3 The Earl of Warwick, 1547–1549

Henry VIII’s will has been described as a ’forensic conundrum’.¹ The final version was dated 30 December 1546, and ostensibly signed by the king, but most modem experts who have examined the document believe that it was stamped. If this was the case, then two further questions follow. Was the will altered after its contents were last discussed with Henry on 30 December, and did the fact that it was stamped make any difference to its validity?² The letters patent authorizing the use of the stamp were undoubtedly valid, and many important documents were authenticated in that way, including the Duke of Norfolk’s attainder on 27 January. No one seems to have challenged the will at the time, and it was not until 1566 that the Scottish lawyer Maitland of Lethington claimed that the stamp did not satisfy the condition laid down in the succession act of 1543 that the king’s will should be ’signed with his most gracious hand’.³ He was pleading a special case, because he was trying to argue that his mistress, Mary, queen of Scots, had not been lawfully barred from the English succession. Mary had been ignored, both in the will and in the act itself, and Maitland’s letter made little impression upon Sir William Cecil, to whom it was addressed. Consequently there is little reason to doubt that the final version of Henry’s testament, as it now survives, was fully valid in law. That, however, does not guarantee that it represented the old king’s last conscious intention. Ostensibly he left the minority government of his young son in the hands of a body of sixteen executors, who were expected to make decisions and enforce their will collectively. On the other hand he also empowered those executors to take whatever steps they deemed to be necessary for the safeguard of the king and the realm. Those who believe that Henry intended a collegiate form of government argue that the second clause was an insertion, designed by those who subsequently seized power as a justification for their action.⁴ Given the circumstances surrounding the last few days of Henry’s life, however, the implied conspiracy is an unnecessary hypothesis. The king changed his mind over a number of things, and was totally unwilling to recognize the imminence of his own death. It is therefore quite probable that he thought of his will as still being in a provisional form when he was last aware of it. What he might have prescribed had he lived a few more days, we cannot know, but his executors were perfectly entitled to believe that Henry had left an indeterminate situation rather than a determinate one, and that it was up to them to give the regency government a workable form.

The fact that the earl of Hertford and his friends were in political control when the king died was less the result of successful intrigue than of Henry’s own wishes. At no point did he become senile, or deranged, or any more suggestible than he had been during most of his life.⁵ Not only had he made it perfectly clear that the destruction of the Howards was his own work, he had also been swift to assure Sir Anthony Browne that the exclusion of Stephen Gardiner from the body of executors was entirely deliberate.⁶ As Van der Delft noted ruefully, there was little chance of any effective challenge being mounted against Hertford’s ascendancy, however little the emperor might relish the prospect of such a regime. When Henry died, late on the night of 28 January, Hertford left Westminster immediately, accompanied by Browne, to secure the person of the new king, who was living at Hatfield House. Meanwhile the late king’s death was concealed until such time as his successor should reach London. There was nothing sinister about such a delay; a similar thing had happened when Henry VII had died, and it had more to do with seemliness and formality than with politics. Parliament, which was in session at the time, held a meeting on the morning of 29 January, and meals continued to be carried to the Privy Chamber with the sound of trumpets.⁷ Meanwhile the executors themselves had been informed, and most of them gathered at Westminster on 30 January to consider the implementation of Henry’s will, which was in the custody of Sir William Paget. It was proposed to accompany the proclamation of the new king with a general pardon, perhaps designed to reassure those who feared a continuing vendetta from the struggles of the past few months. Hertford, however, who by this time was with Edward and Elizabeth at Enfield, sent word that he did not believe that either the executors or the wider council (which included the twelve assistant executors) had the power to issue such a pardon until they had clarified their own position. It would be much better to wait until the coronation, as was customary. On the morning of Monday, 31 January, Lord Chancellor Wriothesley announced the king’s death to parliament, and formally dissolved the session. At about noon Edward entered London, accompanied by Hertford, and proceeded to the Tower where the royal apartments had been hastily prepared to receive him. There the nobility hastened to greet him, and the executors immediately got down to business.⁸

The record of their deliberations was formally entered into the Council Book, and conveys an impression of unanimity which may be misleading. However, the air of inevitability which it also conveys is probably accurate enough.

And forasmuche as in the consideracion and debating of the several poyntes of the charge by the saide wile committed unto us, and of the grete accompte which we have to rendre to God, to our Souveraigne Lorde that nowe is, and to the whole worlde for the same, it appeared unto us aswell uppon thoccasion of the depeache of sundry letters…as uppon sundry other grete and urgent thinges…that being a greate number appoyncted to be executors with equal and like charge, it shuld be more then necessarie aswel for thonour, surety and gouvernment of the moste royal persone of the King our Souveraigne Lorde that nowe is, as for the more certaine and assured order and direction of his affayres, that somme special man of the nombre and company aforesaide shuld be preferred in name and place before others, to whome as to the state and hedde of the reste all strangers and others might have accesse…⁹

It was therefore decided that two offices should be created, that of Lord Protector of the Realm and that of Governor of the King’s Person. Whereupon ’by oone hole assent, concorde and agreement’ it was resolved to confer both these offices upon the earl of Hertford ’uppon mature consideracion of the tendreness and proximitie of bludde between our Souveraigne Lorde that nowe is and the saide Erie of Hertforde, being his uncle…’. In the context, no other decision was possible. Corporate government was unrealistic, even if Henry had seriously intended it, and in the absence of any adult prince of the blood the only possibilities were the king’s maternal uncles, Hertford and Sir Thomas Seymour, or the widowed queen, Catherine Parr. Catherine had indeed been named by Henry as regent during his last brief absence in France in 1544, but she was devoid of ambition and was passed over without comment.¹⁰ Of the two Seymour brothers, Edward was not only the elder and the senior in rank, but also much the more substantial in terms of leadership and the confidence of his colleagues. Dissent, if there was any, may well have concentrated less upon the identity of the Protector than upon the nature of the powers which the office would convey. There was at this stage no will to create a regency with full powers, and it was decreed that Hertford should enjoy his office ’with this special and expresse condition, that he shall nat do any Acte but with thadvise and consent of the reste of the coexecutors in suche maner and fourme as in the saide wille of our saide late Souveraigne Lorde…is apoynted and prescribed’.¹¹

The next day, 1 February, the executors waited upon the king to obtain his formal assent to their proceedings before announcing their decision to the rest of the council, and to the assembled peers. Letters were then dispatched to the emperor, the regent of the Low Countries, and the king of France, notifying them of Henry’s death and of the accession of his son. No dispatch was sent to the pope, thereby indicating that the Protectorate intended to commence its policies where the old king had left off; and no dispatch was sent to Venice, because nobody remembered to do so.¹² Charles V was so unenthusiastic that he refrained for some time from returning the greetings which had been sent to him in Edward’s name. As far as he was concerned the true heir of England was Mary, because she was the only one of Henry’s three surviving children who had been born in lawful wedlock.¹³ Once the realm had gone into schism in 1533, no valid marriages could be contracted, and therefore Edward was as illegitimate as Elizabeth, or Henry Fitzroy. However, it was not in his nature, or his interest, to persevere in such a view once it had become clear that nobody in England shared it, not even Mary. After a few weeks, and firmly holding his nose, he began to do business with the Lord Protector. Until 14 February the old king lay in state at Westminster, and council business was ostensibly kept to a minimum. The coronation was fixed for 19 February, and the preparations, including a court of claims, occupied a fair amount of time. Less visible, but much more significant in political terms, was the attention which began to be given to a list of promotions and rewards which had been drawn up before Henry’s death. This matter was first brought to the council on 6 February when, as a result of claims which were beginning to be made, Paget, Denny, and Herbert were required to testify as to their knowledge of the late king’s intentions.¹⁴ The testimony which mattered was that of Paget, who declared that Henry had disclosed to him his anxiety that the nobility of the realm was ’greately decayed’, and a plan for remedying that situation, using partly the lands recently come to the Crown through the attainder of the Howards: ’he willed me to make unto him a book’, the Secretary went on, ’of such as he did chose to advance; which I did.’¹⁵

It was probably this ’book’ which now survives among the State Papers Domestic. It is a heavily amended and not very coherent document, but that would be consistent with its alleged provenance, having been discussed and altered as the king’s mind or mood had fluctuated.¹⁶ The list is considerable, and contains a number of rewards of a routine kind—grants of land, annuities stewardships, and other offices. Its significance, however, lies mainly in the list of peerage creations with which it starts. The earl of Hertford to be duke of Hertford, Exeter, or Somerset; the earl of Essex to be marquis of Essex; Viscount Lisle to be Great Chamberlain and earl of Coventry; Lord Russell to be earl of Northampton; Lord St John to be earl of Winchester; Lord Wriothesley also to be earl of Winchester; Sir Thomas Seymour to be Lord Seymour and Lord Admiral; and Sir Richard Rich, Sir John St Leger, Sir William Willoughby, Sir Edmund Sheffield, and Sir Christopher Danby to be barons. In presenting this list to the council, Paget simplified it a little by removing the specific titles, but he also gave a long and circumstantial account of the discussions which he had had with Henry, going into considerable detail about the deployment of particular lands.¹⁷ The council declared itself to be satisfied as to the genuineness of the intentions, some knowledge of which had presumably provoked the claims which had already been made, but postponed action until a more seemly time. Once Henry’s body was safely on its way to Windsor, and the plans for the coronation had been completed, that time had come. On 15 February, with only four days to implement its decisions in time for the crowning, the council returned to the issue of new peerages.¹⁸. For some reason, possibly because they declined the proffered honours, St John, Russell, St Leger, and Danby were not promoted as had been proposed. Hertford became duke of Somerset, Essex became marquis of Northampton, Lisle became earl of Warwick, Wriothesley became earl of Southampton; and Seymour, Rich, Willoughby, and Sheffield became barons. The ceremonies of creation were decreed to be held at the Tower on the following day, and the Lord Chancellor was instructed to get busy on the Patents.

