move about from room to room without the help of machinery, or of numerous attendants. The old issue in his leg had become an inveterate ulcer, which kept him in a constant state of pain and excessive irritability. It was alike offensive to the senses, and dangerous alike to life and property to approach this corrupted mass of dying tyranny. The slightest thing displeased him, and his displeasure was a fury and a madness; and nothing on earth could give him a wholesome, agreeable feeling. How his last wife, Catherine Parr, escaped destruction, appears almost marvellous ; she was more than once in imminent peril. The court, which no longer exhibited any of the pageants and gaieties of earlier days, had become a gloomy conventicle, where men, and women too, gave themselves up to the study of polemics."*

Yet this bloated load of corrupted carrion could, in its poisonous and fetid vileness, seal the doom of genius and valour, and make its last earthly act the destruction of a Surrey.

The historians we have quoted above, contemplating the enactments of Henry VIII., say well:-"The temper of such a legislator as Henry, and the thoroughly submissive, the otherwise incredible cowardice and baseness of his parliament, can only be fully exhibited by enumeration of their penal laws; which for number, variety, severity, and inconsistency, are perhaps unequalled in the annals of jurisprudence. Instead of the calmness, the foresight, the wisdom, which are looked for in a legislature, we find the wild fantasies and ever-changing, though ever-selfish, caprices of a spoiled child, joined to the blind, furious, malignant passions of a brutal and cruel savage. It would seem as if the disembodied demon of a Caligula or a Nero, the evil spirit that once wore their human form, had again become incarnate upon earth, let loose by the Omnipotent for some wise, though to dull, mortal eyes, dimly discerned end, to repeat in a distant age and another clime, that strange, wild, extravagant medley of buffoonery and horror which is fitted to move at once the laughter and execration of mankind!"

* Lord Herbert; Knight's History.

CHAPTER IX.

EDWARD VI. presented again the ominous spectacle and prospect of a boy on the throne; and spite of all the praises and wonder of historians over the abilities and virtues of this boy, it is more than probable that, had he lived, he would have furnished another instance of the truth of the Scripture declaration—“ Woe unto those nations whose princes are children!"

There is something so unnatural in royalty, or in the way in which it is treated, that old heads and full-grown and stout hearts cannot withstand its corrupting and destroying influences; but when a child is set on a throne, it is a certain augury of weakness and despotism in him, and of calamity to his people. He is surrounded by such desperate men, and desperate intrigues, by such furious factions and passions, that he is inevitably ruined. He is alternately worshipped as a god, and restrained as a captive; an instrument for the base purposes of those about him; till his mind is lifted from its balance, his temper is irritated, his passions inflamed, his affections irregularly developed, and he becomes the most melancholy object that the world has to show-a mingled mass of vanity and selfishness, weakness and irritability, depraved tastes and heartless tyranny; having lost all good in him, yet thinking nothing good enough for him; fit for neither heaven nor earth; in the midst of cruelty languishing for indulgence; in his person a most loathsome carcase; in his imagination a god! Such monsters are the regular work of royal minorities, regencies, courtiers, and parasites; all history abounds with examples of them. Edward was more blessed; he was one of those "who are loved of the gods, and die young."

But in his own short reign the nobles had time enough to show themselves in their true characters: to show what they would have made of him, of themselves, and the nation. Low as they had cowered before the two Henrys, so high in proportion started up their lawless vanity and ambition, when their fear was taken away from them, and they had only a boy to deal with.

This reign, in fact, is a point of time on which every man desirous of satisfying himself of the real and eternal nature of aristocracy, and of the actual origin and manufacture of some of the proudest of our present families, should steadily fix his eye. Here we have all the old intrigues, rapacity, and boundless

vanity of the aristocrats again in play. Spite of the lopping and levelling of the last reigns, a swarm of adventurers and gamblers for rank and affluence stood as thickly and as busily as ever round the throne. What was worse, they were new men,— hungry, and without law or conscience. The old oaks were felled, and here was a prodigious growth of fungus shot up from their stumps and stools. The nation had got rid of its lions, and had got wolves and leeches in their places. The estates wrested by the crown both from the fallen nobles and the church, and suffered by the bloated hands of Henry VIII. to be snatched away from it, were now pounced upon by a crowd of hitherto unknown men. All these, the moment they became possessed of a good share of this booty, were seized with an equally ravenous desire for titles and power. We find a complete catalogue of strange names, and even where we find the old titles, there are no longer the old men in them, but dull and creeping things; asses in lions' skins; toads and salamanders, which had crept into the deserted shells of tortoises, and swelled with vanity to fill out, if possible, the space too wide for their reptile littleness. Amongst the men surrounding the death-bed of Henry, or forming the first council of Edward, were Browns, Dennys, Bromleys, Wingfields, Petres, Southwells, Parrs, Peckhams, Pagets, Dudleys, Bakers, Saddlers, and such like, all unknown to the old history and glory of the country. There was Wriothesley, who had grown up by vile sycophancy under Henry; and by laying what the historian calls his bestial hands on any vile job which the tyrant wanted doing, had gorged himself with church and other spoil, and grown to Lord Chancellor. There was John Russell, who appeared under Henry for the first time in any prominent history; had crept and wound himself by a most pliable sequacity, and now stood Baron Russell, Lord Privy Seal. This is the origin of the greatness of the Bedford family; for this John Russell managed to lay hold of an enormous slice of church property, and to be made Earl of Bedford; as many of these men were made during Edward's minority, in fact, by themselves, into nobles and great ministers. But above all, the two families destined to play the grand nobles in this reign, the Dudleys and Seymours, were the most complete upstarts, and played "the most fantastic tricks before high heaven;" nothing less than the crown being able to satisfy their ambition. The whole of the proceedings of this reign constitute a most admirable tragi-comedy, showing what aristocracy is and always will be when it can have full swing.

