The Uncrowned Kings of England: The Black Legend of the Dudleys Page 18
Dudley’s hesitation has to be seen against the background of political and religious tension at court. The conservatives were in a frenzy of accusations, arrests and interrogations in and around Westminster. Members of the chamber staff, including John Lascelles, marked out for revenge by the Howards, were being imprisoned or placed under house arrest. Then, in early July, Gardiner and his allies moved against the queen and her ladies. In the most extraordinary sequence of events they gambled for desperately high stakes. Anne Askew was subjected to several interrogations in various locations, some dire, others quite comfortable, in an attempt to disorientate her. Finally, on 29 June, she reached the Tower. There she was subjected to an act of sheer barbarism. Not only was she put to the rack, something quite unheard of in the treatment of female heretics in England, but the officers who personally operated the engine of torture were none other than Lord Chancellor Wriothesly and Sir Richard Rich. They questioned her closely and repeatedly about ladies of the court who, they said, had sent her money. The Duchess of Suffolk, the Countess of Hertford and Lady Denny were among those specifically named. But, they suggested, Anne had more exalted confederates. ‘You had help from some of the king’s Council, did you not?’ they demanded. But Anne remained mute.
An oblique attack having failed, Gardiner now mounted a direct assault on the queen. On 8 July he and his friends achieved a major triumph in the issuing of a proclamation against pernicious books. ‘From henceforth,’ it ran,
no man, woman or person of what estate, condition or degree soever he or they be . . . shall have, take or keep within his possession the text of the New Testament of Tyndale’s or Coverdale’s translation in English, nor any other that is permitted by the Act of Parliament made at Westminster in the four and thirtieth and five and thirtieth year of his majesty’s most noble reign, nor any manner of books printed or written in the English tongue . . . in the names of Frith, Tyndale, Wycliffe, Joy . . .11
This catch-all measure was something they had twice tried unsuccessfully to get through parliament. Now Gardiner used it as a net to catch some exotic fish. Finding Henry in one of his tetchy moods, he observed that the queen seemed to have set herself up as some sort of authority on religious matters, even to the extent of presuming to instruct her husband. How topsy-turvy the world was becoming, he suggested, when women turned theologians. He managed to persuade the king to allow Catherine to be examined as to her faith and arranged that she would be apprehended while she and her husband walked one afternoon in the privy garden. Gardiner had played his ace but his opponents were able to trump it. The ploy was discovered. Catherine hurried to throw herself on the king’s mercy. All was forgiven. And when Wriothesly turned up at the appointed time with some of the king’s guards, Henry angrily dismissed him for his presumption.
The conservatives had overreached themselves. Henry extended his protection, not only over the queen, but also over some of the courtiers who had fallen under suspicion. They were allowed a few victims, including John Lascelles and Anne Askew who perished together in the flames on 16 July, but their deaths drew a line under the last persecution of the reign. Four days earlier John Dudley had decided that the crisis had passed and that he could set out for France. ‘The Viscount Lisle, Admiral, with the Bishop of Durham and divers lords and above a hundred gentlemen, all in velvet coats and chains of gold, went to Paris and were there solemnly received and feasted.’12 At the end of the month Seymour returned to court and by 12 August Dudley had resumed his seat at the Council table. Their position was henceforth unchallenged though on one occasion feelings ran so high that Dudley reached across the table and struck Bishop Gardiner a blow across the face. For this severe breach of etiquette he was banished to his estates for a month. On 29 January 1547, the imperial ambassador gloomily summed up the situation for his master:
If (which God forbid) the King should die . . . it is probable that these two men, Seymour and Dudley, will have the management of affairs, because, apart from the King’s affection for them, and other reasons, there are no other nobles of a fit age and ability for the task.13
But the great tyrant was already dead.
