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”).
On the 12th of October, two days after the meeting of the Privy Council at Ely House, the Protector occupied the prison chamber at Beauchamp Tower. The once all-powerful Duke was brought to his knees in every sense of the term, for, on the 21st of January 1550, he actually signed a confession, kneeling before his nephew the King. Apparently, in consequence of this submission, Somerset was released from the Tower, as Edward records in his diary on the 6th of February, that his uncle “supped at Sir John Yorke’s, one of the sheriffes of London, where the Lords assembled to welcome him”; and on the 31st of March he reappeared at Court, the King writing under that date, “My Lord Somerset was delivered of his bondes and came to court.” On the 21st of April the King recorded, “It was granted that my lord of Somerset should have all his moveable goodes and leases, except those that be alreadie given.”
Warwick, who had about this time been created Duke of Northumberland, had arranged a marriage between his eldest son, Lord Lisle, and Somerset’s daughter, Lady Anne, in June 1550; but in spite of this alliance, the old feud between these enemies broke out again, with the result that on the 16th of October 1551, Somerset was again a prisoner in the Tower, on a charge of high treason. And that evening the royal diarist writes, “This morning none were at Westminster of the conspirators. The first was the duke, who came later than he was wont, of himself. After dinner he was apprehended.” On this occasion Somerset’s wife shared his imprisonment.
The indictment against the Duke was presented at the Guildhall on the 21st of November, a true bill being found by a jury of Middlesex. Strict orders were given to the Lord Mayor “to cause the citie to be well looked to and garded all to-morrow and the next night.” Two days afterwards the King entered in his diary, “The Lord Treasurer (this was William Paulet, created Marquis of Winchester in 1555) apointed high stuard for the arraignment of the Duke of Somerset.”
The King’s House
Stowe writes on the 2nd of December, “The sayde Duke brought out of the Tower of London, with the axe of the Tower borne before him, with a great number of billes, glaves, holbardes, and polaxes attending upon him; and was had from the Tower by water, and having shot London Bridge at five of the clock in the morning, so came unto Westminster Hall, where was made the middle of the Hall a new scaffold, where all the Lordes of the King’s Counsaill sate as his judges, and there was he arraigned and charged with many articles both of treason and felony. And when, after much speeche, he had answered not guiltie, he in all humble manner put himself to be tryed by his peeres who, after long consultations among themselves, gave their verdict that he was not guiltie of the treason, but of the felony.”
The King gave a long and very involved account of the Duke’s trial in his diary, far too long to quote; at the close he writes as follows:—“So the lordes acquited him of high treason and condemned him of treason feloniouse, and so he was adjudged to be hanged. He gave thankes to the lordis for their open trial and cried mercy of the Duke of Northumberland, the Marquis of Northamptoon, and the Erie of Pembroke for his ill meanings against them and made suet (suit) for his life, wife and children, servantes and dettes, and so departed without the axe of the Tower. The people knowing not the matter, shrieked half a dozen times so loud that from the halle dore it was heard at Charing Crosse plainely, and rumours went that he was quitte of all.”
Grafton writes of the Duke’s trial: “But nevertheless he was condemned to death, wherof shortlye after he tasted. The felony that he was condemned of was upon the statute made the last yere agaynst rebelles and unlawfull assemblyes, wherein among thinges is one branch that whosoever shall procure the death of any counsellor, that every such attempt or procurement shall be felonye, and by force of that statute the Duke of Somerset being, accompanyed with certain others, was charged that he purposed and attempted the death of the Duke of Northumberland. After the Duke was thus condemned he was agayne returned to the Tower, through London, where were bothe exclamations, the one cried for joye that he was acquitted, the other cried out that he was condemned. But howsoever they cried he was conveyed to the Tower where he remained until the twenty-second daye of January next following.” Burnet says that everything was done to prevent the young King taking the fate of his uncle to heart, there being many festivities at Court during the month, but the Bishop adds significantly, “he was not much concerned in his uncle’s preservation.”