Scarcely was the breath out of Henry's body when the grand

farce began. Seymour, whose sister had been one of the king's wives, and had thus raised the family out of its insignificance, had already been manufactured into Earl of Hertford, and had been long at work preparing for his possession of the child-king, his nephew. He and his adherents, the wily John Russell, Wriothesley, Paget, Denny, Herbert, &c., had contrived that a clause should appear in the king's will ordering all his promises to be made good. These courtiers then came forward and declared that the king had ordered that out of the estate of the Duke of Norfolk, then under sentence of death, the secretary should "tot down to the Earl of Hertford 1000 marks, to the Lords Lisle (Dudley), St. John, and Russell, 2001. a year, to Lord Wriothesley 1007., to Sir Thomas Seymour 3007. a year, to Denny 100%., and to Sir William Herbert 400 marks. Then the Earl of Hertford was to be Earl Marshal, and Lord Treasurer, and to be Duke of Somerset, Exeter, or Hertford, and his son the Earl of Wiltshire, with 800l. a year of land, and 2007. a year out of the next bishop's lands that fell void. The Earl of Essex was to be Marquis of Exeter, the Viscount Lisle to be Earl of Coventry, the Earl Wriothesly to be Earl of Winchester, Sir Thomas Seymour to be a Baron and Lord Admiral, Sir Richard Rich, Sir John St. Leger, Sir William Willoughby, Sir Edward Sheffield, and Sir Christopher Danby to be Barons, with yearly revenues to them and several other persons. That the king, at the request of Sir Edward North, promised Hertford six of the best prebends that should fall in any cathedral, except deaneries and treasurerships; but at Hertford's request changed two of the six prebendaries into a deanery and treasurership! Herbert then told the king that Denny, who had noted all this down, had forgotten himself, and the king ordered Denny 4007. a year for himself!

Thus it was truly "caw me, caw thee." The whole of this is most rich. Here was a set of fellows trumping up a story to help themselves to the lands and the highest titles of England. There was no evidence in the world for all this, except what rested on their own testimony; i. e., on a will of the king which they produced, and which did not agree in date with their own story; and yet on this swindling pretence-for who was to hinder them with the king's uncle at their head ?-they actually loaded themselves with estates and titles; they, in a word, manufactured themselves into nobles. In this manner was founded a whole batch of families that now lift their heads amongst the very proudest and wealthiest of England! The frogs were now busily blowing themselves out to become as big as bullocks; and

in fact, like the frogs in the fable, those who swelled the most eventually burst.* They had given themselves great estates, but for a while they did not know where to find them; eventually they laid hold of the chantry lands. The titles with which these men finally adorned themselves were- -Essex, made Marquis of Northampton; Lisle, Earl of Warwick; Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton; Sir Thomas Seymour, Baron Seymour of Sudley and Lord High Admiral; Rich, Baron Rich; Willoughby, Baron Willoughby; Sheffield, Baron Sheffield; St. Leger and Danby, with a rare moderation, crept out of the dirty business, and declined both peerage and pension. As for Hertford, says his admirer, Strype," he grew an exceeding great man swelling with titles." This was his style-" The Most High, Noble and Victorious Prince Edward, Duke of Somerset, Earl of Hertford, Viscount Beauchamp, Lord Seymour, Guardian of the Person of the King's Majesty and Protector of all his realms, his Lieutenant General of all his armies both by land and sea, Lord High Treasurer and Earl Marshal of England, Governor of the Isles of Guernsey and Jersey, and Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter"!!!!

But it was not with all these sounding titles that he stopped. His creatures, Russell, Brown, Paget, Cheyney, Northampton, and that miserable coward and creeping slave and persecutor, Cranmer, by a commission signed in the king's name, made him governor of the king and kingdom, without any participation of the council, so that he was, in fact, absolute master of the king and the realm. He went on granting himself fresh estates in the name of the king, who was a prisoner in his hands; and at length styled himself, "Duke of Somerset by the grace of God!" as if he had been a sovereign prince. His rapacity, his arrogance, his puffed up vanity, became so disgusting, ludicrous, and overbearing, that he was regarded on all hands as a vain and insolent upstart. Burnet confesses that "many bishops and cathedrals had resigned many manors to him for obtaining his favour." He sold, or rather gave away, quantities of the chantry lands to his tools; and when he had sunk the kingdom to the lowest point of disgrace by his miserable campaigns in Scotland, and into universal confusion and insurrection at home, he proceeded to build himself a magnificent palace in the Strand, on the site of the present Somerset-house, for which purpose he compelled three bishops to surrender to him their episcopal mansions, which he levelled to the ground. He threw down also a parish church which stood in his way, with various other religious buildings,

* Strype's Ecclesiastical Memorials; Burnet; Lingard.