The Uncrowned Kings of England: The Black Legend of the Dudleys Page 19
Dudley’s allegiance had been severely put to the test in the relinquishing of the Admiralty. It was a job in which he had invested an enormous amount of himself. It is possible that he had already begun grooming his close friend and protégé, Sir Edward Clinton, as his eventual successor. Clinton was a soldier–courtier in the same mould as Dudley and the two men had worked well together on campaign and committee ever since Dudley had been appointed Lord Admiral. Instead, he had been obliged to place the navy in the hands of a flashy, unstable, untrustworthy subordinate. Lord Seymour’s performance (or non-performance) of his duties soon confirmed Dudley’s worse suspicions. During the campaigns of the next couple of years he was very rarely to be found at sea and he was becoming daily more notorious for his support for pirates. Seymour also made no secret of his enmity towards Dudley. In January 1549 councillors and courtiers were remembering that the Lord Admiral delighted to point out how his own landholdings were located in relation to those of Dudley and Somerset and how many gentlemen and tenants he had pledged to his service. He boasted of having thwarted Dudley’s plans by refusing to exchange his manor of Stratford upon Avon for land of greater value. And, when he was trying to win over the Marquess of Dorset, he urged him to keep his house in Warwickshire, ‘chiefly to match Lord Warwick’.8
What made matters worse was that naval hostilities with France were resumed before the reign was many months old. The peace that Dudley had laboured so hard to secure scarcely survived the death of Henry VIII. Within weeks Francis I also died and the new king, Henri II, abandoned his father’s ‘weak’ treaty. He was determined to wipe out the shame of the loss of Boulogne and to forge an alliance with Scotland involving the marriage of Mary Stuart to his own heir. The old threat to England’s security had surfaced once more. From a military and diplomatic point of view it was a matter of ‘business as usual’. Somerset decided that the best way to bring the Scots to the negotiating table was to give them another demonstration of the superiority of England’s armed might. He personally assembled an army of 18,000 at Berwick, supported by a force of 24 ships under the command of Edward, Lord Clinton. What was planned was a repeat of the triumphs of 1542 and 1544. Once again Dudley was given the major responsibility of commanding the vanguard. He performed with his usual combination of calm efficiency and flair. He crossed the border at the head of 4,000 men and advanced towards the Firth of Forth. At one point he found himself ambushed with only a small escort. Undeterred, he charged the enemy and put them to rout. On another occasion the Earl of Huntly, the Scottish commander, proposed that the issue be settled in single combat between himself and Somerset. Immediately Dudley volunteered himself for the confrontation. Somerset, of course, refused to allow it. He had no use for chivalric gestures and, whatever the outcome of such a combat might have been, it would not at all have suited him. He could not risk sacrificing his best general but, equally, he had no intention of letting that general return home as the hero of the hour.
The two armies finally met at Pinkie, near Inveresk. The result was a technical victory for the English but it was a long and bloody fight and casualties were heavy on both sides. To the winners the situation they found themselves in was painfully familiar. The border had been temporarily secured but how were they to turn a brief tranquillity into a lasting peace? Somerset’s solution was twofold: he would leave behind him in the Lowlands a number of garrisoned strongholds and he would impose a marriage treaty which would bind the two nations firmly together. Having organized the first part of the programme, he left Dudley at Berwick to head a team of commissioners to negotiate with the Scottish leaders and took the bulk of his men back to London. The policy failed. The English outposts that were supposed to overawe the surrounding country were too far away to be readily succoured when necessary and thus were themselves vulnerable, especially when French reinforcements were sent to aid the local levies. As for the treaty, it never materialized because the Scottish negotiators simply failed to turn up. Huntly famously observed that though he approved in principal of the proposed marriage between Edward and Mary, ‘I like not this wooing’. English bullying achieved the exact opposite of what it had intended because it drove Scotland into the arms of the French. The leaders in Edinburgh looked to Henri II for aid and he agreed to be the nation’s guardian in return for a Franco–Scottish marriage treaty. In the summer of 1548 little Mary Stuart was shipped across the North Sea and Henri greeted her with the words ‘France and Scotland are now one country.’ The government at Westminster was alarmed. Was this 1545 over again? They ordered Lord Clinton to sea with all haste.
From March 1547 to November 1548 Dudley was absent from the capital for long periods of time, surprising self-denial for a man widely regarded as the most effective and popular member of the governing group. Just as in 1539 and 1541–2, he turned his back on the court. In seeking to understand this behaviour we do not need to assume, as some have done, that Dudley was giving way to a prolonged fit of pique or was actively plotting against Somerset. In fact he was being intensely loyal under increasingly difficult circumstances, and had decided that he could best show that loyalty by distancing himself from political events. It was not Dudley’s hostility that kept him away, but Somerset’s paranoia and jealousy.
All members of the political and diplomatic elite were watching with intense interest the experiment in regency government. They noted Somerset’s behaviour, his relationship with the Council and the reactions of his colleagues. They observed the Protector getting into difficulties both at home and abroad (discussed further below). Under these circumstances nothing would have been easier for Dudley than to skulk around Westminster, feeding off the disaffection of others and holding clandestine meetings behind the Protector’s back. Dudley, however, was not an intriguer, but he was careful to keep himself well informed about national and international events and took every opportunity to assure the Protector of his desire to be of service.
