personality in English politics for a period only just exceeding two
years and a half. As Earl of Hertford, he grasped the reins of power
when Henry VIII. died; but since the fall of Thomas Cromwell, Henry had
reigned without allowing any of his servants to occupy a pre-eminent
position, and the Earl of Hertford had certainly not been an exception.
After his overthrow in the autumn of 1549, his political influence
was never strong enough to affect the measures of his successor: it
sufficed merely to bring about his own execution as a preventive
measure. The whole reign of Edward VI. is, in fact, quite sharply
divided into the two periods of the Seymour ascendency and the Dudley
ascendency; but the distinction somehow seems to be very commonly
overlooked, and Somerset is not only credited with his own doings or
misdoings, but with a goodly share of those for which Northumberland
was responsible, and with which Somerset was entirely out of sympathy.
It would appear, however, that it would be difficult to find two men
whose ideas were more thoroughly antagonistic than those of Somerset
and Northumberland: a view not very easily reconcilable with the
popular verdict, which seems to regard Somerset as being a weaker if
rather more amiable edition of his rival. It is certainly well that
the latest detailed study of the Protector’s career should have at
least sufficed to make the old method of treating him inexcusable
for the future. Without accepting all Mr. Pollard’s inferences as to
his subject’s abilities and character, it must be recognised that
the portrait presented in his _England under Protector Somerset_, if
somewhat “flattered,” will have to be seriously reckoned with by all
future historians of the period.
[Illustration: _PROTECTOR SOMERSET_
_From a Painting by_ HOLBEIN]
Nevertheless, it may be doubted whether the impression left by that
volume is quite what the author intended to convey. The suggestion
certainly is that the Protector was really a great man who only failed
because he was too much in advance of his age. But in fact, while he
possessed certain qualities essential to the great statesman though
by no means requisite for a successful politician, he lacked others
which are necessary to either character. Some of the projects for
which he laboured most strenuously were wrecked, not because they
were out of reach, but because of his own inherent incapacity for
adapting means to ends; and the general effect of his efforts was not
to bring the objects he had in view within nearer reach, but to make
them more difficult of attainment than they were before. Failure is no
condemnation. Wiclif failed, and Huss failed; but they made the
Reformation possible. Somerset failed, and there was hardly one of his
aims which had been advanced a single step by his action. A statesman,
to deserve the title in its full sense, must be an idealist in his
aims, but practical in his methods. The unpractical statesman may
deserve our sympathy and our admiration; but we may not therefore give
him the full meed of applause which belongs to the benefactors of the
race or nation. The unpractical idealist may be invaluable when he is a
voice only. When the control of public affairs falls into his hands, he
is a public danger.
II
THE PROTECTOR AND HIS PROBLEMS
Edward Seymour was born about 1505: of good family, but not of high
rank, though there was a strain of Plantagenet blood on the mother’s
side. At any rate, the Seymours were connected with the Court, and the
future Protector was still a boy when he was holding offices associated
with Royalties. When Henry VIII. tired of Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour was
the new spouse on whom his choice fell. The marriage naturally brought
advancement to her brother; and though she did not long survive the
birth of her son, Seymour, who had by this time been appointed to the
Privy Council and raised to the earldom of Hertford, continued to enjoy
favours as a man of undoubted talents and attractive personality--and
uncle of the heir apparent. Favours, however, meant very little in
the way of power. He discharged various functions and took part in
sundry military operations in France and Scotland; but apart from one
smart action near Boulogne, very little real credit attaches to his
performances, which consisted for the most part in sacking the city of
Edinburgh, and laying waste the Scottish border with rather more than
usual in the way of burning and devastation.
Such as they were, however, these achievements sufficed to bring
him some prestige as a commander. If there was nothing particularly
brilliant about them, the same comment applies generally to those of
his fellows and rivals. There was no one marked out by his talents
to take up the reins of government when the king should die and be
succeeded by a nine-year-old son. But it was fairly obvious that either
the Howards, or Hertford in virtue of his relationship to the young
Edward, must occupy the leading position. Intrigues and the folly of
Surrey turned the scale against the Howards; Surrey and his father were
both attainted; the former was executed and the latter escaped only
through Henry’s death. Hertford was inevitably the man of the hour.
