A Popular History of England, From the Earliest Times to the Reign of Queen Victoria; Vol. II

by François Guizot

Some intentions were attributed to the late king, however, which met with more respect; a clause of the will commanded the executors to accomplish all the promises which he might have made; it was even asserted that he had repeated this injunction to those who surrounded his deathbed. The royal promises might be of great extent and entail grave consequences; inquiries were promptly made; according to the statement of Sir William Paget secretary of state, Sir Anthony Denny and Sir Fulke Herbert, gentlemen of the bedchamber, to whom the king had spoken on the subject, it was a question of a promotion to the peerage and a distribution of legacies in money among the testamentary executors. Lord Hertford was to be made Duke of Somerset; the Earl of Essex to become Marquis of Northampton; Lord Lisle, Earl of Warwick; Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton; Sir Thomas Seymour, brother of Lord Hertford, Baron Seymour and Lord High Admiral; all were to receive from the ecclesiastical property still at the disposition of the crown, revenues proportioned to their new dignities. The servants of the new king rewarded themselves in advance, and with their own hands, for the services which they were to render him. Public opinion was shocked at this; people went as far as to call in question the alleged intentions of the late king as they had been reported by Sir John Paget. The elevation of Somerset was received with great joy among the Protestants, to whom he was favourable; the Catholics counted upon Wriothesley, who had become Lord Southampton, but he committed the imprudence of charging four delegates, under the great seal, to attend in his absence to the affairs of the chancellorship, without having previously consulted his colleagues; this act was declared illegal, and the omission being grave enough to deprive the chancellor of his office and his seat in the privy council, he gave in his resignation and was kept a prisoner in his house, until the council had decided the amount of the fine which he was to pay. Henceforth Somerset found himself without a rival; none protested when he caused all the executive powers to be conferred upon himself, abolishing the two councils, and confounding all the testamentary executors under the common title of councillors of the king. Matters were arranged; an amnesty had been proclaimed for all state offenders, with the exception of the Duke of Norfolk and Cardinal Pole, and the Protector was preparing to sign the treaty of alliance between France and England, renewed in London on the occasion of the accession of Edward VI., when he learnt the death of Francis I. That monarch had been painfully affected by the decease of the King of England; he was convinced, it was said, that he would survive him a short time. In effect, he had died at Rambouillet, on the 31st of March; the Protestant interests received a fatal blow in Germany and in Scotland; in Germany, because the Emperor Charles V., delivered of his rival, was becoming master of the country; in Scotland, because the Guises, the brothers of the dowager queen, were all-powerful with the new King of France, and because the latter immediately concluded a close alliance with the Earl of Arran, now placed at the head of the Catholic party. At the same time, Henry II. refused to sign the treaty of London, and sent ships to Scotland to assist the regent in the siege of the Castle of St. Andrew, which the assassins of Cardinal Beaton had contrived to retain. The latter had demanded help in England, promising to support the marriage of the little Queen Mary with the young King of England; but before the Protector had been able to assemble his forces, the castle had been captured, razed to the ground, and all its defenders conveyed to France. Five weeks elapsed before the English troops were able to cross the frontier. It was on the 10th of September that the two armies met, not far from Musselburgh. Arran was there encamped behind the river Esk, with considerable forces; nearly all the great Scottish noblemen had joined him, notwithstanding party rivalries. The first challenge which the English received was that of Lord Huntley, who proposed to the Protector to fight him man to man, or with the assistance of ten knights on each side, after the fashion of Horatii and Curiatii. Somerset smiled. "Tell your master," he replied to the herald, "that it is a want of judgment on his part to make such a proposal to me, who, by the grace of God, am entrusted with so precious a jewel as the person of a king and the protection of his kingdom." Warwick wished to accept the challenge of Huntley, but the duke did not permit it. "Let them come to us upon the field of battle," he said, "and they shall have blows enough."

The Scots, eager to come to close quarters, committed the imprudence of quitting the advantageous position which they occupied, to advance and meet the enemy. The combat began by a charge of Scottish cavalry, taken in flank as they were crossing the bridge of the Esk, by a broadside from the English vessels drawn up along the coast. The English had found time to take possession of the hill upon which was situated St. Michael's church; the fray soon became general. The English wavered at first before the long lances of the Scots; but the ardour of the latter led them so far forward in the pursuit that, in reforming, they found themselves involved in the hostile ranks; the arrows of the English archers who were drawn up on an eminence, thinned the ranks of the Scottish men-at-arms; the firing from the vessels was incessant; the knights at length moved and took to flight. The pursuit was vigorous and the massacre horrible; quarter was given only to the great noblemen capable of paying a heavy ransom; the Esk rolled down a shoal of corpses; eight thousand Scots, it is said, remained upon the battle-field of Pinkey, as it was called, from the name of a neighbouring mansion belonging to the Douglases. The Earl of Huntley, Lord Yester, Lord Wemyss, and several other persons of distinction were made prisoners.

For four days the victors continued their work of pillage at Leith and in the environs. People expected to see them march upon Edinburgh, but Somerset suddenly ordered a retreat, without any one being able to explain, in Scotland, this unexpected deliverance. Grave interests recalled him to the court of the young king.

