CHAPTER IV

IN THE TIME OF THE TUDOR KINGS

_Henry VII.—Battle of Bosworth—Thomas Wyatt and the Cat—Edward, Earl of Warwick—Perkin Warbeck—Sir William Stanley—Edmund de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk—Sir John Tyrrell—Sir John Wyndham—Marriage of Prince Arthur and Katharine—His Death and Death of his Mother, Elizabeth of York—Death of Henry VII—Henry VIII—Empson and Dudley—Marriage with Katharine of Aragon—High Festival—Building of the Lieutenant’s House and other Improvements—Stafford, Duke of Buckingham—Marriage with Anne Boleyn—Completion of the Tower Buildings—Birth of the Princess Elizabeth—Execution of Anne—Fisher and More—Lord and Lady Howard—The “Pilgrimage of Grace” and its Victims—Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter—The Pole Family—Treachery of Geoffrey Pole—Thomas Cromwell, his Rise and Fall—Marriage with Anne of Cleves and Divorce, 1540—Marriage with Katharine Howard, and her Execution—Anne Askew, Protestant Martyr, Friend of Katharine Parr—Festivities to French Ambassadors—Dukes of Norfolk and Surrey Condemned—Death of Henry VIII—Edward VI—His Uncles the Seymours—Their Fall—Ascendancy of the Duke of Northumberland—Other Executions—The King’s Death._

We have come to the end of secret murders, but the Tower was never more in use as a State prison than under the house of Tudor, which began its royal course after the battle of Bosworth, August 22, 1485.

In the reign of Richard III Henry Wyatt, a gentleman of Surrey and member of the House of Commons, was thrown into the Tower for favouring the claims of Henry Tudor. According to his son’s statement, Richard had him tortured, vinegar and mustard being forced down his throat, and afterwards remonstrated with him. “Wyatt, why art thou such a fool?” said he, “Henry of Richmond is a beggarly pretender; forsake him and become mine. Thou servest him for moonshine in water. I can reward thee, and I swear to thee, I will.” “If I had chosen thee for my master,” answered the prisoner, “I would have been faithful to thee. But the Earl of Richmond, poor and unhappy though he be, is my master, and no allurement shall drive me from him, by God’s grace.” And here comes a pretty legend, we hardly dare regard it otherwise, which is told in the Wyatt papers. King Richard, in a rage, had him confined in a low and narrow cell, where he had not clothes sufficient to warm him and was a hungered. A cat came into this cell, he caressed her for company, laid her in his bosom and won her love. And so she came to him every day and brought him a pigeon when she could catch one. He complained to his keeper of his short fare, and received for answer, that “he durst not better it.” “But if I can provide any,” said Sir Henry, “will you dress it for me?” “I may well enough promise that,” was the answer, and so he promised. And he was as good as his word, and dressed each time the pigeon which the faithful cat brought. When Richmond became King Henry VII he rewarded his faithful liegeman by making him a Privy Councillor and giving him rich offices enough to enable him to buy Allington Castle, one of the finest in Kent. He was equally well regarded by Henry VIII, who visited him at Allington; but more of this farther on.

