28

BIRTH OF A PRINCE OF WALES, DEATH OF HIS MOTHER. That ill-directed restlessness which formed so striking a feature in the character of Henry VIII. had already prompted him to interfere, as we have seen, on more than one occassion, with the order of succession; and the dangerous consequences of these capricious acts with respect to the several branches of the royal family have already been observed. To the people at large also, his instability on so momentous a point was harassing and alarming, and they became as much at a loss to conjecture what successor, as what religion, he would at last bequeath them.

Under such circumstances, great indeed must have been the joy in the court and in the nation on the occurrence of an event calculated to end all doubts and remove all difficulties ;-the birth of a prince of Wales.

This auspicious infant seemed to strangle in his cradle the serpents of civil discord. Every lip hastened to proffer him its homage; every heart united, or seemed at least to unite, in the general burst of thankfulness and congratulation.

The catholics formed the party most to be suspected of insincerity in their professions of satisfaction; but the princess Mary set them an excellent example of graceful submission to what was inevitable, by soliciting the office of godmother. Her sister was happily too young to be infected with court jealousies, or to behold in a brother an unwelcome intruder, who came to snatch from her the inheritance of a crown between Elizabeth and Edward an attachment truly fraternal sprung up with the first dawnings of reason; and notwithstanding the fatal blow given to her interests by the act of settlement extorted from his dying hand, this princess never ceased to cherish his memory, and to mention him in terms of affectionate regret.

The conjugal felicities of Henry were destined to be of short duration, and before he could receive the congratulations of his subjects on the birth of his son, the mother was snatched away by death. The queen died deeply regretted, not only by her husband, but by the whole court, whom she had attached by the uncommon sweetness of her disposition. To the princess Mary her behaviour had been the reverse of that by which her predecessor had disgraced herself; and the little Elizabeth had received from her tokens of a maternal tenderness. Jane Seymour was accounted a favorer of the protestant cause; but as she was apparently free from the ambition of interfering in state affairs, her death had no further political influence than what resulted from the king's marriage thus becoming once more an object of court intrigue. It did not even give a check to the advancement of her two brothers, for the king seemed to regard it as a point of policy to elevate those maternal relations of his son, on whose care he relied to watch over the safety of his person in case of his own death, to a dignity and

importance which the proudest nobles of the land might view with respect or fear. Sir Edward Seymour, who had been created lord Beauchamp the year before, was now made earl of Hertford; and high places at court and commands in the army attested the favor of his royal brother-in-las. Thomas Seymour, afterwards lord highadmiral, attained during this reign no higher dignity than that of knighthood; but considerable pecuniary grants were bestowed upon him; and with the increase of his wealth, he was secretly extending his influence, and feeding his aspiring mind with fond anticipations of future greatness.

All now seemed tranquil: but a discerning eye might already have beheld fresh tempests gathering in the changeful atmosphere of the English court. The jealousies of the king, become too habitual to be discarded, had only received a new direction from the birth of his son : his mind was perpetually haunted with the dread of leaving him a defenceless minor, in the hands of contending parties in religion, and of a formidable and factious nobility; and for the sake of obviating the distant and contingent evils which he apprehended from this source, he showed himself ready to pour forth whole rivers of the best blood of England.

The person beyond all comparison most dreaded and detested by Henry at this juncture was his cousin Reginald Pole, for whom when a youth he had conceived a warm affection, whose studies he had encouraged by the gift of a deanery and the hope of further churchpreferment, and of whose ingratitude he appears to have been justly entitled to complain. It was the long-contested point of the lawfulness of Henry's marriage with his brother's widow, which set the kinsmen at variance. Pole had from the first refused to concur with the university of Paris, in which he was then residing, in its condemnation of this union afterwards having returned to England, alarmed probably at the king's importunities on the subject, he had obtained the royal permission then necessary for quitting the country, and travelled into Italy. Here he formed friendships with the most eminent defenders of the papal authority, now incensed to the highest degree against Henry, on account of his having declared himself head of the English church; and both his convictions and his passions becoming still more strongly engaged on the side which he had already espoused, he published a work on the unity of the church, in which the conduct of his sovereign and benefactor became the topic of his vehement invective.