There was no manner of doubt about the succession. Henry left only
one son, and that son’s legitimacy was unchallenged. But by a wholly
unique measure, Henry had been empowered to fix by will not only the
course of succession after his son but the method of carrying on the
government during Edward’s minority. The will, when produced, was
found to vest the control in a council of executors, giving priority to
none, but remarkable as excluding Bishop Gardiner from the list. The
genuineness of the document has been disputed, but probably without
sufficient reason. At any rate, as it stood, its provisions were very
far from satisfying Hertford’s ambitions, and it is hard to see how
any one could have had a personal interest in giving it such a shape.
Certainly he had none, and his immediate efforts were directed to
inducing the new Council to alter its own constitution fundamentally.
For two days the king’s death was kept secret, while Hertford laid
his plans in conjunction with Paget, who had possession of the will.
When the Council was summoned and the will produced, a proposal was
immediately sanctioned appointing Hertford Lord Protector of the realm
and of the king’s person. The assent of the king and the peers was
formally obtained, and a few weeks later the appointment was confirmed
by the king’s authority under the Great Seal. In the interval there had
been a general distribution of honours, Hertford himself being made
Duke of Somerset. Also the one member of the Council from whom serious
opposition was to be feared, Wriothesley the Lord Chancellor (now
made Earl of Southampton), justified his own removal by transgressing
his powers. Somerset’s position was thus for the time at least made
impregnable.
Henry VIII. himself and his second great minister Cromwell had
conducted the government of the country on autocratic lines under
colour of parliamentary forms, until Parliament itself assigned, not
to the Crown as such, but to Henry personally, what amounted to the
power of legislation by Royal Proclamation. Somerset, though without
this statutory power, continued to make a free use of proclamations,
such being in effect the system to which the country had become
accustomed. He did not appreciate the change which had taken place. For
the successful exercise of those powers a personality was needed which
commanded unquestioning obedience, coupled with an unerring sense of
the limits of endurance in the subjects. In neither respect was the
Protector endowed with the necessary qualities.
There were problems enough to be dealt with to have daunted a master
of statecraft. Over the Channel, there was France, aggrieved because
England was just now holding Boulogne in pawn. The veteran Francis I.
followed his English contemporary and rival to the grave in a very
few weeks, and the son who succeeded him was by no means friendly to
England. Across the northern border there was Scotland, with a baby
queen, a queen-mother who was one of the Guise family who were in
the ascendant in France, and a dominant party which in its national
sympathies was French, and, in the religious point of view, regarded
Henry as a schismatic and all advocates of the Reformation as heretics.
At home, it was quite certain that the removal of Henry’s heavy hand
would be followed by a renewal of the strife in the Church between
the followers of the “Old Learning,” headed by Gardiner, Bonner and
Tunstal, and those of the New, whose chief was Archbishop Cranmer. In
addition, there was a grave social problem.
For a full half century a steady process had been at work throughout
rural England of extending sheep-farming at the expense of cultivation.
It was a process which paid the land-owners, owing to the large demands
from abroad for English wool. But it was not equally satisfactory to
the agricultural labourer, who was deprived of his customary employment
(since sheep-farming required far fewer hands) and found no adequate
compensation as yet in the industrial growth of towns. The evil was
aggravated by the iniquitous manner in which landholders systematically
seized every opportunity of appropriating common lands. In the main,
this was the outcome of natural economic tendencies, which repeated
attempts at legislative interference entirely failed to hold in check.
But these troubles had been directly intensified by the action of
Henry’s government for more than ten years past. The dissolution of
the monasteries had deprived the peasantry of an easy-going and on
the whole kindly group of landlords, and replaced these by another
group who were generally greedy and rapacious. Moreover, the wholesale
and monstrous debasement of the coinage, an expedient to which Henry
had been driven by the depletion of the exchequer caused by his
extravagance, had brought about a corresponding drop in effective
wages, besides shaking financial stability and commercial confidence,
with the unfailing disastrous results. From all of which, wide-spread
misery and want were prevalent, more particularly in the rural
districts.