The two most noteworthy occupants of the Tower, however, in this reign, strangely different in character and circumstances, were brought into close connexion with each other. Edward, Earl of Warwick, was the eldest son of the Duke of Clarence, and was three years old when his father was put to death in the Tower. His early history is obscure; at one time Richard III, after the death of his son, thought to nominate him as his heir, but changed his mind, and sent him to Sheriff Hutton Castle, Yorkshire. After Bosworth Henry VII brought him from thence and shut him up in the Tower, his only offence being that he was the representative of the fallen dynasty of York. The injustice of this was widely felt, and this, combined with the uncertainty as to the whereabouts or movements of the youth, induced a usurper named Lambert Simnel to personate him in Ireland in 1487, and he was actually crowned in Dublin Cathedral. King Henry found it advisable to bring the Earl forth for a day and march him through the streets to St. Paul’s. It was the last day of his life that he spent outside the limits of the Tower. He was taken back and remained there for twelve years longer. And here we have to take up another history. Perkin Warbeck was the son of a citizen of Tournay, who came to England as a serving man to two or three English gentlemen, and in 1491, moved by vanity and ambition, whilst in Ireland, where feeling against Henry VII was strong, declared himself to be the Duke of York, who had been reported murdered in the Tower with his brother Edward V. The King of Scotland, James IV, acknowledged him, and two years later gave him his own cousin, Catherine Gordon, to wife. Charles VIII of France also for a while acknowledged him. But his strongest ally was Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy. This remarkable woman has little to do with the Tower, but is too much connected with English history to be passed over. She was the sister of Edward IV, fifteen years old when he became King. In 1467 she married Charles, Duke of Burgundy, and is favourably remembered as having patronized Caxton, who gave up the Mastership of the Merchant-Adventurers of Bruges to enter her service, and produced his first great printing work under her patronage. In 1477 her husband was killed at the battle of Nancy, and she was left a childless widow. The rest of her life was spent in the Netherlands, and when Henry VII confiscated the dowry which her brother King Edward had granted her, nothing more was needed to ensure her hatred of his rule, and desire to get the Yorkist dynasty restored. She had abetted Simnel, and now furnished Warbeck with means to carry out his attempt. When the latter, after repeated failures, was taken prisoner in October, 1497, his life was spared on his making full confession of his imposture, and he was then placed in the Tower, after being paraded through the streets in mockery. In 1498 he escaped, but was captured in a week, placed in the stocks in Westminster Hall and in Cheapside, and then sent back to the Tower. Next year he renewed his attempt at escape by bribing his gaolers, and unhappily induced the Earl of Warwick, who was of course nothing loth, to join him. The plot was discovered, and on November 23 Warbeck was hanged at Tyburn, and five days later Warwick was beheaded on Tower Hill. This last was a shameful act of injustice, but Henry longed to get rid of him, and it is said that his aversion was furthered by the refusal of King Ferdinand of Aragon to marry his daughter Katharine to Arthur, Prince of Wales, so long as a son of the Duke of Clarence existed as a possible claimant of the succession. When, years later Katharine of Aragon was bewailing the injustice done to her, she observed that it was a judgment of God upon her because her former marriage was sealed with blood, namely Warwick’s.

There was yet another victim to Warbeck’s imposture. Sir William Stanley, who had turned the scale in King Henry’s favour at Bosworth Field, was, in 1495, impeached as having been heard to say that “if he were sure that the young man called Perkin was really the son of Edward IV, he would never draw sword against him.” For this he was sent to the Tower, tried in its Council Hall, and beheaded on Tower Hill, February 16, 1495.

Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, was the son of Elizabeth, sister of Edward IV. His plottings against Henry VII, encouraged by Maximilian, failed, and he fled the kingdom, and remained abroad several years. But Philip, King of Castile, who had given him shelter, visiting Henry in 1506, persuaded him to spare the fugitive’s life on his surrender, and Suffolk was committed to the Tower. Here he remained until 1513, when he was beheaded by order of Henry VIII on a charge of plotting. But he had involved two men in his ruin; Sir James Tyrrell, the same who had assisted at the murder of the two princes, and Sir John Wyndham, who had been knighted for his good service against Perkin Warbeck, were both executed on Tower Hill for their share in Suffolk’s treason. Tragedies enough, these, for one reign; yet we have hardly come to the end of them. The marriage of Prince Arthur with Katharine of Aragon took place in St. Paul’s Cathedral on November 14, 1501, and the rejoicings took the form of a succession of tournaments and feasts within the Tower walls. There were great pageants to emphasize the descent of the bridegroom from his namesake the British hero whose fabulous exploits fill the pages of Geoffrey of Monmouth. But they could not alter the fact that he was a poor sickly child of fifteen, and five months later he died. The calamity was a terrible blow to his mother, Elizabeth, of York, whose health appears to have failed from that time. On February 2, 1503, she gave birth to a daughter, Katharine, in the Tower, and died nine days later, on her birthday, aged thirty-eight. An amiable and beautiful woman, according to all accounts; “brilliant, witty, and pious,” so says Erasmus. Six years later her husband was buried by her side in the Abbey.