The 22nd of January was a Friday, and at seven o’clock in the morning the fatal Hill was covered with a dense crowd, who had come out from all sides of London to see the Protector die. An eye-witness of the scene has left the following account of the Duke’s execution:—
“Soon after eight o’clock of the morning, the Duke of Somerset was beheaded on Tower Hill. There was as gret company as have been syne: the King’s gard behynde them with ther halbards and 1000 men with halbards of the priviledge of the Tower, Ratcliffe, Lymhouse, Whytechappell, Saint Katheryn, and Stretford, Bow, Hogston, and Shoerdyche, and ther were two sheriffs ther present seying the execuyson of my Lord” (Machyn).
Grafton adds that the Duke, “nothing changing voyce nor countenance, but in a manner with the same gesture that he partely used at home, kneeling down upon both his knees, and lifting up his handes, erected himself unto God. And after that he had ended a few shorte prayers, standing up agayne, and turning himself unto the East syde of the skaffolde, he uttered to the people these words.” Then follows a long speech in which the Duke rather praised himself for having upheld religion when he was in power. In the midst of his speech a great tumult arose, and Sir Anthony Browne of Cowdray was seen riding up the Hill, at the sight of whom loud cries of “Pardon! Pardon!” and “God save the King!” were raised by the people. Grafton continues his account thus: “The truth of this hurly-burly grewe hereof, as it was afterwards well knowen. The manner and custome is that when such executions are done out of the Tower, the inhabitants of certayne hamlets round about London, as Hogsden, Newynton, Shordiche, and others, are commanded to give their attendance with weapons upon the Lieutenant. And at this tyme, the Duke being upon the scaffolde, the people of one of the hamlets came late, and coming through the postern gate and espying the Duke upon the scaffolde, made haste and beganne to roune, and cried to their felowes that were behind, ‘Come away, come away.’ The people sodainely beholding them to come rounning with weapons, and knewe not the cause, cried, ‘Away, away,’ by reason whereof the people roun every way, not knowing whither or wherefore.” So great was the panic that many persons fell into the Tower moat. The Duke appears to have waited calmly until the disturbance ceased, and then resumed his speech. He gave a scroll to Dr Coxe, the Dean of Westminster, who attended him upon the scaffold, which probably contained a confession of faith. Coxe was afterwards made Bishop of Ely by Queen Elizabeth, after having been imprisoned in the Tower by Queen Mary, who deprived him of his Deanery, and it was to him that Elizabeth wrote her famous letter, “Proud Prelate, you know what you were before I made you what you are; if you do not immediately comply with my request, by God I will unfrock you.”
After bidding farewell to his friends about him, Somerset gave himself over to the executioner, “and kneling downe agayne in the straw untyed his shirtstrings, and the executioner coming to him, turned downe his collar rounde about his necke, and all other things which did let or hinder him. Then he, covering his face with his own handkerchiefe, lifting up his eyes unto heaven, where his only hope remained, laid himself downe alone, and there suffered the heavie stroke of the axe, which dispersed the head from his bodye, to the lamentable sight and griefe of thousands that heartily prayed God for him and entirely loved him.” Burnet declares that the people were generally “much affected by the execution,” which was somewhat strange, seeing how deeply unpopular the Protector had been, “and many threw handkerchiefs into the Duke’s blood, to preserve it in remembrance of him. One lady that met the Duke of Northumberland when he was led through the city in Queen Mary’s reign, shaking one of these bloody handkerchiefs, said, ‘Behold the blood of that worthy man, that good uncle of that excellent King, which was shed by thy malicious practice, it doth now begin apparently to revenge itself upon thee.’” In Edward’s diary is this laconic entry on 22nd January (1551–52): “The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Towre hill between eight and nine a cloke in the morning.” The boy-king was certainly not much “concerned,” as Bishop Burnet remarked, for the fate of his uncle.