These problems, we have said, might well have daunted even a master of
statecraft. But for each of them the sanguine duke had his solution.
It was with no mere paltry self-seeking designs that he had grasped
at power. He had elected himself to the office of saviour of society:
to the great disgust of some of those members of the Council who had
connived at his elevation, in the confident belief that his interests
and their own were identical, and would be the first objects at which
his government would aim.
III
SOMERSET AND SCOTLAND
At the outset, it was to Scotland that the Protector gave his attention.
Two hundred years before the first Tudor ascended the throne of
England, one of the ablest rulers this country has known realised
that the union of England and Scotland as a single nation was an
eminently desirable object. He sought to achieve that object by force
of arms. He conquered Scotland, and Scotland rebelled. Every time he
reconquered her, she rebelled again. His last attempt at invasion was
foiled by his own death, and during the reign of his incompetent son,
Scotland finally and decisively threw off the yoke he had attempted to
impose. Every subsequent attempt to reimpose that yoke was foiled.
Scottish barons might and did take pay from English kings, but in
general terms it is safe to say that the expectation of an attempt at
the armed conquest of the northern country was the one thing which
could effectively, if only temporarily, induce the factions of the
Scottish nobility to lay aside their personal and family feuds, and
unite in resistance to the Southron. Another method of reconciliation
had attracted the astute Henry VII., who married his eldest daughter
to the Scots king--not indeed with the definite expectation that a
union of the two crowns would result, but still with the _arrière
pensée_ that such a result was not impossible. From the fatal day of
Flodden till the death of Henry VIII., Scotland had been alternately
the prey of rival factions, and the English king had found that the
simplest way of keeping his northern neighbours from becoming dangerous
was to foster those rivalries. He had gone out of his way to prevent
his elder sister’s offspring from inheriting the English throne, by
postponing their claims in his will to those of her younger sister’s
descendants. But he had on the one hand been favourably disposed to the
idea that his own boy should marry the infant queen of Scots when the
two were old enough; and he had more than once implicitly, if not quite
explicitly, asserted the old claim of English suzerainty, with a view
to the ultimate subjection of the Scottish to the English crown if it
should prove convenient to try enforcing it.
Now at the moment of Henry’s death there was a party in Scotland which
depended for its chance of success very largely on English aid. This
was the Protestant section, which had just recently accomplished the
murder of Cardinal Beton. The Catholics looked to France and the
queen-mother’s Guise kinsfolk for support. Various important persons
were as usual quite ready to take either side, as opportunity might
render convenient. But the assassins of the Cardinal were still in
possession of the Castle of St. Andrews. It seemed clear that if
England gave active support to this section and prevented the arrival
of reinforcements to the other party from France, English influence
would predominate. If St. Andrews fell, the French party would acquire
complete ascendency.
Somerset had no lack of political imagination. The idea of the union
with Scotland appealed to him very strongly indeed. A less enthusiastic
advocate of that policy might very well have been content to let things
drift, reckoning that at worst Scotland would be no more willing
to submit to a French than to an English domination, and that the
moment of the almost inevitable anti-French reaction would be the
time for a _rapprochement_. Scotland might after all be postponed
to matters that were more immediately pressing. But there was an
obvious alternative--to espouse the cause of the Protestant leaders
in Scotland, confirm them as a heartily Anglophil party thoroughly
committed at least to the English alliance, and establish them in a
secure ascendency.
Neither of these courses, however, would achieve the solution on
which the Protector was bent--the union of the two countries under a
single Crown. It was true that there were plenty of Scots who in the
abstract regarded such a union as desirable, and had expressed approval
of the particular means proposed to that end--the marriage of Edward
and Mary. If the sexes of the children had been reversed, the scheme
might have run smoothly enough. But the Scottish idea of a union meant
a union on equal terms, and anything which pointed to a danger of the
smaller country being subordinated to the larger was apt to kindle a
fierce flame of opposition. It would require a great deal of diplomatic
tact to convince the Scottish nation at large that the contemplated
marriage would not be turned to account so as to subordinate Scotland.