The reign of Henry VIII forms an epoch in the history of the Tower. There are tragical events in plenty, but there are other notes on which it is pleasant and interesting to dwell. He began his reign by imprisoning Empson and Dudley, who had been his father’s instruments of extortion. He did so because he knew how they were hated by the nation, though he profited by their misdeeds, for Henry VII bequeathed him what was then the enormous sum of £1,850,000. Next year they were both beheaded on Tower Hill. Meanwhile the King was holding high festival to celebrate his marriage with his brother’s widow Katharine. He was now nineteen years old, and she twenty-five. Surrounded by a splendid retinue he created four and twenty Knights of the Bath, after which there was a gorgeous procession from the Tower to Westminster; the details are given at length, and dismal enough they are when one sees the hollowness of them all in what followed. Henry was bent on improving the Tower buildings, and appointed Commissioners to take the work in hand. In the S.W. corner a Lieutenant’s house was built with many chambers, having a free passage both into the Beauchamp and Garden Towers. This house was flanked by two smaller buildings, warders’ houses, one on the West, the other on the South. The Bell Tower part of this building had a stone vault pierced for archers, who from it could sweep the outer works. This is called in old records the Strong Room. Though not intended for the reception of prisoners, it presently received an illustrious one, as we shall see. In the State Papers of the reign are the following memoranda of repairs done in the Tower during the summer of 1532: “Work done by carpenters and taking down old timber, etc., at St. Thomas’ Tower, and for alterations in the palace.” “There has also been taken down the old timber in the four turrets of the White Tower; and the old timber of Robert the Devil’s Tower—that is Julius Caesar’s tower; and of the tower near the King’s wardrobe. Half of the White Tower is now embattled, coped, indented, and cressed with Caen stone to the extent of 500 feet.” The cost is given as £3,593 14_s._ 10_d._

But we have perforce to return to the tragical records. We have already recorded how the Earl of Suffolk, Edmund de la Pole, was beheaded in 1513. Edward Stafford, third Duke of Buckingham, was the great grandson of Humphrey Stafford, son of Anne, daughter of Thomas of Woodstock, son of Edward III. Humphrey Stafford had received his dukedom for his services under Henry VI, had tried in vain to reconcile Queen Margaret with the Yorkists, and was slain at the battle of Northampton. His grandson was executed at Salisbury by Richard III in 1483. The Duke with whom we are now concerned was sworn a Privy Councillor in 1509, and was for a while high in favour with Henry VIII. But he hated Cardinal Wolsey, and the hatred was returned, and the Cardinal appears to have brought before the King some boasting speeches of the Duke about his royal lineage, implying a claim to the throne. For this he was sent to the Tower, was tried for high treason, and on May 17, 1521, was beheaded on the Green. Shakespeare gives us several pathetic touches in his Henry VIII. Half a dozen Augustinian friars, in gratitude for the many kind deeds which the Duke had done to poor religious men in his lifetime, took up his body and buried it in the Church of Austin Friars.

We come to scenes of revelry again in May, 1533, when the King brought hither his new wife Anne Boleyn; painful enough to read in connexion with the rest of the history. He had gone through a marriage service with her in the previous January, before his divorce from Katharine had been pronounced. Anne was now some months advanced in pregnancy. She was brought to the Tower preparatory to a stately march to Westminster for her coronation, and it was all very magnificent to look at, but the people viewed it in sullen silence; enthusiasm there was none. What was yet worse, the King’s passion for her was already on the wane. She gave birth to the future Queen Elizabeth on September 7, 1533, had a miscarriage the next year, and a still-born child in January, 1536, only three weeks after the death of Katharine of Aragon. On Mayday following she was charged with unfaithfulness to the King, was brought a prisoner to the Tower next day, tried in the Great Hall on the 15th, beheaded on Tower Green on the 19th. This is not the place to discuss the question of her guilt or innocence. The twenty-five peers who tried her gave a unanimous verdict against her; the President of the Court was her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. Mr. Gairdner expresses his opinion that the evidence against her was not conclusive, but that her conduct had long been indecorous.