III
KING JOHN
9
Feast in the Morning
Woe to you, O land, when your king is a child and your princes feast in the morning
Ecclesiastes 10:16
The eleven years and ten months during which first Edward VI, then Mary Tudor, occupied the throne of England have often been regarded as a sort of hiatus between the longer and more spectacular reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Little of significance occurred, has been supposed, during the rule of the Protestant boy and the Catholic woman, except a lot of disastrous wrangling over religion. Edward, particularly, remains for many people a shadowy figure whose short life was dominated by powerful and unscrupulous men who milked the country for their own advantage. That is not the way that modern historians see the reign of the boy king, and specifically the years 1549–53.
. . . it is possible to imagine that, had the King lived, the Dudley years would have allowed Edward VI to operate at the heart of one of the most radical, dynamic, and personal adult male monarchies of the Tudor century.1
John Dudley, who had served Henry VIII loyally and effectively as courtier, soldier and diplomat, went on to serve his son in the office of government leader, and most commentators now believe that he made a pretty good job of it.
In the early months of 1547 there were, doubtless, many people up and down the country who pondered the warning of Ecclesiastes. Minority rule meant unstable government and the potential rivalry of noble factions vying for power. That had invariably been the pattern in the past. But what happened in 1547 was something truly remarkable: a nine-year-old boy came to the throne, supported by a Council and a chamber staff who worked together and were in agreement on political and religious fundamentals. Over the next few years there were certainly personality clashes and policy changes. There would be rivalries, some of which would prove fatal, but the whole reign was marked by an underlying unity and continuity of purpose. The debilitating divisions that had cleft the government for the past twenty years were things of the past. An unwavering, idealistic course was set towards a religious and social revolution and dissentient voices that might have effectively challenged it either fell silent of their own accord or were silenced.
Paradoxically, it was the old king, whose religious opinions could never have been clearly labelled as ‘Catholic’ or ‘Protestant’, who launched the unequivocally evangelical regime on its way. Determined at the last, when even he had to recognize the imminent reality of death, to ensure that the Tudor dynasty would not be torn apart by religious factions, Henry quite deliberately entrusted the governance of the realm to Seymour, Dudley, Cranmer and their supporters. His motivation was expressed most clearly in the reason he gave for excluding Gardiner from the council of regency. When it was suggested to him that the bishop’s name might have been omitted by an oversight, Henry fiercely replied,
Hold your peace! I remembered him well enough and of good purpose have left him out. For, surely, if he were in my testament and one of you [executors] he would cumber you all, and you should never rule him, he is of so troublesome a nature . . . I myself could use him and rule him to all manner of purposes, as seemed good unto me, but so shall you never do . . .2
Henry intended that his young son should have a tranquil start to his reign. He, himself, had been able to enforce a religious stalemate on the realm and subordinate religious principles to diplomatic necessity. (Even in his last year he flirted with both Imperial and German embassies by encouraging one to hope for a rapprochement with the pope and the other to look for an alliance of Protestant states) but he was not passing the crown on to a strong-willed and self-assured heir who would be able to continue his policies. That being the case it was necessary to hand real power to one of the prevailing factions.
And when it came to deciding whether traditionalists or progressive
s should be in the ascendant he really had no choice. If he settled Seymour and his colleagues in the dominant position it was not because of any shift in personal conviction towards the evangelical position. Henry’s arrangements for the new reign were based upon purely pragmatic grounds. Seymour and Dudley were the young, up-and-coming men. They had shown themselves to possess military prowess and diplomatic acumen. Moreover, they were his own creation. He could rely on them in a way that he could never rely on the Howards, proud in their ancient lineage, or Gardiner, whose first loyalty would always be to the church. Henry also recognized that Seymour and Dudley did not stand alone. Not only did they have numerous friends and supporters at court, they were also backed by a coterie of churchmen, scholars and lawyers who had a coherent political programme: Cranmer; Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of Rochester; Thomas Goodrich, Bishop of Ely; young Edward’s ‘New Learning’ tutors, Sir John Cheke and Richard Cox, among many others. But what must have weighed heaviest in Henry’s thinking was that only in the hands of the evangelical group was the royal supremacy safe. The Crown’s control of the church in England had been bought at enormous cost and the old king was not going to put that at risk by placing at his son’s Council table those who hankered after the ‘good old days’.
