A Child's History of England

by Dickens, Charles

  find himself, next day, accused of treason, to show it to the

  council board. This Cranmer did to the confusion of his enemies.

  I suppose the King thought he might want him a little longer.

  He married yet once more. Yes, strange to say, he found in England

  another woman who would become his wife, and she was CATHERINE

  PARR, widow of Lord Latimer. She leaned towards the reformed

  religion; and it is some comfort to know, that she tormented the

  King considerably by arguing a variety of doctrinal points with him

  on all possible occasions. She had very nearly done this to her

  own destruction. After one of these conversations the King in a

  very black mood actually instructed GARDINER, one of his Bishops

  who favoured the Popish opinions, to draw a bill of accusation

  against her, which would have inevitably brought her to the

  scaffold where her predecessors had died, but that one of her

  friends picked up the paper of instructions which had been dropped

  in the palace, and gave her timely notice. She fell ill with

  terror; but managed the King so well when he came to entrap her

  into further statements - by saying that she had only spoken on

  such points to divert his mind and to get some information from his

  extraordinary wisdom - that he gave her a kiss and called her his

  sweetheart. And, when the Chancellor came next day actually to

  take her to the Tower, the King sent him about his business, and

  honoured him with the epithets of a beast, a knave, and a fool. So

  near was Catherine Parr to the block, and so narrow was her escape!

  There was war with Scotland in this reign, and a short clumsy war

  with France for favouring Scotland; but, the events at home were so

  dreadful, and leave such an enduring stain on the country, that I

  need say no more of what happened abroad.

  A few more horrors, and this reign is over. There was a lady, ANNE

  ASKEW, in Lincolnshire, who inclined to the Protestant opinions,

  and whose husband being a fierce Catholic, turned her out of his

  house. She came to London, and was considered as offending against

  the six articles, and was taken to the Tower, and put upon the rack

  - probably because it was hoped that she might, in her agony,

  criminate some obnoxious persons; if falsely, so much the better.

  She was tortured without uttering a cry, until the Lieutenant of

  the Tower would suffer his men to torture her no more; and then two

  priests who were present actually pulled off their robes, and

  turned the wheels of the rack with their own hands, so rending and

  twisting and breaking her that she was afterwards carried to the

  fire in a chair. She was burned with three others, a gentleman, a

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  clergyman, and a tailor; and so the world went on.

  Either the King became afraid of the power of the Duke of Norfolk,

  and his son the Earl of Surrey, or they gave him some offence, but

  he resolved to pull THEM down, to follow all the rest who were

  gone. The son was tried first - of course for nothing - and

  defended himself bravely; but of course he was found guilty, and of

  course he was executed. Then his father was laid hold of, and left

  for death too.

  But the King himself was left for death by a Greater King, and the

  earth was to be rid of him at last. He was now a swollen, hideous

  spectacle, with a great hole in his leg, and so odious to every

  sense that it was dreadful to approach him. When he was found to

  be dying, Cranmer was sent for from his palace at Croydon, and came

  with all speed, but found him speechless. Happily, in that hour he

  perished. He was in the fifty-sixth year of his age, and the

  thirty-eighth of his reign.

  Henry the Eighth has been favoured by some Protestant writers,

  because the Reformation was achieved in his time. But the mighty

  merit of it lies with other men and not with him; and it can be

  rendered none the worse by this monster's crimes, and none the

  better by any defence of them. The plain truth is, that he was a

  most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of

  blood and grease upon the History of England.

  CHAPTER XXIX - ENGLAND UNDER EDWARD THE SIXTH

  HENRY THE EIGHTH had made a will, appointing a council of sixteen

  to govern the kingdom for his son while he was under age (he was

  now only ten years old), and another council of twelve to help

  them. The most powerful of the first council was the EARL OF

  HERTFORD, the young King's uncle, who lost no time in bringing his

  nephew with great state up to Enfield, and thence to the Tower. It

  was considered at the time a striking proof of virtue in the young

  King that he was sorry for his father's death; but, as common

  subjects have that virtue too, sometimes, we will say no more about

  it.

  There was a curious part of the late King's will, requiring his

  executors to fulfil whatever promises he had made. Some of the

  court wondering what these might be, the Earl of Hertford and the

  other noblemen interested, said that they were promises to advance

  and enrich THEM. So, the Earl of Hertford made himself DUKE OF

  SOMERSET, and made his brother EDWARD SEYMOUR a baron; and there

  were various similar promotions, all very agreeable to the parties

  concerned, and very dutiful, no doubt, to the late King's memory.

