Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth

By this prudent and humane but somewhat jesuitical decision this perplexing affair was set at rest for the present; and during the small remainder of her brother's reign, a negative kind of persecution, consisting in disfavor, obloquy, and neglect, was all, apparently, that the lady Mary was called upon to undergo. But she had already endured enough to sour her temper, to aggravate with feelings of personal animosity her systematic abhorrence of what she deemed impious heresy, and to bind to her heart by fresh and stronger ties that cherished faith, in defence of which she was proudly conscious of having struggled and suffered with a lofty and unyielding intrepidity.

In order to counterbalance the threatened hostility of Spain, and impose an additional check on the catholic party at home, it was now judged expedient for the king to strengthen himself by an alliance with Christian III. king of Denmark; an able and enlightened prince, who in the early part of his reign had opposed with vigor the aggressions of the emperor Charles V. on the independence of the north of Europe, and more recently had acquired the respect of the whole protestant body by establishing the reformation in his dominions. An agent was accordingly dispatched with a secret commission to sound the inclinations of the court of Copenhagen towards a marriage between the prince-royal and the lady Elizabeth.

That this negotiation proved fruitless, was apparently owing to the reluctance to the connexion manifested by Elizabeth; of whom it is observable, that she never could be prevailed upon to afford the smallest encouragement to the addresses of any foreign prince whilst she herself was still a subject; well aware that to accept of an alliance which would carry her out of the kingdom, was to hazard the loss of her succession to the English crown, a splendid reversion never absent from her aspiring thoughts.

Disappointed in this design, Edward lost no time in pledging his own hand to the infant daughter of Henry II. of France, which contract he did not live to complete.

The splendid French embassy which arrived in England during the year 1550 to make arrangements respecting the dower of the princess, and to confer on her intended spouse the order of St. Michael, was received with high honors, but found the court-festivities damped by a visitation of that strange and terrific malady the sweating sickness.

This pestilence, first brought into the island by the foreign mercenaries who composed the army of the earl of Richmond, afterwards Henry VII., now made its appearance for the fourth and last time in our annals. It seized principally, it is said, on males, on such as were in the prime of their age, and rather on the higher than the lower classes: within the space of twenty-four hours the fate of the sufferer was decided for life or death. Its ravages were prodigious; and the general consternation was augmented by a superstitious idea which went forth, that Englishmen alone, were the destined victims of this mysterious minister of fate, which tracked their steps, with the malice and sagacity of an evil spirit, into every distant country of the earth whither they might have wandered, whilst it left unassailed all foreigners in their own.

Two of the king's servants died of this disease, and he in consequence removed to Hampton Court in haste and with very few attendants. The duke of Suffolk and his brother, students at Cambridge, were seized with it at the same time, sleeping in the same bed, and expired within two hours of each other. They were the children of Charles Brandon by his last wife, who was in her own right baroness Willoughby of Eresby. This lady had already made herself conspicuous by that earnest profession of the protestant faith for which, in the reign of Mary, she underwent many perils and a long exile. She was a munificent patroness of the learned and zealous divines of her own persuasion, whether natives or foreigners; and the untimely loss of these illustrious youths, who seem to have inherited both her religious principles and her love of letters, was publicly bewailed by the principal members of the university.

But by the earl of Warwick the melancholy event was rendered doubly conducive to the purposes of his ambition. In the first place it enabled him to bind to his interests the marquis of Dorset married to the half-sister of the young duke of Suffolk, by procuring a renewal of the ducal title in his behalf, and next authorized him by a kind of precedent to claim for himself the same exalted dignity.

The circumstances attending Dudley's elevation to the ducal rank are worthy of particular notice, as connected with a melancholy part of the story of that old and illustrious family of the Percies, celebrated through so many ages of English history.

The last of this house who had borne the title of earl of Northumberland was that ardent and favored suitor of Anne Boleyn, who was compelled by his father to renounce his pretensions to her hand in deference to the wishes of a royal competitor.

The disappointment and the injury impressed themselves in indelible characters on the heart of Percy: in common with the object of his attachment, he retained against Wolsey, whom he believed to have been actively instrumental in fostering the king's passion, a deep resentment, which is said to have rendered peculiarly acceptable to him the duty afterwards imposed upon him, of arresting that celebrated minister in order to his being brought to his trial. For the lady to whom a barbarous exertion of parental authority had compelled him to give his hand, while his whole heart was devoted to another, he also conceived an aversion rather to be lamented than wondered at.

