many of the nobles and gentry, who hoped to have a share of the church lands, in case of these institutions being dissolved, as in England. And although there were, doubtless, good men as well as bad among the monks, yet the indolent, and even debauched lives of many of the order, rendered them, generally, odious and contemptible to the common people.

166.-EDWARD VI., AND THE ANNALS OF HIS REIGN.

From the Penny Cyclopædia.'

Edward VI., the only son of Henry VIII. who survived him, was born at Hampton Court 12th October, 1537. His mother, queen Jane Seymour, died on the twelfth day after giving him birth. The child had three stepmothers in succession after this; but he was probably not much an object of attention with any of them. Sir John Hayward, who has written the history of his life and reign with great fulness, says that he was brought up among nurses until he arrived to the age of six years.' He was then committed to the care of Dr. (afterwards Sir Anthony) Cooke, and Mr. (afterwards Sir John) Cheke, the former of whom appears to have undertaken his instruction in philosophy and divinity, the latter in Greek and Latin. The prince made great proficiency under these able masters. Henry VIII. died at his palace at Westminster early in the morning of Friday the 28th of January, 1547; but it is remarkable that no announcement of his decease appears to have been made till Monday the 31st, although the parliament met and transacted business on the intervening Saturday. Edward, who was at Hatfield when the event happened, was brought thence in the first instance to the residence of his sister Elizabeth at Enfield, and from that place, on the 31st, to the Tower at London, where he was proclaimed the same day. The council now opened the will of the late king (executed on the 30th of December preceding), by which it was found that he had (according to the powers granted him by the acts 28 Hen. VIII. ch. 7, and 35 Hen. VIII. ch. 1) appointed sixteen persons under the name of executors, to exercise the powers of the government during the minority of his son. One of these, the king's maternal uncle, Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, was immediately elected by the rest their president, and either received from them in this character, or assumed of his own authority, the titles of governor of his majesty, lord protector of all his realms, and lieutenant-general of all his armies. He was also created duke of Somerset, and soon after took to himself the office of lord high treasurer, and was further honoured by being made earl marshal for life. About the same time his brother, Sir Thomas Seymour, was created Baron Seymour of Sudley, and appointed lord high admiral. The elevation of Somerset had been opposed by the lord chancellor Wriothsley (now earl of Southampton); but the protector in a few weeks got rid of his further interference by taking advantage of an informality into which the earl had fallen in the execution of his office of chancellor, and frightening him into a resignation both of the seals and of his seat in the executive council.

The period of the administration of the protector Somerset forms the first of the two parts into which the reign of Edward VI. divides itself. The character of the protector has been the subject of much controversy; but opinions have differed rather as to the general estimate that is to be formed of him, or the balance of his merits and defects, than as to the particular qualities, good and bad, by which he was distinguished. It may be said to be admitted on all hands that he was a brave and able soldier, but certainly with no pretensions in that capacity to a humanity beyond his age; that as a statesman he was averse to measures of severity, and

fond of popular applause, but unstable, easily influenced by appeals either to his vanity or his fears, and without any fertility of resources, or political genius of a high order. It must be admitted also that he was both ambitious and rapacious in no ordinary degree. Add to all this, that with one of the two great parties that divided the country he had the merit, with the other the demerit, of being a patron of the new opinions in religion—and it becomes easy to understand the opposite feelings with which he was regarded in his own time, and the contradictory representations that have been given of him by party writers since.

One of the first acts of his administration was an expedition into Scotland, undertaken with the object of compelling the government of that country to fulfil the treaty entered into with Henry VIII. in 1543 for the marriage of the young queen Mary to Edward. The Scottish forces were signally defeated by the English protector at the battle of Pinkey, fought 10th September, 1547; but the state of politics, as bearing upon his personal interests in England, compelled Somerset to hasten back to the south without securing any of the advantages of his victory. He returned to Scotland in the summer of the following year; but he wholly failed in attaining any of the objects of the war. The young queen was conveyed to France; and the ascendancy of the French or Catholic party in the Scottish government was confirmed, and continued unbroken during all the rest of the reign of Edward.

