[102] “That a populous and wealthy city like Norwich should have been for three weeks in the hands of 20,000 rebels, and should have escaped utter pillage and ruin speaks highly for the rebel leaders.”—W. Rye, Victoria County History of Norfolk.
[103] A few years later, and John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, now Duke of Northumberland, again visited East Anglia to proclaim his daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, Queen of England. No one rose at his call. Neither peasant nor landowner responded to the proclamation; and John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland, died, as his father before him had died, convicted of treason, beheaded by the executioner’s axe on Tower Hill. It was August 22nd, 1553, just four years after the suppression of the peasants’ rising in Norfolk when Northumberland was put to death.
[104] “Robert Ket was not a mere craftsman: he was a man of substance, the owner of several manors: his conduct throughout was marked by considerable generosity: nor can the name of patriot be denied to him who deserted the class to which he might have belonged or aspired, and cast in his lot with the suffering people.”—Canon Dixon, History of the Church of England.
In 1588 a grandson of Robert Ket was burnt as a Nonconformist heretic by order of Elizabeth.
[105] The three were Oxford men. Sir John Eliot was at Exeter (1607), Hampden at Magdalen (1609) and Pym at Broadgate Hall, afterwards called Pembroke (1599).
[106] “In Eliot’s composition there was nothing of the dogmatic orthodoxy of Calvinism, nothing of the painful introspection of the later Puritans. His creed, as it shines clearly out from the work of his prison hours, as death was stealing upon him—The Monarchy of Man—was the old heathen philosophic creed, mellowed and spiritualised by Christianity. Between such a creed and Rome there was a great gulf fixed. Individual culture and the nearest approach to individual perfection for the sake of the State and the Church, formed a common ground on which Eliot could stand with the narrowest Puritan.”—S. R. Gardiner.
[107] Eliot’s argument “was a claim to render ministerial responsibility once more a reality, and thereby indirectly to make parliament supreme.”—S. R. Gardiner.
[108] “He (Eliot) was to the bottom of his heart an idealist. To him the parliament was scarcely a collection of fallible men, just as the king was hardly a being who could by any possibility go deliberately astray. If he who wore the crown had wandered from the right path, he had but to listen to those who formed, in more than a rhetorical sense, the collective wisdom of the nation.”—S. R. Gardiner.
[109] “His (Hampden’s) distinction lay in his power of disentangling the essential part from the non-essential. In the previous constitutional struggle he had seen that the one thing necessary was to establish the supremacy of the House of Commons.”—S. R. Gardiner.
[110] Clarendon.