In the event the creations did not take place until 17 February because on 16 February the old king was finally laid to rest, with suitable pomp ’as to the dignity of such a mighty prince it appertaineth’. The chief mourner was the marquis of Dorset, the husband of Henry’s niece, Frances, but among the very large attendance listed, the principal councillors of the new regime do not feature.¹⁹ Presumably they remained in attendance upon the new king who would not, by custom, attend his father’s obsequies. On the following day they duly received their new dignities, and the tangible rewards which went with them—£800 a year in lands to Somerset, and £200 each to Northampton, Southampton, and Warwick. Paget, whose role in the whole process had been so crucial, received no dignity but 400 marks a year in lands, so he was hardly unrewarded for his pains.²⁰ However much this may look like the party in power feathering their own nests, there is no serious reason to doubt that Henry had intended more or less what transpired. Too many people, particularly members of the Privy Chamber, had had access to some at least of the information to make significant misrepresentation possible. The only man who was seriously aggrieved, as it later transpired, was Thomas Seymour, to whom, a barony and the office of Lord Admiral seemed paltry by comparison with what his brother had received. As far as we know, the new earl of Warwick was sufficiently content. He had hankered after the Great Chamberlainship for some time, and he now had the greater ’estimacion’ of an earldom. On the other hand, he had lost the Admiralty, by which he had set such great store. If he harboured any resentment on that account he kept it to himself, but his relations with Seymour do not seem to have been particularly good.

By the time these things had been accomplished, the coronation was imminent, and the council had already spent a considerable time debating the correct format Not only was it nearly forty years since the last such event, but the central actor was a young child, to whose ’tenderness’ a number of concessions had to be made. Most of the changes which were made in the traditional rite can be attributed to this consideration, rather than to any desire to signal impending religious change. The psalms and collects used, and the high mass celebrated, were all in strict accordance with precedent. Only in the archbishop’s oration to the king was the revolution of the last twenty years clearly expressed.

The promises your Highness hath made here at your coronation to forsake the devil and all his works are not to be taken in the bishop of Rome’s sense, when you commit anything distasteful to that see, to hit your majesty in the teeth…We, your majesty’s clergy, do humbly conceive that this promise reacheth not at your high-ness’s sword, spiritual or temporal…Your majesty is God’s vicegerent and Christ’s vicar within your own dominions, and to see with your predecessor Josiah God truly worshipped, and idolatry destroyed, the tyranny of the bishop of Rome banished from your subjects, and images removed…²¹

In retrospect Cranmer’s speech looks like a protestant manifesto, but it is unlikely that many at the time heard it in that sense. The emphasis was very much upon the supremacy which Henry VIII had created, and the message was that the king’s minority was not going to make any difference to his ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

Being bound by my function to lay these things before your royal highness, the one as a reward if you fulfil, the other as a judgement from God if you neglect them; yet I openly declare before the living God, and before these nobles of the land, that I have no commission to denounce your majesty deprived, if your highness miss in part or in whole of these performances much less to draw up indentures between God and your majesty, or to say you forfeit your crown with a clause.

Perhaps because the ceremonies were shortened, the coronation cost less than half the outlay on Henry VIII’s funeral, but it was nevertheless a very spendid public spectacle, and conveyed visual as well as oral messages. As a concession to Edward’s youthful sensibilities, he was closely followed in procession by the 12-year-old duke of Suffolk, by a group of half a dozen noble youths of similar age, and by John Anthony, his ’tumbling boy’, who seems to have been a particular favourite.²² The duke of Somerset, Earl Marshall for the day as well as Lord Protector, was deliberately conspicuous, and the gentlemen of the Privy Chamber were led by the earl of Warwick.

On 19 and 20 February the emphasis was all upon joy and harmony; ’Sing up heart, sing up heart and sing no more down, but joy in King Edward that weareth the crown…’. However, the contrived appearance was deceptive. Within a few days of the coronation Cranmer had petitioned for new commissions to be issued to himself and his fellow bishops in the name of King Edward. The logic behind this was impeccable, since bishops under the royal supremacy were primarily royal officers, but it came as a nasty shock to some conservatives, including the bishop of Winchester. Gardiner was far too astute to object to the issuing of commissions as such, but on 1 March he wrote to Secretary Paget, protesting that the draft which he had seen described him as a ’delegate’ and not an ’ordinary’.²³ The point was far from pedantic, because the latter term implied that the bishop’s authority derived, in part at least, from his consecration. As a delegate his whole jurisdiction depended upon his appointment, and consecration could be regarded as redundant. Paget replied politely, but the commissions were issued unchanged on 2 March.²⁴ More seriously, on 3 or 4 March a carefully primed charge exploded under the Lord Chancellor, the earl of Southampton. Apart from the earl of Warwick, Thomas Wriothesley was the only man on the minority council with the political skill and status to challenge the Protector. There is no evidence that he had resisted the creation of the Protectorate at the end of January, but a man who could criticize Henry VIII to his face, and earn his gratitude was a man to be reckoned with, and he had crossed swords with Edward Seymour before. Seymour was not satisfied with the limited powers which he had been given on 31 January, and discussions were going on among his fellow councillors to provide an amplification. It seems likely, both from, what happened and from things which were subsequently said, that the Lord Chancellor made clear his opposition to any such move.²⁵ Whether this was prompted by ambition on his part, or by loyalty to Henry VII’s intentions as he understood them, cannot be deduced, but he was perceived to be a formidable obstacle.

He had, however, exposed himself to attack in a manner which is surprising for one of his habitual shrewdness. On. 17 February he had issued a commission to four well-qualified civil lawyers to hear cases in Chancery in his absence, or when he should be preoccupied with the work of the Privy Council.²⁶ The Chancellor’s jurisdiction was partly in equity and partly in common law, and there was an immediate outcry from the common lawyers about the impropriety of his action. On 5 March the case was called before the council, the offending commission having already been examined by the judges, who were not exactly disinterested parties. The substance of the complaint was that the commissioners ’being civilians and nat lerned in the Comen Lawes, setting aside the saide Commen Lawes [would] determyne the waighty causes of this realme according either to the saide Lawe Civile or to their owne conscience; which Lawe Civile is to the subjectes of this realme unknowne’²⁷ but this was a matter of policy or opinion, and the judges concentrated upon the legality of the commission itself. This was a grey area. The judges advised that the commission was unlawful because it had been issued without warrant from the council, but it was at least arguable that the Chancellor had authority ex officio to issue such a process relating to the discharge of his own office. There were plenty of precedents from the time of More and Audley, and Wriothesley himself had issued similar commissions during Henry VIII’s reign.²⁸ However, he had then been granted specific power to do so, and that power had not been renewed in the name of Edward VI. So the precedents may not have been strictly applicable, and the Chancellor’s convictions may have been mistaken. According to the council record Wriothesley made no defence, and submitted himself to judgment.²⁹ He may have been persuaded of the weakness of his ground, or he may simply have recognized a political defeat when he saw one. He had been careless at worst, and in other circumstances might have suffered a mild rebuke or an instruction to withdraw the commission. The judgment that he should be dismissed from office, and suffer fine and imprisonment at the king’s pleasure, was totally disproportionate to the offence, even if an offence had been committed, and reflected the determination of the Protector and his allies to be rid of him.

The reason for this became apparent just a week later when, with Lord St John acting as Keeper of the Great Seal, the executors petitioned the king for a grant of

his royal assent for their establishment and confirmation in the romes of his High-nes Counseillours, and that it wold like please his Heighnes to graunte unto them by a Commission to be signed with his Graces owne hande such powre and auctorite as to their saide romes…apperteigned.³⁰

At the same time the Protector’s own powers were significantly amplified. He was given the crucial authority to appoint new councillors, and the requirement that he should consult his fellow councillors was to be interpreted

amplissimus [sic] liberalissimo ac beneficentissimo modo pro amplificacione, aug-mentacione ac manutenencia auctoritatum, potestatum, preeminenciarum et dignitatum dicti avunculi nostri in quantum verba ac sententia ac verborum et sententiarum vero [sic] intenciones in dictis literis nostris patentibus expresse et specificate construi et extendi possint.³¹

In other words it was waived for all practical purposes, giving the duke of Somerset full regency powers until the king came of age. It was these patents rather than the decisions of 31 January which truly constituted the Protectorate. They certainly went far beyond anything which had been, envisaged in Henry VIII’s will, and appeared to contradict its spirit totally, but they were perfectly lawful, and probably necessary to give adequate authority to a government which could potentially last for nine years, and which was bound to languish in the shadow of the great king.

The earl of Warwick had played a full part in all these proceedings, being one of the half-dozen or so councillors who was present at every meeting between 29 January and 12 March. Along with Russell, St John, Denny, and Herbert, he was one of Somerset’s closest allies, as Van der Delft had noticed before Henry’s death.³² At the same time his signature is noticeably absent from the proceedings of 13 March, when the above-mentioned amplification was approved. It is very unlikely that this was a gesture of dissent. Denny and Herbert were also missing on that day, when only six councillors apart from Somerset himself signed the register. Since the minority council, unlike the Privy Council of an adult king, had a collective responsibility for its actions, it did not matter greatly who was present on any particular day. Van der Delft at this point predicted a rift between Warwick and Somerset, on the grounds that both were ambitious, and that Warwick enjoyed higher popular esteem, but he also believed that Wriothesley and Paget were the two most powerful men in the council a few days before the former’s fall.³³ He subsequently revised his opinion of Warwick, some time before events justified it, and his assessment of the situation during these formative days is not worth a great deal as evidence. A better indication is provided by the fact that on 4 March the earl was commissioned, along with Russell, Thomas Seymour, and Paget, to follow up the treaty of Camp by settling the boundaries of the Boulogne Pale, and to remove by a fresh treaty of amity the kind of alarms which had beset relations between England and France in the autumn of 1546.³⁴ Warwick and Paget had been the architects of the original treaty, and had the confidence of their French equivalents, so it was logical to employ them in this way, but the Protector would hardly have done so if he had suspected their loyalty. The negotiations took place in London during March, and the draft treaty was forwarded on 1 April by the council to Nicholas Wotton in Paris for Francis’s ratification. Unfortunately the French king had died on the previous day, and his successor Henry II refused ratification and repudiated the whole proceeding.³⁵ By early April it began to look as though the fears of attack which had been expressed by Lord Grey in February were about to be realized, and Somerset’s policy during the summer has to be seen in that light. To counter the French threat, he appealed to the Anglo-Imperial treaty of 1543. Charles responded very reluctantly. He had enough problems in Germany, and the last thing he needed was another round with the Valois. He categorically refused to extend his protection to the ’new conquest’ of Boulogne, while agreeing to intervene if Calais should come under attack.³⁶