It has sometimes been thought that pure chance played a major part in the swings and roundabouts of the last months of Henry’s reign. Gardiner foolishly fell out with the king by demurring when he demanded an exchange of diocesan and Crown lands. Norfolk was caught up in the folie de grandeur of his son, the Earl of Surrey, who was reported as boasting that when the king died his family would be in power and who compounded his stupidity by quartering Plantagenet arms with his own. For this offence father and son were both committed to the Tower, found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. Surrey suffered the supreme penalty on 19 January and Norfolk, who had been a close royal servant since the first days of the reign, would undoubtedly have followed him to the block if Henry’s death had not brought him an eleventh-hour reprieve. But to believe that the balance of Edward’s Council depended on his father’s pique with the bishop and his indignation with the leading nobleman is to misjudge Henry’s motivation. He had frequently destroyed men and women on a whim – or, perhaps, it would be truer to say that he had more often allowed their rivals to destroy them while keeping his own hands relatively clean – but he was the driving force behind the downfall of Gardiner and the Howards. He devoted an enormous amount of his dwindling energies to ensuring the convictions of Norfolk and Surrey and he refused to allow the repentant bishop into his presence. Lord Paget, a few years later, remembered that ‘his majesty abhorred [Gardiner] more than any man in his realm’ and only referred to him ‘with such terms as the said Lord Paget is sorry to name’.3 These men had certainly played into Henry’s hands, and without the machinations of their rivals, but the king had their measure and would, one way or another, have excluded them from the government of his son.
The new rulers lost no time in securing their position. Within hours of Henry’s death Seymour sped out to Ashridge to collect Edward and bring him, first, to Enfield where Princess Elizabeth was living, then, to the Tower. Only when this had been done was the news of the late king’s passing released. Immediately the executors named in Henry’s will (authorized by that famous dry stamp) set about securing their positions. There were sixteen of them and the shape of the minority government had been left in their hands. As they deliberated and bargained within the Tower’s old, draughty, outmoded chambers they agreed that they should have a leader and that the obvious man for the job was the king’s uncle, Edward Seymour. He now took the titles of Lord Protector of the Realm and Governor of the King’s Person. He was elevated to the dukedom of Somerset and granted lands to the annual value of £800 to support his new eminence. His colleagues also had to be rewarded if they were to carry the dignity of their position and to remain loyal to the duke. Sir William Paget, the Secretary, produced a ‘book’ which, he claimed, the old king had instructed him to draw up in order to fill gaps in the ranks of the nobility which had of late become ‘greatly decayed’.
John Dudley came out with enormous gains and one significant loss. He was raised to the next order of nobility with £200 per annum in land. It was first proposed to revive for him the earldom of Coventry, extinct since soon after the Conquest, but Dudley had his eye on a much more prestigious title. Claiming descent from the younger daughter of Richard Beauchamp (d. 1439), premier earl of England, he asked for the earldom of Warwick. The title and lands had reverted to the Crown in 1471, since when the Tudors had leased or sold away substantial portions of the estates which had supported this ancient and illustrious peerage. Warwick, a flourishing market town, recently incorporated, overlooked by its ‘most stately and magnificent castle,’4 was at the centre of the region where Dudley had been building up an impressive patrimony over the years and this was his chance to become undisputed master of a wide swathe of central England. He had some hard bargaining to do because it seems that the Council or, perhaps, Seymour, showed initial reluctance in granting him all the traditional appurtenances of the earldom. On 24 March he had to appeal to Paget to use his influence with his colleagues to make good the deficiency. The letter is highly revealing, not only of Dudley’s ambition, but also of his dynastic pride and his sense of tradition.
