler, but was taking himself very seriously indeed, and that he evinced anything but the proper desire to pulverise the Commons when they rose in arms either in the western or the eastern counties, they were not long in deciding that the Protector himself must go. They were only following immemorial custom when they put forward the theory that he was seeking his own advancement by practising the arts of the demagogue, and that the rural unrest was the creation of his machinations.

VI
THE LORD ADMIRAL

The same characteristics of the Protector present themselves in other fields. His motives were quite other than those which actuated the government which succeeded his, and on an altogether higher plane. We have already noted in passing that his scheme for religion included the repeal of the Act of the Six Articles and the old penal statutes de heretico comburendo; that is, his policy abolished the methods of persecution, at least in any stringent form. In precisely the same spirit, he dealt with the Treason Laws invented under Henry VIII. and used by that monarch with such terrible effect. Those laws were a very potent weapon in the hands of an arbitrary ruler; an instrument by which virtually the king—or, if the king so chose, his minister—could absolutely secure the condemnation for high treason of any person who in any way proved obnoxious to his government. To that end it was practically sufficient to procure an information that the proposed victim had used expressions which might be construed as implying a possibility of treasonous intent, or of complicity in treasonous intent—treasonous intent being interpreted in the widest conceivable sense—and the victim’s doom was sealed, whether he were a Buckingham, a More, or a Surrey. This weapon lay ready to the Protector’s hand for the destruction of rivals and the establishment of his own authority. He not only declined to use it; he broke it to pieces himself. It is particularly noteworthy that it was in Somerset’s Act of 1547 that a provision was first introduced requiring that any charge of treason should be supported by two witnesses—a provision repeated in the later Treasons Act of Northumberland. The Protector deliberately and of set purpose deprived himself of those means to tyranny which Thomas Cromwell had so carefully fabricated.

Again, we find during his rule that there was no coercing of Parliament, no interference with freedom of debate, no danger attending on the most outspoken opposition to the personal wishes of the Protector.

Yet here, again, he gave occasion to the enemy. If he had maintained the Cromwellian system of ruthlessness in the pursuit of each object he set before himself, his condemnation as a tyrant would have been tempered by praise of his masterfulness. The policy of blood and iron always has its advocates, and sometimes merits advocacy. But it was not Somerset’s policy, and therefore the one occasion on which he deserted his practice attracts criticism. On that one occasion there is very little doubt that he had an irresistible case. It is scarcely necessary to add that he did the thing the wrong way.

His brother William, created Lord Seymour of Sudely under the new administration, was also Lord High Admiral. But, as the king’s uncle, he was by no means satisfied with the honours which fell to his share, and was extremely jealous of his brother’s absorption of dignities and power. He plunged in a series of intrigues to get the young king under his own personal influence, and to bring the two younger girls, Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey, who might come into the succession, under his own control. He began by secretly marrying Katharine Parr, the king’s widow, for whose hand he had been a suitor before Henry had chosen her for his sixth matrimonial venture: so that his wife had precedence over Somerset’s Duchess. Elizabeth, being under her charge, was thus brought into the Admiral’s household. He bribed Dorset, whose wife under Henry’s will stood next in succession to Henry’s own offspring, to place their daughter Jane under his tutelage also. He put forward a claim that, as the king’s uncle, he was entitled to be governor of the king’s person instead of his brother, who was Protector of the realm—a claim in which he was unsupported. He consistently set himself in opposition to his brother, doing everything in his power to thwart him, and refusing to command the fleet which accompanied the invasion of Scotland. Katharine Parr died within eighteen months of her marriage, and no sooner was she in her grave than he attempted to obtain the hand of Elizabeth, now a girl of barely fifteen years: to whom his behaviour had already been so objectionable that Katharine had found it necessary to remove her out of his reach. As Admiral, instead of repressing the pirates who infested the Channel, he made private league with them for their support—and for shares in their booty. He kept something like a small army of bravoes in his pay, and had a private cannon-foundry of his own; and he found the means for the heavy expenditure entailed through a pact with Sharrington, the master of the mint at Bristol, who was pocketing enormous and iniquitous profits out of the clipping and debasing of the coins he issued.

With Henry on the throne, or a Thomas Cromwell at the head of the State, the Lord Admiral would have been in the Tower in two months. Under the Protectorate, he was allowed to carry on his intrigues and malpractices for two years, with nothing more serious than remonstrances. The discovery, however, of Sharrington’s frauds and Seymour’s implication therein brought matters to a head. The evidence, not only of an abuse of his office which amounted to treason, but of an ulterior intention of subverting the Government, was ample enough, though the only prominent men who were in any sense attached to him were Dorset and Northampton (the latter being Katharine Parr’s brother). There is hardly a question that, in open trial, under the most favourable conditions, the Admiral would have been sentenced and executed. Unfortunately for his own credit, Somerset assented to the view of the Council that the process should be by attainder in Parliament instead. Seymour stood on his right to an open hearing, and refused to answer the interrogatories of committees of the Council or of the Peers; and therefore he was condemned, by the almost unanimous verdict of both houses, unheard. The natural result was that men said at the time, and have continued to say since, that the Protector, fearing that his brother might become a dangerous rival, fabricated charges against him, and in effect contrived one more of the political murders of the type so familiar in the annals of Henry VIII. The Admiral was executed in March. His death was undoubtedly a shock to popular sentiment, and weakened Somerset’s position, so that his fall followed the more easily after the rural risings which turned the majority of the Council decisively against him.