But between her coronation and execution two illustrious victims had passed away. John Fisher, who as a College Principal had done splendid service in the way of advice and assistance to the munificent works of the “Lady Margaret,” Countess of Richmond, Henry VII’s mother, was raised in 1504 to the bishopric of Rochester. He was a man of saintly life, and eager to promote learning. There seems to have been a mutual distrust between him and Wolsey, which Burnet bluntly attributes to Fisher’s grief at the Cardinal’s lax morality. When the question of King Henry’s divorce was raised Fisher expressed himself firmly against it, and when, further, the doctrine of the royal supremacy was proposed to Convocation, he declared that the acceptance of it would “cause the clergy of England to be wiped out of God’s holy Catholic Church.” When it was carried in Convocation, it was he who procured the addition of the saving clause “quantum per Dei legem licet.” Unfortunately he compromised himself by giving countenance to Elizabeth Barton, “the nun of Kent,” when the _soi-disant_ prophetess threatened calamity to the King for his marriage with Anne Boleyn. In April, 1534, he and Sir Thomas More were summoned to Lambeth to take the oath to the Act of Succession. They both agreed to that portion of the Act which fixed the succession to the offspring of the King and Anne, but firmly objected to call the Princess Mary illegitimate, and to the words denying faith, truth, and obedience to the Roman Church. The commissioners were anxious, Cranmer at the head of them, to accept the submission as sufficient for the occasion, but they were both sent to the Tower; and when the Act of Supremacy was passed in November, 1554, Secretary Cromwell read it to Fisher, with the clause making it high treason to deny the King’s right to the claim. Fisher declined to subscribe to it. Henry was unwilling to proceed to extremities, but at this very moment Pope Paul III, ignorant (as he afterwards declared) of the unhappy relations between King and bishop, and desirous of rewarding learning, made Fisher a Cardinal. Henry broke out into ungovernable fury when he heard it, and declared that the red hat might come, but that there should be no head on which to place it. The bishop was brought to trial at Westminster and beheaded on Tower Hill June 15, 1535. “There is in this realm no man,” said Sir Thomas More, “in wisdom, learning, and long approved virtue together, meet to be matched and compared with him.” He died with perfect calmness and dignity. The head was fixed on London Bridge, and the body lay exposed to insult all day. In the evening it was buried without ceremony in the Church of Allhallows Barking.

A fortnight later Sir Thomas More shared the same fate, and on the same charge. His brilliant abilities, wit, and virtue have made his name illustrious. Many of his noble friends visited him in confinement and did all they could to persuade him to yield, but in vain. Not only his firmness, but his cheerfulness remained undiminished. When he was brought through Traitors’ Gate the porter, according to ancient custom, demanded his uppermost garment as his fee. More handed him his cap, telling him that this was his “uppermost garment,” and that he wished it was of more value. When he ascended the scaffold he observed that it was somewhat insecure. “Prythee, good fellow,” he said to one of the guards, “help me up; when I come down let me shift for myself.” And when the headsman prayed his forgiveness, “I forgive thee, good fellow, with all my heart,” he said as he laid his head on the block. Immediately after he raised it for a moment to remove his beard. “That,” he said, “has not committed treason; pity it should be cut.”

Every succeeding year of this darkening reign brought more prisoners to the Tower. Thence Lord Howard was sent with his wife, the King’s niece, because they had married without the royal consent. Here the husband died and then the widow was released. She afterwards became the mother of Darnley.

“The Pilgrimage of Grace,” in other words the series of insurrections which broke out in the North because of dissatisfaction at the promulgation of the reformed doctrines and the dissolution of the religious houses, filled the Tower dungeons with prisoners. Among them were the Lords Darcy and Hussey, Sir Robert Constable, Sir John and Lady Bulmer, Sir Francis Bigot, Sir Thomas Percy, brother of the Earl of Northumberland, Sir Stephen Hamilton, William, son of Lord Lumley, Nicholas Tempest and Robert Aske; also the Abbots of Rievaulx, Fountains and Jervaux, and the Prior of Bridlington. All were convicted of treason and put to death in 1536.

In 1538 Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, Sir Edward Neville, Sir Nicholas Carew and others were accused of holding a traitorous correspondence with Cardinal Pole, and were imprisoned in the Tower; as were also the Cardinal’s brothers, Lord Montague and Sir Geoffrey Pole, their mother the Countess of Salisbury, the Marchioness of Exeter, Sir Adrian Fortescue and Sir Thomas Dingley. Reginald Pole, who had never hesitated in his conferences with the King to condemn the divorce, had been entrusted by Henry to go on a mission to the Pope to make peace if possible. Pope Paul IV had made him a Cardinal, to Henry’s indignation, and he was still on the Continent. The Marquis of Exeter was a grandson of Edward IV, and Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, was the daughter of his brother, the Duke of Clarence. The King was roused to fresh anger against them because Charles V and Francis I had laid aside their enmity and become friends, and the Pope, looking to them for assistance, had issued a bull of excommunication against him. Geoffrey Pole saved his life by giving evidence against the plotters. Exeter and Montague were beheaded, December 9, 1538, Carew on March 3 following. Lady Exeter was pardoned, but the Countess of Salisbury was kept in confinement for two years longer, when she was brought to the scaffold on the fatal Green. Froude thinks it was because she was found to be still secretly corresponding with her son the Cardinal against the King, and there were fresh alarms of a rising in the North under Sir John Neville. Froude discredits the story told by Lingard, that the aged Countess refused to lay her head on the block on the ground that she was no traitor, and that the headsman hacked it off as he best could; and Mr. Gairdner evidently does not believe it.

