CHAPTER XIV.

THE REFORMATION UNDER EDWARD VI.

"WOE unto thee, O land," said the Preacher, "when thy king is a child." The truth of his words did not recommend them to the Parliament of Edward VI ; and, when Dr John Story quoted them in his protest against the first Act of Uniformity, he was sent to expiate his boldness in the Tower. Yet he had all the precedents in English history on his side. Disaster and civil strife had attended the nonage of Henry III and Edward III, of Richard II and Henry VI; and the evils inseparable from the rule of a child had culminated in the murder of Edward V. When, in 1547, a sixth Edward ascended the throne, the signs were few of a break in the uniform ill-fortune of royal minorities. Abroad, Paul III was scheming to recover the allegiance of the schismatic realm ; the Emperor was slowly crushing England's natural allies in Germany ; France was watching her opportunity to seize Boulogne ; and England herself was committed to a hazardous design on Scotland. At home, there was a religious revolution half-accomplished and a social revolution in ferment; evicted tenants and ejected monks infested the land, centres of disorder and raw material for revolt ; the treasury was empty, the kingdom in debt, the coinage debased. In place of the old nobility of blood stood a new peerage raised on the ruins and debauched by the spoils of the Church, and created to be docile tools in the work of revolution. The royal authority, having undermined every other support of the political fabric, now passed to a Council torn by rival ambitions and conflicting creeds, robbed of royal prestige, and unbridled by the heavy hand that had taught it to serve but not to direct.

Council met in the Tower. Its composition had been determined on St Stephen's Day, five weeks before, when Henry, acting on an authority specially granted him by Parliament, had drawn up a will, the genuineness of which was not disputed until the possibility of a Stewart succession drew attention to the obstacles it placed in their way to the throne. But the arrangements made in the will for the regency destroyed the balance of parties existing in Henry's later years. Norfolk had been sent to the Tower, and from the sixteen executors, who were to constitute Edward's Privy Council, Bishops Gardiner and Thirlby were expressly excluded. To the eleven, who had previously been of Henry's Council, five were added; two were the Chief Justices, Montagu and Bromley, but the other three, Denny, Herbert, and North, were all inclined towards religious change. Besides the sixteen executors Henry nominated twelve assistants, who were only to be called in when the others thought fit. Unless, in defiance of the testimony of those present when Henry drew up his will, that selection is to be regarded as due to the intrigues of the Reformers, it would seem that Henry deliberately sought to smooth the way for the Reformation by handing over the government to a Council committed to its principles. Not half a dozen of its members could be trusted to offer the least resistance to religious change ; and, when the Council assembled in the Tower on that Monday afternoon, it only met to register a foregone conclusion.

Henry had been given no authority to nominate a Protector; but such a step was in accord with precedent and with general expectation, and one at least of the few conservatives on the Council thought that the appointment of Hertford to the protectorate afforded the best guarantee for the good government and security of the realm. He was uncle to the King, a successful general, and a popular favourite ; and, though his peerage was but ten years old, it was older than any other that the Council could boast. He was to act only on the advice of his co-executors ; but there was apparently no opposition to his appointment as Protector of the realm and Governor of the King's person. On the following day the young King and the peers gave their assent. Five days later Paget produced a list of promotions in the peerage which he said Henry had intended to make. Hertford became Duke of Somerset, and Lord High Treasurer and Earl Marshal in succession to Norfolk; Lisle became Earl of Warwick, and Wriothesley Earl of Southampton ; Essex was made Marquis of Northampton, and baronies were conferred on Sir Thomas Seymour, Rich, and Sheffield.

A more important change ensued. Doubts of the validity of a dead King's commission had already led the Chancellor to seek reappointment at the hands of his living sovereign, and the rest of the Council now followed suit. On March 13 Edward VI nominated a new Council of twenty-six. It consisted of the sixteen executors, except Somerset and Southampton, and the twelve assistants named by Henry VIII, but they now held office, not in virtue of their appointment by Henry's will, but of their commission from the boy-King At the same time the Protector received a fresh commission. He was no longer bound to act by the advice of his colleagues ; he was empowered to summon such councillors as he thought convenient, and to add to their numbers at will. No longer the first among equals, he became King in everything but name and prestige ; and the attempt of Henry VIII to regulate the government after his death had, like that of every King before him, completely broken down.

The absolutism, which came in with the new monarchy and was perfected by Cromwell, was relaxed ; and the first Parliament summoned by the Protector (November 4, 1547) effected a complete revolution in the spirit of the laws. Nearly all the treasons created since 1352 were swept away, and many of the felonies. It was, indeed, still treason to deny the Royal Supremacy by writing, printing, overt deed or act; but it was no longer treason to do so by " open preaching, express words or sayings." Benefit of clergy and right of sanctuary were restored ; wives of attainted persons were permitted to recover their dower ; accusations of treason were to be preferred within thirty days of the offence ; no one was to be condemned unless he confessed or was accused by two sufficient and lawful witnesses; and Proclamations were no longer to have the force of law. The heresy laws, the Act of Six Articles, all the prohibitions against printing the Scriptures in English, against reading, preaching, teaching, or expounding the Scriptures, " and all and every other act or acts of Parliament concerning doctrine or matters of religion" were erased from the Statute-book.

The clamour raised by the advent of this foreign legion has somewhat obscured the comparative insignificance of its influence on the development of the English Church. The continental Reformers came too late to affect the moderate changes introduced during Somerset's protectorate, and even the Second Prayer-book of Edward VI owed less to their persuasions than has often been supposed. England never became Lutheran, Zwinglian, or Calvinistic ; and she would have resented dictation from Wittenberg, Zurich, or Geneva as keenly as she did from Rome, had the authority of Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin ever attained the proportions of that of the Roman Pontiff". Each indeed had his adherents in England, but their influence was never more than sectional, and failed to turn the course of the English Reformation into any foreign channel.

