Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/331

A.D. 1549.] His execution took place on the 20th of March, on Tower Hill; Seymour declaring loudly that he had been condemned without law or justice. Before laying his head on the block, ho was overheard to tell an attendant of the Lieutenant of the Tower to "bid his man speed the thing he wot of." The servant was arrested immediately, and threatened till he confessed that his master had made some ink in the Tower by some means, and, plucking an aiglet from his dress, had, with its point, written a letter to each of the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, which he had placed between the leathers of a velvet shoe-sole. The shoe was opened, and the letters found, filled with the bitterest complaints against his brother and all who had conspired for his destruction. The servant, notwithstanding his confession, was executed.

In the whole of this unrighteous business, scarcely any one shows to more disadvantage than the zealous reformer, and generally honest Hugh Latimer. He preached a sermon on the death of the admiral, which is, perhaps, unrivalled as a specimen of all uncharitableness. It may be supposed that the admiral had not received the recommendations of Latimer to confess himself guilty; for he left him with an ebullition of spleen which swallowed all commiseration for his fate.

To the assumption that Seymour must have been innocent, or he would not have died so boldly, Latimer replied that that was a very "deceivable argument." "This I say," he added, "if they ask me what I think of his death, That he died very dangerously, irksomely, horribly." Latimer was lost in wonder at the ingenuity of Seymour in furnishing himself so cleverly with pen and ink. "I was a prisoner in the Tower myself," he cried, "and I could never invent to make ink so. What would he have done, if he had lived still, that invented this gear when he laid his head on the block at the end of his life?" He concluded a most vituperative harangue by declaring that Seymour "was a man farthest from the fear of God that ever I knew or heard of in England;" adding, that he had heard say that he believed not in the immortality of the soul; that when the good Queen Catherine Parr had prayers in her house both forenoon and afternoon, he would get away like a mole digging in the earth. "He shall be to me," he exclaimed, "Lot's wife as long as I live. He was a covetous man—an horrible covetous man: I would there were no mo in England. He was an ambitious man: I would there were no mo in England. He was a seditious man—a contemner of the Common Prayer: I would there were no mo in England. He is gone: I would he had left none behind him."

But he certainly had left a much more horrible and more covetous man in the Protector, whose work poor Latimer was thus doing; for Somerset not only slew his brother, but took possession of his estates. Seymour's only child, the infant daughter of Catherine Parr, not only lost her father's ample patrimony by his attainder, but by an Act of Parliament entitled "An Act for disinheriting Mary Seymour, daughter and heir of the late Lord Sudley, Admiral of England, and of the late queen," lost also her mother's noble estates. A subsequent Act restored her to her rights, but only nominally, for her uncles held her property fast in their selfish gripe. Catherine's brother, Thomas Parr, Marquis of Northampton, was as unnaturally cruel to his sister's orphan as Somerset himself. Sudley was granted to him on Seymour's attainder, and he not only held it fast, but maintained a heartless indifference to the fate of his niece, whose champion he ought to have been, having owed his fortune in the world to her mother's influence.

This unhappy child, the daughter of Seymour and Catherine, was consigned, as Seymour wished, to the care of the Countess of Suffolk, but we find her writing the most urgent letters to Cecil, the secretary of Somerset, afterwards the famous minister of Elizabeth, complaining that she can obtain no allowance for her support, nor even her linen and plate, which were rigorously detained by Somerset and his heartless and revolting wife. The poor girl is stated by Lodge, but without giving any authority, to have died in her thirteenth year; but it has been satisfactorily shown by Miss Strickland that she lived and was married to Sir Edward Bushell, and has still descendants in the family of the Lawsons, of Herefordshire and Kent, a branch of the ancient family of the Lawsons of Yorkshire and Westmoreland, who still retain several heirlooms once the property of Catherine Parr.

The Protector no sooner had put his brother out of his path into a bloody grave, than he was called upon to contend with a whole host of enemies. A variety of causes had reduced the common people to a condition of deep distress and discontent. The depreciation of the coinage by Henry VIII. had produced its certain consequence—the proportionate advance of the price of all purchasable articles. But with the rise of price in food and clothing, there had been no rise in the price of labour. The dissolution of the monasteries had thrown a vast number of people on the public without any resource. Besides the vast number of monks and nuns who, instead of affording alms, were now obliged to seek a subsistence of some kind, the hundreds of thousands who had received daily assistance at the doors of convents and monasteries were obliged to beg, work, or starve. But the new proprietors who had obtained the abbey and chantry lands, found wool so much in demand, that instead of cultivating the land, and thus at once employing the people and growing corn for them, they threw their fields out of tillage, and made great enclosures where their profitable flocks could range without even the necessity of a shepherd.

The people thus driven to starvation were still more exasperated by the change in the religion of the country, in the destruction of their images, and the desecration of the shrines of their saints. Their whole public life had been changed by the change of their religion. Their oldest and most sacred associations were broken. Their pageants, their processions, their pilgrimages were all rudely swept away as superstitious rubbish; their gay holidays had become a gloomy blank. What their fathers and their pastors had taught them as peculiarly holy and essential to their spiritual well-being, their rulers had now pronounced to be damnable doctrines and the delusions of priestcraft; and whilst smarting under this abrupt privation of their bodily and spiritual support, they beheld the new lords of the ancient church lands greedily cutting off not only the old streams of benevolence, but the means of livelihood by labour, and showing not the slightest regard for their sufferings.