If England now took up the cause of the Protestants, it was more than
probable that when they were in power they would find sufficient
reasons for evading the marriage. The Scots lords who had expressed
approval were already making it clear that they did not intend to be
bound by their past declarations.
Somerset desired the union by assent. But if the Scots would not
assent, he meant to enforce it. The object in view was excellent, the
method was ruinous. He saw nothing for it but invasion. The castle
of St. Andrews fell, and the party friendly to England lost ground.
Somerset dropped hints about the old claim of suzerainty, and Scottish
indignation grew. His own previous record in Scotland did not encourage
confidence in his good intentions. Early in September, Somerset crossed
the border at the head of a large army. It availed nothing that the
Scots army was completely shattered at Pinkie Cleugh--a defeat due to
the same blunder which had given Surrey the victory at Flodden and was
to give Cromwell the victory at Dunbar, as well as to the superiority
in artillery of the smaller English army--and that Edinburgh was again
sacked. Somerset’s plans had not extended to preparing an army of
occupation. The principal effect of the invasion, in strict accordance
with unvarying precedent, was to set the whole of Scotland in fierce
opposition to the union, with the result that shortly afterwards little
Queen Mary was embarked on French ships and carried off to France,
to be placed under the care of her Guise uncles and betrothed to the
French Dauphin, while the Guise ascendency in Scotland was confirmed.
Had the Protector been actuated mainly by a desire to achieve
popularity, the Pinkie campaign would have been a brilliant success.
But his aims were far higher. His conception of a union with Scotland
was so far in advance of his times that it was not even realised by the
union of the crowns in 1603, or until the Treaty of Union in 1707, more
than 150 years later. That in itself is sufficient to demonstrate that
his statesmanship had its quite admirable side. On the other hand, the
means by which he endeavoured to secure those aims were absolutely the
worst that could have been devised. The Pinkie campaign placed them
more completely and hopelessly out of reach than any inaction or any
other measures he could possibly have contrived. That is sufficient
to explain why his government was on the whole so disastrous. He had
thrown Scotland into the arms of France, and made France herself more
instead of less hostile to England.
IV
SOMERSET’S RELIGIOUS POLICY
The Protector’s praiseworthy desire for a union with Scotland was in
part at least subsidiary to his enthusiasm for the Reformation. The
desire to see Scotland Protestant as well as England was one of his
motives, and a strong one. And for his efforts in the cause of the New
Learning in England he deserves more praise and less censure than is
usually accorded to him. The historians with what may be called the
anti-Protestant bias rarely distinguish between what was done under his
rule and what was done under that of his successor in power. Those with
a Protestant bias are apt to condemn him as lukewarm. Very rarely is
it realised that under his government a degree of toleration prevailed
such as was never contemplated by other Protestant rulers of his times,
still less by Catholic princes. Yet here as in all else his work was
marred by his lack of judgment, and still more--unhappily--by personal
defects in his character.
The religious problem was obviously the most prominent of those which
demanded solution on the death of Henry VIII. That monarch had broken
with the Papacy, revolutionised the relations of the State and the
ecclesiastical organisation in England, dissolved the monasteries,
appropriated their revenues, condemned a few superstitious practices,
and authorised a version of the Scriptures in the vernacular. There
he had stopped. No dogmatic innovations had been admitted, and a
large number of practices which moderate as well as extreme reformers
desired to see altered had been retained. Obedience had been enforced
by stringent legislation, and the Six Articles Act was a standing
menace to innovators. Still, if in his later years Henry refused to go
forward, he also declined to go backward. The party of reaction, when
they attempted to subvert Cranmer’s position in the royal favour, only
got a sharp reprimand for their pains. Yet the Reformation had reached
a stage at which standing still had become impossible.
