Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/394

374 A bill was secretly drawn to separate the offices; to give effect to which he wrote a letter, purporting to be from the King to the Houses of Parliament, desiring them to favour his uncle the Admiral in a suit which he was about to bring forward; and this letter he begged Sir John Cheke, who was the King's tutor, to persuade Edward to copy out and sign.

Cheke cautiously declined to meddle, and the Admiral then attempted Edward himself. But the boy was shrewd enough to see that it was no place of his to interfere in such a matter. 'If the thing was right,' he said, 'the Lords would allow it; if it was ill, he would not write in it.' Seymour therefore determined to depend upon himself. His unprincipled selfishness was aggravated into hatred by some foolish jealousy between his wife and the Duchess of Somerset. He had a claim, or supposed that he had a claim, on certain jewels, detained by Somerset as Crown property, which Queen Catherine asserted to have been a gift from Henry to herself. 'If I be thus used,' he said to Dorset and Clinton on their way to Westminster, at the opening of the session, 'by God's precious soul I will make this the blackest Parliament that ever was in England.' He swore that 'he could live better without the Protector than the Protector without him.' He would 'take his fist to the ear' of the proudest that should oppose him, with other wild unpromising words.

Such a man was not likely to effect much in