Of the King’s chief adviser in these terrible doings we have as yet said nothing, but it becomes necessary to do so now. Thomas Cromwell, who had risen from low estate, and whose early history is almost a blank to us, after a youth spent on the Continent, was appointed by Wolsey collector of his revenues of the see of York, entered Parliament in 1523 and became a member of Gray’s Inn. Wolsey leaned much upon him, made him one of the commissioners appointed (1525) to inquire into the conditions of the smaller monasteries—and in this work he acted with great harshness—and he also managed the work of the foundation of the Cardinal’s Colleges at Oxford and Ipswich. He seems to have remained faithful to Wolsey to the end, but it was he more than any one who persuaded Henry VIII to make himself supreme head of the Church by way of facilitating his divorce from Katharine, and he rose high in favour with the King and became Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1535 he was made Vicar-General for a general visitation of churches, monasteries and clergy, was rewarded with large gifts of confiscated church lands, and was made Lord Chamberlain in 1539. This was the culmination of a career clever and wary, but tyrannical and oppressive to the English nation and utterly unprincipled towards foreign powers. His fall, which had long been desired by the Catholic party in England, was hastened by his negotiating the King’s marriage with Anne of Cleves. Henry’s disgust at his first sight of his affianced bride would not have sufficed to cause the agent’s ruin, but the alliance with German Protestants, of which the marriage was to be the seal, was unpopular, and as it had served its purpose, nothing more was to be got out of it. For arranging the marriage he was created Earl of Essex April 1540, and on June 10 following the Duke of Norfolk denounced him as a traitor at the Council board, and he was at once sent to the Tower, charged with receiving bribes wholesale, selling commissions, secretly dispersing heretical books, and designing to marry the Princess Mary and make himself King. He was not tried but proceeded against by attainder. Archbishop Cranmer vainly tried to stem the tide. He was beheaded on Tower Green July 28, 1540. It was one sign of a Catholic reaction. The Tower and other metropolitan prisons were crowded with Protestant heretics, who were dragged away on hurdles and burnt in Smithfield, as were also some Catholics at the very same period for denying the King’s supremacy.

Anne of Cleves was married to Henry on January 6, 1540, and divorced in July following. She lived the rest of her life in England with a pension, quite content, and rode in the procession along with the Princess Elizabeth at Queen Mary’s coronation. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, August 1557.

Immediately after this divorce Henry married Katharine Howard, niece of the Duke of Norfolk, and for a while all seemed bright. The royal pair next year went on a tour through the North. At Hampton Court they kept All Saints’ Day, 1541, with much solemnity, and the King gave directions to the celebrant, the Bishop of Lincoln, to return thanks to God “for the good life which he hoped to lead after sundry troubles.” Next day after mass Archbishop Cranmer sorrowfully handed the King a paper which gave evidence of Katharine’s unchastity both before and after marriage. She was confined for a while at Syon House, on February 10 was brought to the Tower, and beheaded on the Green three days later. It was a strange request which she made, and which was complied with—that the block might previously be brought to her cell that she might learn how to place her head upon it aright. With her died Lady Rochford, who had connived at her immoralities.

Anne Askew, our next prisoner, presents a strange contrast. She was the daughter of a Lincolnshire gentleman, who married in early life a Mr. Kyme, an ardent Roman Catholic. Anne’s friends in London were equally ardent believers in the Reformed faith; among these friends was Queen Katharine Parr. Anne’s husband, who for some time had neglected her, charged her with heresy, resting his charge on the recently passed “Six Articles” Act, which ordained that denial of Transubstantiation should be punished with death by burning. It was in 1545 that she was charged. Bishop Bonner appears to have been so moved by the sight of her simple beauty as to try to save her, but the Chancellor, Wriothesley, pressed her with questions, and she was firm in her answers, and was condemned. Her first place of confinement was Newgate, but she was sent to the Tower to be racked. The rack, says Lord de Ros, was regarded with such horror by the people as to be applied only in secrecy, and there might have been an outbreak in the city had all this become known. The application of the torture was in order to force her to incriminate the ladies who had supported her, but she resolutely closed her lips, first declaring that she was grateful to all her friends and would not betray them, and that it was her faithful maid who had kept her from starvation by going out and begging for her “of the prentices and others she met in the streets.” Wriothesley himself worked the rack until she was nearly dead. She was taken off the machine, but was no longer able to walk, so she was carried in a cart to Smithfield and burned. Queen Katharine appears to have been in danger, but the King’s sympathies were moved by the accounts which reached him of the sufferer’s noble constancy, and when Wriothesley came to him to excite him against the Queen, Henry called him a beast and a fool and drove him out of the room.