In so far as the English Reformers sought spiritual inspiration from other than primitive sources, there can be no doubt that, difficult as it would be to adduce documentary evidence for the statement, they, consciously or unconsciously, derived this inspiration from Wiclif. Like them, he appealed to the State to remedy abuses in the Church, attacked ecclesiastical endowments, and gradually receded from the Catholic doctrine of the Mass. The Reformation in England was divergent in origin, method, and aim from all the phases of the movement abroad ; it left the English Church without a counterpart in Europe,-so insular in character that no subsequent attempt at union with any foreign Church has ever come within measurable distance of success. It was in its main aspect practical and not doctrinal ; it concerned itself less with dogma than with conduct, and its favourite author was Erasmus, not because he preached any distinctive theology, but because he lashed the evil practices of the Church. Englishmen are little subject to the bondage of logic or abstract ideas, and they began their Reformation, not with the enunciation of any new truth, but with an attack upon the clerical exaction of excessive probate dues. No dogma played in England the part that Predestination or Justification by Faith played in Europe. There arose a master of prophetic invective in Latimer and a master of liturgies in Cranmer, but no one meet to be compared with the great religious thinkers of the world. Hence the influence of English Reformers on foreign Churches was even less than that of foreign divines in England. Anglicans never sought to proselytise other Christian Churches, nor England to wage other than defensive wars of religion ; in Ireland and Scotland, which appear to afford exceptions, the religious motive was always subordinate to a political end.

No doubt, they were led in the same direction, some by conviction and some by the desire, as Sir William Petre expressed it, " to fish again in the tempestuous seas of this world for gain and wicked mammon." But there was also popular pressure behind them. Zeal and energy, if not numbers, were on the side of religious change, and the Council found it necessary to restrain rather than stimulate the ardour of the Reformers. One of its first acts was to bind over the wardens and curate of St Martin's, Ironmonger Lane, to restore images which they had " contrary to the King's doctrine and order" removed from their church. Six months later the Council was only prevented from directing a general replacement of images illegally destroyed by a fear of the controversy such a step would arouse; and it had no hesitation in punishing the destroyers. In November, 1547, it sought by Proclamation to stay the rough treatment which priests suffered at the hands of London serving-men and apprentices, and sent round commissioners to take an inventory of church goods in order to prevent the extensive embezzlement practised by local magnates. Early in the following year Proclamations were issued denouncing unauthorised innovations, silencing preachers who urged them, and prohibiting flesh-eating in Lent. In April, 1548, the ecclesiastical authorities were straitly charged to take legal proceedings against those who, encouraged by the lax views prevalent on marriage, were guilty of such " insolent and unlawful acts " as putting away one wife and marrying another. The Marquis of Northampton was himself summoned before the Council and summarily ordered to separate from the lady he called his second wife. Similarly the first Statute of the reign was directed not against the Catholics, but against reckless Reformers; it sought to restrain all who impugned or spoke unreverently of the Sacrament of the altar; the right of the clergy to tithe was reaffirmed, and the Canon Law as to precontracts and sanctuary, abolished by Henry VIII, was restored. It was no wonder that the clergy thought the moment opportune for the recovery of their position as an Estate of the realm, and petitioned that ecclesiastical laws should be submitted to their approval, or that they should be readmitted to their lost representation in the House of Commons.

The responsibility for these changes cannot be apportioned with any exactness. Probably Gardiner was not far from the mark, when he implied that Cranmer and not the Protector was the innovating spirit ; and the comparative caution with which the Reformers at first proceeded was as much due to Somerset's restraining influence as the violence of their later course was to the simulated zeal of Warwick. Cranmer's influence with the Council was greater than it had been with Henry VIII ; to him it was left to work out the details of the movement, and the first step taken in the new reign was the Archbishop's issue of the Book of Homilies for which he had failed to obtain the sanction of King and Convocation five years before. Their main features were a comparative neglect of the Sacraments and the exclusion of charity as a means of salvation. Gardiner attacked the Book on these grounds ; and, possibly out of deference to his protest, the saving power of charity was affirmed in the Council's injunctions to the royal visitors a few months later.

The general Visitation in the summer and autumn of 1547 was mainly concerned with reforming practical abuses, with attempts to compel the wider use of English in services, the removal of images that were abused, and a full recognition of the Supremacy of the boy-King. In November and December Convocation recommended the administration of the Sacrament in both kinds, and liberty for priests to marry ; but the latter change did not receive parliamentary sanction until the following year. The bill against " unreverent " speaking of the Sacrament was, by skilful parliamentary strategy which seems to have been due to Somerset, combined with one for its administration in both kinds, the motive being obviously to induce Catholics to vote for it for the sake of the first part, and Reformers for the sake of the second. The Chantries Bill was in the main a renewal of the Act of 1545 ; but its object was now declared to be the endowment of education, and not the defence of the realm ; and the reason alleged for suppression was the encouragement that chantries gave to superstition and not their appropriation by private persons. Such opposition as this bill encountered was due less to theological objections than to the reluctance of corporations to surrender any part of their revenues ; and Gardiner subsequently expressed his concurrence in the measure. Its effect on gilds was to convert such of their revenues as had previously been devoted to obits and masses into a rent paid to the Crown ; but a bill, which was introduced a year later and passed the House of Commons, to carry out the intentions of founding schools alleged in the Chantries Act, disappeared after it» first reading in the House of Lords on February 18, 1549.

