Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/317

A.D. 1547.] closely the proceedings of Somerset, put the great seal to a commission, empowering four masters to hear all causes in Chancery, and giving to their decisions all the force of his own, provided that, before they were enrolled, they received his signature. But the Protector, aware of the chancellor's object, very soon moved several lawyers to petition against this arrangement. The petition was referred by the council to the judges, who declared that the act of putting the great seal to this commission was punishable with loss of office, and fine and imprisonment at the royal pleasure. Southampton boldly contended that the commission was perfectly legal; that even had it been illegal, they could only revoke it, to which he made no objection; that he held his office by patent from the late king, and they had no power to deprive him of it. But legal arguments had no weight with the council. Somerset had secured a majority in it, and Southampton was compelled to resign, and retire to his residence at Ely House, or expect worse. He surrendered the seal the same evening, which was given to Lord St. John. But that was not enough for Somerset: Southampton was ordered to confine himself to his own house as a prisoner, till the amount of the fine was determined.

Having thus ousted this dangerous opponent, Somerset immediately procured letters patent under the great seal, conferring on himself alone the whole authority of the crown. This patent was signed by his facile and devoted friends Cranmer, St. John, Russell, Northampton, Cheney, Paget, and Browne, and thus did these men, who had gorged themselves with the property of the Church, and arrayed one another with titles, basely surrender to this adventurer the whole of the will of King Henry, which they had sworn to maintain, as far as it regarded the safeguards of the crown during the minority.

Having thus seized and secured the actual sovereign power in England, Somerset began to turn his attention to foreign affairs. Henry VIII. had left it as a strict injunction to his council to secure the marriage of the Queen of Scots with his son Edward. Somerset, therefore, addressed a letter to the Scottish nobility, calling upon them to complete an arrangement which he recommended as equally advantageous with that to which they were bound by oaths, promises, and seals. The Scotch took little notice of this communication from the man who had carried the commands of the late king through their land with fire and sword.

Whilst this fruitless intercourse was passing, Francis I. died at Rambouillet, on the 31st of March, about two months after Henry VIII. From some cause, probably some astrological calculation, Francis entertained a firm conviction that the lives of himself and Henry were bound together in some mysterious union. On the news, therefore, of Henry's decease, he dreamed that his own hour was at hand, and fell into a deep melancholy and dejection, which nothing could chase away. With all their sparrings, fightings, and jealousies, Francis appears to have felt a considerable regard for his brother of England, and seemed to feel an affection for his heir. Proposals for the renewal of alliance and friendship betwixt the two monarchs had been made and accepted, and messengers already appointed to receive their oaths, when Francis died. His successor, his son Henry, pursued a very different policy. He was greatly guided by the counsels of the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, the brothers of the queen-dowager of Scotland. The Guises were bigoted Romanists, and of course the queen-dowager was a resolute opponent of the English plans. To her they were the most fearful heretics, and she not only educated her daughter in opinions diametrically opposed to those of Edward VI., and which made her the least fitted for his wife as the queen of Protestant England, but she naturally clung to a closer alliance with France. Henry II., who sympathised with her in her religious views, saw also the vast advantages offered to France by espousing the cause of the infant Queen of Scotland. Still he preserved the appearance of concord with England.

The Castle of St. Andrews, which the murderers of Cardinal Beaton held out against Arran, had in the course of this summer been surrendered to a French force, and the conspirators were conveyed to France. Some of them were confined in fortresses on the coast of Brittany, and others, amongst whom was John Knox, were sent to work in the galleys, whence they were not released till 1550. By the mouth of August, Somerset was once more prepared to invade Scotland, and to force, if possible, the young queen from the hands of Arran and the queen-mother. Under the name of Hertford he was already too well known as the scourge which Henry VIII. had repeatedly sent thither, and who had executed the remorseless vengeance of the tyrant on that unhappy country in the same spirit as that in which it had been dictated: what that was we may learn from these literal orders with which Henry furnished him for his expedition in 1543-4. He commands him, through a despatch of the privy council, to make an inroad into Scotland, "there to put all to fire and sword; to burn Edinburgh town; and to raze and deface it, when you have sacked it, and gotten what ye can out of it, as that it may remain for ever a perpetual memory of the vengeance of God lighted upon it for its falsehood and disloyalty. Do what you can out of hand, and without long tarrying, to beat down and overthrow the castle, sack Holyrood House, and as many towns and villages about Edinburgh as ye conveniently can; sack Loith, and burn and subvert it and all the rest, putting man, woman, and child to fire and sword, without exception, when any resistance shall be made against you; and this done, pass over to the Fife land, and extend like extremities and destructions in all towns and villages whereunto ye may reach conveniently, not forgetting, amongst all the rest, to spoil and turn upside-down the cardinal's town of St. Andrews, as the upper stone may be the nether, and not one stick stand by another, sparing no creature alive within the same, specially such as, either in friendship or blood, be allied to the cardinal."

Hertford, so far as he was able, had carried this out to the letter. And now he set out to make a campaign in Scotland on his own account; and the manner in which he conducted himself showed how well he had studied Henry's savage system of Christian warfare. The army collected at Newcastle, and there Somerset himself arrived, on the 27th of August. Warwick, the second in command, and Sir Ralph Sadler, deep in the mysteries of facing Scotland's sons against herself, or of directing his own countrymen how best they might most completely