Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/352

338 as still remained in its possession were totally inadequate to meet the annual demands of the Government. Northumberland, therefore, asked for two-tenths and two-fifteenths; but even with his care to pack the Commons he found it no easy task to obtain it, and the friends of Somerset again assembled in considerable force in the House, resenting in strong terms the pretence thrown out in the preamble to the bill that it was owing to the extravagance and improvidence of the late Duke of Somerset, to his involving the country in needless wars, debasing the coin, and occasioning a terrible rebellion.

In his second object, the suppression of the bishopric of Durham, Northumberland succeeded more easily. Failing to persuade Parliament to condemn the bishop, Northumberland had erected a new and utterly unconstitutional court of lawyers and civilians, empowering them to call the prelate before them, and to examine him on the charge of cognisance of conspiracy; and this monstrous and illegal tribunal had stripped the bishop of all his ecclesiastical preferments as the punishment for his offence. The see being now held to be vacant, an Act was passed for the suppression of that diocese and the erection of two new ones—one including Durham, the other Northumberland. The plea for this daring innovation was the vast and unwieldy extent of the diocese of Durham; but the real cause was well understood to be one much more interesting to Northumberland himself. These two important Acts being passed, Parliament was dissolved, and within two months the bishopric was converted into a county palatine, annexed at present to the Crown, but awaiting a convenient transfer to the possessions of the house of Dudley.

But the king's health was fast failing, and it was high time for Northumberland to make sure his position and fortune. The constitution of Edward had long betrayed symptoms of fragility. In the early spring of the past year he was successively attacked by measles and smallpox. In the autumn, through incautious exposure to cold, he was attacked by inflammation of the lungs, and so enfeebled was he become by the meeting of Parliament on the 1st of March, 1553, that he was obliged to receive the two Houses at his palace of Whitehall. He was greatly exhausted by the exertion, being evidently far gone in a consumption, and harassed with a troublesome cough.

Northumberland, from the day on which he rose into the ascendant at Court, had shown that he was the true son of the old licensed extortioner. He had laboured assiduously not only to surround himself by interested adherents, but to add estate to estate. He inherited a large property, the accumulations of oppression and crimes of the blackest dye. But during the three years in which he had enjoyed all but kingly power, he had been diligently at work creating a kingly demesne. He was become the Steward of the East Riding of Yorkshire, and of all the Royal manors in the five northern counties. He had obtained Tynemouth and Alnwick in Northumberland, Barnard Castle in Durham, and immense estates in Warwick, Worcester, and Somersetshire. The more he saw the king fail, the more anxious he was to place his brother, his sons, his relatives, and most devoted partisans in places of honour and profit around him at Court. This done, he advanced to bolder measures, to which these were only the stepping-stones. Lady Jane Grey was the daughter of Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, whose mother was Mary, the sister of Henry VIII. Mary first married Louis XII. of France, by whom she had no children, and next, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, by whom she had two daughters. The youngest of these two daughters married Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, but the eldest, Frances, whose claim came first, had by the Duke of Suffolk three daughters, Jane, Catherine, and Mary.

Northumberland, casting his eye over the descendants of Henry VIII., saw the only son, King Edward, dying, and the two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, bastardised by Acts of Parliament still unrepealed. A daring scheme seized his ambitious mind—a scheme to set aside these two princesses, the elder of whom, and immediate heir to the throne, was especially dangerous to the permanence of the newly-established Protestantism. It was true that Margaret of Scotland, the sister of Henry VIII., was older than his sister Mary, and her granddaughter, Mary Queen of Scots, would have taken precedence of the descendants of Mary, but she and her issue had been entirely passed over in the will of Henry. Leaving out, then, this line, and setting aside the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth as legally illegitimate, Lady Jane Grey would become heir to the throne after her mother Frances, Duchess of Suffolk. But Northumberland was well informed that the Duchess of Suffolk would not on any account aspire to the throne, though she might not object to see her daughter placed there under promising circumstances.

Northumberland resolved, therefore, to secure Lady Jane in marriage for his son, Lord Guildford Dudley; to obtain Lady Jane's sister, Catherine, for Lord Herbert, son of the Earl of Pembroke, who owed title, estates, and everything to the favour of Northumberland; and to marry his own daughter Catherine to the eldest son of the Earl of Huntingdon.

In May, 1553, Edward was apparently much improved in health, and though, with a good portion of his father's obstinacy, he had greatly disregarded the advice of his physicians, he now promised to observe their recommendations, and cheering hopes were entertained of his actual recovery. The promise was delusive, and Northumberland was probably well aware of it; but as this auspicious event enabled him to effect the contemplated marriage with less suspicion, and with the personal sanction of the sovereign, he seized upon it. The marriages were celebrated at Durham House, Northumberland's new residence in the Strand, where the utmost gaiety prevailed, which the king, with all his asserted improvement, was too feeble to witness, but he sent to the brides magnificent presents; and, no doubt with the intention of winning the approval of the Princess Mary to those alliances, at this time a grant was made her of the castle of Hertford, and of several manors and parks in that county and in Essex.

The gleam of the king's convalescence died away, as it were, with the wedding fetes at Durham House; and in June he had sunk into such debility that it was evident that his life was fast ebbing to a close. Northumberland saw that no time was to be lost in the completion his aspiring plans. He sat down by the bed of the dying young prince, a boy still not sixteen years of age, and