Unfortunately, she brought him no living offspring; and after a few years he separated himself from her to indulge his melancholy alone and without molestation. In this manner he spun out a suffering existence, oppressed with sickness of mind and body, disengaged from public life, and neglectful of his own embarrassed affairs, till the fatal catastrophe of his brother, brought to the scaffold in 1537 for his share in the popish rebellion under Aske. By this event, and the attainder of sir Thomas Percy's children which followed, the earl saw himself deprived of the only consolation which remained to him,—that of transmitting to the posterity of a brother whom he loved, the titles and estates derived to him through a long and splendid ancestry. As a last resource, he bequeathed all his land to the king, in the hope, which was not finally frustrated, that a return of royal favor might one day restore them to the representatives of the Percies.

This done, he yielded his weary spirit on the last day of the same month which had seen the fatal catastrophe of his misguided brother.

From this time the title had remained dormant, till the earl of Warwick, untouched by commiseration or respect for the misfortunes of so great a house, cut off for the present all chance of its restoration, by causing the young monarch whom he governed to confer upon himself the whole of the Percy estates, with the new dignity of duke of Northumberland; an honor undeserved and ill-acquired, which no son of his was ever permitted to inherit.

But the soaring ambition of Dudley regarded even these splendid acquisitions of wealth and dignity only as steps to that summit of power and dominion which he was resolved by all means and at all hazards to attain; and his next measure was to procure the removal of the only man capable in any degree of obstructing his further progress. This was the late protector, by whom some relics of authority were still retained.

At the instigation of Northumberland, a law was passed making it felony to conspire against the life of a privy-counsellor; and by various insidious modes of provocation, he was soon enabled to bring within the danger of this new act an enemy who was rash, little sagacious, by no means scrupulous, and surrounded with violent or treacherous advisers. On October 16th 1551, Somerset and several of his relations and dependants, and on the following day his haughty duchess with certain of her favorites, were committed to the Tower, charged with treason and felony. The duke, being put upon his trial, so clearly disproved most of the accusations brought against him that the peers acquitted him of treason; but the evidence of his having entertained designs against the lives of the duke of Northumberland, the marquis of Northampton, and the earl of Pembroke, appeared so conclusive to his judges,—among whom these three noblemen themselves did not blush to take their seats,—that he was found guilty of the felony.

After his condemnation, Somerset acknowledged with contrition that he had once mentioned to certain persons an intention of assassinating these lords; but he protested that he had never taken any measures for carrying this wicked purpose into execution. However this might be, no act of violence had been committed, and it was hoped by many and expected by more, that the royal mercy might yet be extended to preserve his life: but Northumberland spared no efforts to incense the king against his unhappy uncle; he also contrived by a course of amusements and festivities to divert him from serious thought; and on January 21st 1552, to the great regret of the common people and the dismay of the protestant party, the duke of Somerset underwent the fatal stroke on Tower-hill.

During the whole interval between the condemnation and death of his uncle, the king, as we are informed, had been entertained by the nobles of his court with "stately masques, brave challenges at tilt and at barriers, and whatsoever exercises or disports they could conjecture to be pleasing to him. Then also he first began to keep hall17, and the Christmas-time was passed over with banquetings, plays, and much variety of mirth18."

We learn that it was an ancient custom, not only with the kings of England but with noblemen and "great housekeepers who used liberal feasting in that season," to appoint for the twelve days of the Christmas festival a lord of misrule, whose office it was to provide diversions for their numerous guests. Of what nature these entertainments might be we are not exactly informed; they probably comprised some rude attempts at dramatic representation: but the taste of an age rapidly advancing in literature and general refinement, evidently began to disdain the flat and coarse buffooneries which had formed the solace of its barbarous predecessors; and it was determined that devices of superior elegance and ingenuity should distinguish the festivities of the new court of Edward.

Accordingly, George Ferrers, a gentleman regularly educated at Oxford, and a member of the society of Lincoln's inn, was chosen to preside over the "merry disports;" "who," says Holinshed, "being of better credit and estimation than commonly his predecessors had been before, received all his commissions and warrants by the name of master of the king's pastimes. Which gentleman so well supplied his office, both in show of sundry sights and devices of rare inventions, and in act of divers interludes and matters of pastime played by persons, as not only satisfied the common sort, but also were very well liked and allowed by the council, and other of skill in the like pastimes; but best of all by the young king himself, as appeared by his princely liberality in rewarding that service."

"On Monday the fourth day of January," pursues our chronicler, whose circumstantial detail is sometimes picturesque and amusing, "the said lord of merry disports came by water to London, and landing at the Tower wharf entered the Tower, then rode through Tower-street, where he was received by Vause, lord of misrule to John Mainard, one of the sheriffs of London, and so conducted through the city with a great company of young lords and gentlemen to the house of sir George Burne lord-mayor, where he with the chief of his company dined, and after had a great banquet, and at his departure the lord-mayor gave him a standing cup with a cover of silver and gilt, of the value of ten pounds, for a reward, and also set a hogshead of wine and a barrel of beer at his gate, for his train that followed him. The residue of his gentlemen and servants dined at other aldermen's houses and with the sheriffs, and then departed to the Tower wharf again, and so to the court by water, to the great commendation of the mayor and aldermen, and highly accepted, of the king and council."

