Page:The Queens of England.djvu/390

 35o THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND. to the dignity of the dukedom of Suffolk, vacant by the death of Henry Brandon, without issue ; and on the same day John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, was created Duke of Northumber- land. The fates were spinning in these ducal creations the deadly web of her own early destruction. This John Dudley was unquestionably the most rank and rapid fungus-growth of the extraordinary adventurers of that age. Who, indeed, was this towering Duke of Northumber- land ? In the reign of Henry the Seventh there figured con- spicuously two tools of that avaricious king, far above all others in the vileness of their rapacity. These two were the scoundrel lawyers, Empson and Dudley. They were the king's agents for extorting money by any means from his subjects. Lord Bacon says : "As kings do more easily find instruments for their will and humor, than for their service and honor, he had gotten for his purpose these two instruments, whom the people esteemed as his horse-leeches and shearers ; bold men and careless of fame, that took toll of their master's grist ; nay, turned law and justice into wormwood and rapine. They charged the owners of estates, which had long been held on a different tenure, with the obsolete burdens of wardships, liv- eries, premier seizins, and the whole array of feudal' obliga- tions, for which they would only give quittances for payment in money : they not only converted every offense into a case of fine and profit, but invented new offenses to get fines ; to hunt up their game, they kept packs of spies and informers in every part of the kingdom, and, to strike it down with legal forms, they kept a rabble to sit on juries. At length, they did not observe so much as the half-face of justice : they arrested men by precept, and tried them by jury in their own private houses. These and other courses, fitter to be buried than repeated, they had of preying upon the people, both like tame hawks for their master, and like wild hawks for themselves, insomuch that they grew to great riches and substance." The people were excited to desperation by these villainies ; and one of the very first acts of Henry the Eighth was to appease the popular fury by the arrest of these arch rogues, and, after a year's confinement in the Tower, striking off their heads. Such was Dudley and his infamous companion Empson. They had their heads taken off ; but the people's property which they had embezzled remained in their families, and Dudley's son by its means rose to an extraordinary height,