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 now his park was ploughed up as an illegal enclosure, and he fiercely attacked Hales as the cause of the agrarian discontent. Other members of the government, including even his ally Paget, remonstrated with the Protector, but without effect, except to stiffen his back and confirm him in his course. Fresh instructions were issued to the commissioners in 1549; and, having failed to obtain relief for the poor by legislation, Somerset resorted to the arbitrary expedient of erecting a sort of Court of Requests, which sat in his own house under Cecil's presidency to hear any complaint that poor suitors might bring against their oppressors.

Measures like these were of little avail to avert the dangers Somerset feared. Parliament had scarcely disposed of his bills, when the resentment of the peasants found vent in open revolt. The flame was kindled first in Somersetshire; thence it spread eastwards into Wilts and Gloucestershire, southwards into Dorset and Hampshire and northwards into Berks and the shires of Oxford and Buckingham. Surrey remained in a state of "quavering quiet"; but Kent felt the general impulse. Far in the west Cornwall and Devon rose; and in the east the men of Norfolk captured Norwich and established a " commonwealth" on Household Hill, where Robert Ket, albeit himself a landlord of ancient family, laid down the law, and no rich man did what he liked with his own. The civil war, which the French king had hoped to evoke from Seymour's conspiracy, seemed to have come at last, and with it the opportunity of France. On August 8, 1549, at Whitehall Palace, the French ambassador made a formal declaration of war.

The successful Chauvinist policy of the French government would have precipitated a conflict long before but for the efforts of the English to avoid it. Henry II had begun his reign by breaking off the negotiations for an alliance with England, and declining to ratify the arrangement which the English and French commissioners had drawn up for the delimitation of the Boulonnais. But a variety of circumstances induced him to modify for a time his martial ardour, and restrict his hostility to a policy of pin-pricks administered to the English in their French possessions. The complete defeat of the German Princes at Mühlberg (April, 1547) made Henry anxious as to the direction in which the Emperor would turn his victorious arms; and the rout of the Scots at Pinkie five months later inspired a wholesome respect for English power. Then, in 1548, Guienne broke out in revolt against the gabelle, and clamoured for the privileges it had once enjoyed under its English kings. Charles V, moreover, although he disliked the religious changes in England and declined to take any active part against the Scots, gave the French to understand that he considered the Scots his enemies. Somerset, meanwhile, did his best to keep on friendly terms with Charles, and sought to mitigate his dislike of the First Act of Uniformity by granting the Princess Mary a dispensation to hear mass in private. Unless the Emperor's attention was absorbed elsewhere,