The king, probably with treacherous intentions, invited Pole to come to England, and explain to him in person certain difficult passages of his book but his kinsman was too wary to trust himself in his hands; and his refusal to obey this summons, which implied a final renunciation of his country and all his early prospects in life, was immediately

32 MARCHIONESS OF EXETER AND THE COUNTESS OF SALISBURY.

ducement could have drawn this nobleman into a plot for disturbing the succession in favour of a claim more distant than his own; and that the blood which he inherited was the true cause of Henry's apprehensions, evidently appeared to all the world by his causing the son of the unhappy marquis, a child of twelve years old, to be detained a state prisoner in the Tower during the remainder of his reign.

Sir Edward Nevil was brother to lord Abergavenny and also to the wife of lord Montacute;-a connexion likely to bring him into suspicion, and perhaps to involve him in real guilt; but it must not be forgotten that he was also himself a lineal descendant of the house of Lancaster by Joan daughter of John of Gaunt. The only person not of royal extraction who suffered on this occasion was sir Nicholas Carew, master of the horse, once a distinguished favourite of the king: of whom it is traditionally related, that though accused as an accomplice in the designs of the other noble delinquents, the real offence for which he died, was the having retorted, with more spirit than prudence, some opprobrious language with which his royal master had insulted him as they were playing at bowls together. [Fuller's Worthies in Surrey.] The family of Carew was however allied in blood to that of Courtney, of which the marquis of Exeter was the head.

But the attempt to extirpate all, who, under any future circumstances, might be supposed capable of advancing claims formidable to the house of Tudor, must have appeared to Henry himself a task almost as hopeless as cruel. Sons and daughters of the Plantagenet princes had in every generation freely intermarried with the ancient nobles of the land; and as fast as those were cut off whose connexion with the royal blood was nearest and most recent, the pedigrees of families pointed out others, and others still, whose relationship grew into nearness by the removal of such as had stood before them, and presented to the eyes of their persecutor, a hydra with still renewed and multiplying heads.

Not contented with these inflictions,—sufficiently severe it might be thought to intimidate the papal faction,-Henry gratified still further his stern disposition by the attainder of the marchioness of Exeter and the aged countess of Salisbury. The marchioness he soon after released; but the countess was detained prisoner under a sentence of death, which a parliament, atrocious in its subserviency, had passed upon her without form of trial, but which the king did not think proper at present to carry into execution; either because he chose to keep her as a kind of hostage for the good behaviour of her son the cardinal, or because, tyrant as he had become, he had not yet been able to divest himself of all reverence or pity for the hoary head of a female, a kinswoman, and the last who was born to the name of Plantagenet.

The contemplation of these acts of legalized atrocity is melancholy, and even disgusting, but it is fraught with various and important instruction. They form unhappily a leading feature of the administra

tion of Henry VIII. during the latter years of his reign; they exhibit in the most striking point of view the sentiments and practices of the age; and a review of them will assist us to form a juster estimate of the character and conduct of Elizabeth, who, familiarised from her infancy with these domestic tragedies, has often suffered in her fame by inconsiderate comparisons which have placed her in parallel with the enlightened and humanized sovereigns of more modern days, rather than with the stern and the arbitrary Tudors, her barbarous predecessors.

It is remarkable that the protestant party at the court of Henry, so far from gaining strength by the severities exercised against the adherents of cardinal Pole and the ancient religion, was evidently in a declining state. The feeble efforts of its two leaders, Cromwell and Cranmer, of whom the first was deficient in zeal, the last in courage, now experienced irresistible counteraction from the influence of Gardiner, whose uncommon talents for business, joined to his extreme obsequiousness, had rendered him at once necessary and acceptable to his royal master. The law of the Six Articles, which forbade under the highest penalties the denial of several doctrines of the Romish church peculiarly obnoxious to the reformers, was probably drawn up by this minister. It was enacted in the parliament of 1539: great numbers were soon after imprisoned for transgressing it; and Cranmer himself was compelled, by a clause which ordained the celibacy of the clergy, to send away his wife.

