Lady Jane Grey and Her Times

by Ida A. Taylor

To material ills and privations, other grievances were added. Associated in the minds of the people with their condition of want were the changes lately enforced in the sphere of religion. The new ministers were often ignorant men, who gave scandal by their manner of life, their parishioners frequently making complaints of them to the Bishops.

“Our curate is naught,” they would say, “an ass-head, a dodipot [?], a lack-latin, and can do nothing. Shall I pay him tithe that doth us no good, nor none will do?”[97]

In some cases the fault lay with patrons, who preferred to select a man unlikely to assert his authority. Economy on the part of the Government was responsible for other unfit appointments, and capable Churchmen being permitted to hold secular offices, they were removed from their parishes and their flocks were left unshepherded. Against this practice Latimer protested in a sermon at St. Paul’s, on the occasion of a clergyman having been made Comptroller of the Mint. Who controlled the devil at home in his parish, asked the rough-tongued preacher, whilst he controlled the Mint?

The condition of things thus produced was not calculated to commend the innovations it accompanied to the people, and the introduction of the new Prayer-book was in particular bitterly resented in country districts. In many parts of England, interest and religion joining hands, fierce insurrections broke out, and the measures taken by “the good Duke” to allay popular irritation, by ordering that the lands newly enclosed should be re-opened, had the double effect of stirring the people, thus far successful, to yet more strenuous action in vindication of their rights, and of increasing the dislike and distrust with which his irresponsible exercise of authority was regarded by the upper classes.

Upon domestic troubles—Ket’s rebellion in Norfolk, one of large dimensions in the west, and others—followed a declaration of war with France, certain successes on the part of the enemy serving to discredit the Protector and his management of affairs still further.

Whilst rich and poor were alike disaffected in the country at large, the Duke had become an object of jealousy to the members of the Council Board who were responsible for having placed him in the position he occupied. To a man with the sagacity to look ahead and take account of the forces at work, it must have been plain that the possession of absolute and undivided power on the part of a subject was necessarily fraught with danger, and that the Duke’s astonishing success in obtaining the patent conferring upon him supreme and regal authority contained in itself the seed and prophecy of ruin. But, besides more serious causes of offence, his bearing in the Council-chamber, far from being adapted to conciliate opposition, further exasperated his colleagues against him. Cranmer and Paget were the last to abandon his cause, but on May 8—not two months after his brother’s execution—the latter wrote to give him frank warning of the probable consequences of his “great cholerick fashions.” It is evident that a stormy scene had taken place that afternoon, and that Paget must have been strongly convinced of the need for interference before he addressed his remonstrance to the despotic head of the Government.

“Poor Sir Richard a Lee,” he wrote, “this afternoon, after your Grace had very sore, and much more than needed, rebuked him, came to my chamber weeping, and there complaining, as far as became him, of your handling of him, seemed almost out of wits and out of heart. Your Grace had put him clean out of countenance.” After which he proceeded to warn the Duke solemnly, “for the very love he bore him,” of the consequences should he not change his manner of conduct.[98]

Paget’s love was quickly to grow cold. During the summer the various rebellions in different parts of the country were suppressed, the Earl of Warwick playing an important part in the operations. On September 25 the Protector was, to all appearance, still in fulness of power and authority. By October 13 he was in the Tower.

The Spanish spectator again supplies an account of the view taken by the man in the street of the initiation of the quarrel which led to the Duke’s disgrace and fall. Returned to London, Warwick, accompanied by the captains, English and foreign, who had served under him against the rebels, is said to have come to Court to demand for his soldiers the rewards he considered their due. Met by a refusal on the part of the Protector of anything over and above their ordinary wages, his indignation found vent. If money was not to be had, it was because of the sums squandered by the Duke in building his own palace. The French forts were already lost. If the Protector continued in power he would end by losing everything.