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EDW influence of the king, so weak in political matters, came into play, and prevented at that epoch the check given to the English Reformation during the reign of his sister and successor, Mary. In any case the fears of the protestant leaders were, in one respect, not realized. Warwick gave in his adhesion to the Reformation, and left Cranmer's hands tolerably free to deal both with the party which dung to the ancient faith, and with the broachers of rival doctrines, regarded by protestants as heretical. Somerset himself was not only released from imprisonment but after a time readmitted to the council, and appointed to an office in the household. One of Somerset's daughters was even married to Warwick's eldest son. The reconciliation thus inaugurated was, however, but of brief duration. Somerset plotted, but he was no match for Warwick, or, as we may now call him, Northumberland. On the 16th October, 1551, the ex-protector was once move in the Tower. In the following November he was tried by his peers for high treason, and, although acquitted on that charge, was found guilty of the capital offence of having conspired to seize and imprison the earl of Warwick, a privy councillor. The king signed his death-warrant, and on the 22nd January, 1562, the duke of Somerset was executed on Tower Hill, amid the grief of the populace, who looked up to him as their champion. The whole record of the event in King Edward's diary is the following calm entry, sub dato:—"The duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine o'clock in the morning." Thus coolly did Ewdard surrender to the block another uncle, the guardian of his early boyhood. It was only when his religious zeal was aroused, that Edward resisted those who happened to be his councillors at the time. When the emperor of Germany threatened England with war, if the Lady Mary were forbidden to hear mass, it was with difficulty that the king could be dissuaded from not accepting the contest, rather than tolerate in his sister what he deemed idolatrous worship. And when one Joan Boucher of Kent was condemned to be burnt for maintaining heretical doctrines respecting the incarnation, Cranmer had to wait for a year before he could obtain Edward's signature to the death-warrant. The king argued, not that the punishment was too great, but that to deprive her of life while she held her erroneous faith, was to condemn her to eternal misery. It was only "with tears" that at last he signed the sentence. A year or so after the execution of Somerset, the king was attacked both by measles and smallpox. Later in the year, when heated by a game at tennis, he is said to have imprudently drank freely of a cold liquid, and soon after to have been seized by a consumptive cough. Early in June, 1553, it was evident that the king was dying. Anxious to exclude his anti-protestant sister Mary from the throne, he sketched the well-known will, which, interpolated by Northumberland, determined the succession in favour of Lady Jane Grey. Here again, when his religious sentiments were excited, he behaved resolutely and with spirit, sternly rebuking, from what was to be his deathbed, the judges who hesitated to draw up an instrument altering the succession without the authority of an act of parliament. In the interval between this discussion and his death, the young king, it is said, was committed to the charge of a female pretender to medical skill, who instead of working his cure hastened his death, a consummation, it has been insinuated, which the duke of Northumberland was not anxious to avert. On the 6th of July, 1553, after prayer and pious ejaculations, Edward breathed his last. He wanted three months of attaining the age of sixteen, and he had reigned a little more than four years. Various admirable portraits of him, at different ages, by Holbein, survive. Cardan, who saw him not long before his death, describes him as "of stature below the usual size, his complexion fair, his eyes grey, his gesture and general aspect sedate and becoming." Of his works, by far the best edition is that of Mr. John Gough Nichols—"Literary remains of King Edward VI.," edited from his autograph manuscripts, with historical notes and a biographical memoir—two handsome quartos, printed for the Roxburgh Club in 1857.—F. E.  EDWARD. See.  