CHAPTER IX
EDWARD VI
The boy King Edward VI. was only ten years of age when he succeeded to the throne. On the 30th of May 1547, he was brought in state to the Tower amidst an outburst of the people’s gladness, which, considering all the troubles they had for so long endured under the savage rule of the late monarch, must have been heartfelt and genuine.
Near the town of Midhurst in Sussex are the ruins of one of the finest of the old Tudor mansions, Cowdray House, the old home of the Montagus. In the reign of Edward VI. Cowdray belonged to Sir Antony Brown, who held the proud office of Grand Standard Bearer of England. Here it was that the boy King in the year of his accession was entertained by Sir Antony, and in his precocious diary the little monarch wrote that he was “marvellously, yea, rather excessively banketted.” Cowdray House—and that is my reason for writing about it here—contained a most interesting series of paintings upon its walls illustrating the events in the reign of Henry VIII. and that of his son, who was so “excessively banketted” within its halls. Among these paintings were representations of the siege of Boulogne by Henry VIII.; the Field of the Cloth of Gold; and a huge painting of the coronation of Edward VI., in which the long procession is seen wending its gorgeous length from the Tower to Westminster Abbey. All these paintings perished in the disastrous fire which destroyed Cowdray on the 24th of September 1793. Fortunately, George Vertue copied these paintings and engraved the copies in the middle of the eighteenth century, the engravings being published by the Society of Antiquaries. Next to the Bayeux tapestry, nothing more interesting than these pictured records of English history have come down to us.
Among the pageants and devices with which the joyous Londoners graced the occasion when the young King rode through the festive streets, was a very quaint one, which Holinshed thus describes: “An argosine (a sailor) came from the batilment of Saint Poule’s Church, upon a cable, beyng made faste to an anker at the deane’s doore, liying uppon his breaste, aidyng himself neither with hande nor foote, and after ascended to the middes of the same cable, and tumbled and plaied many pretie toies, wherat the Kyng and other of the peres and nobles of the realme laughed hartely.” A few days before his coronation Edward had taken his place upon a throne in the Tower, and had had his little hand kissed by the peers, receiving the accolade of knighthood from the hands of his maternal uncle, the Protector Somerset. But whilst he received knighthood from one uncle, to another he gave lodging in the Tower. The latter was Thomas, Lord Seymour of Sudley, Lord High Admiral of England. Lord Sudley—or as it is also written Sudeley—was an over-ambitious personage. He had married the late King’s widow, Catherine Parr, and after her death, which he is supposed to have hastened, he began to pay very marked attentions to the Princess Elizabeth. Although one does not wish to allude to any scandal that may have attached itself in the gossip of the time to the name of that Princess, the flirtation—to give Elizabeth’s conduct with the Lord High Admiral its mildest description—was at one time too notorious an episode in the future “Gloriana’s” career to be wholly omitted from mention. Who has not read of the “high jinks” carried on between them? How on one occasion Seymour was found cutting the Princess’s gown “into a hundred pieces,” in the gardens of Hanworth, and how on another he had the audacity to pay Elizabeth a visit in her bed-chamber, on which occasion she “ran out of her bed to her maidens, and then went behind the curtains of her bed.” Seymour was certainly uncommonly handsome, and it is well known that Elizabeth was very impressionable in the matter of manly beauty. Probably Elizabeth’s chances of one day succeeding to the Crown may have helped to make Seymour so forward in his advances, but it was neither his flirtation with the Princess, nor his marriage with Catherine Parr, that brought about his ruin; he was discovered to be intriguing against his all-powerful brother, the Protector Somerset. A warrant was issued for his arrest on the 17th of January 1549, and he was taken to the Tower, in spite of his threat to poignard any person who dared to lay hands on him (“State Papers,” Dom. Ed. VI.). “By God’s precious soul,” he wrote, “whosoever lays hands on me to fetch me to prison, I shall thrust my dagger into him.” It is not recorded whether he carried his threat into execution. He was repeatedly interrogated whilst in the Tower, but without any effect, and on the 25th of February the bill of attainder against him was introduced into the House of Lords. On the 2nd of March it passed the Commons, and three days later received the royal assent; on the 15th, Goodriche, Bishop of Ely, communicated to Seymour that he was to suffer death on the 20th.