In spite of this setback to English diplomacy, Henry’s bark turned out to be worse than his bite. He refused to honour the indemnity due for Boulogne under the treaty of Camp, but reports that he had sent 4,000 troops to Scotland were mistaken. His own financial situation precluded large-scale aggression, and in spite of Guise influence, and Wotton’s pessimistic predictions, for the time being nothing happened. Somerset, however, did not know this, and in the circumstances his pursuit of a ’final solution’ in Scotland has to be seen as a rash gamble. On 24 July he informed Van der Delft that the Scots had mobilized 25,000 men against him, and that French galleys were operating in the Firth of Forth.³⁷ Both these statements seem to have been incorrect, and were primarily a justification for his own mobilization, which was already going ahead. Somerset had risen to favour, not just as the brother of Henry VIII’s favourite queen, but as a soldier, and he had been particularly successful in Scotland. If he could cap that success by forcing the Scots to accept the marriage which Henry had failed to impose, it would surely give his Protectorate an instant credibility which could not be obtained by any other means. The dying king may, or may not, have urged another Scottish campaign upon him; but the decision to undertake it should not be seen either as an example of his far-sighted idealism, or as a mere piece of wanton aggression. If he wanted to ’busy giddy minds with foreign wars’, then Scotland was by far the safest bet—or it would have been if it had not been for the death of Francis I. War always raises soldiers to political prominence, and, although he had achieved some note as a diplomat, Warwick was also primarily a soldier. His kinsmen and friends followed the same bent. His cousins Edward and Henry were both serving under Lord Grey at Boulogne, where it is reasonable to suppose that he had been instrumental in placing them. Henry, indeed, had cut a great dash at the tournament held there to celebrate Edward’s coronation.³⁸ At the same time Warwick’s younger brother Andrew had been appointed as early as 27 February to command a fleet ’addressed into the North Sees aswel for annoyance of the Skottes bruted to prepare to passe towardes France, and for the interruption of suche municion as is loked to be brought for Skotland owte of Fraunce…’.³⁹ On 12 March he reported a notable success to the Lord Admiral, Thomas Seymour. He had taken the Lyon, and with it many Scottish prisoners, although documents which he had also been anxious to secure had been cast into the sea.

After 20 March Warwick virtually ceased to attend council meetings, probably because he was busy with military affairs in France and the north. On 28 May he received £42.10s. ’for so muche by him imprested in Frenche crownes to James Walshe, sent aboute the Kinges Majestes affayres into the partes of Fraunce’,⁴⁰ but there are few other indications of his activity in the early summer. He was, however, not neglectful of his own interests, and his manner of pursuing them gives some insight into the workings of the patronage system at this stage of the Protectorate On 24 March he wrote, not to Somerset but to his old familiar Paget, setting out his case for a grant of the ’lordship’ of Warwick as a part of the £300 a year in land which he was due to receive under the terms of the February creations. He was already constable, high steward, and master of the game there, and ’because of the name and my descent from one of the daughters of the rightful line I am the more desirous to have the thing’.⁴¹ He offered to remit part of the fees which he already enjoyed in Warwick in return for the farm of the manor, castle, and town. The castle was in any case, he pointed out, partly ruinous and ’unable to lodge a good baron with his train’. ’Move the rest of the lords to this effect’, he wrote ’and be friendly to [Sir Anthony] Denny, according to his desire for the site and remains of Waltham.’ If he could not have Warwick, then Paget was to put in a bid on his behalf for Tonbridge, Penshurst, and Canonbury. At the same time he was mindful that Sir Anthony Browne was keen to have ’the lordship in Sussex that was Lord De La Warr’s’, and that it would be well bestowed upon him because he would keep a household there.⁴² If Somerset’s was the only voice which counted in such matters, then Warwick was clearly ignorant of the fact. He was prepared to bargain for support, and to be beholden to his friends; nor was he taking anything for granted. Paget presumably advised him to present his request in due form, because on 27 March he submitted a very large petition, running to twenty-nine membranes, to the court of Augmentations, listing lands in twelve counties, which must have amounted to the whole £300 of his entitlement, and headed by the manor, castle, and town of Warwick.⁴³ Much negotiation must then have followed, because the grant which he eventually received on 22 June was different in many respects from the grant requested, but it included the Warwick ’lordship’ by which he set so much store.⁴⁴

No sooner was this grant made than Dudley began to alienate some of the properties which he had received: the site of the hospital at Ludlow to William and Edward Foxe; the monastery of St John at Colchester to Francis Jobson; the manor of Ramborough, Suffolk, to Sir Edward North.⁴⁵ Over the following two years he was to distribute much land in this way, and although we do not know the terms, it is very likely that these were preferential sales, or even gifts, intended to built up an affinity and a network of friendships. The names of the recipients—Sir Thomas Darcy, Francis Jobson, Sir Thomas Palmer, George Harper, and Thomas Culpepper—suggest no less. In spite of a noble lineage, as a service peer Dudley had no natural manred. He had shifted his main base at least twice, and, although the earldom gave him a position of some strength in the West Midlands, he needed an affinity to sustain the political position to which he aspired, especially in the uncertain circumstances of a minority. On 7 July he received the £500 which had been bequeathed to him under the terms of Henry VIII’s will, and had every reason to be satisfied with a profitable few weeks,⁴⁶ but his gains were as nothing by comparison with those of the duke of Somerset, who on 9 July caused himself to be granted a massive annuity of 8,000 marks.⁴⁷ At £5,333 per annum he thereafter received what was in effect a salary as chief minister equivalent to the landed revenues of the richest peerage in the country—over and above the revenues of the duchy of Somerset. For the next two years his income from all sources was probably in excess of £10,000 a year. He also used his position to extract lands from the Church by way of profitable exchanges. The bishop of Lincoln was licensed on 18 August to grant him the manor of Woburn.⁴⁸ Nor did he fail to extract other rewards from a vulnerable Crown estate. On 11 July 1548 he was to receive a further £500 worth of land for his services in Scotland where the situation by then would rather have merited a refund.⁴⁹ On 19 August 1547 his brother Thomas also received land to the annual value of £500.⁵⁰ Perhaps it is only fair to add that the Seymours, unlike the Dudleys, did not in addition nibble away at the court of Augmentations. Apart from two small grants to the Protector’s son after his death, their profits were taken on a large scale.

By the beginning of July preparations for war in the north were far advanced. As early as 24 March the council was deliberately exaggerating the report of an ’attemptate’ by the Scots of the West March, received from Lord Wharton.⁵¹ In April the northern counties were warned about aggressive Scottish and French intentions, and muster commissioners in all counties were required to survey their available men, making returns by 20 May.⁵² Warwick was one of those busied in this way. He was still available in London on 2 July to be one of those commissioned to take Sir Anthony Denny’s account. His instructions for the north were eventually dated 12 August, but they seem to have been drafted about a month earlier, and to have been the subject of some negotiation. On 22 July Paget replied to a letter from the earl, in which he had clearly objected to some part of his orders, including the daily rate of his ’diet’, which was set at 5 marks. Paget agreed that £5 would have been more appropriate, but regretted that he was unable to reply more satisfactorily ’For both my Lord Protector’s Grace is absent at London, and I here at Drayton also absent from, the court…’. He suggested that Dudley should leave his unsatisfactory commission with one of his servants, until Paget could acquire a more satisfactory one to send after him.⁵³ It was presumably the amended version which was issued on 12 August. Warwick’s authority was that of ’Lieutenant and Captain Generall’ of the North Parts. At the same time Lord Thomas Seymour was given a similar commission for the South, and a number of other peers were given authority to levy men within particular counties.⁵⁴ The Protector himself was appointed ’King’s Lieutenant and Captain General for wars both within the realm and without’ with the power to hire mercenaries and to exercise martial law at his discretion. The impression given by these commissions is that of a realm preparing to defend itself against a mighty adversary, rather than that of one preparing to launch a medium-sized campaign of brief duration against a recalcitrant but not particularly formidable foe. Perhaps this was done to deter the French from intervening, or perhaps to strengthen the council’s hand for dealing with possible trouble at home. It certainly appears unnecessarily comprehensive for the campaign which followed.

By this time there was little in the way of an English party in Scotland, but there was a growing protestant element which looked to England for protection, particularly as the Protector’s religious policy began to surface in the summer of 1547. Over a year before, in May 1546, a protestant ’commando’ group had broken into St Andrews castle, murdered Cardinal Beaton, and defied all attempts to remove them.⁵⁵ The raising of that seige does not seem to have been high on Somerset’s agenda, and the naval protection which Henry had accorded to the garrison was inadequately maintained. On 31 July 1547 a squadron of French galleys under the command of Leo Strozzi bombarded the castle into surrender, and English credibility among the Scottish reformers was heavily undermined. Just two days later, on 2 August, Somerset sent orders to the muster commissioners of all shires to send their contingents to rendezvous at Newcastle on August 28.⁵⁶ Because the Lord Admiral was also Lieutenant of the South, the fleet was placed under the command of Lord Edward Clinton. By 1 September Somerset had about 18,000 men and 24 fighting ships mustered at Berwick, while Lord Wharton at Carlisle was poised to lead 2,500 raiders across the western border as a diversion. On 2 September the earl of Warwick, leading a vanguard of about 4,000 men, crossed the river Tweed and entered Scotland. Behind him Somerset commanded the main army, and Lord Dacre the rearguard. Whatever his original commission may have indicated, when the campaign actually began, Warwick was the Protector’s second in command, and entrusted with the most responsible position in an advancing army. William Patten, whose account, published in January 1548, provides a detailed narrative of the campaign, is fulsome in his praise of the Earl’s skill and courage. Admittedly Patten’s work is a eulogy of the whole English command, and his comments may be discounted, but the incidents which he describes are circumstantial and convincing. On 7 September, while the army was crossing the north Tyne in a thick mist, Warwick, with, a small band of horsemen, lingered behind to deter a Scottish attack upon the rearguard, and fell into an ambush. Unintimidated and seizing his lance,

with so valiant a courage he charged at one (it was thought Dandy Carr a captain among them) that he did not only compel Carr to turn, but himself chased him above twelve score together, all the way, at spear point; so that if Carr’s horse had not been exceeding good and wight, his Lordship had surely run him through in this race. He also, with his little band, caused all the rest to flee amain.⁵⁷

The panache which had earned the 19-year-old John Dudley his knighthood was still there in his mid-forties. Neither advancing years nor the responsibilities of command had dimmed his appetite for a good fight. Patten’s account of this incident is also interesting for the names of some of those who were the members of his ’band’, presumably a kind of personal bodyguard; Henry Vane ’a gentleman of my Lord’s’, and the French mercenaries Jean de Bertheville and Jean Ribaut, both of whom were to have chequered careers over the next few years.⁵⁸

On 9 September, as the advance continued to the Esk, Warwick was again tempted to let his youthful zeal outrun his mature discretion. George Gordon, earl of Huntly, one of the Scottish commanders, sent a challenge to Somerset offering to reduce the effusion of Christian blood by fighting him man to man in limited or personal combat. The Protector took the opportunity to deliver the herald a public lecture on Scottish responsibility for the confrontation, and declined Huntly’s somewhat quixotic offer on the grounds of his own superior status and responsibility. Warwick immediately offered to accept the challenge in Somerset’s place, ’but my Lord’s Grace would in no wise grant to it’.⁵⁹ The argument that Warwick was also superior to Huntly in status is unconvincing, but the Protector was undoubtedly right not to risk his valued second in command in a chivalric gesture which would have resolved nothing. Whether he was also unwilling to allow Dudley to obtain extra prestige by winning such a combat must remain an open question. The battle which was fought on the following day, was at first a close and bloody contest because the Scots, instead of standing on the defensive, attacked, taking the English by surprise. However, good discipline and superior firepower turned the day, which ended in a devastating Scottish rout. Although Patten does not expressly say so, it seems from his account that this was a victory won by hard fighting captains and soldiers rather than by skilful commanders. Somerset receives nothing but praise and ’My Lord Lieutenant’ is vividly portrayed inspiring the vanguard with noble words,⁶⁰ but once the battle was joined there was little that either of them could do to influence the outcome. According to Patten, some 13,000 Scots were killed in the battle and the pursuit which followed it. The figure is certainly an exaggeration, but this was no repetition of Solway Moss, and the casualties were certainly heavy. Nor did the English escape lightly, although their dead may have been numbered in hundreds rather than thousands.