These measures were temporary expedients designed to preserve some sort of quiet, pending the production of the one " uniform and godly " order of service towards which the Church had been moving ever since the break with Rome. The assertion of the national character of the English Church necessarily involved an attempt at uniformity in its services. The legislation of 1547 seemed to imply unlimited religious liberty, and to leave the settlement of religious controversy to public discussion ; but it was not possible to carry out a reformation solely by means of discussion. Local option, too, was alien to the centralising government of the Tudors and, unchecked, might well have precipitated a Thirty Years1 War in England. Uniformity, however, was not the end which the government had in view, so much as the means to ensure peace and quietness. Somerset was less anxious to obliterate the liturgical variations between one parish and another, than to check the contention between Catholics and Reformers which made every parish the scene of disorder and strife; and the only way he perceived of effecting this object was to draw up one uniform order, a compromise and a standard which all might be persuaded or compelled to observe. Nor was the idea of uniformity a novel one. There were various Uses in medieval England, those of York, Hereford, Lincoln, and Sarum ; but the divergence between these forms of service was slight, and before the Reformation the Sarum Use seems to have prevailed over the greater part of the kingdom.

Thus Cranmer was only following the general tendency when, in 1543, he obtained Henry's consent to the examination and reformation of the Church service books. For some years he laboured at this task ; but what stage he had reached in 1547 when Convocation demanded the production of his work is not clear. That demand was refused; and it was not until September, 1548, that the final stage in the evolution of the First Book of Common Prayer was commenced. Its development remains shrouded in obscurity. There is no trace of any formal commission to execute the task, of the composition of the revising body, or of the place where it carried on its work. Cranmer without doubt took the principal part, and once at least he called other divines to help him at Windsor; but it is unsafe to assume that the revisers continued to sit there, or indeed that there was any definite body of revisers at all. Probably about the end of October most of the Bishops were invited to subscribe to the completed book ; but it seems to have undergone further alteration without their consent, and there is not sufficient evidence to show that it was submitted to Convocation. In December, it was in the House of Lords the subject of an animated debate in which Cranmer, Ridley, and Sir Thomas Smith defended, and Tunstall, Bonner, Thirlby, and Heath attacked, the way in which it treated the doctrine of the Mass.

The intention was to make the uniform order tolerable to as many as was possible, and the result was a cautious and tentative compromise, a sort of Anglican Interim, which was more successful than its German counterpart. The penalties attached to its non-observance by the First Act of Uniformity were milder than those imposed by any of the subsequent Acts, and they were limited to the clergy. Neither in the First Act of Uniformity nor in the First Book of Common Prayer is there any attempt to impose a doctrinal test or dogmatic unity. All that was enforced was a uniformity of service ; and even here considerable latitude was allowed in details like vestments and ritual. A few months later a licensed preacher declared at St Paul's, that faith was not to be "coacted," but that every man might believe as he would. Doctrinal unity was in fact incompatible with that appeal to private judgment which was the essence of the Reformation, and Somerset's government was wise in limiting its efforts to securing an outward and limited uniformity.

Even this was sufficiently difficult. Eager Reformers began at once to agitate for the removal of those parts of the Book of Common Prayer which earned Gardiner's commendation, while Catholics resented its departure from the standard of orthodoxy set up by the Six Articles. Religious liberty was in itself distasteful to the majority ; and zealots on either side were less angered by the persecution of themselves than by the toleration of their enemies. Dislike of the new service book was keenest in the west, where the men of Cornwall spoke no English and could not understand an English service book ; they knew little Latin, but they were accustomed to the phrases of the ancient Use, and men tolerate the incomprehensible more easily than the unfamiliar. So they rose in July, 1549, and demanded the restoration of the old service, the old ceremonies, the old images, and the ancient monastic endowments. They asked that the Sacrament should be administered to laymen in one kind and only at Easter-a strange demand in the mouths of those who maintained the supreme importance of the sacramental system-and that all who refused to worship it should suffer death as heretics ; the Bibles were to be called in again, and Cardinal Pole was to be made first or second in the King's Council.

Henry II of France changed a defensive into an offensive policy ; and, in taking up the Scottish policy urged upon him by Henry VIII, Somerset was seeking, not merely to carry out one of the most cherished of Tudor aims, but to ward off a danger which now presented itself in more menacing guise than ever before. There might be doubts as to the policy of pressing the union with Scotland at that juncture-there could be none as to the overwhelming and immediate necessity of preventing a union between Scotland and France ; and Gardiner's advice, to let the Scots be Scots until the King of England came of age, would have been fatal unless he could guarantee a similar abstinence during the same period on the part of Henry II. Somerset, however, pursued methods different from those of Henry VIII. He abandoned alike the feudal claim to suzerainty over Scotland and the claim to sovereignty which Henry had asserted in 1542; he refrained from offensive references to James V as a " pretensed king " ; he endeavoured to persuade the Scots that union was as much the interest of Scotland as of England ; and all he required was the fulfilment of the treaty which the Scots themselves had made in 1543. His efforts were vain ; encouraged by French aid in men, money, and ships, the Scottish government refused to negotiate, and stirred up trouble in Ireland. In September, 1547, the Protector crossed the border, and on the 10th he won the crushing victory of Pinkie Cleugh. The result was to place the Lowlands at England's mercy ; and, thinking he had shown the futility of resistance, Somerset attempted to complete the work by conciliation.

This struggle was fought over the Protector's attitude towards the momentous social revolution of the sixteenth century, a movement which lay at the root of most of the internal difficulties of Tudor governments, and vitally affected the history of the reign of Edward VI. It was in effect the breaking up of the foundations upon which society had been based for five hundred years, the substitution of competition for custom as the regulating principle of the relations between the various classes of the community.