Lord Seymour, brother of the Protector, and Lord High Admiral of England, was as ambitious as his elder brother, and more courageous and enterprising; he had been deeply offended by the unequal partition of the power, and during the absence of Somerset he had laboured to establish his influence with the little king. He married, in the month of June, 1547, Catherine Parr, the widow of the king, who had always loved him, it was said, notwithstanding the two other unions which she had contracted, and finding himself thus brought nearer to the person of the king, who often saw his step-mother, and being enriched by the fortune which Catherine had amassed as queen of England, he took care to win the good graces of Edward VI. by supplying him with the funds which he wanted for pocket-money and charities, liberalities which the Protector did not encourage.

Death Of Anne Askew.

Seymour had also gained the favour of the household of the king, by distributing many gifts among them. In the month of November, 1547, the admiral persuaded the young king to address a letter to Parliament, demanding that the office of guardian of the royal person should be conferred upon his uncle, Lord Seymour. The project became known and steps were taken; the admiral was threatened with the Tower, and a reconciliation was effected between the two brothers; Seymour shortly afterwards received a fresh dotation.

The ambition of the admiral could not be satisfied with money; Catherine Parr had recently died in childbed, and the rumour was circulated that she had been poisoned. Her husband had already turned his views higher; he was paying his addresses to the Princess Elizabeth, whose guardian he had completely gained over; he did not aspire to a secret marriage, which, according to the will of Henry VIII., would have impaired the right of succession, but he patronized all the members of the council, endeavouring to arouse among them sufficient disaffection to secure the approval of his union with the princess. The Protector resolved to rid himself of so dangerous a rival. The opportunity was propitious; Sharington, the director of the mint at Bristol, was accused of having enriched himself by means of numerous malversations. The admiral defended him vigorously, but Sharington, to save his life, suddenly betrayed his advocate; he stated that he had promised to coin money for Lord Seymour, and that the latter could count upon an army of ten thousand men, with whom he hoped to change the aspect of the State. Less than this was needed to send the Lord High Admiral to the Tower. His courage was not cast down, and he demanded to be confronted with his accusers. Somerset had been brought up in the school of Henry VIII.; he knew how to use bills of attainder: the little king, terrified, had abandoned his uncle Seymour; when the House of Commons made some opposition, demanding that the accused should be heard, a royal message silenced the objectors, and the bill was voted without further difficulty; Lord Seymour was executed on the 20th of March, 1549, protesting his innocence to the last. Two letters had been seized, it was said, written from the Tower to the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, to incite them to jealousy towards their brother. The Protector had given to the young king a terrible example of cold barbarity, by being the first to sign the death-warrant of his brother.

The war continued in Scotland, with alternations of successes and reverses, but its principal aim, the marriage of King Edward VI. with the little queen, had been thwarted by Henry II., king of France, who destined her for the Dauphin. Parliament even consented to send the child to France, there to receive her education in safety. Mary of Guise remained in Scotland; but the little queen, Mary Stuart, arrived at Brest in French vessels, and was conducted to St. Germain-en-Laye, to be solemnly betrothed to the Dauphin. The warfare continued upon the frontiers, but the thoughts of the government were elsewhere; a great popular insurrection, which had taken its rise in the south, had gained the eastern counties; a portion of England was in flames. Various causes had contributed towards the insurrection; the alteration of the currency under the reign of Henry VIII. had brought about an excessive rise in the nominal price of commodities, but labour was not remunerated in proportion; workmen were, on the contrary, less employed and less paid than in the past. A great quantity of arable land had been transformed into pasture-ground, in consequence of a considerable increase in the price of wools. The monasteries no longer took in intelligent peasants to make monks of them; the monastic charities no longer relieved the misery of the poor; the vast spaces belonging to the parishes, where the villagers were wont to let their cattle graze, had been, by degrees, swallowed up by the neighbouring proprietors, who had enclosed all the waste lands, thus depriving the poor, at a time of great distress, of a resource to which they were accustomed. Vagrancy had increased in such a manner, that in the first year of the reign of Edward VI. a barbarous law had been voted by Parliament, delivering up to the first comer, in the capacity of a slave, any individual without a fixed residence, sojourning for three days in any place. Being declared a vagabond, he was to be branded upon the chest with a red-hot iron; his master had the right to compel him to work by every possible punishment; he could chain him up, let him out to hire, or sell him; a veritable slave-market being thus suddenly instituted for a few years in that free England, which, three centuries later, was to be the first to put its hand to work to destroy slavery in the whole world. These rigours did not suffice; the vagabonds were not the only unhappy or exasperated persons; the religious feelings of the Catholic populations were galled by the rapid progress of the Reformation; the insurrection was so grave that the Protector, always greedy of popularity, vainly endeavoured to appease it by a hurried measure, forbidding the enclosure of all waste lands accessable to the peasants, and ordering that they should everywhere be restored to their former uses. This concession only served to put arms in the hands of the peasantry, some to beat down the fences, others to defend them; the government was everywhere obliged to send troops. But for the auxiliaries raised in Italy, Spain, and Germany, for the war with Scotland, the Protector might have found himself much embarrassed.