Meanwhile great changes were effected in the domestic state of England. The renunciation of the supremacy of the pope, the dissolution of the religious houses, and the qualified allowance of the reading of the Scriptures in English, were the principal alterations in religion that had been made up to the death of the late king. Only a few months before the close of the reign of Henry, protestants as well as catholics had been burned in Smithfield. Under Somerset and the new king measures were immediately taken to establish protestantism as the religion of“ the state. Even before the meeting of parliament, the practice of reading the service in English was adopted in the royal chapel, and a visitation, appointed by the council, removed the images from the churches throughout the kingdom. Bishops Gardiner of Winchester and Bonner of London, who resisted these measures, were committed to the Fleet. The parliament met in November, when bills were passed allowing the cup to the laity, giving the nomination of bishops to the king, and enacting that all processes in the ecclesiastical courts should run in the king's name. The statute of the Six Articles, commonly called the Bloody Statute, passed in 1539, was repealed, along with various other acts of the preceding reign for the regulation of religion. By the parliament of 1548 the use of the Book of Common Prayer was established, and all laws prohibiting spiritual persons to marry were declared void. At the same time an act was passed (2 and 3 Ed. VI. c. 19) abolishing the old laws against eating flesh on certain days, but still enforcing the observance of the former practice by new penalties, 'the king's majesty,' says the preamble, considering that due and godly abstinence is a mean to virtue, and to subdue men's bodies to their soul and spirit, and considering also specially that fishers, and men using the trade of living by fishing in the sea, may thereby the rather be set on work, and that by eating of fish much flesh shall be saved and increased.'

But Somerset's path was now crossed by a new opponent, in the person of his own brother, Lord Seymour. That nobleman, equally ambitious with the protector, but of a much more violent and unscrupulous temper, is supposed to have, very soon after the king's accession, formed the design of disputing the supreme power with his brother. It is said to have been a notice of his intrigues that suddenly recalled Somerset from Scotland after the battle of Pinkey. The crime of Seymour

does not appear to have gone farther than caballing against his brother; but Somerset contrived to represent it as amounting to high treason. On this charge he was consigned to the Tower: a bill attainting him was brought into the Housc of Lords, and read a first time on the 25th of February, 1549; it was passed unanimously on the 27th. The accused was not heard in his own defence, nor were any witnesses examined against him; the House proceeded simply on the assurance of his brother, and of other members of the council, that he was guilty. The bill was afterwards passed, with little hesitation, by the House of Commons; it received the royal assent on the 14th of March; and on the 20th Lord Seymour was beheaded on Tower-hill, with his last breath solemnly protesting his innocence. During the summer of this year the kingdom was disturbed by formidable insurrections of the populace in Somerset, Lincoln, Kent, Essex, Suffolk, Devon, Cornwall, and especially in Norfolk, where a tanner of the name of Kett opposed the government at the head of a body of 20,000 followers. The dearness of provisions, the lowness of wages, the enclosure of common fields, and in some places the abolition of the old religion, with its monasteries where the poor used to be fed, and its numerous ceremonies and holidays that used to gladden labour with so much relaxation and amusement, were the principal topics of the popular clamour. It is worth noticing that the agency of the press was on this occasion employed, probably for the first time, as an instrument of government. Holinshed records that while these wicked commotions and tumults, through the rage of the undiscreet commons, were thus raised in sundry parts of the realm, sundry wholesome and godly exhortations were published, to advertise them of their duty and to lay before them their heinous offences.' Among them was a tract by Sir John Cheke, entitled 'The Hurt of Sedition, how grievous it is to a Commonwealth,' which is a very able and vigorous piece of writing. It was found necessary however to call another force into operation: the insurgents were not put down without much fighting and bloodshed; and many of the rebels were executed after the suppression of the commotions. The institution of lords lieutenants of counties arose out of these disturbances.