The Protector, like his brother the Admiral, was a singularly handsome man even in that age of handsome men, and according to Sir John Hayward, one of his contemporaries, was “courteous and affable.” A French writer of the period is not so complimentary in his appreciation of the Duke of Somerset, writing that he was a “homme de quelque entendement, couvert et simulé en ses actions, de la nature commune des Anglois, douce apparence, gracieuses paroles, et maligne volonté.”
One of the invariable results of the fall of a party chief in these so-called “good old days,” was that his most trusted friends and adherents fell after him; this occurred in the case of the Protector. The Earl of Arundel, Lords Grey and Paget, with others of his supporters, were sent to the Tower at the same time as the Duke, and of these, Sir Ralph Vane, Sir Michael Stanhope, Sir Thomas Arundel, and Sir Miles Partridge, were executed. Sir Ralph Vane had distinguished himself at the siege of Boulogne in 1544, where he had gained his knighthood, a distinction given in those times only for distinguished services on the field. James I. was the first monarch to prostitute this honour by making it a thing of sale. Vane had also fought in the Scottish campaign. “A man of fierce spirit,” Hayward characterises him, “both sodaine and bold, of no evill disposition, saving that he thought scantnesse of estate too great an evill.” Sir Ralph had in some manner offended the all-powerful Duke of Northumberland, and on some now unknown charge, he was lodged in the Tower in the March of 1551. He was released, but again imprisoned on a charge of conspiring with Somerset. He fled, hiding himself in a stable in Lambeth, but was re-arrested, and again placed in durance in the Tower. When examined by the Privy Council he showed a bold, even a defiant, front, “The time hath been,” he exclaimed, “when I was of some esteeme; but now we are at peace, which repenteth the coward and the courageous alike,” “and so with an obstinate resolution he made choice rather not to regard death than by any submission to intreat for life” (Hayward’s Edward VI.). When found guilty and sentenced to death he said that his blood would make Northumberland’s “pillow uneasy to him,” and Edward hearing of Sir Ralph’s replies to the Court, wrote in his diary under the date 27th January 1551–52, “Sir Ralph Vane was condemned of felony in treason, answering like a ruffian.” Sir Michael Stanhope was a cousin of Somerset’s, a fact sufficient in itself to condemn him. Sir Thomas Arundel, another of the condemned knights, was of Lamberne in Cornwall, and had been one of Wolsey’s attendants, being made a Knight of the Bath at Anne Boleyn’s coronation. In 1549 he was appointed Receiver-General of the Duchy of Cornwall. He had been accused of forming a conspiracy in Cornwall, for participation in which his relative, Humphrey Arundel, Governor of St Michael’s Mount, had been hanged at Tyburn in 1549, but Sir Thomas had been released from his imprisonment, the charge against him not having been proved. Shortly afterwards, however, he was again thrown into prison, charged with complicity in the Somerset conspiracy, the nature of this fresh charge being indicated by King Edward’s brief entry in his diary of 11th October 1551, “Sir Thomas Arrundel had ashuired my Lord that the Tower was sauf.” On the 16th October he was sent to the Tower, and Edward writes, “Arrondel was taken.” Arundel was tried the day after Sir Ralph Vane, and also sentenced to die. These and the two others were all executed on the same day, 26th February 1552. Sir Ralph Vane—or, as it should be spelt Fane, for he belonged to the same stock as the Fanes, Earls of Westmoreland, but in those days of euphonious spelling, it is found as Vane, Fane, Perne, and even Phane—and Sir Miles Partridge were hanged, whilst Sir Thomas Arundel and Sir Michael Stanley were beheaded. “Ther body wher putt into dyvers new coffens to be bered, and heds, into the Towre in cases, and ther bered” (Machyn’s Diary); the Earl of Arundel, Lords Grey and Paget were acquitted.
Edward’s short reign of six years ended on the 6th of July 1553, and considering the brief time he occupied the throne, there was a sufficiency of blood shed upon the scaffold, through the machinations of those around him, to have pleased the insatiable Henry the Eighth himself.