Some may allege consideration concerning the non-assignment of the lordship of Warwick [to me], saying it is a stately castle, a goodly park and a great royalty. But the castle is itself unable to lodge a good baron with his train. All on one side, with the dungeon tower is in ruins. The late King sold all the principal manors belonging to the earldom and castle, so that now only the rents of some houses in the town and meadows in Wedgnock Park belong to it. I am Constable, High Steward and Master of the Game of the castle, park and town, with herbage for life. Because of the name and my descent from one of the daughters of the rightful line I am the more desirous to have the thing. 5
Dudley obtained the lordship of Warwick and from this point he adopted as his family badge the bear and ragged (more accurately ‘raguled’) staff, the badge of the Beauchamp earls. The bear supposedly represented Arthal, a Saxon earl (‘Arctos’, Latin for the Great Bear), and the staff was an uprooted ash tree from which the branches had been lopped.
Within the court Dudley received the senior position he had apparently craved eighteen months before, when he was appointed Lord Great Chamberlain. However, at the same time he had the chagrin of seeing the Admiralty taken from him and granted to a less worthy suitor. Somerset had to find perquisites for his younger brother, Thomas Seymour. There was little love lost between the siblings but, as the king’s other uncle, Thomas could not be ignored. And he had a not undistinguished military record. During the recent war with France he had served as one of Dudley’s admirals and played his part in maintaining England’s mastery of the Narrows, but he lacked Dudley’s energy, enterprise and commitment to detail. However, his besetting sin in the eyes of his predecessor was putting his own interests before those of his country. Baron Seymour of Sudeley, as he now became, was a notorious patron of pirates. Now that England was not at war letters of marque were not being issued to privateers but this did not deter him from encouraging his captains to set upon merchant vessels of all nations and taking a share of the proceeds. It was the Council who had to cope with the diplomatic backlash from these activities. If Lord Seymour’s mind was not wholly on his naval duties it was because he had other personal concerns. Basically, he was jealous of his brother and saw no reason why he should not share the honour and the profits of his nephew’s guardianship. When Somerset would not give him what he wanted, he went other ways about getting it. He paid court to Princess Elizabeth and, according to gossip, also to Princess Mary and Anne of Cleves. Then, a mere few weeks after Henry VIII’s death, he secretly married his widow, Catherine Parr, imagining that this gave him a double claim on overseeing the king’s upbringing. Soon he was wheedling hi
s way into young Edward’s favour by giving the boy presents and encouraging him to act independently of his governor.
All this was a problem for the Lord Protector but Thomas Seymour’s irresponsibility and hubris rankled with Dudley also. He deeply resented handing over the navy, for which he was still working with energy, industry and flair. In 1549 the Imperial ambassador reported an argument he had overheard in which Dudley told the younger Seymour, ‘be content . . . with the honour done to you for your brother’s sake and with your office of Lord High Admiral, which I gave up to you for the same motive; for neither the King nor I will be governed by you; nor would he be governed by your brother, were it not that his virtue and loyalty towards the King and the kingdom make him the man fittest to administer the affairs of the country during the King’s minority.’6
Yet it was precisely that last assertion that John Dudley was beginning to doubt. It has been customary to emphasize the material benefits obtained by Dudley and his colleagues once they held undisputed sway. Dudley certainly made significant gains. He was assiduous in campaigning for the lands he wanted and in buying and selling properties which enabled him to continue enhancing his position as the leading Midlands magnate. But such acquisitiveness pales into insignificance beside the landed fortune (reckoned at £7,500 per annum) built up by Somerset to support his semiregal estate. The showy centrepiece of his property holdings was the new Somerset House in the Strand, a vast waterside palace. It stood in stark contrast to his own modest building projects and can only have reinforced his growing suspicion of his old friend’s deteriorating character.
Dudley and Somerset were ideologically committed to the same broad programme and any rifts in the government could only give comfort to the likes of Gardiner, Howard and Wriothesley, who were watching closely from the sidelines of power. Dudley would not play into the hands of the reactionaries by letting them know his reservations. At the same time he suffered the frustration of the talented subordinate obliged to watch his superior making a mess of things. Somerset ‘clearly lacked the character and personality necessary for the office he held’7 and like, most men in such a position, he progressively distanced himself from his colleagues, became increasingly dictatorial and resented those who bade fair to outshine him.