He chose to communicate, not with Somerset in person, but with the men who were closest to the nation’s leader. His chief confidants were Sir William Paget and William Cecil. Paget was Secretary to the Council in the early weeks of the reign and was subsequently raised to the position of Comptroller of the Household. Cecil, a young man whose remarkable career in English politics was just beginning, was Somerset’s private secretary. Through these intermediaries Dudley offered advice, sought favours, conveyed information and displayed his support. Thus we find him writing with news he has discovered about French naval manoeuvres. He entreats for a lady who ‘having been destroyed by bad London surgeons, has been eased by the surgeon of Boulogne. Please have my lord let him remain or she may lose a leg’. When Stephen Gardiner, who steadfastly opposed the religious innovations of the new regime, was brought to Whitehall for interrogation by the Council, Dudley was eager for news:
I write to ask if [the Lord Protector] has proceeded with the arrogant bishop according to his deservings. I heard he was to be before my lord’s grace and the Council yesterday, but had it been so I suppose it would have been more spoken of. I fear his accustomed wiliness and the persuasions of his friends will again let the fox deceive the lion. Tell me something of the matter.9
And in the same letter he adds a note which tantalizingly refers to an earlier letter about a subject close to his heart: ‘Remind my lord about the navies.’
In the summer of 1548 Dudley requested a government job that would give him every excuse to spend most of his time at Dudley. (This was still his principal residence. He never seems to have changed his opinion of Warwick Castle and did not bother to engage in a grandiose building programme there.) He asked to be given the oversight of Wales and the border. This was the same position of responsibility he had sought from Cromwell almost a decade before, when he had declared himself tired of the stressful life of court and capital, and it is tempting to think that he found himself once again under the same emotional pressures. This time his request was granted and he became President of the
Principality of Wales and its Marches. Via Cecil he expressed his thanks: ‘I have received my lord’s letters, being glad he accepts my offer to serve, which is but my duty. For his friendship I would do more if I could.’10
Now Dudley’s correspondence begins to reveal a man expressing his devotion to Somerset, as it were, through gritted teeth. The two were soon at loggerheads in relation to Dudley’s new role. Dudley wanted to stamp his own authority on the principality but found there a group of officials who were well set in their ways and reluctant to bow to their new superior. The president had reason to suspect the chief judicial officer, one Townsend, of gross corruption and some of the councillors as his aiders and abettors. Dudley asked permission to replace Townsend with John Gosnold, a lawyer in the Court of Augmentations whom he knew well to be an extremely efficient officer and a devout evangelical. Somerset received the request and at first considered it sympathetically. Then he changed his mind; Townsend had been granted his office for life and he would not remove him. Reluctantly, though with an acute sense of political realities, Dudley accepted the decision: ‘[Townsend] cannot be removed without a great cause and I will not advise my lord to break any of the King’s grants by letters patent, for the same may happen to me and others afterwards.’11 He did, however, ask for some of his fellow council members to be removed so that his own judgement would carry more weight. Again, the Protector seemed to accept the recommendation, only to go back on his word afterwards. Dudley was furious. However, by the time he responded to Cecil he had calmed sufficiently to divert his criticism from Somerset.
By whose persuasions this happens I know not but am sure I have base friends who smile to see me so used. But I trust, despite my charges and pains, I have made my provision there. Despite mockery I shall be as ready to serve as those who have now won their purpose, not the first or last to be worked with my lord. If they work no more displeasure I will be more willing to forgive.12
Those lines suggest the frustration of a man who has tried to escape the negative effects of factional jealousies, only to find that they have pursued him deep into the shires and who realizes that he has no support from the man to whom he has pledged his allegiance. Whatever friendly comradeship had once existed between Somerset and Dudley had by now been squandered.
Dudley was very far from being the only member of the political class to be alienated from the Lord Protector. In the spring of 1549 Paget wrote to Somerset in words that Dudley might have used had he been prepared to wear his heart on his sleeve.
No man dares speak what he thinks, although necessary . . . you sometimes nip me so sharply that if I did not know you well and were not assured of your favour, I might often have blanched for speaking frankly. If other honest men, not so well acquainted with your nature, say their opinions honestly and are snapped, God knows what you shall lose . . . A King who discourages men from saying their opinions frankly imperils the realm. A subject in great authority as you are, doing so, is likely to endanger himself as well as the commonwealth . . . relent sometimes from your own opinions. Your surety will be greater, your burden less.13
It took Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, less than eighteen months to alienate himself from most of his conciliar colleagues. The disaffection cannot be ascribed to religious faction. By the summer of 1548 the conservative leaders, Norfolk and Gardiner, were both in the Tower. Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, the only other effective reactionary, was deprived of the Lord Chancellorship and did not regain his seat on the Council until January 1549. The remaining members were reformists, temporizers or Catholic sympathizers keeping their heads well below the parapet. Somerset only had himself to blame for the development of a conciliar majority which would eventually force him from power.