  To be more dutiful still, they made themselves rich out of the

  Church lands, and were very comfortable. The new Duke of Somerset

  caused himself to be declared PROTECTOR of the kingdom, and was,

  indeed, the King.

  As young Edward the Sixth had been brought up in the principles of

  the Protestant religion, everybody knew that they would be

  maintained. But Cranmer, to whom they were chiefly entrusted,

  advanced them steadily and temperately. Many superstitious and

  ridiculous practices were stopped; but practices which were

  harmless were not interfered with.

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  The Duke of Somerset, the Protector, was anxious to have the young

  King engaged in marriage to the young Queen of Scotland, in order

  to prevent that princess from making an alliance with any foreign

  power; but, as a large party in Scotland were unfavourable to this

  plan, he invaded that country. His excuse for doing so was, that

  the Border men - that is, the Scotch who lived in that part of the

  country where England and Scotland joined - troubled the English

  very much. But there were two sides to this question; for the

  English Border men troubled the Scotch too; and, through many long

  years, there were perpetual border quarrels which gave rise to

  numbers of old tales and songs. However, the Protector invaded

  Scotland; and ARRAN, the Scottish Regent, with an army twice as

  large as his, advanced to meet him. They encountered on the banks

  of the river Esk, within a few miles of Edinburgh; and there, after

  a little skirmish, the Protector made such moderate proposals, in

  offering to retire if th
e Scotch would only engage not to marry

  their princess to any foreign prince, that the Regent thought the

  English were afraid. But in this he made a horrible mistake; for

  the English soldiers on land, and the English sailors on the water,

  so set upon the Scotch, that they broke and fled, and more than ten

  thousand of them were killed. It was a dreadful battle, for the

  fugitives were slain without mercy. The ground for four miles, all

  the way to Edinburgh, was strewn with dead men, and with arms, and

  legs, and heads. Some hid themselves in streams and were drowned;

  some threw away their armour and were killed running, almost naked;

  but in this battle of Pinkey the English lost only two or three

  hundred men. They were much better clothed than the Scotch; at the

  poverty of whose appearance and country they were exceedingly

  astonished.

  A Parliament was called when Somerset came back, and it repealed

  the whip with six strings, and did one or two other good things;

  though it unhappily retained the punishment of burning for those

  people who did not make believe to believe, in all religious

  matters, what the Government had declared that they must and should

  believe. It also made a foolish law (meant to put down beggars),

  that any man who lived idly and loitered about for three days

  together, should be burned with a hot iron, made a slave, and wear

  an iron fetter. But this savage absurdity soon came to an end, and

  went the way of a great many other foolish laws.

  The Protector was now so proud that he sat in Parliament before all

  the nobles, on the right hand of the throne. Many other noblemen,

  who only wanted to be as proud if they could get a chance, became

  his enemies of course; and it is supposed that he came back

  suddenly from Scotland because he had received news that his

  brother, LORD SEYMOUR, was becoming dangerous to him. This lord

  was now High Admiral of England; a very handsome man, and a great

  favourite with the Court ladies - even with the young Princess

  Elizabeth, who romped with him a little more than young princesses

  in these times do with any one. He had married Catherine Parr, the

  late King's widow, who was now dead; and, to strengthen his power,

  he secretly supplied the young King with money. He may even have

  engaged with some of his brother's enemies in a plot to carry the

  boy off. On these and other accusations, at any rate, he was

  confined in the Tower, impeached, and found guilty; his own

  brother's name being - unnatural and sad to tell - the first signed

  to the warrant of his execution. He was executed on Tower Hill,

  and died denying his treason. One of his last proceedings in this

  world was to write two letters, one to the Princess Elizabeth, and

  one to the Princess Mary, which a servant of his took charge of,

  and concealed in his shoe. These letters are supposed to have

  urged them against his brother, and to revenge his death. What

  they truly contained is not known; but there is no doubt that he

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  had, at one time, obtained great influence over the Princess

  Elizabeth.

  All this while, the Protestant religion was making progress. The

  images which the people had gradually come to worship, were removed

  from the churches; the people were informed that they need not

  confess themselves to priests unless they chose; a common prayerbook

  was drawn up in the English language, which all could

  understand, and many other improvements were made; still

  moderately. For Cranmer was a very moderate man, and even

  restrained the Protestant clergy from violently abusing the

  unreformed religion - as they very often did, and which was not a

  good example. But the people were at this time in great distress.

  The rapacious nobility who had come into possession of the Church

  lands, were very bad landlords. They enclosed great quantities of

  ground for the feeding of sheep, which was then more profitable

  than the growing of crops; and this increased the general distress.