Social organisation in medieval times was essentially conservative; custom was the characteristic sanction to which appeal was universally made. Land, in the eyes of its military feudal lord, was valuable less as a source of money than as a source of men ; it was not rent but service that he required, and he was seldom tempted to reduce his service-roll in order to swell his revenues. But the Black Death and the Peasants1 Revolt, co-operating with more silent and gradual causes, weakened the mutual bonds of interest between landlord and tenant, while the extension of commerce produced a wealthy class which slowly gained admission into governing circles and established itself on the land. To these new landlords land was mainly an investment; they applied to it the principles they practised in trade; and sought to extract from it not men but money. They soon found that the petite culture of feudal times was not the most profitable use to which land could be turned ; and they began the practice known as " engrossing," of which complaint was made as early as 1484 in the Lord Chancellor's speech to Parliament. Their method was to buy up several holdings, which they did not lease to so many yeomen, but consolidated, leaving the old homesteads to decay; the former tenants became either vagabonds or landless labourers, who boarded with their masters and were precluded by their position from marrying and raising families. Similarly the new landed gentry sought to turn their vague and disputed rights over common lands into palpable means of revenue. Sometimes with and often without the consent of the commoners, they proceeded to enclose vast stretches of land with a view to converting it either to tillage or to pasture. The latter proved to be the more remunerative, owing to the great development of the wool-market in the Netherlands ; and it was calculated that the lord, who converted open arable land into enclosed pasture land, thereby doubled his income.

These evils had not passed without notice from statesmen and writers in the previous reign. Wolsey, inspired perhaps by Sir Thomas More, had in 1517 made a vigorous effort to check enclosures ; and More himself had sympathetically pourtrayed the grievances of the population in the pages of his Utopia. Later in the reign of Henry VIII remedial measures had been warmly urged by conservatives like Thomas Lupset and Thomas Starkey, and by more radical thinkers like Brynkelow and Robert Crowley. But the King and his ministers were absorbed in the task of averting foreign complications and effecting a religious revolution, while courtiers and ordinary members of Parliament were not concerned to check a movement from which they reaped substantial profit. After the accession of Edward VI the constant aggravation of the evil and the sympathy it was known to evoke in high quarters brought the question more prominently forward. The Protector himself denounced with more warmth than prudence the misdeeds of new lords "sprung from the dunghill.'" Latimer inveighed against them in eloquent sermons preached at Court; Scory told the young King that his subjects had become "more like the slavery and peasantry of France than the ancient and godly yeomanry of England." Cranmer, Lever, and other reforming divines held similar opinions, but the most earnest and active member of the party, which came to be known as the " Commonwealth's men," was John Hales, whose Discourse of the Common Weal is one of the most informing documents of the age.

The existence of this party alarmed the official class, but the Protector more or less .openly adopted its social programme ; and it was doubtless with his connivance that various remedial measures were introduced into Parliament in December, 1547. One bill " for bringing up poor men's children " was apparently based on a suggestion made by Brynkelow in the previous reign that a certain number of the poorest children in each town should be brought up at the expense of the community ; another bill sought to give farmers and lessees security of tenure; and a third provided against the decay of tillage and husbandry. None of these bills got beyond a second reading, and the only measure which found favour with Parliament was an Act which provided that a weekly collection in churches should be made for the impotent poor, and that confirmed vagabonds might be sold into slavery.

The commissioners, of whom Hales was the chief, encountered an organised and stubborn resistance from those on whose conduct they were to report. With a view to disarming opposition, the presentment of offenders was postponed, until evidence should have been collected to form the basis of measures to be laid before Parliament ; and subsequently Hales obtained from the Protector a general pardon of the offenders presented by the commission. Both measures failed to mollify the gentry, who resolutely set themselves to burke the enquiry. They packed the juries with their own servants ; they threatened to evict tenants who gave evidence against them, and even had them indicted at the assizes. Other means taken to conceal the truth were the ploughing up of one furrow in a holding enclosed to pasture, the whole being then returned as arable land, and the placing of a couple of oxen with a flock of sheep and passing off the sheep-run as land devoted to fatting beasts. Under these circumstances it was with difficulty that the commissioners could get to work at all ; and only those commissions on which Hales sat appear to have made any return. The opposition was next transferred to the Houses of Parliament. In November, 1548, Hales introduced various bills for maintaining tillage and husbandry, for restoring tenements which had been suffered to decay, and for checking the growth of sheep-farms. An Act was passed remitting the payment of fee-farms for three years in order that the proceeds might be devoted to finding work for the unemployed ; and a tax of twopence was imposed on every sheep kept in pasture. But the more important bills were received with open hostility ; and after acrimonious debates they were all rejected either by the Lords or by the Commons.

Measures like these were of little avail to avert the dangers Somerset feared. Parliament had scarcely disposed of his bills, when the resentment of the peasants found vent in open revolt. The flame was kindled first in Somersetshire ; thence it spread eastwards into Wilts and Gloucestershire, southwards into Dorset and Hampshire and northwards into Berks and the shires of Oxford and Buckingham. Surrey remained in a state of "quavering quiet"; but Kent felt the general impulse. Far in the west Cornwall and Devon rose; and in the east the men of Norfolk captured Norwich and established a " commonwealth" on Household Hill, where Robert Ket, albeit himself a landlord of ancient family, laid down the law, and no rich man did what he liked with his own. The civil war, which the French king had hoped to evoke from Seymour's conspiracy, seemed to have come at last, and with it the opportunity of France. On August 8, 1549, at Whitehall Palace, the French ambassador made a formal declaration of war.

Still, the endless bickerings •with France about Boulogne were very exasperating ; and eventually the Protector offered to restore it at once for the sum stipulated in the treaty of 1546, if France would further the marriage between Edward VI and Mary, Queen of Scots. That, however, was the last thing to which the Guises would consent; the preservation of their influence in Scotland was at that moment the mainspring of their action and the chief cause of the quarrel with England. The only condition on which they would keep the peace was the abandonment of Scotland to their designs, and that condition the Protector refused to the last to grant. Before the end of June, 1549, the French had assumed so threatening an attitude that Somerset sent Paget to Charles V with proposals for the marriage of the Princess Mary with the Infante John of Portugal, for the delivery of Boulogne into the Emperor's hands, and for a joint invasion of France by Imperial and English armies. This embassy seems to have alarmed Henry II, and he at once appointed commissioners to settle the disputes in the Boulonnais. The Protector thereupon forbade Paget to proceed with the negotiations for a joint invasion. The Emperor at the same time, doubtful of the value of England's alliance in her present disturbed condition, and immersed in anxieties of his own, declined to undertake the burden of Boulogne, or to knit any closer his ties with England. This refusal encouraged the French king to begin hostilities. He had collected an army on the borders of the Boulonnais ; and in August it crossed the frontier. Ambleteuse (Newhaven) was captured through treachery; Blackness was taken by assault; Boulogneberg was dismantled and abandoned by the English; and the French forces sat down to besiege Boulogne.