Having won his victory, Somerset did remarkably little with it. He moved towards Leith, and began some desultory seige works but more to keep his pioneers occupied than with any serious intent. Clinton’s ships took the island of Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth, and the castle of Broughty, further north on the Firth of Tay, but no attempt was made against Edinburgh, and on 20 September the English army began to withdraw towards the borders. Somerset was well aware that Henry VIII’s policies in Scotland had achieved nothing, and fear of a similar failure haunted his dreams.⁶¹ The battle of Pinkie had destroyed Scotland’s military capability for the time being, but unless he could devise a better follow-up strategy than the old king, it would amount to no more. His intention, as it soon emerged, was to plant strategic garrisons across the Lowlands, and by a constant military presence to apply coercive pressure and to make future large-scale invasions unnecessary. In the immediate aftermath of the battle such garrisons were established at Hume castle, Roxburgh, Eye mouth, Castlemilk, and Moffat in the Scottish marches, at Inchcolm, and at Broughty.⁶² Somerset made no secret of his intentions. The French and imperial ambassadors were well aware of them, and so were the Scots themselves. The ultimate objective of all this coercion was, of course, to resurrect the treaty of Greenwich and to bring about a personal union between England and Scotland. By the beginning of October Somerset was back in London, leaving the earl of Warwick and Sir Ralph Sadler, with other commissioners, in Berwick to meet with the promised representatives of the council of Scotland. Two other Dudleys also remained behind, Andrew (who had been knighted during the campaign) as Captain of Broughty, and Sir Edward, the earl’s cousin, as Captain of Hume castle.

Over the following weeks it transpired that Warwick was wasting his time. The promised Scottish commissioners ’neither came, nor, belike, meant to come’. This was probably due not, as Patten believed, to deliberate Scottish perfidiousness, but rather to the chronic divisions among the Scottish aristocracy.⁶³ These were partly occasioned by personal and family feuds of long standing, and partly by the steady growth of the Reformation.

A number of border lairds pledged their allegiance to Warwick as the king’s Lieutenant, and there were English supporters of similar rank in both Fife and Angus. The earl of Bothwell, Patrick Hepburn, who had been captured at Pinkie, offered to surrender his great border castle of Hermitage in return for an English marriage. However, since he had his eyes on the two royal princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, thinking ’if he liked them, they would not mislike him’, either his judgement or his seriousness must be suspected.⁶⁴ How long Warwick remained in the north after the end of September is not apparent. He is not noted as having been present at the parliament which convened on 4 November, nor does he appear again among the attenders at the Privy Council until January 1549.⁶⁵ Neither of these records can be relied upon, however, and it is likely that he was back in London well before Christmas. On 22 December he received a grant of lands to the value of £108 for his services in Scotland, which had presumably been completed by that date; and on 25 December he was licensed to grant his manor of Ramborough in Suffolk to his fellow councillor Sir Edward North.⁶⁶ On 8 January 1548 he wrote to the Protector from Ely Place, asking the latter to authorize an exchange of lands with the bishop of Worcester. ’This is the first exchange I ever desired at any of [the bishop] hands’ he wrote righteously, ’and shall be the last. I desire no disprofit to the bishop…’.⁶⁷ He had extracted Lincoln Place in Holborn from the bishop of Lincoln back in August, but that, presumably, did not even pretend to be an exchange.

On 24 December Somerset had caused his patent of 12 March to be renewed ’forasmuch as by his [the king’s] said uncle and council, affairs have been well managed…’. He was now to hold office during the king’s pleasure rather than for the duration of the minority, and he was confirmed in his office of Lieutenant-General of the kingdom.⁶⁸ It has been pointed out that Warwick did not set his hand to this, but that is of no significance because, unlike the original patent, this confirmation was not recorded in the council register, and was authorized directly by the king. In spite of Warwick’s absence from the council board during these months, there is no evidence of a rift, or even of strained relations, between himself and the Protector. He saw himself as a person of influence with Somerset and was so perceived by others. On 22 January Sir Henry Long wrote ‘It may please your Grace to understand thant I have written unto my Lord of Warwick, desiring his lordship to be a mean for me unto your grace, whereby I trust the sooner to know your grace’s pleasure’; and on 1 February the earl himself wrote to William Cecil, Somerset’s private secretary, urging the Protector’s favour for a group of ‘poor folk’ who were desirous of founding a free grammar school.⁶⁹ Warwick’s developing relationship with Cecil is of considerable interest, because by the spring of 1548 he was writing to the secretary in very much the same manner as he had addressed Sir William Paget when the latter had been the king’s secretary in 1545 and 1546. Like Paget, Cecil was the man with immediate access to the source of power. Paget was still an important councillor, and there is no reason to suppose that Warwick had fallen out with him, but his infuence was declining. He continued to bombard the Protector with good advice, but Somerset was no longer listening. This was eventually to prove a mistake, but it explains the change in the pattern of Dudley’s correspondence. There are some references in the early part of 1548 to suggest that Warwick’s health may have been poor. Both de Selve and Van der Delft commented upon his frequent indispositions in explanation of his absence from the council; but the former also reported that his influence with the Protector was unimpaired.⁷⁰ It is possible that having observed the increasingly marginal role to which the council was being relegated in the decision-making process, Warwick simply did not bother to attend, preferring to maintain his role by other means. The key to that strategy may again lie in his developing relationship with Cecil.

At the end of June he was appointed President of the Council in the Marches of Wales. There is no trace of his commission either in the Patent Rolls or in the council register, so the exact date is unknown, but on 2 July he wrote to Cecil ‘to know my lord’s resolution concerning the commission of marches’.⁷¹ In many ways he was an appropriate choice, because his principal seat at Dudley castle was within easy reach of Ludlow, and he held a number of properties within the marches. Nevertheless his old anxiety about ‘estimacion’ still seems to have troubled him. He was willing to serve, but doubted whether his ‘liveries’ would be sufficient. ‘Without honest and sound associates,’ he wrote, ‘the President will be able to do little good with the froward and ignorant.’⁷² His doubts must have been overcome, because he certainly did serve, but very little is known about his activity in that capacity. Even his title is open to some doubt. In July 1549 he was formally described as President of the Principality of Wales and its Marches, whereas the usual title was President of the Council in the Marches of Wales, which was the designation applied to his successor, Sir William Herbert.⁷³ None of his surviving correspondence is dated from the marches, and if he ever went there in an official capacity it has escaped notice. Despite his professions of willingness, a distinctly sour note was struck within a few days of his appointment. On 7 July he wrote to Cecil complaining that his attempt to remove a corrupt Justice and some unsuitable councillors had been blocked in spite of earlier assurances from the Protector that his wishes would be respected.

By whose persuasion this happens I know not, but I am sure I have base friends who smile to see me so used. But I trust, despite my charges and pains, I have made provision there. Despite mockery I shall be as ready to serve as those who have now won their purpose, not the first or last to be worked with my lord. If they work no more displeasure I will be more willing to forgive.⁷⁴

It is difficult to know how seriously to take this display of ill humour. Warwick may have believed that he had influential enemies at court, who were endeavouring to poison his relationship with Somerset, or he may have been suffering from a fit of temporary pique. There is no suggestion of a serious rift with the Protector himself, and his requests to Cecil for small favours from the duke’s patronage continued without interruption.

Until the end of July Warwick was at Pendley in Hertfordshire. While the council concerned itself with the recurring French threat to Boulogne, and with reliable reports of Henry’s intention to intervene in Scotland, England’s most dashing and successful soldier seems to have stayed quietly at home. Barrett Beer’s conjecture that this was due to a prolonged period of ill health is probably correct, although the sparsity of comment to that effect is rather surprising.⁷⁵ For whatever reason he was not on active service during the summer of 1548; nor was he at court. The earl of Shrewsbury commanded on the Scottish borders, and Lord Grey of Wilton at Boulogne. There was plague in London during the summer, ‘a great mortalitie by pestilence’ as Grafton recorded. Warwick was at Ely Place in Holborn during September when he reported that his wife ‘had had her fit again’. This was clearly not plague, but it caused him to defer a planned return to the court.⁷⁶ His occasional references to his own health are more suggestive of hypochondria than of serious indisposition. He complained of falling ill while on a visit to the earl of Southampton, and of being unable to eat.⁷⁷ Wriothesley was not the most obvious man to be playing the host, as the former Lord Chancellor was still excluded from the council and was deeply aggrieved by the way in which he had been treated in the previous year. However, they were colleagues of long standing, and he does not seem to have held Dudley responsible for his humiliation. The continued friendship which this visit suggests was to be significant for the events of the following year. Warwick’s return to active and visible participation in affairs came with the convening of Edward’s second parliament of 27 November. This was the parliament which saw the introduction of the first bill of uniformity, which was the culmination of the Protector’s ecclesiastical policy. Warwick had been noted long before Henry’s death as a supporter of the new learning—a heretic in the eyes of Van der Delft—and he had done nothing during the first year of the reign to indicate a change of heart.⁷⁸ Indeed the imperial ambassador noted with disfavour that mass was no longer celebrated in the earl’s household by December 1547.⁷⁹ As this was some months before the public introduction of Cranmer’s interim provision for an English language communion, it would be interesting to know what liturgy was used at Ely Place. Unlike Somerset, Warwick seems to have had no interest in doctrinal issues. He did not, at this stage, correspond with leading reformers, or receive the dedications of their works. He did take part in December 1548 in one of the debates on the Bill of Uniformity of which a record has survived, but his contribution serves only to reveal an unsophisticated and distinctly secular mind.

