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.