The revolts had placed Somerset in a, predicament from which a modern minister would have sought refuge in resignation. His sympathy with the insurgents weakened his action against them ; and his readiness to pardon and reluctance to proscribe exasperated most of his colleagues. He was still obstinate in his assertion of the essential justice of the rebels1 complaints, and was believed to be planning for the approaching meeting of Parliament more radical measures of redress than had yet been laid before it. Paget wrote in alarm lest far-reaching projects should be rashly adopted which required ten years' deliberation; and other officials made Cecil the recipient of fearful warnings against the designs of the "Commonwealth's men." The Council and the governing classes generally were in no mood for measures of conciliation, and disasters abroad and disorders at home afforded a good pretext for removing the man to whom it was convenient to ascribe them.

The malcontents found an excellent party-leader in Warwick ; few men in English history have shown a greater capacity for subtle intrigue ,or smaller respect for principle. A brilliant soldier, a skilful diplomatist, and an accomplished man of the world, he was described at the time as the modern Alcibiades. No one could better turn to his own purposes the passions and interests of others, or throw away his tools with less compunction when they had served his end. Masking profound ambitions under the guise of the utmost deference to his colleagues, he never at the time of his greatest influence attempted to claim a position of formal superiority. Afterwards, when he was practically ruler of England, he sat only fourth in the order of precedence at the Council-board ; and content with the substance of power, he eschewed such titles as Protector of the Realm or Governor of the King's person.

In the general feeling of discontent he had little difficulty in uniting various sections in an attack on the Protector. The public at large were put in mind of Somerset's ill-success abroad; the landed, gentry needed no reminder of his attempts to check their enclosures. Protestant zealots recalled his slackness in dealing with Mass-priests, and Catholics hated his Prayer Book. Hopes were held out to all ; Gardiner in the Tower expected his release ; Bonner appealed against his deprivation ; and Southampton made sure of being restored to the woolsack. Privy Councillors had private griefs as well as public grounds to allege ; the Protector had usurped his position in defiance of Henry's will ; he had neglected their advice and browbeaten them when they remonstrated; he consulted and enriched only his chosen friends ; Somerset House was erected, but Warwick's parks were ploughed up.

The Protector now thought of raising the masses against the classes. Handbills were distributed inciting the commons to rise in his defence ; extortioners and "great masters" were conspiring, they were told, against the Protector because he had procured the peasants their pardon. On the night of the 6th he hurried the King to Windsor for the sake of greater security. But either he repented of his efforts to stir a social war, or he saw that they would be futile ; for in a letter to the Council on the 7th he offered to submit upon reasonable conditions drawn up by representatives of both parties. The Council in London delayed their answer until they had heard from Russell and Herbert, to whom both parties had appealed for help. The commanders of the western army were at Wilton, and their action would decide the issue of peace or war. They promptly strengthened their forces, and moved up to Andover. There they found the country in a general uproar ; five or six thousand men from the neighbouring counties were preparing to march to Somerset's aid. But Russell and Herbert were disgusted with the Protector's inflammatory appeals to the turbulent commons ; they threw the whole weight of their influence on the Council's side, and succeeded in quieting the commotion, reporting their measures to both the rival factions.

Council that the Duke should suffer no loss in lands, goods, or honours, and that his adherents should not be deprived of their offices. On the delivery of this message Paget fell on his knees before the Protector, and, with tears in his eyes, besought him to avail himself of the Council's merciful disposition. The others, relieved of their apprehensions, wept for j oy and counselled submission. Somerset then gave way ; and, through the " diligent travail " of Cranmer and Paget, his servants were removed from attendance on the King's person. When this measure had been effected, the Council no longer considered itself bound to observe the promises by which it had induced the Protector and his adherents to submit. Wingfield, St Leger, and Williams were sent with an armed force to arrest them all except Cranmer and Paget. On the 12th the whole Council went down to Windsor to complete the revolution. Somerset was conveyed to London, paraded as a prisoner through the streets, and shut up in the Tower ; Smith was deprived of the secretaryship, expelled from the Council, and also sent to the Tower ; and a like fate befell the rest of those who had remained faithful to the Protector. Of the victors, Warwick resumed the office of Lord High Admiral, which had been vacant since Seymour's attainder ; Dr Nicholas Wotton, who was also Dean of Canterbury and of York, succeeded Smith as Secretary; and Paget received a peerage in reward for his services. The distribution of the more important offices was deferred until it was settled which section of the Protector's opponents was to have the upper hand in the new government. For the present it was advisable to meet Parliament with as united a front as possible, in order to secure its sanction for the Protector's deposition, and its reversal of so much of his policy as both sections agreed in detesting.

The fact that this Act did not pass until it had been read six times in the Commons and six times in the Lords may indicate that it encountered considerable opposition ; but there was probably little hesitation in reversing the Protector's agrarian policy. Parliament was not indeed content with that; it met (November 4>, 1549) in a spirit of exasperation and revenge, and it went back, not only upon the radical proposals of Somerset, but also upon the whole tenour of Tudor land legislation. Enclosures had been forbidden again and again ; they were now expressly declared to be legal; and Parliament enacted that lords of the manor might "approve themselves of their wastes, woods, and pastures notwithstanding the gainsaying and contradiction of their tenants." In order that the process might be without let or hindrance, it was made treason for forty, and felony for twelve, persons to meet for the purpose of breaking down any enclosure or enforcing any right of way ; to summon such an assembly or incite to such an act was also felony; and any copyholder refusing to help in repressing it forfeited his copyhold for life. The same penalty was attached to hunting in any enclosure and to assembling with the object of abating rents or the price of corn; but the prohibition against capitalists conspiring to raise prices was repealed, and so were the taxes which Somerset had imposed on sheep and woollen cloths. The masses had risen against the classes, and the classes took their revenge.