From this time Ferrers became "a composer almost by profession of occasional interludes for the diversion of the court19." None of these productions of his have come down to posterity; but their author is still known to the student of early English poetry, as one of the contributors to an extensive work entitled "The Mirror for Magistrates," which will be mentioned hereafter in speaking of the works of Thomas Sackville lord Buckhurst. The legends combined in this collection, which came from the pen of Ferrers, are not distinguished by any high flights of poetic fancy, nor by a versification extremely correct or melodious. Their merit is that of narrating after the chronicles, facts in English history, in a style clear, natural, and energetic, with an intermixture of political reflections conceived in a spirit of wisdom and moderation, highly honorable to the author, and well adapted to counteract the turbulent spirit of an age in which the ambition of the high and the discontent of the low were alike apt to break forth into outrages destructive of the public tranquillity.

Happy would it have been for England in more ages than one, had the sentiment of the following humble stanza been indelibly inscribed on the hearts of children.

"Some haply here will move a further doubt,And as for York's part allege an elder right:O brainless heads that so run in and out!When length of time a state hath firmly pight,And good accord hath put all strife to flight,Were it not better such titles still to sleepThan all a realm about the trial weep?"

This estimable writer had been a member of parliament in the time of Henry VIII., and was imprisoned by that despot in 1542, very probably without any just cause. He about the same time translated into English the great charter of Englishmen which had become a dead letter through the tyranny of the Tudors; and he rendered the same public service respecting several important statutes which existed only in Latin or Norman French; proofs of a free and courageous spirit extremely rare in that servile age!

Ferrers lived far into the reign of Elizabeth, finishing his career at Flamstead in his native county of Herts in 1579.

From the pleasing contemplation of a life devoted to those honorable arts by which society is cultivated, enlightened and adorned, we must now return to tread with Northumberland the maze of dark and crooked politics. By many a bold and many a crafty step this adept in his art had wound his way to the highest rank of nobility attainable by a subject, and to a station of eminence and command scarcely compatible with that character. But no sooner had he reached it, than a sudden cloud lowered over the splendid prospect stretched around him, and threatened to snatch it for ever from his sight. The youthful monarch in whom, or over whom, he reigned, was seized with a lingering disease which soon put on appearances indicative of a fatal termination. Under Mary, the next heir, safety with insignificance was the utmost that could be hoped by the man who had taken a principal and conspicuous part in every act of harshness towards herself, and every demonstration of hostility towards the faith which she cherished, and against whom, when he should be no longer protected by the power which he wielded, so many lawless and rapacious acts were ready to rise up in judgement.

One scheme alone suggested itself for the preservation of his authority: it was dangerous, almost desperate; but loss of power was more dreaded by Dudley than any degree of hazard to others or himself; and he resolved at all adventures to make the attempt.

By means of the new honors which he had caused to be conferred on the marquis of Dorset, now duke of Suffolk, he engaged this weak and inconsiderate man to give his eldest daughter, the lady Jane Grey, in marriage to his fourth son Guildford Dudley. At the same time he procured an union between her sister, the lady Catherine, and the eldest son of his able but mean-spirited and time-serving associate, the earl of Pembroke; and a third between his own daughter Catherine and lord Hastings, son of the earl of Huntingdon by the eldest daughter and co-heir of Henry Pole lord Montacute; in whom the claims of the line of Clarence now vested.

These nuptials were all celebrated on one day, and with an ostentation of magnificence and festivity which the people exclaimed against as highly indecorous in the present dangerous state of the king's health. But it was not on their good will that Northumberland founded his hopes, and their clamors were braved or disregarded.

His next measure was to prevail upon the dying king to dispose of the crown by will in favor of the lady Jane. The animosity against his sister Mary, to which their equal bigotry in opposite modes of faith had given birth in the mind of Edward, would naturally induce him to lend a willing ear to such specious arguments as might be produced in justification of her exclusion: but that he could be brought with equal facility to disinherit also Elizabeth, a sister whom he loved, a princess judged in all respects worthy of a crown, and one with whose religious profession he had every reason to be perfectly satisfied, appears an indication of a character equally cold and feeble. Much allowance, however, may be made for the extreme youth of Edward; the weakness of his sinking frame; his affection for the pious and amiable Jane, his near relation and the frequent companion of his childhood; and above all, for the importunities, the artifices, of the practised intriguers by whom his dying couch was surrounded.

The partisans of Northumberland did not fail to urge, that if one of the princesses were set aside on account of the nullification of her mother's marriage, the same ground of exclusion was valid against the other. If, on the contrary, the testamentary dispositions of the late king were to be adhered to, the lady Mary must necessarily precede her sister, and the cause of religious reformation was lost, perhaps for ever.

