for the sake of the materials; destroyed the monuments of the dead in them, and scattered the bones of the dead themselves, flinging them by cart-loads into a pit in Bloomsbury.

But this man was but one actor in the play. His brother, Sir Thomas Seymour, now Baron Seymour and Lord High Admiral, looked with envious eyes on Somerset's greatness, and resolved to equal or surpass him. For this purpose he married the Queen Dowager, Catherine Parr, began bribing right and left, even giving money to the poor boy, the king, who seemed always very glad of it. He got the Princess Elizabeth into his hands; and in the Burghley Papers, published in 1740 and 1759, there are some very curious passages respecting his conduct to Elizabeth, such as his tickling her in bed, going into her bedroom in the night, &c. &c.; which, when an examination came to be made into these matters, put Elizabeth into a terrible fright, especially the confessions of her governses, Mrs_Catherine Ashley. After his wife's death he wanted to marry Elizabeth. He planned to get the king into his own hands, and carry him to his castle of Holt, in Denbighshire, but his career was stopped by his brother, who caused him to be brought before the council, and was the first to set his hand to his death-warrant. He was executed on Tower-hill. Thus Somerset had got rid of his brother, but, as in all such companies of upstarts, there were plenty of enemies still left behind. He had early thrown Wriothesley out of office, and done his best to ruin him; and revenge was not wanting, but more than revenge, ambition as daring as his own was at work. Warwick was as eager to play the hero, and lay hold of the power of the Crown, and of the Crown itself, as Somerset or his brother. With the counsels of the disgraced and wily Wriothesley to guide him, he made a dead set at Somerset, raised a party against him, brought him before the council, and humiliated him to the dust. He then raised him again, and plotted with him as a tool, till finally he struck his blow; and the poor, vain-glorious duke, after being paraded through London on horseback, was conveyed to the Tower, and had his head struck off on the very spot where he had caused that of his brother to fall! His whole government had, in truth, been wretched and ruinous. His wars in Scotland and France had been a series of losses and national disgraces. His domestic transactions had been one course of blundering and irritating mischief. The whole kingdom had been thrown into a flame; in every quarter of it the people were driven to rebellion. In Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Gloucester, Hertfordshire, Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Essex, Hants, Suffolk, Wilts, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire; in fact, in every part, the people had been in arms and

committing devastations, but especially in Norfolk, where 1600 men, with the notorious Ket at their head, were not put down without a fierce resistance and a terrible slaughter. These things were all favourable to the designs of Warwick; and from the moment of Somerset's disgrace, Warwick, like a true aristocratic balloon, began to fill with the gas of soaring ambition, and to aim at the same fatal altitude of dominion. He was speedily metamorphosed into Great Master of the Household, Lord High Admiral; and his helps, Russell and St. John, were turned into Earls of Bedford and Wiltshire. Warwick then became Warden of the Scottish Marches, and finally Duke of Northumberland; his supporters being again disguised in the new names of Duke of Suffolk, Marquis of Winchester, Earl of Pembroke, &c.

Northumberland had now got the king and power into his hand, but the health of Edward began to decline, and that decline was the rise of a new and vast dream of ambition in Northumberland, no less than that of fixing his family on the throne by marrying his son, Lord Guildford Dudley, to Lady Jane Grey, the next heir to the crown after Edward's two sisters. He then proceeded to the daring design to set aside the two princesses. This he actually managed by his influence over the enfeebled mind of the dying boy-king, Edward, on the pleas of Mary's bigotry, and of the illegitimacy of them both, which, in truth, their own brutal father had virtually declared in his pleas for putting away their mothers. He forced, by violence, this marriage on the council, and did not stop till his audacious and profligate attempt had brought to the block his sons, Lord Guildford Dudley and Lord Robert Dudley, the amiable and innocent Lady Jane Grey herself, Sir Thomas Palmer, Sir John Gates, the Duke of Suffolk, Lord Thomas Grey, his brother, and others.

And who was this towering Duke of Northumberland? Let the reader turn to the reign of Henry VII., and he will find his father figuring away as one of the vilest tools of that avaricious king. Henry, he will find, had two agents, whose business it was to extort money from the king's subjects: these were two scoundrel lawyers, Empson and Dudley. Lord Bacon says,"As kings do more easily find instruments for their will and humour than for their service and honour, he had gotten for his purpose these two instruments, whom the people esteemed as his horse-leeches and sheerers, bold men and careless of fame, and that took toll of their master's grist ;-nay, turned law and justice into wormwood and rapine. They charged the owners of estates which long had been held on a different tenure, with the obsolete burdens of wardships, liveries, premier seisins, and

G

the whole array of feudal obligations, for which they would only give quittances for payments in money: they not only converted every offence into a case of fine and profit, but invented new offences to get the fines: to hunt up their game, they kept packs of spies and informers in every part of the kingdom, and to strike it down with the legal forms, they kept a rabble to sit on juries. At length, they did not observe so much as the halfface of justice. They arrested men by precept, and tried them without any jury in their own private houses. These and other courses, fitter to be buried than repeated, they had of preying upon the people, both like tame hawks, for their master, and like wild hawks for themselves, insomuch that they grew to great riches and substance."