VII
THE EX-PROTECTOR

The Council’s coup d’État cost very little trouble. The moment was seized, when the unsuspecting Somerset was at Hampton Court, Cranmer and Paget being absent; while Russell and Herbert were returning with victorious laurels and most of the available army from the suppression of the Western rising. Both of them had strong feelings as to Somerset’s Enclosures policy. After a futile appeal to the people, there was nothing to do but surrender. But the Duke was at any rate a popular favourite; a good many of those who were in the plot against him liked him well enough personally though his policy annoyed them; he was not of the stuff of which successful political plotters are made; there was no plausible excuse for treating anything that he had done as proving anything worse than incompetence; and the Council were satisfied by his being turned out of office, subjected to a brief imprisonment, and deprived of no great amount of his lands. Six months after his fall he was even readmitted to the Privy Council, as Southampton had been three years before. There was, in short, no display of animosity; but the Warwick faction meant to grasp the management of public affairs, and to conduct them with more profit to themselves than the Protector’s rÉgime permitted.

Warwick and his friends—the Earl did not get himself created Duke of Northumberland till two years later—took over the control in October 1549. They retained it for a little less than four years. During that time their foreign and Scottish policy showed no improvement upon that of Somerset. In matters of religion, they progressed from the Prayer-book of 1548–49 to that of 1552: which would have been of a more pronounced Calvinistic flavour than it was but for the moderating influence of Ridley and Cranmer. Bonner and Gardiner were both deprived of their sees at the beginning of the rÉgime, and later Tunstal, Day, and Heath were also imprisoned and deprived. The new appointments were all advanced Reformers. Before Somerset’s fall the Princess Mary had been attacked for persisting in the use of the Mass in private, after the Act of Uniformity, but the Protector granted her a licence to continue. The Warwick government was not similarly complaisant. And when a second Act of Uniformity was passed, of a much narrower type than the first, laymen as well as clergy were penalised for failure to conform. In dealing with the rural troubles Somerset’s policy was reversed, legislation being directed to the coercive repression of discontent and the relaxation of such safeguards as existed against the rapacity of landlords. To this must be added their new treason law, which not only extended the same protection to all Privy Councillors as to the king himself, but also made assemblies “for altering the laws” high treason, while renewing the requirement of two witnesses as well as of a time-limit which Somerset had introduced.

Yet there are historians who say that there is no need to differentiate between the policy of Somerset and his successor—associating them in the same condemnation.

Somerset, restored to liberty and formally reconciled to Warwick, consistently endeavoured to use his influence in mitigation of the rigours of the new Government, whose chief began to fear, not without reason, that the moderate men might draw together and reinstate his rival. Paget, whose abilities made him dangerous, was removed from the Council, and imprisoned on an inadequate pretext in the autumn of 1551, to simplify the carrying out of Warwick’s plot; evidence of an alleged conspiracy was carefully concocted, Somerset and several of his friends were arrested, and the torture—never employed by the Protector—was resorted to for the extraction of confessions from some of the prisoners. A mythical assassination plot was dropped out of the indictment. Finding that even the concocted evidence was quite inadequate for a conviction of treason, Northumberland magnanimously declined to press personal charges, and Somerset was found guilty of felony—apparently on the ground that he had incited the citizens of London to rebellion—by a carefully packed court.

Having been acquitted of treason, but—with equal satisfaction to Northumberland, since the penalty was the same—condemned for felony, the axe borne by Somerset’s gaolers was reversed when he was taken from the judgment-hall. The crowds which had gathered to await the verdict were thus misled into the belief that the trial had gone in his favour, and broke into a clamour of rejoicing. It was a fond illusion. Even when his doom was made known the populace refused to believe that it would be carried out. The Duke himself knew better. As he stood on the scaffold, having already pronounced his moving and dignified dying speech, a messenger was seen approaching, and a wild cry arose—a delighted shout that he was carrying a pardon. Somerset hushed the people, warning them it was no such thing, and bidding them pray with him for the King’s Majesty. Then, with the words “Lord Jesus, save me,” he laid his head on the block to receive the fatal stroke: and the spectators hastened to dip their kerchiefs in his blood, to be preserved as memorials of one who, with all his faults, had won the heart’s love of the common folk.

Somerset’s personal faults were shared by the majority of the prominent men of his time; it was only the greatness of his position which made them a shade more conspicuous in him. As a statesman, he was a melancholy failure; capax imperii he was not in any possible sense; and his incapacity was only the more conclusively proved by the fact that he never suspected it himself. The shrewdest of men would have found it difficult enough to realise his aims, and of shrewdness he had not a particle. His failure was due not less to his complete lack of judgment than to the difficulties inherent in the problems which with easy confidence he set himself to solve. It was an ill thing for England that he was not a wiser man. But it had been well for England if wiser men than he had possessed more of those moral qualities of his to which he himself so woefully failed to give effect.