A few months after these events brought Somerset's domination to a close. His new enemy, John Dudley, formerly Viscount Lisle, and now Earl of Warwick, the son of that Dudley whose name is infamous in history for his oppressions in the reign of the seventh Henry, had probably been watching his opportunity, and carefully maturing his designs against the protector, for a long time. It is supposed to have been through his dark and interested counsel that Somerset was chiefly impelled to take the course which he did against his brother; Warwick's object was to destroy both, and he probably counted that by the admiral's death, and the part which the protector was made to take in it, he both removed one formidable rival, and struck a fatal blow at the character and reputation of another. He himself meanwhile had been industriously accumulating popularity and power. He had greatly distinguished himself at the battle of Pinkey, and in other passages of the Scotch war; and it had been chiefly by him that the late insurrection in Norfolk had been so effectually quelled. The energy which he showed on this occasion was contrasted by the enemies of the protector with what they represented as the feebleness of the latter, who had, they contended, encouraged the insurrection by the hesitation and reluctance which he manifested, on the first threatenings of it, to take the necessary measures for putting it down. The protector had at this time incurred considerable odium by his lavish expenditure (out of the spoils, as it was said, of the church) on his new palace of Somerset House, and certain violations both of public and of private rights of which he was accused of having been guilty

in procuring the space and the materials for that magnificent structure. A cry was also raised against him on account of a proposition he had made in the council for a peace with France on the condition of resigning Boulogne for a sum of money. In the beginning of October he learned that measures were about to be immediately taken against him. In fact Warwick and his associates in the council had collected their armed retainers, and were now ready to employ force if other means should fail. They had retired from Hampton Court, where the king resided, and fixed themselves in London, where they had contrived to obtain possession of the Tower. Somerset, on the first notice of their proceedings, carried off the king to Windsor Castle, and shut himself up there as if with the intention of holding out; but he soon found himself nearly deserted by all; and after a few days the king himself was obliged to sanction the vote for his deposition passed by the majority of the council. On the 14th he was brought to London in custody, and sent to the Tower. From this moment Warwick, though without his title of protector, enjoyed his power. Somerset, reduced to insignificance by this usage, but especially by an abject submission which he made in the first moments of danger, was some time after this released from confinement, and was even allowed again to take his seat at the council-table; but he either engaged in designs to regain his lost place, or Warwick, now duke of Northumberland, and possessed almost of undivided power in the state, felt that he should not be quite secure so long as his old rival lived. An apparent reconciliation had been effected between the two, and ratified by the marriage of Warwick's eldest son to Somerset's daughter: but this connexion was no shelter to the overthrown protector: on the 1st of December, 1551, he was brought to trial before the high steward and a committee of the House of Lords, on charges both of high treason and of felony; he was convicted of the latter crime, and was executed on Tower-Hill, the 22nd January, 1552. He met his death with great manliness, and the popular sympathy was deeply excited in his favour, both by the feeling that, with some faults, he had fallen the victim of a much worse man than himself, and by the apprehension that in his destruction the great stay which had hitherto supported the Reformation in England was thrown down.