The people were worked up to madness by these villanies, and one of the very first acts of Henry VIII. was to appease them by arresting these arch rogues, and, after a year's imprisonment in the Tower, striking off their heads.

Such is the material out of which nobility is continually made. This knave of a lawyer and extortioner had his head taken off, but the people's property, which he had embezzled, remained in the family, and enabled the son to rise to the very height of the crown, and to stretch out his hand to seize it. He again fell, and many of his family with him, yet we find his grandson, Robert Dudley, by his handsome exterior, captivating Queen Elizabeth, and made Earl of Leicester. When we read of the unprincipled deeds of Leicester, of the atrocious murder of his wife, and of other acts which deserved the halter, we have only to remember old Dudley the extortioner, and his conduct appears quite in keeping with his origin.

CHAPTER X.

WE may pass over the reign of Mary, which was only distinguished by its burnings and bigotry, and in which the nobility were scarcely noticeable except for their servility, and contemplate that of her more remarkable sister, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth has been long lauded to the skies as a great princess. "The glorious Queen Bess" has, like the glorious constitution, been represented by Tory writers as the envy and admiration of the world. We have been taught to regard her as one of the most patriotic of rulers, and as an incontestable benefactor of

the country. It has been said that our present Queen was studiously and assiduously educated on the model of Elizabeth. Heaven forbid! A worse woman surely never existed, nor one whose principles and practices were more thoroughly un-English. She was a murderess, and a destroyer of the people's rights and free-will of the worst and most implacable dye. Her coldblooded ministers and herself were engaged the whole of their lives, after she mounted the throne, in practices and a policy most hateful to every true English mind, most hostile to every English principle of action, to all English honour and highheartedness, most detestable for their Machiavellian, dark, clandestine, Inquisition-like, assassin-like, and remorseless character. The longer and the more accurately our history has been studied, the more widely sentiments of true greatness and just ideas of government and freedom have prevailed, the lower has sunk the character of Elizabeth. Of late years, a free search amongst the original documents of the State-paper Office has brought to light such evidence, under the hands of Elizabeth's own ministers, of the real transactions and principles of administration of her reign, as must set for ever the most damning blackness on her character, and on that of her confidential advisers. There is no man who is able to free himself from educational prejudices, and to regard these revelations as a man and a Christian, who can contemplate them without the most unqualified abhorrence.

That Elizabeth was an able woman, and that she was surrounded by able men, is an unquestionable fact. But how did she and they employ this ability? That is the question. In great and generous actions-in promoting the happiness of all those with whom they stood in connexion in preferring truth and honour to stratagem and deceit―magnanimity and promotion of the common good to petty jealousy and base passions? These are the principles of true greatness, and the foundations of true glory, and for these we seek in vain in Elizabeth or her counsellors. They must, indeed, have strange and perverted ideas of what glory and greatness are, that find them in her policy. Escaped from the glare of false splendours, which our former historians, quoting the false documents of a paid press, have flung round our school-day fancies-from the cries of "Glorious Queen Bess," which Tories, true to their own views, have deceived us with-we look for the woman and the deeds which they have lauded, and what do we find? A woman of undoubted ability, though overrun with the most ludicrous vanity and the most childish weaknesses-a woman of a most masculine will and despotic disposition-daring, selfish, cunning,

and artful as a serpent, but with the serpent's venom and the tiger's cruelty-a true Henry VIII. in petticoats. And what did she for the country? Ruled it in peace, and maintained the Protestant religion. Henry did that too; but will any one call that monster a glorious monarch? He maintained peace, and Protestantism, and persecution; and she maintained peace and Protestantism, because they were both knowing, selfish, and strong-willed people, who knew what was agreeable to themselves and how far they might go, and who would have maintained anything put into their heads, out of pride and love of power; but who loved themselves far better than their own people, and stuck at nothing that they deemed conducive to their domination, were it as black as the blackest spot in the heart of Satan.

The defeat of the Armada, and Elizabeth's conduct on that occasion, have been made the subject of much childish admiration. We shall come to speak of these presently; but her persecutions and tauntings of all who resisted her will in government or religion-her violations of all the liberties and sacred rights of the subject-her repugnance to education and her most contemptible ideas of religious tolerance-her fanaticism and monopolies have been less touched upon. She is, in truth, a character at which every true-hearted Englishman must shudder.

What is of the highest importance in judging of her reign, is to bring clearly before our view the base, subservient disposition of her nobility, who seconded the very worst of her actionsthose which have cast a vile stain on that period of our history; and the not less striking fact that the people, who really again fought out the true glory of this reign, have never even won the slightest whisper of the credit of it. Sycophants and parasites have stolen their honours to hang them on the brows of exalted malefactors.

The great drama of Elizabeth's life and reign is based on that deadly hate with which the beauty and popularity of her cousin, the Queen of Scots, inspired her; and on that subtle, neverpausing, and successfully murderous series of schemes, plots, briberies, hiring of assassins, and forgery of evidence, suborning of false and perjured accusers, and forced submissions to servile judges, by which, from the first moment of her reign to that of the shedding of Mary's blood, she never ceased to pursue her. And here it must be recollected that there is no room for surmises; the whole train of dark transactions is now dragged to the day, and stands in the front of our history, and on the testimony of the actors themselves, in our archives. On the authority of these evidences, a modern historian says:-" In a fatal