Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

A.D. 1547. The earl of Surrey is tried and convicted of high treason", Jan. 13; he is beheaded, Jan. 19.

The duke of Norfolk is attainted by act of parliament, to which the royal assent is given by commission; Jan. 27x.

The king dies at Westminster, Jan. 28; he is buried at Windsor, Feb. 16.

proceedings, there is a charge against the earl of Surrey of saying, If the king die, who should have the rule of the prince, but my father or I?"

"The charge against him was that, "machinating to extinguish the cordial love which the king's lieges bore to him, and to deprive him of his crown and dignity, he had set up, joined to his proper bearings, the arms or Edward the Confessor, Azure, a cross fleury between five martlets gold,' which belonged to the king in right of his kingdom, and might not be borne by any subject."

[graphic]
[ocr errors]

His life was saved by the death of the king early on the following morning, but he was imprisoned in the Tower until the accession of Mary.

Arms of Edward the Confessor.

[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][merged small][merged small][merged small]

EDWARD, the only son of Henry VIII. by Jane Sevmour, was born at Hampton Court, Oct. 12, 1537. He succeeded to the throne Jan. 28, 1547, and his reign is a very important period of English history, although, from his youth, his influence on its transactions was very limited. The real rulers were, first, his uncle Somerset. and afterwards John Dudley, duke of Northumberlanda,

a He was born in 1502, and was the son of Edmund Dudley. Very soon after his father's death he was re

stored in blood, soon distinguished himself in arms, accompanied Cardinal Wolsey on his embassy to France, and was appointed master of the horse to Anne of Cleves. In 1543 he was, in consequence of his maternal descent, made Lord Lisle; and was soon after appointed lord high admiral, when he took Leith, and the next year defended Boulogne, and ravaged the French coast. He was named one of the executors of the will of Henry VIII., created earl of Warwick, had the principal part in the Scottish campaign, and is accused of sowing dissension between the Protector and his brother, which caused the ruin of both. He became on Somerset's

Arms of Dudley, duke of
Northumberland.

both men of little principle. From merely political motives, they joined with Cranmer and other real Reformers in establishing the Church of England substantially on its present footing; but they confiscated its possessions, laboured to render its ministers, from the highest to the lowest, mere creatures of the State, and treated the Princess Mary, Gardiner, Heath, Bonner, and others in a manner altogether unjustifiable, and which unquestionably had a great share in bringing about the persecution by which the following reign was rendered so unhappy and so odious.

Somerset, the Protector, after driving from the council the lord chancellor, (Wriothesley,) who was a decided Romanist, applied himself with vigour to carry forward the work of reformation. He also made an expedition against Scotland, but though he gained a victory in the field, he could not bring about the marriage which Henry VIII. had projected between his son and the

fall the real ruler of the kingdom, obtained the high offices of lord steward and earl inarshal, and was created duke of Northumberland, receiving at the same time the county palatine of Durham. By a feigned zeal for Protestantism he gained a great ascendancy over Edward VI., and prevailed on him to bequeath the crown to his cousin, Lady Jane Grey; but this enterprise failed in the execution; Northumberland was deserted by his adherents, and, in spite of his abject submission, was tried, condemned, and executed as a traitor, and owed Christian burial to the gratitude of an old servant (John Cock, Lancaster herald), who begged his remains from the queen, and interred them in the chapel of the Tower. He had married Jane, daughter of Sir Edward Guildford, warden of the Cinque Ports, and had a large family; four of his sons were concerned in his treason, but only one of them (Guildford) was executed; his daughter Mary became the mother of Sir Philip Sydney. Northumberland was a bold, active, unscrupulous man, and though he greatly forwarded the Reformation, it was evidently merely from views of personal aggrandizement, for he died professing himself a Romanist, and warning the spectators to avoid the Protestant teachers as sowers of sedition."

[ocr errors]

He

young queen as a means of uniting the kingdoms. offended the rest of the council by assuming a superiority which they contended that Henry VIII. had not meant to exist, and alarmed them by introducing foreign troops; and being already odious to the nation for his rapacity in seizing the college and chantry lands, and his unnatural conduct in bringing his brother to the scaffold, he was easily stripped of his power by a confederacy formed against him, and committed to the Tower, in October, 1549.

After a while

The earl of Warwick was now ruler. Somerset was permitted to return to the council, but was soon involved in what seems to have been a sham plot, tried, condemned, and put to death. The young king's health had long been declining, and Dudley (now become duke of Northumberland) having gained his confidence by an apparent zeal for the Reformation, persuaded him to settle the crown on his cousin, Lady Jane Grey, to the exclusion of his sisters; a change in the succession which he was incompetent to make without the authority of parliament. Edward died very shortly after, at Greenwich, on July 6, 1553, and was buried on August 8, at Westminster.

Beside the formal establishment of Protestantism, the reign of Edward is chiefly remarkable for the enactment of severe laws against vagabonds and tumultuous assem

She was the daughter of Henry Grey, duke of Suffolk, by his wife Frances, who was the daughter of Mary, the sister of Henry VIII. and Charles Brandon. Lady Jane, though only sixteen, was the wife of Guildford Dudley, the duke's son. She was learned, amiable, and pious, and her long imprisonment and violent death were the fruit of her filial piety, which induced her to accept the crown against her better judgment.

blies, the creation of a variety of new treasons, and some discreditable tampering with the coind. A peace was concluded with France, by which king Henry's conquest of Boulogne was given up, and an attempt was made to bring about a marriage between the king and Elizabeth, daughter of Henry II. War was maintained, on a small scale, against the Scots, but the council feared to enter on hostilities with the emperor (Charles V.), and therefore, after an angry debate, they desisted from their design of forcing the new service-book on the Princess Mary, though they imprisoned her servants, and prevented her own escape to Flanders.

The arms of Edward VI. are the same as those of Henry VIII., but his supporters are uniformly the golden lion and the red dragon. Only one badge, the sun in splendour, is ascribed to him.

The character of the young king, as far as it was allowed to develope itself, was amiable. To his coun

[graphic]
[ocr errors]

cillors, and not to himself, must be laid the odium of the

Badge of Edward VI.

These treasons were, however, in general, such as had been created under the reign of Henry VIII. and abolished in the first parliament of Edward VI.; they were re-enacted in the year 1552, after the fall of Somerset.

d Under the date April 10, 1551, the young king writes in his Journal: "It was appointed to make 20,000 pound weight for necessity somewhat baser, to get gains £16,000 clear, by which the debt of the realm might be paid, the country defended from any sudden attempt, and the coin amended." Several subsequent entries speak of "deliberations touching the coin," in one of which "the small money was ordered to be made of a baser state," and in another, two standards were fixed on, "one without any craft;" "the other not fully six [the nominal standard], of which kind was not a few."

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »