by which there was a covert allusion to their claim to the crown; and as the shield had been registered in the Royal College, with the royal consent, and had been seen in battle-field and tournay for forty years, there was no denying the crime. Sentence was of course pronounced, and on the 19th of January the Earl of Surrey died a traitor's death. § 28. But the king himself was breathing his last breath with pain, and fancy can picture to us the two rooms in which Norfolk and his persecutor lay. On the 29th of January the duke was to appear on the scaffold which had witnessed his son's execution ten days before. He was watching in his dungeon in the Tower the breaking of the morning light that was to lead him to his doom; but before the dawn the king, after sending for Cranmer, who could only bid him hope for mercy, without venturing to assure him of it, brought his terrible career to a close. In the fifty-five years of his life, or at least in the thirtyseven years of his reign, this man had heaped more personal crime, and caused more human suffering, than the tyrants of Tunis or Morocco. And yet it is possible he was one of the selfdeceiving monsters who believe in their own protestations of good intentions and the claims of lofty motive with which they try to deceive others. The ruin of English freedom, which had been industriously begun by the cunning and perseverance of his father, was completed by his brutal determination and insane love of power. No pity nor remorse, no respect for man, or tenderness for woman, stood in the way of his selfish gratification. He never had a valuable counsellor whom he did not destroy; he never promised love and protection to a wife whom he did not degrade or murder. But the peculiarity of his history is, that in many instances the results of his vices were beneficial to the State. If he rioted like a blood-stained savage in the execution of his unhappy consorts, he probably elevated the standard of female virtue by the tremendous consequences that followed the A.D. 1547] CHARACTER OF HENRY VIII. 449 want of it, and established a purer atmosphere about his court than the poisoned air breathed in the midst of mistresses and favourites by his rival Francis. If he quarrelled with the Pope, in the heat of anger at a disappointment of his passions, he brought to maturity the great thought which for years had been germinating in the English heart; and if he robbed the Church to enrich his private hoards, and buy over a corrupt and degraded nobility, the lands he threw open to competition were the foundation of a middle class such as no part of Europe ever possessed-a gentry, without hereditary privileges and exemptions to offend the people; and a yeomanry, no longer the tenants of an imperious landlord, but holding their acres by as inalienable a title as the king his crown. It was very soon found that religious liberty could not co-exist with political subjection, and the same Reformation which destroyed the power of the priesthood, and dissolved the monasteries, and spread the Gospel in every village, reawakened the courage of Parliament, and made a despotic throne impossible. A.D. LANDMARKS OF CHRONOLOGY. 1509. Accession of Henry VIII., and 1520. Interview between the Kings of England and France, near 1532. The king marries Anna Boleyn. G G 450 CHAPTER III. Ꭼ Ꭰ Ꮃ Ꭺ Ꭱ Ꭰ THE SIXTH. A.D. 1547 to A.D. 1553. CONTEMPORARY SOVEREIGNS. FRANCE.-Henry II. SCOTLAND.-Mary. SPAIN. Charles I., or V. of Germany. EMPEROR OF GERMANY.-Charles V., King of Spain. § 1. Accession of Edward VI. His youth and amiability.—§ 2. The Duke of Somerset made Protector. His disagreements with his younger brother, Lord Sudely. Execution of the latter.-§ 3. Tyranny and cruelty of the Protector. His trial and execution. Ascendancy of the Duke of Northumberland.-§ 4. General state and political changes of the nation.-§ 5. The Church entirely dependent on the Crown. Progress of the Reformation. Gardner, Bonner, and Cranmer.-6. Abolition of superstitious observances; introduction of the Book of Common Prayer, and translation of the Bible.— § 7. Dissatisfaction and sufferings of the lower orders. Influence of Cranmer. § 8. Ignorance of the clergy.—§ 9. Illness of the king. The Duke of Northumberland's assumption of power. Death of Edward, and Northumberland's proclamation in favour of his daughterin-law, Lady Jane Grey. § 1. EDWARD, the son of Jane Seymour, the only one of the late king's wives who had escaped either disgrace or destruction, succeeded without a blot upon his title. His sisters -Mary, the daughter of Catherine of Arragon, and Elizabeth, the daughter of Anna Boleyn-had both been declared illegitimate by Act of Parliament; but the natural sense of justice had always been revolted by the iniquitous declaration, and they were looked on as princesses of England and lineal heirs to the crown. Edward was under ten years old, and showed the folly of too early a training by a premature ap A.D. 1547.] AMIABLE CHARACTER OF EDWARD VI. 451 pearance of wisdom and information which has brought discredit on his name. He was forced into scholarship, and pampered into political knowingness, till people in reviewing the actions of the writer of such sensible essays, and the sayer of such wise sayings, forgot that he was only a boy after all, and blame him for the coldness of his heart and the cruelty of some of his actions, as if he had had the responsibilities of a grown-up man. He was nothing during all the six years of his reign but a tool of other men. What little of his own nature was allowed to peep through showed a startling resemblance to the mental features of his father in his youth; and we may safely conclude that the early termination of his career tended as much to the belief in his amiable disposition as to the happiness of his people. § 2. The marriage of the king to Jane Seymour had elevated her family above their former degree. Her brothers, of whom one was now Duke of Somerset, was Protector of the king and kingdom; the younger, who bore the title of Lord Sudely, was Lord High Admiral of England. Perhaps fortunately for the nation, the brothers did not agree. Being both uncles of the king, the only rivalry in rank lay between themselves; but the younger brother married Catherine Parr, the widow of Henry; and the wife of the Protector was forced to yield precedence to the queen dowager. When Catherine died, the admiral, more aspiring still, was reported to be paying his attentions to the Princess Elizabeth, and this precipitated the disagreement of the Seymours into a fatal quarrel. The admiral was accused, not perhaps without some appearance of foundation, of designing to share the custody. of the king, and even to displace his brother. Counsellors were still as ready to shed blood as in the preceding reign, and Sudely, a gallant soldier, and generous open-handed gentleman, suffered on the scaffold at Tower Hill. He married, courted, and died all within two years. § 3. Guilty or not, the part of prosecutor was felt to be the last a brother ought to have sustained. Somerset's personal popularity suffered more by this judicial sentence than his power was strengthened by the absence of a rival; and a cry was frequently heard, "What can you expect from a man who had no pity on his brother?" Riots, originally springing from local causes, but skilfully turned by the old Church party to the uses of the Catholic faith, broke out in various quarters. Dudley, Earl of Warwick, the only competitor in power and favour with the Protector, acquired fresh fame by his success in quelling a dangerous insurrection in Norfolk. A rising in Cornwall had only been put down by Lord Russell after a pitiless execution among the peasantry, and Somerset, divided apparently between his desire to be lenient and the wisdom of being severe, hesitated between a generous pardon and a policy of extermination, and was lost. People, after a reign of blood, could have understood severity, and after the introduction of a purer religion could have appreciated a method of Christian kindness. But his cruelty offended the people, and his gentleness offended the lords; his council caballed against him. He was arrested as a traitor, and after a hollow truce between him and the rising Warwick, who was now Duke of Northumberland, he was prosecuted with malignant hatred. He was hurried to the block amid the lamentations of all the citizens, and the regret of the right-thinking throughout the country, but with the consent and by the sign manual of the king, who, though only in his thirteenth year, and therefore excusable if he had followed the advice of others, unfortunately writes such a business-like entry of the incident in his diary that we cannot extend the privilege of childhood to so mature a mind: "On the 22nd of January, 1552, he had his head cut off upon Tower Hill, between eight and nine o'clock of the morning." On that cold, grey morning, he must have had sad thoughts of the scene that had occurred at the same place when his brother was executed only three years before. |