On the first day he intervened only to point out that what was looked for was uniformity, not theological debate. He accused Thomas Thirlby, the bishop of Westminster, who disagreed with the doctrine of the proposed Prayer Book, of speaking a ‘perilous word’, and of stirring up discord.⁸⁰ The clergy, he continued, echoing the well-remembered words of Henry VIII, were looked to for leadership in consensus, to set an example of obedience to the laity, ‘Seeing there is but one truth and verity…calling therein for the aid of God’. On the second day Dudley was somewhat more ambitious, challenging Bishop Nicholas Heath of Worcester on the question of tran-substantiation. His question was actually answered in a protestant sense by Nicholas Ridley of Rochester, whereupon the Earl exclaimed ‘Where is your scripture now, my Lord of Worcester? Methink because you cannot maintain your argument neither by Scripture nor doctors, you would go now with natural reason and sophistry…’.⁸¹ The best that can be said for his interjection is that it shows an understandable anxiety to bring the rather pointless exchange to an end. Conservatives and reformers were actually talking at cross purposes on this issue, having different philosophical premisses, but there is no sign that Warwick understood that.⁸² He was clearly out of his depth in intellectual terms, but understood clearly that the outcome of the debate depended upon political power rather than persuasive argument. If the Protector could muster enough votes in the House of Lords, then the validity or otherwise of the dissenters’ views would count for nothing. On 15 January 1549 seven bishops and three lay peers voted against the Bill of Uniformity, which passed comfortably in a House of some seventy-five members. Warwick voted with the majority.⁸³

It is possible that his low-profile summer may also have been connected with the desire to pay some attention to the management of his estate. In July he sold 40 acres of marsh in Poplar to Sir Francis Jobson, and on 17 August paid £1,286 into the court of Augmentations for the manor of Ched-worth in Gloucestershire, and a long list of other lands.⁸⁴ According to a subsidy assessment taken in the first year of the reign, his income from lands at this point was £1,200 per annum.⁸⁵ This represents both an absolute and a relative decline from his position four years earlier. Not only was he now behind the Lord Protector (£1,700), but he was also exceeded by Lord Russell the Lord Privy Seal (£1,396), the marquis of Dorset (2,000 marks), and the marquis of Northampton (also 2,000 marks), as well as by other major peers, such as the earls of Derby and Shrewsbury, whose assessments at this time are not recorded. The absolute decline was probably of no significance, because the assessments were already beginning to lose touch with the reality which Henry had always insisted upon, but Warwick’s failure to gain on his peers indicates a lack of competitive edge which he may well have been attempting to remedy. He certainly spent some time upon his estates in Warwickshire, probably during July and August, because it was there that he brushed with the commission of enquiry into enclosures, headed by the zealous John Hales of Coventry. These commissions had been launched by the Protector in the previous summer, in pursuit of what he considered to be his social duty.⁸⁶ While population levels were low in the previous century, a fair amount of arable land had been taken out of use and converted to profitable sheep pasture. When the population began to rise again, after about 1480, holdings became scarce, and resentment against ‘depopulation’ began to be voiced. Cardinal Wolsey had been sufficiently concerned by the evidence of agrarian unrest to launch a series of enquiry commissions in 1517. No very resolute action had resulted, but Henry VIII had accepted an anti-enclosure culture, which had been expressed in a series of statutes for the protection of tillage. By the end of his reign the overall economic situation had deteriorated because of the advent of inflation, and the consequent need felt by landlords to maintain their real income by raising rents and converting land to more profitable use wherever possible. There is no reason to suppose that there had been an orgy of depopulating enclosure since 1520, indeed all the evidence points the other way, but a group of zealous preachers and pamphleteers who are sometimes known by the misleading collective term of ‘the commonwealth men’, set about launching a moral crusade in the early days of the Protectorate.⁸⁷ Their targets were gentle and aristocratic landlords, whom they accused of irresponsible economic exploitation, and of wilful disregard of the rights and interests of the poor. Modern research has shown most of their specific arguments to have been spurious, but they held the moral high ground at the time, and Somerset was convinced by their thesis. If was the king’s responsibility to protect his humble subjects against oppression by the rich and powerful, and that responsibility devolved upon him as Protector. He therefore let it be known that he intended to continue with the traditional Tudor policy of protecting arable farming, and sent out commissioners to collect complaints and evidence of abuse. It was such a commission that aroused the ire of the earl of Warwick.⁸⁸

Warwick’s protest to Hales does not survive, but he obviously accused him of stirring up agrarian unrest by promising remedies which could not be implemented, and by undermining that deference to the gentry upon which so much of the fabric of social discipline depended. John Strype, nearly two centuries later, commented disparagingly that ‘he grew much displeased with Hales, who acted very honestly in this commission, and favorably to the commons’.⁸⁹ However, it was not Hales’s honesty that was in question, but the political sense of what he was doing. Writing to Warwick during August, he protested that he had no intention of ‘stirring up’ the people against the nobility and gentlemen, nor of inciting anyone to violence. It is clear from his instructions, and from the Protector’s proclamations, that he was theoretically right. It was very carefully pointed out that no private citizen, however justly he may feel aggrieved, was entitled to take the law into his own hands.⁹⁰ However, it is also clear from the sporadic riots which broke out during the summer of 1548, and from the storms of the following year, that that is exactly what happened. However virtuously Hales, or Somerset, might deny it, or disclaim any such intention, there was a direct connection between the expectations aroused by the commissions and the spread of agrarian violence. Warwick was right to be both angry and alarmed by these developments, and the fact that his own interests were threatened is no good ground for dismissing the validity of his fears. He was to return to the same theme in the more threatening circumstances of the following summer.

By the end of 1548 the Protectorate was in difficulties. Somerset had started the year in Scotland by attempting to build on the strong position which the victory of Pinkie and the establishment of the garrisons had given him. His first weapon was persuasion, and in January he published, both in Latin and in English, An epistle or exhortation, to unitie and peace, in which he set out with eloquence and conviction the advantages which would accrue to both kingdoms from a union of the crowns.⁹¹ This work was widely circulated in southern Scotland, but the fact that it was published simultaneously in Latin meant that the Scots were not its only target. It was intended to persuade the international community, and perhaps most particularly the imperialists, of the righteousness of the English cause. The Protector’s arguments found an echo in the north, not only among the protestant reformers who dreaded the revival of French influence, but also among mercenary intellectuals like James Harrison, who endeavoured to sell the union line to his fellow countrymen in return for a pension.⁹² Unfortunately such propaganda, however good, did not convert readily into serious politics. In January and February 1548 a diplomatic battle was raging in Scotland between England and France, and the principal weapon was gold. At first it seemed that the English would prevail. Lennox, Glencairn, Bothwell, Angus, and even Argyle were apparently taking that side at the end of January. However the French, urged on by the queen mother, Mary of Guise, counter-attacked strongly with an offer of marriage between Mary and the Dauphin. What probably decided the issue in the end was the constant irritant of the English garrisons. However careful the English commanders Grey, Wharton, and Bowes might be (and they were not always particularly careful) the reinforcement of these fortresses, and the desultory fighting which they inevitably provoked, constantly reminded the Scots of the unfinished war.⁹³ As late as the end of March the chief French negotiator, Chapelle, believed that he would lose because of the threat of English military power. There was no will to resist; the English raided selectively and at will to intimidate those who refused to adhere to them; and another full-scale English invasion was being prepared.⁹⁴ On the latter point his intelligence was faulty, but there was substantial military activity in the borders, and Sir Andrew Dudley was an active, not to say aggressive, commander at Broughty Crag. Somerset’s policy, although not pursued with uniform success, was to speak softly and carry a big stick. So impressed was Chapelle that he told Henry that only a full military commitment in Scotland could redeem the situation, and the king believed him.⁹⁵

On 18 June 6,000 French troops were landed at Leith. Lord Clinton and Sir Thomas Wyndham had a substantial fleet at sea off the north-east coast, because the advent of Montalembert’s force was expected, but they were in the wrong place, and, although the French were sighted off Dunbar, by then it was too late to intercept. This comparatively modest force transformed the military situation, because the English were not as strong as rumour made them, and the spirit of Scottish resistance revived. Strategically well briefed, Montalembert moved straight to the seige of Haddington, the key English fortress on the road between Berwick and Edinburgh. At the same time he proposed to the assembled Scottish estates the Franco-Scottish marriage which had been mooted in January, together with the suggestion that Mary should be sent immediately to France. Overwhelmed, perhaps, with relief at being freed from English bullying, or not liking to argue with their forceful liberators, the parliament accepted both these proposals in the treaty of Haddington on 10 July.⁹⁶ Early in August the young queen left Scotland by the western route, and, evading a rather half-hearted attempt at English interception, landed after a stormy crossing at Roscoff in Brittany on 13 August. Somerset’s Scottish policy was ruined at a blow, and over the next few weeks his political limitations were ruthlessly exposed. Instead of cutting his losses, or reverting to a low-key policy of support for the Scottish protestants until the French should outstay their welcome, he resurrected the worst features of Henry VIII’s bankrupt strategy. Abandoning the idealism of his January manifesto, he again advanced the ancient English claim to suzerainty over her northern neighbour.⁹⁷

Those Scots who had regarded his ‘one Britain’ rhetoric as opportunist humbug thus appeared to be completely vindicated, and those who had accepted it were embarrassed and undermined. At the same time he prepared to strike another military blow.

There was a good case for trying to neutralize Montalembert, and his presence at Haddington actually created the English threat which he believed he had come to counter. The first attempt, however, led by Sir Robert Bowes and Warwick’s protégé” Sir Thomas Palmer, was a fiasco. What was intended as a diversionary raid by 3,000–4,000 men was ambushed, thanks to Palmer’s foolhardiness, and driven off with heavy losses. Both Bowes and Palmer were captured.⁹⁸ The Protector was understandably enraged, because Palmer had deliberately ignored orders, but it was not altogether unreasonable, as Paget pointed out, for the latter to claim that he had been misled by Somerset’s own bellicosity.⁹⁹ Palmer bitterly resented the anger which was vented upon him, and Paget was troubled, not for the first time, by the fact that his cautious advice had been ignored. The main campaign, led by the sensible Shrewsbury, ran no such risk, but was extraordinarily inconsequential. As 15,000 men crossed the border on 17 August and advanced towards Haddington, the French prudently withdrew, but Montalembert refused to be drawn into a pitched battle. By early September, short of money and supplies, and apparently under orders from the Protector not to tarry, Shrewsbury retreated to Berwick and immediately began to disband his forces.¹⁰⁰ Apart from reinforcing Haddington, he had accomplished nothing. By the end of September the Franco-Scottish siege had again closed around the garrison. The contrast between Somerset’s aggressive rhetoric and his faltering performance was stark and disturbing.