Warwick however (although at his death, a few years after this, he declared that he had always been a Catholic) did not feel himself strong enough to take any measures openly in favour of the antient faith, opposed as he knew he would be in that course by the great mass of the nation. It is probable that he cared little which religion prevailed, so that he remained at the head of affairs. The government accordingly continued to be conducted in all respects nearly as it had heretofore been. In March, 1550, a peace had been concluded with France, one of the articles stipulating for the surrender of Boulogne, the support of which very proposition had been made the principal charge against Somerset a few months before. In the following July another treaty between the two countries was signed at Angers, by which it was agreed that the king of England should receive in marriage Elizabeth, the daughter of the king of France. Meanwhile at home the matter of religion continued to be treated by the new government much as it had been by the old. No Roman Catholics were put to death during this reign, though many were fined, imprisoned, and otherwise not capitally punished; but on the 2nd of May, 1550, an unfortunate fanatic, Joan Becher, commonly called Joan of Kent, was burnt for certain opinions considered to be neither Catholic nor Protestant, in conformity with a warrant extorted by Cranmer from the king about a year before; and on the 2nd of May, 1551, an eminent surgeon, named Von Panis, of Dutch extraction, but resident in London, paid the same penalty for his adherence to a similar heresy. Bishop Bonner was deprived of his see in September, 1549; Gardiner, in January

1551; and Day of Chichester, and Heath of Worcester, in October of the same year. The forty-two articles of belief, afterwards reduced to thirty-three, were promulgated in the early part of this year.

In April, 1552, Edward was attacked by small-pox; and, although he recovered from that disease, the debility in which it left him produced other complaints, which ere long began to assume an alarming appearance. By the beginning of the following year he was very ill. Northumberland now lost no time in arranging his plans for bringing the crown into his own family. In May his son Lord Guildford Dudley married the Lady Jane Grey, the eldest daughter of the duchess of Suffolk, who was herself the eldest daughter, by her second marriage with Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, of Mary Tudor, the ex-queen of France, and the daughter of Henry VII., upon whose descendants Henry VIII. had by his will settled the crown on failure of the lines of his son Edward and of his daughters Mary and Elizabeth. This settlement, it is to be remembered, had been made by Henry under the express authority of an act of parliament, which empowered him to dispose of the kingdom to whomsoever he chose, on failure of his three children. Northumberland now applied himself to induce Edward to make a new settlement excluding Mary and Elizabeth, who had both been declared illegitimate by parliament, and to nominate Lady Jane Grey (in whose favour her mother the duchess of Suffolk, still alive, agreed to renounce her claim) as his immediate successor.

The interest of the Protestant religion, which it was argued would be more secure with a sovereign on the throne whose attachment to the principles of the Reformation was undoubted, and upon whose birth there was no stain, than if the succession were left to be disputed between the king's two sisters, one of whom was a bigoted Catholic, and the legitimacy of either of whom almost implied the illegitimacy of the other, is believed to have been the chief consideration that was urged upon the dying prince. Edward at all events was brought over to his minister's views. On the 11th of June, Montague, the chief justice of the Common Pleas, and two of his brethren, were sent for to Greenwich, and desired to draw up a settlement of the crown upon the Lady Jane. After some hesitation they agreed, on the 14th, to comply with the king's commands, on his assurance that a parliament should be immediately called to ratify what was done. When the settlement was drawn up, an engagement to maintain it was subscribed by fifteen lords of the council and nine of the judges. Edward sunk rapidly after this, and lived only till the evening of the 6th of July, when he expired at Greenwich. His death, however, was concealed for two days, and it was not till the 9th that Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed.

Edward VI. is stated by the famous Jerome Cardan, who was brought to see him in his last illness, to have spoken both French and Latin with perfect readiness and propriety, and to have been also master of Greek, Italian, and Spanish. In his conversation with Cardan, which the latter has preserved, he showed an intelligence and dexterity which appear to have rather puzzled the philosopher. Walpole has set him down among his royal authors on the strength of his 'Diary,' printed by Burnet in his History of the Reformation, and the original of which is still preserved among the Cottonian manuscripts; a lost comedy which is attributed to him; some Latin epistles and orations, of which specimens are given by Strype; a translation into French of several passages of scripture, preserved in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge; a tract in French against popery, entitled, 'L'Encontre des abus du monde ;' and a few other productions of a similar kind which have not been printed.

The act of the 1st Edward VI. gave to the king all the colleges, free-chapels, chauntries, hospitals, &c., which were not in the possession of his father by the