The Protector has naturally been greatly blamed for the part he took in bringing his brother to the scaffold, and there is a curious passage in a letter written by the Princess Elizabeth to her sister Queen Mary, shortly after she herself was sent a prisoner to the Tower, in which she says, “In late days I hearde my Lorde Somerset say, that if his brother had bine suffered to speke to him, he had never suffered; but the persuasions were made to him so gret, that he was brought in beleafe that he could not live safely if the admirall lived; and that made him give his consent to his dethe.” The young King’s entry in his diary regarding his uncle’s death is extremely laconic: “The Lord Sudley, admiral of England, was condemned to death, and died in March ensuing.” Burnet in his “History” says, “What his behaviour was on the scaffold I do not find,” and indeed no record, as was the case with so many of his distinguished contemporaries, has come down to us of his last moments, except that Strype in his “History” says, that just before the end the Admiral bade his servant, “speed the thing that he wot of.”
This last message appears to have regarded two letters which he had written in the Tower, one to the Princess Elizabeth, and the other to the Princess Mary. They had been written in some kind of invisible ink, and, having no pen, he had written them with the point of an “uglet” which “he had plucked from his hose,” and they had been sewn between the sole of one of his velvet shoes. “By this means these letters came to light, and fell into the hands of the Protector and Council. The contents of these tended to this end, that the two sisters should conspire together against the Protector, enforcing many matters against him, to make these ladies jealous of him, as though he had, it may be, estranged the King their brother from them, or to deprive them of the right of their succession. Both these papers Latimer himself saw, and repeated publicly in his fourth sermon before the King, though in the last edition of his sermons the passage is left out.” The following, however, is the passage from Latimer’s most strange discourse on the death of the Lord High Admiral, which he preached before the King regarding his uncle’s death; a less charitable or courtly address is not often met with: “As touching the kind of his death, whether he be saved or no, I refer that to God. In the twinkling of an eye He may save a man or turn his heart. What he did I cannot tell, and when a man hath two strokes with an axe, who can tell but between two strokes he doth repent? It is hard to judge, but this I will say, if they will ask me what I think of his death, that he died very dangerously, irksomely and horribly. He was a wicked man and the realm is well rid of him” (“Latimer’s Sermons”).
The death of his brother made the Protector still more disliked by the people; he was already unpopular by reason of his rapaciousness and the manner in which he attained great wealth by the seizure of Church property. The huge palace he had built by the riverside, and called after himself Somerset House, was a standing witness of his overpowering greed in the eyes of all men. In order to increase the size of this building he had committed desecration by pulling down a church, and casting away the human remains that had been buried within it; such an action in those days was considered by the populace as a crime.
The elder brother soon followed the younger along the same gloomy road to the grave, thus fulfilling the words of the chronicler Grafton, who, when Seymour died, had written, “It was commonly talked that the fall of one brother would be the overthrow of the other, as soone after it came to passe.”
The Protector’s fall was brought about by John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, his rival. At a meeting convened at Ely House, Holborn, at which Lord St John, the President of the Council, Northumberland, Southampton, Arundel, and five other members of the Privy Council were present, the Protector’s arrest was decided upon. When Somerset heard this startling news he took the young King from Hampton Court to Windsor, and prepared to defend himself by force to the last. His call to arms, however, met with no response; none of his former friends came forward in his support, and he felt that his cause was lost. Meanwhile the Privy Council had taken possession of the Tower and despatched Sir Philip Hoby as its messenger to the King at Windsor, with letters, “beseeching his highness to give credit to that which he should declare in their names; and the King gave him libertie to speak, and most gentlie heard all that he had to saie, and trulie he did so wiselie declare his message, and so gravelie told his tale in the name of the Lords, yea therewithal so vehementlie and greevous so against the Protector, who was also there present by the King, that in the end, the Lord Protector was commanded from the King’s presence” (“Grafton’s Chronicle”).