By the end of 1548 the Protector’s Scottish policy seemed to be drifting. Torn between an obstinate determination not to abandon the hopeless cause of an Anglo-Scottish marriage, and an acute awareness of his mounting debts, he managed to achieve the worst of all possibilities. Sir James Wilford, in command of the key fortress of Haddington, received such indifferent responses to his appeals for assistance that he believed that he had been abandoned. Sir John Lutterell, who had replaced Andrew Dudley at Broughty Crag, shared the same conviction, and yet both in fact remained crucial to the Protector’s strategy.¹⁰¹ He had totally failed to exploit the Franco-Scottish tension which surfaced in the wake of Shrewsbury’s raid, and it was the weather rather than English military strength which preserved the status quo through the winter. In January 1549 fresh levies were brought to Berwick, and both Haddington and Broughty were revictualled for six months. John Brende, Somerset’s personal representative in the north, sent him regular and dispassionate accounts of the situation, so it was not ignorance, or the special pleading of particular officers, which induced the Protector’s low-key attitude to what had been his most obsessive programme. The truth is that other pressing issues forced him to reduce the priority of Scotland as soon as an enforced period of inactivity allowed him to do so.

In spite of the war in the north, formal relations with France continued to be correct. Shrewsbury’s campaign encouraged Chatillon, the French commander in Picardy, with the king’s encouragement, to venture some probes against the defences of Boulogne.¹⁰² These achieved nothing, and neither side wanted an open breach. The English council could not contemplate a second war without imperial support, and Henry was finding his commitments in the north unexpectedly expensive and frustrating. Both sides scored points. The French complained bitterly that Charles was allowing the English to recruit mercenaries in the Empire for use in Scotland, while the English complained that Henry was styling himself king of Scotland by virtue of his son’s betrothal to the queen. Both sides stepped up privateering activity—or more properly piracy since there was no state of war—and Lord Admiral Seymour seems to have allowed his enthusiasm for this activity to outrun the limitations of discretion or common sense.¹⁰³ At the same time, Warwick was not the only peer to be suffering grave doubts about the wisdom of the Protector’s agrarian policy. There had been scattered riots in a number of counties during the summer, which seemed to be directly connected to his sympathetic attitude to petitions. The religious temperature was also rising as the affects of the Chantries Act of the previous year began to become apparent, and as the archbishop’s campaign against images became increasingly insistent.¹⁰⁴ In April the abrasive and somewhat unsavoury archdeacon of Cornwall, William Body, had been lynched for a particularly insensitive application of these policies.¹⁰⁵ The ringleaders had been arrested and executed, but their action had commanded a great deal of support. The introduction of the uniformity bill therefore, in December 1548, not only heralded a sharp debate in the House of Lords, but also the possibility of violence in the parishes. Somerset’s biggest problem, however, at the end of 1548 was domestic in every sense of the word, because it concerned the conduct of his younger brother, Lord Seymour of Sudely.

Seymour was a man of some ability and, as it transpired, overwhelming ambition. He had been created a gentleman of the Privy Chamber in 1537, while his sister was queen, and knighted in the same year. In 1543 he became Master of the Ordnance, and was given several commands, mostly at sea, during the ensuing French war.¹⁰⁶ He was a member of the Privy Council during the last year of Henry’s life, but to his bitter chagrin was not named as one of the sixteen executors of the king’s will. Like several other councillors, he appeared among the twelve assistants. Having received a barony in Edward VI’s ‘accession honours’, he succeeded Warwick as Lord Admiral on 17 February, and returned to the council ex officio. From his own subsequent actions, and from testimony relating to them, it appears that he considered such recognition inadequate. He believed that he should have been given the position of Governor of the King’s Person, and became increasingly jealous of his dominant and successful brother. Little of this rancour, however, was apparent at the time. What was apparent was the rapid revival of the relationship which had formerly existed between Seymour and the queen dowager, Catherine Parr.¹⁰⁷ Catherine would almost certainly have married Seymour after the death of her second husband, Lord Larimer, if Henry had not intervened. In the early months of 1547, having endured three sexually unsatisfying marriages, the 35-year-old Catherine responded ardently to the advances of her erstwhile admirer. It is easy to be cynical about Seymour’s motives, but the courtship seems to have been a passionate one on both sides, and their short-lived marriage was to be happy.¹⁰⁸ The Protector, understandably, was not amused by his brother’s passion when he found out about it. Not only did it appear to be a mere cover for political ambition, it also exarcerbated an existing feud between Catherine and the duchess of Somerset, Anne Stanhope, a lady with a highly developed sense of her own importance. Realizing that Somerset would not consent to his intended marriage, and that to proceed without consent would be politically impossible, Seymour circumvented his brother in the only way open to him. He made himself familiar with John Fowler, one of the grooms of the Privy Chamber, who by virtue of his office had unsupervised access to the king. According to Fowler’s later testimony

He…asked me if I had communication with the king soon, to ask him if he would be content he should marry, and if so whom. I agreed, and that night when the king was alone, I said I marvelled that the Admiral did not marry. He said nothing. I asked him if he was content he should do so, and he agreed. I asked him whom and he said my lady Anne of Cleves, and then he said no, but he should marry his sister Mary, to turn, her opinions…¹⁰⁹

Having extracted this somewhat flippant response from the 9-year-old Edward, Seymour was poised to exploit his advantage.

Next day the Admiral came again to St, James’s, and called me to him in the gallery. I told him all the king had said. He laughed, and asked me to ask the king if he would be content for him to marry the queen, and if he would write in his suit. I agreed and did so that night. The next day the Admiral came to the king; I cannot tell what communication they had, but the king wrote a letter to the queen, and the Admiral brought one back from her…

Catherine did not need any persuasion, but the king’s personal endorsement, obtained in this underhand manner, made it impossible for the Protector to object. He was greatly incensed, however, and if relations between the two brothers had not been strained before, they certainly were after July 1547. A quarrel over Catherine’s jewels, for which each must bear a share of the responsibility, made matters even worse.¹¹⁰

This story is illuminating in several ways. It shows the young king in an attractive light. He was fond of his stepmother but clearly did not at once associate her happiness with Seymour. On the other hand he was easily persuaded. He must have liked the Admiral, who was a plausible operator, and he was innocent of suspicion. At the same time it shows that the Protector was a negligent guardian. He already knew that his brother coveted the Guardianship, and yet he took no precautions to forestall such an approach. On one occasion Seymour rashly commented to Fowler that the king was so poorly kept that it would have been easy to carry him off.¹¹¹ Probably the appointment of Sir Michael Stanhope, the Protector’s brother-in-law, as Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber in August 1547 was an attempt to lock the stable door after the horse had been stolen. If that was the case the remedy did not work, because Stanhope kept his young master short of money, an opportunity which Seymour, through Fowler, was quick to exploit.¹¹² The Admiral also had a gambler’s reckless confidence. Very early in the reign, probably before his marriage to Catherine, he persuaded the not very bright Henry Grey, marquis of Dorset, to place his eldest daughter, Jane, then aged about 10, in his household, claiming that he would be able to arrange her marriage to the king. Edward liked his cousin, but that Seymour should have made such a suggestion, and that Dorset should have believed in it, suggests that neither had a very firm grasp of political reality.

In spite of his office, Seymour did not command the fleet against Scotland. It was later alleged that he refused to do so, the implication being that he wished to remain at court in order to undermine his brother’s influence during the campaign.¹¹³ However, the true reason seems to have been that he had also been appointed Lieutenant of the South of England, and that the Protector intended him to stay on his command, in case the French should seek to exploit the situation to their advantage. On 18 August, Van der Delft reported to Prince Philip, mentioning the Admiral’s marriage, and declaring that it was intended that during the coming campaign ‘he will remain here with the council to take the place of his brother’. Once the campaign was over, it was expected that Lord Seymour would be elevated to a dukedom.¹¹⁴ The ambassador may have been a victim of Seymour’s own propaganda, or the Protector may have been naïve, but it certainly does not look as though relations between the brothers had broken down irretrievably at that stage. However, Seymour did not know the meaning of discretion, and jealousy continued to fester. Catherine bore him a daughter, and died in childbirth in September 1548. The marquis of Dorset very properly withdrew his daughter from the widower’s household, but was then persuaded to allow her to return.¹¹⁵ Even before his wife’s death Seymour seems to have been attempting to build up a relationship with the 14-year-old Princess Elizabeth, and he subsequently made a wild bid for her hand.¹¹⁶ Mary was also bombarded with proposals, but she was old enough, and wise enough to have nothing to do with his advances. Elizabeth was almost compromised. All this is a familiar story, and it is difficult to know how much of it was subsequent embroidery, designed to put a treasonable construction upon actions which were, in themselves, merely foolish and irresponsible. The crisis came in January 1549, not triggered by any single event but by the cumulative effect of his behaviour during the second parliament. His intention seems to have been to introduce a bill for the purpose of annulling his brother’s patent of office. He talked to a number of his fellow peers, and believed that he had their support.¹¹⁷ Presumably he also believed that their backing would give him enough clientage to sway the House of Commons as well. By about 10 or 11 January his activities had become so notorious that Somerset summoned him to a private meeting. Fearing a trap he refused to come, and on 17 January the full council deliberated ‘siche informations as had bene geven…of great attemptates and disloyall practises’ by the Lord Admiral, and ordered his arrest.¹¹⁸