With regard to the other claimants who might still be interposed between Jane and the English throne, it was pretended that the Scottish branch of the royal family was put out of the question by that clause of Henry's will which placed the Suffolk line next in order to his own immediate descendants; as if an instrument which was set aside as to several of its most important provisions was necessarily to be held binding in all the rest. Even admitting this, the duchess of Suffolk herself stood before her daughter in order of succession; but a renunciation obtained from this lady by the authority of Northumberland, not only of her own title but of that of any future son who might be born to her, was supposed to obviate this objection.

The right of the king, even if he had attained the age of majority, to dispose of the crown by will without the concurrence of parliament, was absolutely denied by the first law authorities: but the power and violence of Northumberland overruled all objections, and in the end the new settlement received the signature of all the privy council, and the whole bench of judges, with the exception of justice Hales, and perhaps of Cecil, then secretary of state, who afterwards affirmed that he put his name to this instrument only as a witness to the signature of the king. Cranmer resisted for some time, but was at length won to compliance by the tears and entreaties of Edward.

Notwithstanding this general concurrence, it is probable that very few of the council either expected or desired that this act should be sanctioned by the acquiescence of the nation: they signed it merely as a protection from the present effects of the anger of Northumberland, whom most of them hated as well as feared; each privately hoping that he should find opportunity to disavow the act of the body in time to obtain the forgiveness of Mary, should her cause be found finally to prevail. The selfish meanness and political profligacy of such a conduct it is needless to stigmatize; but this was not the age of public virtue in England.

A just detestation of the character of Northumberland had rendered very prevalent an idea, that the constitution of the king was undermined by slow poisons of his administering; and it was significantly remarked, that his health had begun to decline from the period of lord Robert Dudley's being placed about him as gentleman of the bed-chamber. Nothing, however, could be more destitute both of truth and probability than such a suspicion. Besides the satisfactory evidence that Edward's disease was a pulmonary consumption, such as no poison could produce, it has been well remarked, that if Northumberland were a sound politician, there could be no man in England more sincerely desirous, for his own sake, of the continuance of the life and reign of this young prince. By a change he had every thing to lose, and nothing to gain. Several circumstances tend also to show that the fatal event, hastened by the treatment of a female empiric to whom the royal patient had been very improperly confided, came upon Northumberland at last somewhat by surprise, and compelled him to act with a precipitation injurious to his designs. Several preparatory steps were yet wanting; in particular the important one of securing the persons of the two princesses: but this omission it seemed still possible to supply; and he ordered the death of the king to be carefully concealed, while he wrote letters in his name requiring the immediate attendance of his sisters on his person. With Mary the stratagem had nearly succeeded: she had reached Hoddesdon on her journey to London, when secret intelligence of the truth, conveyed to her by the earl of Arundel, caused her to change her course. It was probably a similar intimation from some friendly hand, Cecil's perhaps, which caused Elizabeth to disobey the summons, and remain tranquil at one of her houses in Hertfordshire.

Here she was soon after waited upon by messengers from Northumberland, who apprized her of the accession of the lady Jane, and proposed to her to resign her own title in consideration of a sum of money, and certain lands which should be assigned her. But Elizabeth wisely and courageously replied, that her elder sister was first to be agreed with, during whose lifetime she, for her part, could claim no right at all. And determined to make common cause with Mary against their common enemies, she equipped with all speed a body of a thousand horse, at the head of which she went forth to meet her sister on her approach to London.

The event quickly proved that she had taken the right part. Though the council manifested their present subserviency to Northumberland by proclaiming queen Jane in the metropolis, and by issuing in her name a summons to Mary to lay aside her pretensions to the crown, this leader was too well practised in the arts of courts, to be the dupe of their hollow professions of attachment to a cause unsupported, as he soon perceived, by the favor of the people.

The march of Northumberland at the head of a small body of troops to resist the forces levied by Mary in Norfolk and Suffolk, was the signal for the defection of a great majority of the council. They broke from the kind of honorable custody in the Tower in which, from a well-founded distrust of their intentions, Northumberland had hitherto held them; and ordering Mary to be proclaimed in London, they caused the hapless Jane, after a nominal reign of ten days, to be detained as a prisoner in that fortress which she had entered as a sovereign.

Not a hand was raised, not a drop of blood was shed, in defence of this pageant raised by the ambition of Dudley. Deserted by his partisans, his soldiers and himself, the guilty wretch sought, as a last feeble resource, to make a merit of being the first man to throw up his cap in the market-place of Cambridge, and cry "God save queen Mary!" But on the following day the earl of Arundel, whom he had disgraced, and who hated him, though a little before he had professed that he could wish to spend his blood at his feet, came and arrested him in her majesty's name, and Mary, proceeding to London, seated herself without opposition on the throne of her ancestors.