One more cheerful record remains of this terrible reign. In 1546, in honour of the peace which had been made between France and England, the former country sent its Lord High Admiral, the Bishop of Evreux, and some other nobles on an embassy to England. They landed at Greenwich and thence were conducted to the Tower, where a splendid banquet awaited them; thence to Lambeth Palace, and finally to Hampton Court, where the treaty was signed.

And still we have two more illustrious prisoners to name in this reign. The Duke of Norfolk was now seventy-four years old: He had commanded the victorious army at Flodden, had led another victorious campaign in Scotland, and had done good service in France. He was a son-in-law of King Edward IV, and two of his nieces had been Queens of England. The jealousy of Henry was aroused; he knew himself to be nearing his end, and feared that the Duke and his son, the Earl of Surrey, had designs upon the crown. He appointed Lord Hertford, his son’s uncle, to be his guardian during his minority, and sent to Parliament a complaint that Norfolk and his son were plotting to seize the government. Surrey was accused of quartering the arms of King Edward the Confessor on his shield, after the manner of an heir-apparent, and also (it is shocking to have to record it) of having persuaded his sister, the widow of the King’s natural son, the Duke of Richmond, to become Henry’s mistress, of course with a view to ruling his movements. Surrey was tried by jury January 13, 1547, and perished six days later on Tower Hill. The Duke of Norfolk was condemned by bill of attainder, and would have died in like manner, had not the King himself died January 28, 1547, a few hours before the appointed time of execution. The Duke remained a prisoner until the accession of Mary, when he was released. He presided at the trial of the Duke of Northumberland, and died in his bed in 1554, aged eighty-one.

The young Edward, now ten years old, was at Hatfield when his father died. Next day his uncle, the Earl of Hertford, brought him up to the Tower with great pomp and ceremony. Here he received knighthood by the accolade of his uncle, and in return conferred on him the title of Duke of Somerset. On February 24 the coronation took place at Westminster with the usual pageants.

Almost immediately disturbances began. Thomas, Lord Seymour, Somerset’s younger brother, was sent to the Tower on the charge of aspiring to the kingdom by offering marriage to the Princess Elizabeth. He had secretly married Queen Katharine Parr on King Henry’s death, and when she died (Sept. 5, 1548) he made this new move. Other acts of ambition were charged against him, as well as of using his office of Lord High Admiral for privateering. He was beheaded on Tower Hill March 20, 1549, and though he was not worthy of much sympathy, public opinion was indignant against the heartlessness of his brother the Protector, and advantage was taken of it by the Catholic party to form a faction against him. He was accused, not unjustly, of accumulating vast riches by seizing property of the Church and Crown. A leader of the opposition to him was found in Dudley, Earl of Warwick. A meeting of his opponents was held in Ely Place in October 1549, with the result that the Tower was seized and Somerset was shut up in it. He was deposed from the Protectorate, and in February 1550 was pardoned and re-admitted to the Privy Council. But in October 1551 he was again arrested on the charge of plotting to raise the country and murder Warwick. On this charge he was tried and beheaded on Tower Hill. He was the first Protestant ruler of England, “a rank Calvinist,” and was, in fact, in close communication with Calvin. It was certainly his influence which led to the changes between the two English prayer-books of 1549 and 1552. His royal nephew, apparently, was, as Burnet puts it, “not greatly concerned” for him. This is his entry in his diary: “January 22, the Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Touer Hill between eight and nine a cloke in the morning.” His fall involved the ruin of some of his principal supporters. Thus Sir Ralph Vane (or Fane; he belonged to the still existent Westmoreland family), though he had distinguished himself in the army, had offended the Duke of Northumberland. He was charged with complicity with Somerset and hid himself in a stable at Lambeth, but was arrested. Before the Privy Council he showed a bold front, and on his condemnation declared that his murder would make Northumberland’s pillow uneasy. He was hanged, and the royal diary recording his “felony” and death adds that on his trial he “answered like a ruffian.” Sir Miles Partridge was also hanged; Sir Thomas Arundel and Sir Michael Stanhope were beheaded; the Earl of Arundel, Lords Grey and Paget were acquitted.

Edward VI’s was a short reign, but a terrible amount of blood was shed on the scaffold, through the machinations of evil counsellors.