So the balance trembled. But Southampton was no match for "that most faithful and intrepid soldier of Christ," as Hooper styled Warwick. "England," he went on, "cannot do without him.1' Neither could the Earl afford to discard such zealous adherents as the Reformers ; in them he found his main support. They compared him with Moses and Joshua, and described him and Dorset as "the two most shining lights of the Church of England." They believed that Somerset had been deposed for his slackness in the cause of religious persecution; Warwick resolved to run no such risk. The tendency towards religious change, which Henry VIII had failed to stop, was still strong, and Warwick threw himself into the stream. Privately he seems, if he believed in anything, to have favoured Catholic doctrines ; and the consciousness of his insincerity made him all the louder in his professions of Protestant zeal, and all the more eager to push to extremes the principles of the Reformers. He became, in Hooper's words, "a most holy and fearless instrument of the Word of God."

But this policy could not be combined with the conciliation of Catholics ; and the coalition which had driven Somerset from power fell asunder, as soon as its immediate object had been achieved, and it was called upon to formulate a policy of its own. Southampton ceased to attend the Council after October ; and Parliament, which had completely reversed the Protector's liberal and social programme, effected almost as great a change in the methods and aims of his religious policy. The direction may have been the same, but it is pure assumption to suppose that the Protector would have gone so far as his successors or employed the same violence to attain his ends. The difference in character between the two administrators was vividly illustrated in the session of Parliament which began a month after the change. Under Somerset there had always been a good attendance of Bishops, and a majority of them had voted for all his religious proposals ; at the opening of the first session after his fall there were only nine Bishops, and a majority of them voted against two of the three measures of ecclesiastical importance passed during its course. One was the Act for the destruction of all service books other than the Book of Common Prayer and Henry's Primer; and the other was a renewal of the provision for the reform of Canon Law. A majority of Bishops voted for the bill appointing a commission to draw up a new Ordinal ; but, when they complained that their jurisdiction was despised and drafted a bill for its restoration, the measure was rejected.

The new government now felt firm in the saddle, and it proceeded to turn its attention to foreign affairs. His failure abroad had been the chief ostensible reason for Somerset's downfall; but his successors had done nothing to redeem their implied promise of amendment. In spite of the fact that the agrarian insurrections-the immediate cause of the Protector's reverses in France and Scotland-had been suppressed, and large bodies of troops thus set free for service elsewhere, not a place had been recaptured in France, and in Scotland nearly all the English strongholds fell during the winter into the enemy's hands. The Council preferred peace to an attempt to retrieve their fortunes by war ; and early in 1550 Warwick made secret overtures to Henry II. The French pushed their advantage to the uttermost ; and the peace concluded in March was the most ignominious treaty signed by England during the century.

Boulogne, which was to have been restored four years later for 800,000 crowns, was surrendered for half that sum. All English strongholds in Scotland were to be given up without compensation; England bound itself to make no war on that country unless fresh grounds of offence were given, and condoned the marriage of Mary to the Dauphin of France. The net result was the abandonment of the whole Tudor policy towards Scotland, the destruction of English influence across the Border, and the establishment of French control in Edinburgh. Henry II began to speak of himself as King of Scotland; it was as much subject to him, he said, as France itself; and he boasted that by this peace he had now added to these two realms a third, namely England, of whose King, subjects, and resources he had such absolute disposal that the three might be reckoned as one kingdom of which he was King. To make himself yet more secure, he began a policy of active, though secret, intervention in Ireland. Had he succeeded in this, he would really have held England in the hollow of his hand; had a son been born to Mary Stewart and Francis II, England might even have become a French province. Fortunately, the accession of Mary Tudor broke the French ring which girt England round about; but it was certainly not Warwick's merit that England was delivered from perhaps the most pressing foreign danger with which she was ever threatened.

Under the circumstances it might seem that the Council would have done well to resort to some of Henry VIH's methods for enforcing uniformity; and indeed both parties agreed in demanding greater rigour. But they could not agree on the question to whom the rigour should be applied ; their contentions indirectly tended towards the emancipation of conscience from the control of authority, though such a solution seemed shocking alike to those who believed in the Royal and to those who believed in the Papal Supremacy. There was no course open to the government that would have satisfied all contemporary or modern critics. England was in the throes of a revolution in which no government could have maintained perfect order or avoided all persecution. The Council's policy lacked the extreme moderation and humanity of Somerset's rule, but it averted open disruption, and did so at the cost of less rigour than characterised the rule of Henry VIII, of Mary, or of Elizabeth.

The most remarkable of these creations and translations, which were made by letters patent, was perhaps the elevation of Hooper to the see of Gloucester. Hooper had, after a course of Zwinglian theology at Zurich, become chaplain to the Protector on the eve of his fall ; but he found a more powerful friend in Warwick, who made him Lent preacher at Court in February, 1550. He was one of those zealous and guileless Reformers in whom Warwick found his choicest instruments; he combined fervent denunciations of the evils of the times with extravagant admiration for the man in whom they were most strikingly personified ; and, as soon as his Lenten sermons were finished, he was offered the See of Gloucester. He declined it from scruples about the new Ordinal, the oath invoking the Saints, and the episcopal vestments. After a nine months'' controversy, in which the whole bench of Bishops, with Bucer and Martyr, were arrayed against him and only John à Lasco and Micronius appeared on his side, and after some weeks1 confinement in the Fleet, Hooper allowed himself to be consecrated. The simultaneous vacancy of Worcester enabled the Council to sweep away one of Henry VIII's new bishoprics by uniting it with Gloucester ; and another was abolished by the translation of Thirlby from Westminster to Norwich, and the reunion of the former see with London.

