X. the emperor, they found him sitting in a chair, with his CHAP. feet on a stool, and looking very pale, weak, lean and feeble, tho his eyes were lively. He declared his disposition to peace upon the offer of reasonable conditions; 109 and the English cabinet thought that what the French required partook so little of this character, as to instruct its ambassadors not to mention them to him, but to urge the commissioners of France to more suitable proposals.110 Nothing occurring of this description, the English council, only six days before it lost its sovereign, instructed its representative to state frankly to Charles all that they had done to accomplish a pacification, and if their efforts continued to be ineffective, to provide for their return, with honor to their own king, and in continued amity with his imperial majesty." 111 Edward's last illness was now advancing rapidly to its fatal termination. At times unwell before his accession, he became more frequently so afterwards. In the spring of 1552 a combination of two diseases weakened still more his infirm constitution.112 His Christmas festivities afterwards were celebrated with an unusual magnificence and joviality. It was the first time that he had kept them in kingly state, and 113 109 This interview was on the 8th June 1552. Strype, 97. 110 Strype, 98, 9. MS. Galba, B. 12. from which Strype has printed the dispatch, dated Greenwich, 1st July 1553, and signed by twenty-three of the royal council. 100-2. 112 6 p. 70. April 2. I fell sick of the measles and small-pox.' Edw. Journ. 113 Dec. 23. The king removed from Westminster to Greenwich, to keep his Christmas there; and began to keep state, and had a lord of misrule, who ordered the sports and pastimes for the king's diversion in such great variety and royal pomp as scarcely ever had been seen before. Strype, 30. BOOK II. it was his last. Their dangerous excitement, their 115 114 Godw. 253. The Italian letter of the 24th July, places the dangerous cough in 'i primi giorni di Febraro.' Lett. Pris. v. 3. p. 135. It never left him. La tosse nol lasso mai.' ib. The young duke of Richmond had died in the same way. ib. Stowe, 609. 115 Heylin, 137. The parliament was dissolved at Whitehall on the last evening of the month, at seven of the clock at night.' Stowe. 117 X. Southwark, for the sick.116 In the week after May CHAP. day, some flashes of reviving animation seduced the judgments of his physicians to promise his restoration; but he was allowed to be seen by very few 118 and the French ambassador was commanded by his court to procure an audience, in order to ascertain his state by his own inspection. He earnestly demanded an interview. It was promised, but delayed. Again the physicians despaired," and yet again declared him out of danger.120 Such are the changes and illusions of the consumptive disease. The envoy obtained an audience of the king, but only long enough to be briefly received and rapidly dismissed;121 and expectation fluctuated in alternate hope, doubt and uncertainty, for the next three weeks. In April the matches were finally agreed upon for two of the duke of Suffolk's daughters; lady Jane 116 Stowe, 609; and also Grey Friars, now Christ Church. Strype, 112, who states the heads of the indenture as to Bridewell. 117 It was on 7th May, that Northumberland wrote to Cecil, 'Now I will re-comfort you with the joyful comfort which our physicians have these two or three mornings revived my spirits with, which is, that our sovereign lord doth begin very joyfully to increase and amend, they having no doubt of the thorough recovery of his highness.' Lett. in Strype, v. 2. p. 506. part 2. The obvious pleasure with which Northumberland, from this letter, was indulging this hope, and communicating it to his fellow statesman Cecil, may be admitted as evidence that he was then neither contriving nor desiring the king's demise. 118 Lett. Noailles, v. 2. p. 4. 119 On 13th May, the French ambassador informed his court, The physicians have little hope of his convalescence, being in great apprehensions that he will expectorate away his lungs.' p. 25. 120 Five days afterwards Noailles wrote, "There is such an improvement, that now they think he is quite out of danger, but with a great debility and defaillance, accompanied with a cough that surprisingly distresses him.' ib. 27. II. BOOK Gray, the eldest, with Northumberland's fourth son, lord Guildford Dudley; and lady Catherine, the second, with earl Pembroke's son and heir, lord Herbert; and also for Northumberland's daughter with lord Hastings, for whose wedding apparels a grant from the king's wardrobe was obtained.122 Three such marriages, could not, in the usual habit of great families, have been a hasty concoction of scheming device. It is rather more reasonable to refer their origin to the common desire of a dignified alliance in Northumberland, than to any instantaneous project on his part on the crown, as they must have been prepared and arranged before the king's disease had fixed any certainty of his premature dissolution. The exact time of their solemnization has not been transmitted.123 The most natural inference, after such a grant in April, would place them early in May. Nothing unfavorable to Mary's accession then appeared; for Edward about this time sent her a table diamond, with a pendent pearl.14 But in the beginning of June a direct plan had been resolved upon, to dispossess both her and 122 This warrant is dated 24th April. If we allow three months for the previous negotiations for three such marriages, we are probably not taking too large a scope. 123 Stowe, who was then alive, merely says, 'When the king lay dangerously sick.' p. 609. The duke of Suffolk's third daughter was at the same time married, but only to a gentleman porter,' ib.; and Northumberland's eldest daughter to sir Henry Sidney. Burn. 3. p. 356. So many marriages as five of these great and connected families at the same time, neither imply precipitation, nor look like plotting. On 8th June, a grant of wedding apparel, silks and jewels, was made to sir Andrew Dudley, apparently a relation of Northumberland, with the daughter of the earl of Cumberland. Strype, 111. 121 Strype, 112. Elizabeth of their father's crown, and to transfer it by violence to their second cousin, lady Jane Gray, now the wife of lord Guildford Dudley. This plot is usually charged on Northumberland as a scheme for his personal aggrandisement, because one of his sons would be advanced by it; but as the state council and the king himself chose to concur in it, and one of the cabinet was coarsely vehement to promote it,125 in strict justice it must be deemed a foul conspiracy of the whole administration, excepting Cranmer, who at first opposed, tho he afterwards guiltily acquiesced in it. There is no reason to place the crime solely on Northumberland. It was a nefarious combination of both the king and the cabinet, without any justifying necessity, and in violation of moral principle, to subvert established law and personal rights. The first authors of it have not yet been discovered; but the dishonoring drama was opened by a summons, on 11 June, to the chief justice of the Common Pleas, two other judges, and the attorney and solicitor general, to attend the cabinet council. They came; and the king himself, tho in his mortal decline, yet in the full possession of his senses, and in his sixteenth year, chose to state his impressions of the danger in which the kingdom would stand if his sister Mary should succeed, as she might marry a stranger, and change the laws and religion of the realm. He therefore declared that he had determined to alter the succession to the crown, and ordered the prepared articles to be read, which, disinheriting Elizabeth, not a Catholic, as CHAP. |