In framing the list of his executors, it seems as though the king’s
intention had been to preserve a balance, with a slight leaning towards
the forward school; a leaning which would almost have been reversed if
Gardiner had been included. Cranmer was balanced by Tunstal, Hertford
by Wriothesley. Dudley, Herbert, and Russell, were avowedly on the
Protestant side. Others were pronounced supporters of the old order,
and others again like Paget would be guided by circumstances. The
moment, however, that Hertford’s ascendency was assured, it was quite
certain that the forward movement would be set on foot. Cranmer took in
the pulpit the earliest opportunity of likening the boy-king to Josiah,
thereby very definitely fore-shadowing a war against “images.”
Nevertheless, there was nothing in the way of a violent revolution
instituted. Broadly speaking, measures of which Cranmer had openly
avowed himself in favour during the late king’s reign were resorted to
perhaps more hastily than was wise. The Archbishop’s Book of Homilies
received the sanction which Henry had refused to it. Injunctions based
on those of Thomas Cromwell were issued, chiefly directed against
“abused images,” and a visitation by Royal Commission was presently set
on foot. While Somerset was still in Scotland, Gardiner and Bonner, the
bishops of Winchester and London, offered some opposition on the ground
that these measures were inconsistent with the later ecclesiastical
legislation of Henry; and both were placed under easy confinement in
the Fleet. So far, however, there was nothing which could be called
innovation; there was merely a renewal of Cromwell’s activity on the
same lines--accompanied in practice by very much the same irreverence
and violence.
When Convocation and Parliament met for the winter, there was no
appearance of any violence being done to ecclesiastical consciences.
All the bishops were Henry’s bishops, not Somerset’s; and though
they did not prove unanimous in Parliament, a majority of them were
favourable to the reforming measures introduced--with the exception
of the Chantries Act, which was in itself quite obviously nothing
but the completion of an approved policy. Acts for the suppression
of irreverent language about the Sacrament, and enjoining the
administration of the Communion in both kinds, were passed actually at
the instance of the clergy themselves, while the clerical demand for
permission to marry was ignored. The Six Articles Act was repealed,
but that was nothing more than an abolition of penalties, like the
accompanying repeal of the statutes _de heretico comburendo_. During
1548, there were proclamations enjoining the Lenten fast, for the
sake of the fisheries; an Order of service for Communion was issued,
which, however, only gave effect to the recent Act; there was a fresh
Injunction against Images; preaching was restricted to the Homilies,
except for licensed preachers--a custom frequently enforced in the last
reign. In form, there was still no innovation.
In the winter of 1548-9 came the First Prayer Book of Edward VI., and
the Act of Uniformity. The Prayer Book was a compromise, which admitted
of such divergent interpretation that the most and the least advanced
of the bishops could use it without straining their consciences: and
the Act of Uniformity, while it penalised disobedience on the part of
the clergy, laid no burden whatever upon laymen.
Now we have here reviewed summarily the whole of the ecclesiastical
legislation for which Somerset was responsible. On the face of it,
the changes he introduced were by no means revolutionary. Even the
new Prayer Book in effect required no one to accept any new doctrine.
The repeal of penal acts practically permitted but assuredly did not
enforce the teaching of the doctrines against which they had been
directed. Not a single victim was sent to the stake; not a single
bishop was deprived of his See. During Somerset’s absence in Scotland,
Gardiner and Bonner were placed in confinement for disobeying the
Injunctions. Both were released after some three months. Again, the
next year, Gardiner adopted a critical attitude which led to his being
imprisoned again in what was no doubt a high-handed fashion; and
almost at the moment of the Protector’s fall, Bonner was again sent to
prison for disobeying the Act of Uniformity. There is only one other
act of persecution charged to Somerset which even calls for comment,
the condemnation of Joan Bocher; and that is only to remark that as a
matter of fact it was after his fall that her execution was sanctioned.
It was not till he had been ousted from power by Dudley that the
zealots dominated the reforming party.