John Hayward, being wise after the event, attributed Lord Seymour’s fall and the estrangement between the brothers to the machinations of the duchess of Somerset and the earl of Warwick who ‘had his finger in the businesse and drew others also to give furtherance or way to her violent desires. Being well content she should have her minde, so as the Duke might thereby incurre infamy and hate…’.¹¹⁹ According to this theory, Dudley had long harboured a jealous dislike of the duke, which he had dissembled until the opportunity arose to strike at him through his brother. Seymour’s fall then set in train the sequence of events which enabled the earl of Warwick to overthrow the Protector in October 1549, and eventually to bring about his execution in January 1552. All this, however, owes more to Dudley’s ‘black legend’ than it does to contemporary evidence. Seymour certainly disliked and distrusted Warwick. The marquis of Dorset testified that ‘the Admiral also advised me to keep my house in Warwickshire, as it is a county full of men, chiefly to match Lord Warwick’.¹²⁰ Similarly, according to Sir William Sharrington, ‘He [Seymour] often showed me what shires and places were for him, noting where he was the judge of his friends, and where lay the lands of the Protector and Lord Warwick, to whom I know he had no affection…’.¹²¹ From this it seems clear that Lord Seymour regarded the earl as an ally and associate of his brother, rather than as someone who could be cajoled into his own camp. Van der Delft confessed that he had originally believed that Warwick, ‘as he is the most splendid and haughty by nature and in high reputation’, would have challenged the Protector, but by July 1547 he had changed his mind. Warwick and Paget were Somerset’s two principal allies, and the former showed every sign of contenting himself with ‘the pre-eminence which he at present enjoys’.¹²² While the investigations into Seymour’s misconduct were still progressing, in early February 1549, the ambassador also repeated a story relating to Warwick’s conduct which is circumstantially convincing. At some point after the feud between the two brothers had become notorious, probably in the summer of 1547, he had set out to affect a reconciliation, ‘using strong language to the Admiral, remonstrating with him that he had come to occupy such a high position through the favour of his brother and the council…’. Seymour had been explicitly excluded by the late king from the body of his executors, the earl went on,

‘Be content therefore’ (these are Warwick’s words) ‘with the honour done to you for your brother’s sake, and with your office of Lord Admiral, which I gave up to you for the same motive, for neither the king nor 1 will be governed by you, nor would we be governed by your brother were it not that his virtues and loyalty towards the king and country made him the man fittest to administer the affairs of the country during the king’s minority’.¹²³

Van der Delft does not cite the source of this very precise information, but it may well have been Warwick himself, in which case it reflects the impression which he wished to create, rather than what actually happened. According to the story, Seymour was so abashed by this rebuke that he went off at once and negotiated a cessation of hostilities, at least for the time being.

Whether or not Warwick did play the honest broker in the manner described, he certainly wanted to emphasize his loyalty to Somerset. He had nothing particular to gain from the destruction of the Admiral, and it is not at all clear that anyone at the time believed that the Protector’s position had been undermined by his decision to deal resolutely with his brother. The reason why he was proceeded against by act of attainder rather than by a normal trial probably had more to do with his own attitude and the position of the king than it did with the nature of the charges. Edward was fond of Lord Thomas, who clearly had a great deal of charm and plausibility, and if treason was to offend the king, then the Admiral was not guilty. However, the real problem was that he refused to answer the charges against him. The Lord Chancellor, accompanied by five other members of the council, visited him in the Tower to obtain his response, but after admitting that he had at one time sought the custody of the king’s person, and had given John Fowler money for the boy, he refused to say any more, and refused to set his hand to a transcript of the statement which he had already made.¹²⁴ No efforts could break this impasse, and the council were therefore faced with the possibility of arraigning a peer who would refuse to plead before the court. This interview took place on 24 February, and the bill of attainder was introduced into the House of Lords the next day.¹²⁵ By 27 February it had passed on the third reading, and was sent to the Commons. There it suffered considerable argument and delay, not because the Admiral had many supporters in the House, but because the Commons disliked bills of attainder on principle. After some pressure, it passed on 4 March.¹²⁶ On 10 March the king gave his assent, with obvious reluctance and using words which had been put into his mouth.¹²⁷ It has sometimes been argued that Seymour’s crime was simply to plot against his brother, and that his fate was the Protector’s personal revenge. ‘Seymour was doubtless an ambitious and turbulent man, but there is no evidence whatever to show that he harboured any ill intentions against the state’, wrote John Maclean, and such a view has been echoed more recently.¹²⁸ However, he was guilty of treason as that was construed during a minority government, and it was not for that reason that the Commons were temporarily obstructive. According to Hayward ‘Many of the nobles cried out upon the Protector, calling him a blood-sucker, a murderer a parracide and a villain…’, but there is no hint of such a reaction at the time, and if they did so they were hypocrites because none of them voted against the attainder.¹²⁹

The solid support which the Protector received from the council over this issue strengthened his position rather than the reverse, but it could not dissipate the other clouds which were gathering about his regime. Suspicions that Seymour had been preparing an armed insurrection led to an investigation of his resources, and that in turn uncovered the large-scale malfeasance of his friend Sir William Sharrington, the under-treasurer of the Bristol mint.¹³⁰ Sharrington had not been deeply involved in the Admiral’s plots, but Seymour had let it be known that he was aware of his illegal practices, and in return had extracted a promise of large-scale financial backing—to the tune of £4,000—in support of whatever enterprise he might have in hand. It is not known exactly how much Sharrington had already milked out of the mint before these revelations, but his activities were certainly not helping a currency already heavily undermined by debasement, and increasingly discounted on the foreign exchanges. Although the French had failed to carry Haddington by storm in early October, by the end of 1548 the English were on the defensive throughout the borders, with no clear-cut policy and inadequate resources. Henry II hoped that the arrest of Lord Seymour might provoke civil strife within England, and expose the country to French pressure from both sides.¹³¹ His agents seem to have been taking the Lord Admiral too much at his own valuation. There was never the slightest chance of an armed faction attempting to rescue or avenge the Protector’s brother, and de Selve would have been wasting his time trying to create one, but the warning of French intentions was worth heeding in case some other dissension should arise. There were well-founded reports that Henry was intending to send reinforcements to the north, but his resolution was extremely fragile. Imperial agents, picking up reports of his dissatisfaction with the Scottish nobility, believed that he was about to pull out altogether.¹³² If these rumours reached the English, they rightly discounted them. Moreover, even if the French did reduce their military commitment, that did not alter the fact that the Scottish queen was in France and likely to stay there.

Somerset’s decision, which must have been taken, very early in 1549, to redeem his position in Scotland with a new offensive in the summer was a triumph of hope over experience, and of obstinacy over common sense. Whether he consulted the council at all on the matter is not clear. According to Professor Hoak’s persuasive reconstruction, he was scarcely meeting the council at all during these months, except to determine the fate of his brother.¹³³ Routine business continued to be transacted, but attendance lists are almost entirely missing. On the other hand there is no clear evidence that he was at odds with his colleagues over Scotland until his fall gave an opportunity for retrospective criticism. As early as 20 February Van der Delft picked up a rumour that the earl of Warwick was about to depart to the north ‘to look after the English fortresses’; but he added that he seemed to be in no hurry to go, and the report may have been premature.¹³⁴ In March and April consideration was being given to the commands in the borders. Lord Grey, who had long since been asked to be relieved of the East March, was replaced by the earl of Rutland, a man of adequate status, but very slight experience. At the same time Lord Wharton was dismissed from the West March, and replaced by his arch rival Lord Dacre, a move which earned the Protector his implacable hostility.¹³⁵ By the end of May Rutland had about 5,500 under his command, half of them foreign mercenaries, and a general levy had been ordered to rendezvous at Berwick. On about 25 May Warwick returned to court, after what Van der Delf described as ‘a long illness’ of an unspecified nature.¹³⁶ Three days later he was appointed general of the army against Scotland, although there is no trace of his commission, and it was not until 3 July that he was paid £1,000 ‘uppon advancement of his journey’.¹³⁷

Within a few weeks circumstances were forcing a complete rethink of the Protector’s ‘forward’ strategy, and it is not clear that Warwick’s command ever took effect. As early as 19 March he had written to Somerset’s confidential aide Sir John Thynne, outlining his proposals for the government of the Welsh marches in his absence, so he had had plenty of time to prepare himself for his northern command. However by early July civil disorders were breaking out all over southern and midland England, and on 12 July Warwick wrote urgently to Thynne from Ely Place. Either he had never left London, or he had returned in haste as the alarming tidings reached him.

Mr Thynne, I received your letters, being very sorry to hear the continual trouble of my Lord’s Grace with these uproars. And wherein I do perceive my Lord’s Grace would have had mine advice if I had had therein other notice or knowledge…¹³⁸

Since leaving the court he had been ‘ill in my stomach’, and was unable to leave his house that day, however

I do intend to adventure tomorrow to come to his Grace, though it cast me down utterly. For the body that shall not be able to strive at this present were better out of the world than in it, and so if God should not give me health now to stir, I would me to be in my grave…

It may be that Thynne’s letter had expressed some doubt on Somerset’s part about his friend’s attitude, for Warwick’s response seems to be making excuses, ‘for my meaning towards his Grace, I would his Grace knew it as God doth…’. He had heard that very morning of stirs in Warwickshire, and of gentlemen’s servants ‘gowing from their masters to the rebels, which is a piteous hearing’. He was uncertain whether his own men would be able, or willing, to hold Warwick castle, and he had summoned his friends to come to him.¹³⁹ There is no trace of hostility in this letter. The writer is anxious to reassure, and if he held the Protector in any way to blame for the hornets’ nest which had been stirred up, he gives no hint of it. In any case as the crisis grew during the remainder of July, it was no time for rifts to appear among the councillors. In the face of this growing emergency Somerset finally abandoned his Scottish priority. Rutland’s mercenaries were withdrawn, and no reinforcements were sent. The campaign deteriorated into rather aimless raiding, and by August the Protector had very belatedly decided to cut his losses.¹⁴⁰

Somerset’s unwillingness to accept the seriousness of the domestic situation is understandable. There had been suggestions in the previous year that his sympathetic attitude towards anti-enclosure protesters was undermining the structure of public order. On 23 May he felt constrained to issue a proclamation which, while promising redress ‘when his highness sees time convenient’ consisted primarily of a fierce denunciation of those who took the law into their own hands instead of waiting for due process to take its course.¹⁴¹ At some point in June or early July the council summoned as many Justices of the Peace as were able to attend, and the Lord Chancellor harangued them on the need to do their duty more rigorously. Rich certainly took his own message to heart, and kept the peace in Essex with remarkable success during the troubled weeks which followed. Thinking that the situation was under control, the Protector then most unfortunately allowed his enclosure commissioners to resume their work. The king’s journal expressed the result succinctly:

the people began to rise in Wiltshire, where Sir William Herbert did put them down, overrun and slay them. Then they rose in Sussex, Hampshire, Kent, Gloucestershire, Suffolk Warwickshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, a piece of Leicestershire Worcestershire, and Rutlandshire, whereby fair fair persuasions, partly of honest men among themselves, and partly by gentlemen, they were often appeased, and again, because certain commissions were sent to pluck down enclosures, then [they] did rise again…¹⁴²

