Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 5.djvu/52

32 been exposed, as in the instance of his mother's funeral, to petty insults and mortifications; and early in the spring of 1551 he had begun to meditate the possibility of revenging himself. Whalley, the fraudulent receiver of Yorkshire, one of the least reputable of his friends, had felt the pulses of the peers with a view to his restoration; he became privy to Catholic conspiracies without revealing them; and, after his arrest, the missing link in the evidence, the want of which had saved the Bishop of Durham from imprisonment a few months previously, was found in his desk. The council in their treatment of his friends provided him with unscrupulous partisans. Sir Ralph Vane, a distinguished soldier, had a right of pasturage by letters patent over lands which the Earl of Warwick claimed or coveted. Warwick sent his servants to drive Vane's cattle from the meadows; Vane defended his rights in arms, and was arrested and sent to the Tower, as much, perhaps, because he was a follower of the Duke, as for any offence of his own.

The confinement was soon over; but the injury remained, and Vane became ready at any moment to rise in arms. Suspected before his intentions had assumed a definite form, Somerset, on the 23rd of April, had been on the point of flying, in a supposed fear of his life, with Lord Grey, to the northern counties, to call out the people and place himself at their head. He had