EDWARD PLANTAGENET, the last of the name, was the son of George, duke of Clarence, by Isabella Neville, daughter of the great earl of Warwick, and was born in the year 1475. After his father's execution in 1478, the child was created Earl of Warwick by Edward IV., who, from political considerations, would not let him assume the title of a prince of the blood. Similar motives induced Richard III., upon his accession, to place the unfortunate boy, then only ten years old, in confinement at a castle in Yorkshire; and the remaining fourteen years of his sad life were passed in prison. Immediately after the victory of Bosworth, Henry VII. caused him to be removed to the Tower. In 1486, the impostor Simnel—a report having first been circulated of Edward's death—passed himself off for the real earl of Warwick, and was proclaimed king in Ireland, by the title of Edward VI. On this occasion, the real earl was led in a procession from the Tower to St. Paul's, and then taken to the palace at Shene, in order that the public mind might be satisfied as to his identity. In 1499, Perkin Warbeck was the hero of a still more formidable plot, the nominal design of which was to place him on the throne, as being the duke of York, who, it was supposed, had been murdered in the Tower. It is probable that the secret intention of the framers of both these plots, had either of them succeeded, was to place the young earl of Warwick on the throne, the impostor being made use of in either case merely as a blind. After Perkin was seized, he became the fellow-prisoner of Edward in the Tower. A plot which they formed together was discovered, and the young earl was brought before the house of lords, charged with conspiring against the king. He was condemnd by that obsequious body, and executed by Henry's orders on the 20th December, 1499.—T. A.  * EDWARDES,, Colonel, a distinguished Anglo-Indian officer and official, was born in January, 1820, at Frodesley in Shropshire, son of its rector. Educated at King's college, London, he was nominated to a cadetship, and landed in India in January, 1841. We find him in 1845 appointed aid-de-camp to Lord Gough, and in that capacity receiving a wound at the battle of Moodkee, the earliest of the victories which decided in favour of the British the first Sikh war. At its conclusion, the young officer was appointed third assistant to the commissioners of the Trans-Sutlej territory, and subsequently first assistant to Sir Henry Lawrence, the resident at Lahore. In the following year, 1848, began the series of operations and adventures which first made Colonel Edwardes famous. Moolraj, the hereditary Sikh ruler of Mooltan, affecting to be discontented with the new system of British protection, offered to resign his government into the hands of the Anglo-Indian authorities, and two English officials, Mr. Vans Agnew and Lieutenant Anderson, were despatched to Mooltan to receive the fortress. Both were cruelly and treacherously murdered by the Mooltanees, and the Sikh government, when appealed to, avowed its inability to punish the crime. With promptitude and intrepidity Edwardes commenced the task of chastising Moolraj. He raised troops, which he supported by levying contributions on the territories of Moolraj, and he prevented the subjects of the latter from swelling the army of the Sikhs in their second war against the British. On the 18th of June, 1848, with three thousand irregulars and no guns, he crossed the Indus and kept an army of ten thousand Sikhs, with two thousand cavalry and ample artillery, at bay for seven hours, until Cortlandt brought cannon and reinforcements over the river to aid him, when the Sikhs were routed and forced to retire to Mooltan. On the 1st of July, Edwardes arrived before Mooltan, and defeating Moolraj, in at least one signal engagement, kept his ground until the advent of General Whish with a siege train in the middle of August. His part in the subsequent operations of the siege, though a prominent and brilliant one, was that of a subordinate. For his services he was raised to the local rank of major, and created a C.B. At the termination of the second Sikh war he came to England, where he was feted as a hero, married, and in 1851 published his dashing and interesting work, "A Year on the Punjaub frontier." Subsequently appointed a commissioner at Peshawur, he did good service at the outbreak of the Indian mutinies, by calling on the native chiefs to rally round him, and send him levies of horse and foot; an appeal to which they promptly responded. "Events here," he was enabled to write at the beginning of July, 1857, "have taken a wonderful turn. During peace Peshawur was an incessant anxiety. Now it is the strongest point in India," and the change was in no small measure due to Major Edwardes' alertness, and to the faith in himself with which he had inspired the population of the district. Since then he has returned to England a colonel, and made a striking and effective speech at the ceremonial of inaugurating a monument to the memory of the great Lord Clive, at Shrewsbury in January, 1860.—F. E. 