Under these circumstances Cromwell began to look round on all sides for support; and recollecting with regret the powerful influence exerted by Anne Boleyn in favour of the good cause, and even the feebler and more secret aid lent to it by Jane Seymour, he planned a new marriage for his sovereign with a lady educated in the very bosom of the protestant communion. Political considerations favored the design; for a treaty having been lately concluded between the emperor and the king of France rendered it expedient that Henry, by way of counterpoise, should strengthen his alliance with the Smalcaldic league. Cromwell's project was in consequence approved by his master. Holbein, whom the king had appointed his painter on the recommendation of sir Thomas More, and still retained in that capacity, was sent over to take the portrait of Anne, sister of the duke of Cleves; and, rashly trusting in the fidelity of the likeness, Henry soon after solicited her hand in marriage.

'The lady Anne,' says a historian, 'understood no language but Dutch, so that all communication of speech between her and our king was intercluded. Yet our ambassador, Nicholas Wotton, doctor of law, employed in the business, hath it, that she could both read and write in her own language, and sew very well; only for music, he said, it was not the manner of the country to learn it.' [Herbert.] It must

C

34 QUEEN ANNE OF CLEVES-CROMWELL, EARL OF ESSEX.

be confessed that, for a princess, this list of accomplishments appears somewhat scanty; and Henry, unfortunately for the lady Anne, was a great admirer of learning, wit and talents, in the female sex, and a passionate lover of music, which he well understood. What was still more unfortunate, he piqued himself extremely on his taste in beauty, and was much more solicitous respecting the personal charms of his consorts than is usual with sovereigns; and when, on the arrival of his destined bride in England, he hastened to Rochester to gratify his impatience by snatching a private view of her, he found that in this capital article he had been grievously imposed upon. The uncourteous comparison by which he expressed his dislike of her large and clumsy person, is well known. Bitterly he lamented to Cromwell the hard fortune which had allotted him so unlovely a partner, and he returned to London full of melancholy. But the evil appeared to be now past remedy; it was contrary to all policy to affront the German princes by sending back their countrywoman after matters had gone so far, and Henry magnanimously resolved to sacrifice his own feelings, once in his life, for the good of his country. Accordingly, he received the princess with great magnificence and with every outward demonstration of satisfaction, and was married to her at Greenwich in January 1540.

Two or three months afterwards, the king, notwithstanding his secret dissatisfaction, rewarded Cromwell for his pains in concluding this union by conferring on him the vacant title of earl of Essex ;-a fatal gift, which exasperated to rage the mingled scorn and jealousy which this minister had already excited among the ancient nobility by intruding himself into the order of the garter, and which served to heap upon his devoted head fresh wrath against the day of retribution which was fast approaching. The act of transferring this title to a new family, could in fact be no otherwise regarded by the great house of Bourchier, which had for ages enjoyed it, than as a marked indignity, a fresh result of the general Tudor system of depressing and discoun→ tenancing the blood of the Plantagenets, from which the Bourchiers, through a daughter of Thomas of Woodstock, were descended. last earl of Essex had left a married daughter, to whose husband, according to the customary courtesy of English sovereigns in similar circumstances, the title ought to have been granted; and as this lady had no children, the earl of Bath also, as head of the house, felt himself aggrieved by the alienation of family honors which he hoped to have seen continued to himself and his posterity.

The

In celebration, probably of the recent marriage of the king, unusually splendid jousts were opened at Westminster on May-day; in which the challengers were headed by sir John Dudley, and the defenders by the earl of Surrey. This entertainment was continued for several successive days, during which the challengers, according to the