These episcopal changes afforded scope for another sort of ecclesiastical spoliation; most of the new Bishops were compelled to alienate some of their manors to courtiers as the price of their elevation ; and Ponet went so far as to surrender all his lands in return for a fixed stipend of two thousand marks. These lands were for the most part distributed among Warwick's adherents ; and no small portion of the chantry endowments and much Church plate found its way to the same destination. Somerset had issued a commission in 1547 for taking a general inventory of Church goods in order to prevent the private embezzling which was so common just before and during the course of the Reformation ; and this measure was supplemented by various orders to particular persons or corporations to restore such plate and ornaments as they had appropriated. But it may be doubted whether these prohibitions were very effectual ; and after Somerset's fall private and public spoliation went on rapidly until it culminated (March, 1551) in a comprehensive seizure by the government of all such Church plate as remained unappropriated.

Somerset, after his submission and deposition from the Protectorate, had been released from the Tower on February 6, 1550. In April he was readmitted to the Privy Council ; and in May he was made a gentleman of the privy chamber and received back such of his lands as had not already been sold. The Duke's easy-going nature induced him readily to forgive the indignities he had suffered at Warwick's hands ; and in June, 1550, the reconciliation went so far that a marriage was concluded between the Duke's daughter and Warwick's eldest son, Lord Lisle.- From this time Somerset, to all appearance, took an active part in the government. But it was clear that he only existed on sufferance, as a dependant of the Earl of Warwick. The situation was too galling to last long. The Duke was allowed no free access to his royal nephew; he was excluded from the innermost secrets of the ruling faction, and was often dependent for knowledge of the government's plans on such information as he could extract from attendants on the King; he was not only opposed to almost every principle on which Warwick acted, but was personally an obstacle to the achievement of the designs which the Earl was beginning to cherish. He was thus, unless he was willing to be Warwick's tool, forced to become the centre of active or passive resistance-the leader of the opposition, in so far as Tudor practice tolerated such a personage. Within three months of his readmission to the Council he was exerting himself to procure the release of Gardiner, of the Earl of Arundel, and of other prisoners in the Tower; and, while Warwick was absent, Somerset was strong enough to obtain the Council's promotion or restoration of several of his adherents. He attempted to prevent the withdrawal of the Princess Mary's licence to hear mass, and sought so far as he could to restore a friendly feeling between England and the Emperor. In these efforts he found considerable support among the moderate party ; and the spiritless conduct of foreign affairs by the new government, coupled with the harshness of its domestic administration, made many regret the Protector's deposition. Before the session of 1549-50 broke up, a movement was initiated for his restoration; the project was defeated by a prorogation, but it was resolved to renew it as soon as Parliament met again, and this was one of the reasons why Parliament was not summoned till after Somerset's death.

The real cause and occasion of this sudden coup (Tetat are still obscure. It is probable that foreign affairs had more to do with the matter than appears on the surface. The Constable of France, when informed of it, suggested that Charles V and the Princess Mary were probably at Somerset's back, and offered to send French troops to Northumberland's aid; it is quite as likely that Henry II was at the bottom of Northumberland's action. Somerset had, since the days when he served in the Emperor's suite, been an imperialist; and Charles V, who still professed a personal friendship for him, would have welcomed his return to power in place of the Francophil administration, which had just (June, '1551) put the seal on its foreign policy by negotiating a marriage between Edward VI and Henry II's daughter, Elizabeth. The dispute with the Emperor concerning the treatment of the Princess Mary was at its height ; and it is possible that plot and counterplot were in essence a struggle between French and Imperial influence in England. In any case the stories told to the young King and published abroad were obviously false ; Edward was informed that his uncle had plotted the murder of Northumberland, Northampton, and Pembroke, the seizure of the Crown and other measures against himself, to which the young King's knowledge of the fate of Edward V would give a sinister interpretation ; the people of London were informed that he meant to destroy the city.

Chancellor of the University of Oxford. Paget, at whose house the intended assassination was to have taken place, was never brought into Court ; neither was Lord Grey, another accomplice, who was afterwards made captain of Guines "as amends'" for the unjust charge. To the minor conspirators a very simple principle was applied quite irrespective of their guilt : if they implicated Somerset, they were released without trial ; if they persisted in asserting their own and his innocence they were executed. But, in spite of all Northumberland's efforts, no confirmation was obtained of Palmer's main charge. Scores of witnesses were imprisoned in the Tower and put to torture; but the story of the intended assassination was so baseless that the charge did not appear in any one of the five indictments returned against Somerset, and was not so much as alluded to in the examinations of the Duke himself and his chief adherents.

Meanwhile, stringent measures were taken to prevent disturbance. The creation of Lords-Lieutenant put local administration and the local militia into the hands of Northumberland's friends, and provided him with an instrument akin to Cromwell's Major-generals. London was overawed by the newly-organised bands of gens d'armes ; and an effort was made to appease one source of dissatisfaction by proclaiming a new and purified coinage. Parliament, which was to have met in November, was further prorogued; and Northumberland's control of the government was strengthened by a decision that the King's order (he was just fourteen) should be absolutely valid without the couflter-signature of a single member of the Council. Lord-Chancellor Rich resigned soon after in alarm at this violent measure, and he consequently took no part in Somerset's trial. The tribunal consisted of twenty-six out of forty-seven peers ; among them were Northumberland, Northampton, and Pembroke, who were really parties in the case. They had already acted practically as accusers, had drawn up the charges, and examined the witnesses ; they now assumed the function of judges, and after their verdict determined whether it should be executed or not.

