craftes [of London] commandyd to go to ther halles and ther yt was [shewed] them that the Duke of Somersett wold [to] have taken the Towre and to have [destroyed] the cete and then to go to the ylle of Whytte and so every craft to ward at evere gatt in London and to have a rydyng wache through the cete.' Wriothesley's Chronicle notes how the Council, on the 19th of October, declared the misdemeanours of the duke to the Commons, and ordered that 'everie cittizen in his owne house shoulde looke to his familie, and to see that vagabondes and idle persons might be avoyded out of the cittie.'

'On the xxx day of November,' says Machyn, ther was a grett skaffold mad in Westmynster halle agaynst the next day, that was the ffurst daye of December, for the Duke of Somersett, the which was raynyd of treson and qwytt of ytt and cast of fe[lony] and ther was such a shutt of men and women for they thought that he had byne qwytt.' And Wriothesley noted in his Chronicle, There was such a shoyke and castinge up of caps that it was heard into the Long Acre, beyonde Charinge Cross, and also made the lords astonyed, and word [was] likewise sent to London which the people rejoysed at, and about v of the clocke at night the duke landed at the Crane in the Vintre, and so [was] had thorough Can[dle] Wyke Street to the Toure, the people crying, God save him" all the way he went.' One party, says Holinshed, cried with joy that he was acquitted and the other cried out that he was condemned. The second party was right; the earl had been condemned for felony, for having designed to kill the Duke of Northumberland and others, and, according to the journal of Edward VI., he had 'seemed to confess he went about their death.' At last Northumberland's day had come. Somerset was beheaded on Tower Hill' afore ix of the clocke in the forenoon, which took his death very patiently, but there was such a feare and disturbance amonge

the people sodainely before he suffered that some tumbled downe the ditch and some ranne toward the houses thereby and fell, that it was marveile to see and hear, but howe the cawse was, God knowith.' Such was Wriothesley's testimony. A cry of pardon had been raised but Somerset was not deceived. Protesting his loyalty to the king his nephew, he died; and, more than seven weeks after the trial, the young king made a note in his diary, 'the Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill on the 22nd January 1551-2, between 8 and 9 o'clock in the morning.'

Peter Heylyn, in his History of the Reformation, gives a forcible, if only half true, picture of the two brothers :'The admiral was fierce in courage, courtly in fashion, in personage stately, in voice magnificent: the duke was mild, affable, free and open, more easy to be wrought on but no way malicious, and honoured by the common people as the Admiral was more generally esteemed among nobles. The Protector was more to be desired as a friend, the other more to be feared as an enemy. The defects of each being taken away, their virtues would have made one excellent man.'

One last word must be spoken concerning the literary ability of the two brothers. In keeping with their characters, it was the Protector alone who possessed some literary gifts and tastes and knowledge. A doggerel poem, supposed to have been written a few days before his death, is alone ascribed to the Lord Admiral. It deserves quotation because of the sentiments expressed

'Forgetting God
To love a kynge
Hath been my rod
Or else no thynge
In this frail lyfe
Being a blast

Of care and stryfe

Till yt be paste
Yet God did call
Me, in my pryde
Leste I shulde fall
And from him slyde
For whom he loves, he

Must correcte,
That they may be

Of hys electe,

Then, death, haste thee,

Thou shalt me gaine

Immortallie

With God to raigne,

Lorde! sende the kyng

Like years as Noye (Noah)

In governinge

Thys realme in joye,

And, after thys

Frayl lyfe such grace

That in thy blisse
He maie find place.'

There is something very characteristic of human nature suddenly brought face to face with death in these quaint lines, yet although this, together with the contrast they present to the Lord Admiral's everyday character, might suggest in the paradox of things, that they are genuine, the use of the term 'hys electe,' belonging as it does to a later doctrinal period, relegates them rather to the seventeenth than the sixteenth century.

The Lord Protector having read, during his first imprisonment, a translation in manuscript from the German entitled A most spirituall and most precious Pearl, teaching all men to love and embrace the Cross as a most sweet and necessary thing, proceeded, on his release, to get the manuscript printed, and himself wrote a characteristic preface. In this book he says is put forth 'a real medycyne for an unquiet mind,' for it is well known that whosoever foloweth

but worldlye and mans reason to teache comforte to the troubled mynde can geve but a counterfeit medycyne.' In our greate trouble,' he continues, whyche of late dyd happen unto us (as all the worlde doth know) when it please God for a tyme to attempte us wyth hys scourge, and to prove yf we loved hym: in reading thys book we dyd fynd greate comforte and an inward and godlye workynge power much relevyng to the gryefe of oure mynde.' Hence it seemed to him to be his duty to put this book before all men, as the duty of a Christian to be ready to helpe all men by all wayes possible.' There is in Tottel's Miscellany,1 a poem entitled 'The pore estate to be holden for best,' the first letters of the lines of which (with the last of the last) make the acrostic Edwarde Somerset.' It is written in two rhyme royal stanzas of Alexandrines in the style of Wyatt and Surrey, and may have been written by the Lord Protector during one or other of his imprisonments. His other work of note was the translation of Calvin's Epistle of Godly Consolation from French to English. Religion, whether it had meant little or nothing to him, except from a political standpoint, during the ambitious years of his life-and this, it seems, must remain an unanswered question-certainly brought him, in his last years, the consolation that he expressed in his Preface to A Spiritual Pearl, apart from any question of images and shrines and spoliation of church property.

1 Songes and Sonettes (Tottel's Miscellany), 1557, ed. Arber, p. 164.

CHAPTER IV

VICTIMS OF ELIZABETH

'Our life is turned

Out of her course wherever man is made

An offering or a sacrifice.'-WORDSWORTH.

THE romantic marriages of the Seymour family were not to end with the death of the Lord Admiral.

The Duke of Somerset, by his first wife Katherine Filliol, had two sons; John, who was sent to the Tower with his father in October 1551, and, dying there in December 1552, was buried in Savoy Hospital, and Edward, who was knighted at the Battle of Pinkie in 1547, and was restored to blood by Act of Parliament in 1553. He settled at Berry Pomeroy, in Devonshire, and was the ancestor of the Seymours of Berry Pomeroy, the present Dukes of Somerset.

For the moment, however, we will concern ourselves with the children of the second marriage of the Protector. These were four sons and six daughters. Two of the sons died young, the others were Edward, Earl of Hertford, whose life is the most interesting, and Henry, the admiral, whose greatest fame is that he was concerned in the fight against the Spanish Armada. Of the six daughters, Anne, the eldest, married firstly, John Dudley, son of the Earl of Northumberland, and, secondly, Sir Edward Unton; 1 Margaret, Jane, and Katherine all died unmarried, the last being maid-of-honour to Queen Eliza

1 She died in February 1587-8, and there is extant 'A sermon preached at Farington (Faringdon) in Barkeshire the seventeene Daye of Februarie 1587, at the burial of Anne, Countess of Warwicke, widow of Sir Edward Umpton,' by B. Chamberlaine, London, 1591, 8vo.