The Protector refused to see these things as cause and effect. According to Van der Delft he informed the council in the middle of June that there was much justice in the commons’ complaints, and at about the same time issued another proclamation pardoning all those who had been misled into creating disturbances, provided that they desisted at once.¹⁴³ This was hardly the crisis management which Warwick’s letter to Thynne had implied to be necessary, and it may be significant that the correspondence ceases at that point. The earl seems to have kept his word and returned to court, illness or no, because by 16 July he was playing a leading role in arming the Tower of London and Windsor castle.¹⁴⁴ By then regular watches had also been organized in London, and an altogether more realistic sense of urgency prevailed in the council. To what extent this may have been Warwick’s achievement the evidence is not adequate to show, but it would have been consistent with the kind of advice we know him to have been offering. By the middle of the month artillery had been mounted at the gates of the City, and martial law had been proclaimed.¹⁴⁵

In spite of the widespread nature of the disturbances, in most places the local gentry managed to suppress or contain the trouble. In Sussex the earl of Arundel, who had no sympathy whatever with most of the Protector’s policies, nevertheless managed to impose a peaceful solution in an excellent demonstration of traditional lordship.¹⁴⁶ Although less well recorded, it seems that the earls of Shrewsbury and Derby also succeeded in controlling their ‘countries’. Where the situation got out of control, there was either no dominant lord, as was the case in Oxfordshire, or the traditional ruling families had been removed by royal action. This was the case both in the south-west, where the Courtenays had been destroyed by Cromwell in 1538, and in East Anglia, where the Howards had fallen a mere two and a half years before. The earl of Warwick does not seem to have had much faith in his own lordship to control the midlands. His large estates had been recently acquired, and his family had no ancient prestige in the region. Lord Russell, who had taken the marquis of Exeter’s place as the largest landowner in Devon, was sent down to the south-west at the end of June, but it soon became apparent that his own manred could accomplish nothing, and that he would need professional soldiers to encounter a rebel army which was beseiging Exeter and controlling virtually the whole county.¹⁴⁷ Russell bombarded the Protector with pleas for resolute instructions, and for the necessary forces to carry them out. It may be that at first Somerset was genuinely anxious to avoid bloodshed, clinging to the hope that the rebels were merely deluded protesters. But it is more likely that he simply did not have the troops to send until those who had been withdrawn from the borders arrived in the south. On 22 June Russell was informed that Warwick would be sent to join him, but the reinforcements which actually left a few days later were commanded by Lord Grey and Sir William Herbert.¹⁴⁸ Once he was adequately supported even Russell, who was an overcautious and indifferent soldier, had little difficulty in defeating his numerous but poorly armed opponents.¹⁴⁹

The reason why Warwick did not go to Devon seems to have been that he had grasped the nettle of maintaining order in his own country, and gone down to Warwick to rally the local gentry. Despite the relative weakness of his local position, this leadership seems to have been effective, and the midland ‘stirs’ did not escalate into a major rebellion. Somerset himself seems to have felt obliged to remain at Westminster with the remainder of the council. The only business recorded during these days is the signing of warrants, but their main preoccupation seems to have been the mobilization of troops, and their own physical security.¹⁵⁰ By the middle of July it was clear that Norfolk as well as Devon would require the attentions of a professional army, because the local gentry had fled in confusion before a rebel host rumoured to number 10,000 men. By about 25 July some 2,000 soldiers had been assembled, mostly Italian mercenaries and the retinues of several peers and councillors. With Warwick away in the midlands and Russell, Grey, and Herbert already committed, however, the choice of a commander presented real difficulties. There seems to have been an intention to send the earl, of Shrewsbury, but it was not pursued, probably on the grounds that he was urgently needed at home. The only peer who was available because he had very little authority in his home area was William Parr, marquis of Northampton. He was a man with no military experience and no talent, but presumably it was hoped that his professional captains would know their job in any case, and that he could have been little more than a figurehead. Unfortunately such hopes proved to be ill-founded. On 30 July Northampton occupied the city of Norwich, encountering no resistance. The same night it became clear that he had walked into a trap, and his force was driven out with heavy losses.¹⁵¹ As he fell back towards London, the council went into emergency session to decide how to redeem the situation. With the Protector anchored in the capital, there was only one person who could be turned to. On 7 August it was decided to commission the earl of Warwick, and £5,000 was paid to John Hornywold, the treasurer of his army.¹⁵² On 10 August Warwick wrote to Cecil from his title town, to acknowledge receipt of his instructions ‘for which I am bound to [the Protector] and council’, but also to suggest that Northampton should remain in overall command. ‘He has lately had enough misfortune, and this might discourage him forever…’, he wrote with remarkable charity,¹⁵³ ‘No one should be discarded for one mischance, which may happen to us all…’. However, the Protector was less inclined to be sympathetic, and the marquis did not command again in East Anglia. By 15 August the gentry of Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk were mustered with their retainers, a few veterans were perilously recalled from Boulogne, and Warwick, having set his own country in order, joined them at Cambridge and assumed his command.¹⁵⁴

His relationship with the Protector at this point appears to have been correct, if not cordial. There had been disagreements between them, and Warwick had occasionally expressed dissatisfaction, notably over the council in the marches, but if there was any deep-seated rivalry or jealousy, it was either not noticed or not commented upon. He conducted an intermittent but perfectly amicable correspondence, partly with William Cecil and partly with Sir John Thynne, who had become Somerset’s principal man of business. Most of these letters related to land transactions of one sort or another, or appointments. In March 1548 he commended Edward Peckham to the Protector’s attention, and complained that Somerset was not willing to sell him the ‘overplus of Aldington lordship’.

I perceive by your said letters that his grace will not condescend to my request in that behalf [but] I assure you that there is neither castle nor manor nor borough nor market town belonging or appertaining unto the lordships land…The lordship of Fecknam is not above £33 a year, and Ardingley that is joined to it is £19 a year. But seeing his grace esteemeth it to be such a thing, it becometh me not to sue further for it…¹⁵⁵

However, he eventually obtained his desire, receiving both Aldington and Fecknam as part of a substantial grant on 10 July 1549.¹⁵⁶ This was neither gift nor purchase, but part of an exchange arrangement with the Crown, and it looks as though a long negotiation followed Warwick’s original request. In March 1549 he was again requesting changes to the commission of the council in the marches, which needed a fuller authority if it was to cope with the troubles which could be foreseen. ‘The people be both subtle and naturally given to sedition…’, he wrote.¹⁵⁷ On 29 March a further letter expressed his pleasure and satisfaction that the commission had been ‘amplified’. In April a rather curious letter suggests that Warwick had been angling for a senior post, ‘so great an office and meet for the best man in the realm under my lord himself’, and was ‘the more ashamed to seem to labour for it…’. Although he had been unsuccessful in his suit, he expressed himself well content with Thynne’s ‘good answer’, and went on ‘I did not at any time despair of his grace’s friendship towards me…’.¹⁵⁸ What the object of his ambition may have been is not clear. Both the Admiralty and the Mastership of the Horse were vacant at that point, but neither would merit so fulsome a description. Perhaps he was hoping to exchange the Lord Great Chamberlainship of the household for the more powerful position of Lord Great Master. A week later he wrote again ‘touching the office of the pensions’, which he had requested either for himself or for one of his friends, and which the Protector had forgotten ‘albeit I am out of doubt you had broken with him in it at length’.¹⁵⁹ Early in May further letters commended a ‘poor man’ for the post of surgeon, and asked for Somerset’s decision about another land deal, this time intended to place the Lady Elizabeth ‘in Otford or Knole or some other place agreeable to her desire…’.¹⁶⁰ The tone of all this correspondence was friendly, even intimate considering that Thynne was little more than a servant. It is reminiscent, both in content and manner, of much of the correspondance which Thomas Cromwell received when he was the doorkeeper of the king’s bounty, and too much should not be read into it. As long as Somerset was in power everyone was polite to him, but that does not necessarily mean that they were happy with his regime. A good example is provided by Thomas Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, Wriothesley had more cause than most to be the Protector’s enemy, but he had been far too sensible to get drawn into Thomas Seymour’s insubstantial schemes. His role in that crisis earned him an offer to lead the last-ditch negotiations with France which took place in June. He declined on the grounds of ill health, but in a courteous exchange of letters assured Somerset ‘You shall never have cause to repent of your goodness towards me’.¹⁶¹ He then went on to press an earlier request for the grant of a house ‘which is now ten times more important than before…’.

Neither Warwick nor Southampton were displaying any overt hostility to the Protector as the crisis of the summer of 1549 moved towards its climax. However, Paget’s letter of 8 May suggests a rather different situation. He had warned the Protector earlier about the need to cultivate the goodwill of his colleagues, and to work with their collaboration, even if the terms of his patent no longer strictly required that. By May 1549 he was close to despair. If Somerset could not control his temper, and deal more rationally with those who disagreed with him, he was going to be in serious trouble.

a subject in great authority, as your grace is, using such fashion, is like to fall into grat danger and peril of his own person, beside that to the commonweal…¹⁶²

Royal rages were all very well, but he was not the king. Paget was not expressing a remote or hypothetical anxiety. He knew perfectly well that it was not only relatively insignificant men like Sir Richard Lee who were distressed and angered. The growing civil disorder might well expose the Protector to further criticism, but it also gave him an opportunity to redeem himself, and protected him from colleagues who were, above all else, anxious to give no further encouragement to the rebellious commons. If he could not use that opportunity constructively, then he might well face a radical challenge to his authority. Consequently it proves very little that there was no open bickering among the councillors during June and July 1549, or that men going about their business did not pick quarrels with each other’s servants. There is no reason to suppose that Warwick had been plotting against the Protector for years, but it would be unrealistic to imagine that, as he took up his command in East Anglia, he was entirely happy with the way in which English affairs were being managed. According to Van der Delft, who was reasonably well informed, a conspiracy against the Protector had already formed by the end of July, and the earl of Warwick was one of the plotters. That would be consistent, both with the cessation of his correspondence with Thynne in mid-July, and with the disparaging remarks which he is alleged to have made about Somerset during the Norfolk campaign. Almost the last news which he received before setting off from Warwick had been of the French declaration of war on 8 August. He might tell Cecil that ‘open war seems better than cloaked friendship’, but he also went on, ‘I wish we had no more to deal with; as it is we must trust in the lord…’.¹⁶³ It may well be that he and his friends already knew what they had to do.