Somerset was sent back to the Tower amid extravagant demonstrations of joy by the people, who thought he had been acquitted. He remained there seven weeks, and there was a general expectation that no further steps would be taken against him. Parliament, however, was to meet on January 23, and it was certain that a movement in Somerset's favour would be made. Northumberland had endeavoured to strengthen his faction in the Commons by forcing his nominees on vacant constituencies ; but his hold on Parliament remained nevertheless weaker than that of his rival, and it was therefore determined to get rid of Somerset once and for all. An order of the King drawn up on January 18 for the trial of Somerset's accomplices, was, before its submission to the Council on the following day, transformed by erasures and interlineations into an order for the Duke's execution. No record of the proceedings was entered in the Council's register ; but Cecil, with a view to future contingencies, secured the King's memorandum and inscribed on the back of it the names of the Councillors who were present. Somerset's execution took place at sunrise on the 22nd; in spite of -elaborate precautions a riot nearly broke out, but the Duke made no effort to turn to account the popular sympathy. He had resigned himself to his fate, and died with exemplary courage and dignity.

This Second Act of Uniformity also imposed a Second Book of Common Prayer. The First Book of Common Prayer had scarcely received the sanction of Parliament in 1549, when it began to be attacked as a halting makeshift by the Reformers. The fact that Gardiner expressed a modified approval of it was enough to condemn it in their eyes, and in the Second Book those parts which had won Gardiner's approval were carefully eliminated or revised. The Prayer Book of 1549 was elaborately examined by Bucer and more superficially by Peter Martyr; but the changes actually made were rather on lines indicated by Cranmer in his controversy with Gardiner than on those suggested by Bucer ; and the actual revision was done by the Archbishop, assisted at times by Ridley. There is no proof that Convocation was consulted in the matter, nor is there any evidence that the Book underwent modification in its passage through Parliament. The net result was to minimise the possibility of such Catholic interpretations as had been placed on the earlier Book ; in particular the Communion Office was radically altered until it approached very nearly to the Zwinglian idea of a commemorative rite. The celebrated Black Rubric, explaining away the significance of the ceremony of kneeling at Communion, was inserted on the Council's authority after the Act had been passed by Parliament. Two other ecclesiastical measures of importance were the Reformatio legum, ecclesiasticarum and the compilation of the Forty-two Articles. The Articles of Religion, originally drawn up by Cranmer, were revised at the Council's direction and did not receive the royal signature until June, 1553, while Parliament in the same year refused its sanction to the Book of Canon Law prepared by the commissioners ; lay objections to spiritual jurisdiction were the same, whether it was exercised by Catholic or by Protestant prelates.

By this time his government had become so unpopular that he shrank from meeting a really representative assembly, and had recourse to an expedient which has been misrepresented as the normal practice of Tudor times. There had already been isolated instances of the exercise of government influence to force particular candidates on constituencies ; but the Parliament of March, 1553, was the only one in the sixteenth century that can fairly be described as nominated by the government; and Renard, when discussing the question of a Parliament in the following August, asked Charles V whether he thought it advisable to have a general Parliament or merely an assembly of "notables" summoned after the manner introduced by Northumberland. A circular appears to have been sent round ordering the electors to return the members nominated by the Council. Even this measure was not considered sufficient to ensure a properly subservient House of Commons ; and at the same time eleven new boroughs returning twenty-two members were created, principally in Cornwall, where Crown influence was supreme. The process of packing had already been applied to the Privy Council, more than half of which, as it existed in 1553, had been nominated since Northumberland's accession to power. To this Parliament the Duke represented his financial needs as exclusively due to the maladministration of the Protector, who had been deposed three and a half years before ; and a subsidy was granted which was not, however, to be paid for two years. Acts were also passed with a view to checking fiscal abuses ; but Northumberland again met with some traces of independence in the Commons, and Parliament was dissolved on March 31, having sat for barely a month.

There were other temptations which led him to stake his all on a single throw. No immediate interference need be feared from abroad. Scotland, now little more than a province of France, had no desire to see a half-Spanish princess on the English throne, and France was even more reluctant to witness the transference of England's resources to the hands of Charles V. The Emperor was fully occupied with the French war, and Mary had nothing on which to rely except the temper of England. Northumberland's endeavour to alter the Succession might well seem worth the making. He could appeal to the fact that no woman had sat on the English throne, and that the only attempt to place one there had been followed by civil war. Margaret Beaufort had been excluded in favour of her son; and in the reign of Henry VIII there were not wanting those who preferred the claim of an illegitimate son to that of a legitimate daughter. He could also play upon the dread of religious reaction and of foreign domination which would ensue if Mary succeeded and, as she probably would, married an alien. The Netherlands, Hungary, and Bohemia had all by marriage been brought under Habsburg rule and with disastrous consequences; might not England be reserved for a similar fate ? Some of these objections applied also to the Princess Elizabeth, but not all, and Northumberland would have stood a better chance of success had he selected as his candidate the daughter of Anne Boleyn. But such a solution would not necessarily have meant a continuance of his own supremacy, and that was the vital point.

Margaret Clifford (another possible claimant) to Northumberland's brother Andrew. The news of these arrangements confirmed the popular suspicions of the Duke's designs, and during the month of June foreign ambassadors in London were kept pretty well informed of the progress of the plot. The reluctant consent of the Council was obtained by a promise that Parliament should be summoned at once to confirm the settlement ; and on June 11 the judges were ordered to draw up letters patent embodying the young King's wishes. They resisted at first, but Edward's urgent commands, Northumberland's violence, and a pardon under the Great Seal for their action at length extorted compliance. On the 21st the Council with some open protests and many mental reservations signed the letters patent. The Tower had been secured; troops had been hastily raised ; and the fleet had been manned. Every precaution that fear could inspire had been taken when the last male Tudor died on July 6 at Greenwich; nothing remained but for the nation to declare, through such channels as were still left open, its verdict on the claims of Mary and the Duke of Northumberland's rule.