Character defects aside, Somerset’s problem was that he was a man with a mission. Edward VI and his uncle inherited a dislocated realm. Widespread changes in land ownership, coupled with rapidly rising inflation had created or exacerbated a variety of social problems. Landlords, in order to maximize profits or simply to make ends meet, turned arable land into pasture and raised rents. Itinerant workers and beggars (often lumped together as ‘vagrants’) swelled the population of towns, placing pressure on food prices, rents and local services. Taken individually most problems facing the economy were not new but they were widespread and they were worsening rapidly.
Contemporaries were hard pressed to understand what was happening to them (why should the price of flour go up in a year of good harvest?) and economic historians still disagree about some aspects of the sixteenth-century crisis. Those caught in the poverty trap and several social commentators tended to identify the causes of distress with the more obvious recent events. They looked at the roofless abbeys and lamented the disappearance of monastic hospitals, schools and alms distribution. They gawped at the fine houses being built by ‘new’ men in town and country and inveighed against the arrivistes who had no care for local people and ancient ways. Preachers condemned the culture of pitiless greed encouraged by massive land speculation and the pursuit of quick fortunes.
. . . London was never so ill as it is now. In times past men were full of pity and compassion but now there is no pity; for in London their brother shall die in the streets for cold, he shall lie sick at the door between stock and stock . . . and perish there for hunger . . . When any man died they would bequeath great sums of money toward the relief of the poor . . . but now charity is waxen cold; none helpeth the . . . poor . . . Repent therefore, repent, London and remember that the same God liveth now that punished Nebo and he will punish sin as well now as he did then . . .14
Such perceptions were as faulty as ‘golden age’ nostalgia usually is but they were ubiquitous and powerful.
They were fed by the feelings of insecurity and bewilderment engendered by religious change. Parishioners had seen their churches stripped of ancient shrines and images. Local pilgrimage centres that had brought business to many areas had ceased to function. The replacement of familiar objects of veneration by chained bibles forced men to alter their spiritual compass bearings. If the process of change had been all in one direction it might not have been so disruptive but Henry VIII’s stop-go Reformation could only leave people confused and apprehensive.
Somerset determined to come to their aid. He would provide clear policies and firm leadership. He would protect the people from their voracious social superiors and lead them into the lush pastures of pure faith and religious truth. He pledged himself to what has been called a ‘commonwealth’ programme which coupled unequivocal evangelical revival with the redress of social ills. Edward Seymour emerges from the historical record as a man with two faces, one that of the ‘good duke’, which he showed to the general populace, and the other the ambitious and ill-tempered autocrat so familiar to those who tried to work with him. Of few men has the verdict of historians varied so much over the centuries. Susan Brigden neatly exposes the dilemma:
As the soldier who had left the poor in the Borders to live like animals in their ruined homes; as rack-renter, sheep-master and encloser; as the ruler who presided over the Vagrancy Act which imposed slavery upon those who, willingly or not, left their homes, he was ostensibly an unlikely social reformer. Yet to that role he aspired. Here was a man as ambitious of virtue, the badge of nobility, as of riches.15
Somerset was not the first politician and certainly not the last to suffer from messianic delusions; to believe, quite sincerely, that he was the people’s friend while feathering his own nest and developing a monumental ego. Moreover, his position was not one of total isolation. He did have behind him a coterie of enthusiastic supporters who gave his regime philosophical respectability and spiritual sanction. This group embraced ecclesiastics like Thomas Cranmer, now eagerly pushing through parliament and convocation a programme of doctrinal and liturgical change, the king’s reformist tutors, Roger Ascham, John Cheke and Richard Cox, the radical parliamentarian John Hales, leading academics and literary propagandists f
or social reform such as Sir Thomas Smith and a bevy of preachers who came to court to preach before the king, foremost among them was the veteran Hugh Latimer.
Within months the regime had removed from the statute book the Act of Six Articles and every subsequent anti-reform measure. Commissioners were despatched throughout the land to report on the state of the church, armed with draconian injunctions. They were to bestir the local clergy,
that they shall take away, utterly distinct and destroy all shrines, covering of shrines, all tables, candlesticks, trindles [wax tapers], or rolls of wax, pictures, paintings and all other monument of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and superstition, so that there remain no memory of the same in wall, glass windows or elsewhere within their churches or houses. And they shall exhort all their parishioners to do the like within their several houses . . .16
As if that 1547 injunction were not clear enough it was followed in subsequent years by still more specific instructions for the whitewashing of church interiors and the removal of all traces of the old style of worship. Cranmer and diocesan officers kept a close eye on parish clergy to ensure that their orders were being carried out. The government’s attitude gave the green light to local zealots to take the law into their own hands. In vain the commissioners pointed out that unauthorized defacing of images was forbidden. The general impression gained by most ordinary people was that the churches were to be gutted by order of the new regime. Therefore, activists saw no reason to hesitate to vent their feelings on artefacts they found offensive. Conservative clergy and parishioners protested against this iconoclasm, but cases which came before the Council or justices of the peace were usually decided in favour of the reformers.