  So the people, who still understood little of what was going on

  about them, and still readily believed what the homeless monks told

  them - many of whom had been their good friends in their better

  days - took it into their heads that all this was owing to the

  reformed religion, and therefore rose, in many parts of the

  country.

  The most powerful risings were in Devonshire and Norfolk. In

  Devonshire, the rebellion was so strong that ten thousand men

  united within a few days, and even laid siege to Exeter. But LORD

  RUSSELL, coming to the assistance of the citizens who defended that

  town, defeated the rebels; and, not only hanged the Mayor of one

  place, but hanged the vicar of another from his own church steeple.

  What with hanging and killing by the sword, four thousand of the

  rebels are supposed to have fallen in that one county. In Norfolk

  (where the rising was more against the enclosure of open lands than

  against the reformed religion), the popular leader was a man named

  ROBERT KET, a tanner of Wymondham. The mob were, in the first

  instance, excited against the tanner by one JOHN FLOWERDEW, a

  gentleman who owed him a grudge: but the tanner was more than a

  match for the gentleman, since he soon got the people on his side,

  and established himself near Norwich with quite an army. There was

  a large oak-tree in that place, on a spot called Moushold Hill,

  which Ket named the Tree of Reformation; and under its green

  boughs, he and his men sat, in the midsummer weather, holding

  courts of justice, and debating affairs of state. They were even

  impartial enough to allow some rather tiresome public speakers to

  get up into this Tree of Reformation, and point out their errors to

  them, in long discourses, while they lay listening (not always

  without some grumbling and growling) in the shade below. At last,

  one sunny July day, a herald appeared below the tree, and

  proclaimed Ket and all his men traitors, unless from that moment

  they dispersed and went home: in which case they were to receive a

  pardon. But, Ket and his men made light of the herald and became

  stronger than ever, until the Earl of Warwick went after them with

  a sufficient force, and cut them all to pieces. A few were hanged,

  drawn, and quartered, as traitors, and their limbs were sent into

  various country places to be a terror to the people. Nine of them

  were hanged upon nine green branches of the Oak of Reformation; and

  so, for the time, that tree may be said to have withered away.

  The Protector, though a haughty man, had compassion for the real

  distresses of the common people, and a sincere desire to help them.

  But he was too proud and too high in degree to hold even their

  favour steadily; and many of the nobles always envied and hated

  him, because they were as proud and not as high as he. He was at

  this time building a great Palace in the Strand: to get the stone

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  for which he blew up church steeples with gunpowder, and pulled

  down bishops' houses: thus making himself still more disliked. At

  length, his principal enemy, the Earl of Warwick - Dudley by name,

  and the son of that Dudley who had made himself so odious with

  Empson, in the reign of Henry the Seventh - joined with seven other

  members of the Council against him, formed a separate Council; and,

  becoming stronger in a few days, sent him to the Tower under

  twenty-nine articles of accusation. After being sentenced by the

  Council to the forfeiture of all his offices and lands, he was

  liberated and pardoned, on making a very humble submission. He was

  even taken back into the Council again, after having suffered this

  fall, and married his daughter, LADY ANNE SEYMOUR, to Warwick's

  eldest son. But such a reconciliation was little likely to last,

  and did not outlive a year. Warwick, having got himself made Duke

  of Northumberland, and having advanced the more important of his

  friends, then finished the history by causing the Duke of Somerset

  and his friend LORD GREY, and others, to be arrested for treason,

  in having conspired to seize and dethrone the King. They were also

  accused of having intended to seize the new Duke of Northumberland,

  with his friends LORD NORTHAMPTON and LORD PEMBROKE; to murder them

  if they found need; and to raise the City to revolt. All this the

  fallen Protector positively denied; except that he confessed to

  having spoken of the murder of those three noblemen, but having

  never designed it. He was acquitted of the charge of treason, and

  found guilty of the other charges; so when the people - who

  remembered his having been their friend, now that he was disgraced

  and in danger, saw him come out from his trial with the axe turned

  from him - they thought he was altogether acquitted, and sent up a

  loud shout of joy.

  But the Duke of Somerset was ordered to be beheaded on Tower Hill,

  at eight o'clock in the morning, and proclamations were issued

  bidding the citizens keep at home until after ten. They filled the

  streets, however, and crowded the place of execution as soon as it

  was light; and, with sad faces and sad hearts, saw the once

  powerful Protector ascend the scaffold to lay his head upon the

  dreadful block. While he was yet saying his last words to them

  with manly courage, and telling them, in particular, how it