Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/546

526 The Duke of Somerset, on the 18th of February, received a formal pardon. In the beginning of April he resumed his duties as a privy councillor. On the 3rd of June his reconciliation with Warwick was cemented by the union of Lady Anne Seymour with Lord Ambrose Dudley. The summer pageant of the marriage ceremony was at Shene upon the Thames. The King was present, and the French ambassadors also, who had arrived in England on the conclusion of the peace, and had been entertained by the lords in a series of gorgeous entertainments. On the 4th, the day following, Lord Robert Dudley (Earl of Leicester afterwards) was also married at the same place—the fact being chiefly memorable through its consequences—to the daughter of Sir John Robsart.

These scenes of brilliancy had followed close upon another scene which was not so brilliant. In May, Joan Bocher, a Kentish woman, who had been left in prison by Somerset's heresy commission, had been sent to the stake. She was a pious worthy woman, it appears, a friend of Anne Askew, who had died the same death a few years previously. Her crime was an erroneous opinion on the nature of the incarnation; and, inasmuch as the statute for the punishment of heresy by death had been formally repealed, the authorities were obliged to fall back upon the traditions of the common law—much as if a judge