Henry's attempts to enforce its fulfilment by sending his army to ravage and burn their country only set them the more against the proposed match. Edinburgh itself was sacked and fired by the English under Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, brother of Queen Jane Seymour. Irritated by French intrigues in Scotland, Henry, in alliance with Charles V., also entered upon war with France, and passing over to that country in 1544, he took Boulogne, which it was afterwards agreed should be given back at the end of eight years, upon payment of a sum of money, besides the pension due by the treaty of 1525. The Scots were included in this peace.

7. Death of Henry.-Henry, who in his later years had become unwieldy and infirm, and suffered great pain, died Jan. 28, 1547. Not long before, the Duke of Norfolk and his son Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who was famous for his poetical talent, had been sent to the Tower under charges of treason, the suspicion being that they meant to seize on the Regency after Henry's death. Surrey was beheaded on the 19th Jan., and it is said that the day for Norfolk's execution was fixed; but as on that very morning the King died, the sentence was not carried out, and the Duke remained in prison. It is supposed that Surrey owed his death to the Seymours, who had risen into high favour with the King, and between whom and the Howards there was bitter jealousy. The Howards belonged to the old nobility, and leaned towards the old faith; the Seymours were new men," and well-disposed to the new doctrines. The Earl of Hertford was among the sixteen "executors" of King Henry's will, to whom the government during the minority of his son was entrusted; for Parliament had given Henry special powers with regard to the succession to his kingdom. In case Edward died childless, the Crown was settled by Act of Parliament on the King's daughters, first on Mary and her heirs, then on Elizabeth and her heirs.

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After them, Henry bequeathed it to the descendants of his younger sister Mary.

8. Defender of the Faith.-Henry was the first of our Kings who bore the title of "Defender of the Faith." This he obtained in 1521 from the Pope, Leo X., in return for his having written against Luther a Latin treatise on the Seven Sacraments; and he and his successors still kept it after they had ceased, in papal eyes at least, to deserve it.

9. Wales and Ireland.—In 1536 Wales was incorporated with England, and the English laws and liberties were granted to its inhabitants. Ireland, where England had almost lost its authority, such as it was, was brought under a somewhat stronger rule; and in 1542 it was raised to the dignity of a kingdom, having been hitherto styled only a lordship.

IO. The Navy.Henry VIII. followed the example of his father in paying great attention to the navy. He constituted the Admiralty and Navy Office, and incorporated the Trinity House, a guild for the promotion of commerce and navigation, which was empowered to make laws for the shipping; he also established dockyards at Deptford, Woolwich, and Portsmouth.

CHAPTER XXIX.

EDWARD VI.

Edward VI; rule of the Protector Somerset (1)—beheading of Seymour; fall and beheading of Somerset (2) -the Duke of Northumberland; death of the King; alteration of the succession (3)—the Reformation (4).

1. Edward VI., 1547-1553--The directions of Henry's will were at once infringed, the Earl of Hertford prevailing on his fellow-executors to make him Protector and governor of the young King his nephew,

and thus to place him at the head of the State, although under the will they had equal powers. In accordance, it was said, with the late King's intentions, he was also created Duke of Somerset. Ambitious and greedy of riches, the Protector yet really sought the welfare of his country, and won the love of the common people, for whom he had kindly feelings. He was a good soldier, and in the first year of his rule he made a savage attack upon Scotland, in hopes of enforcing the marriage treaty; his victory at Pinkie, near Musselburgh (September 10, 1547), strengthened his influence at home, although he did not bring back the young Queen, who in the course of the next year was sent into France as the betrothed of the Dauphin, afterwards King Francis II. In religious matters Somerset gave his support to the advanced Reformers, who had hitherto been kept down; and when Parliament met, the "Six Articles and the statutes against the Lollards were repealed, as well as Henry's harsh enactments concerning treason. All the remaining chantries (where masses were said for the souls of particular persons) and colleges, saving only the cathedral chapters, the colleges in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the colleges of Winchester and Eton, were suppressed, and their property made over to the Crown. The King, who was only ten years old when he came to the throne, being brought up by men of strong Protestant views, naturally held their opinions; and in piety and religious zeal he was beyond his years. Hugh Latimer, the most outspoken of the Reformed preachers, the most fearless rebuker of iniquity in high places, had a pulpit erected for him in the King's garden, where young Edward would sit and listen to sermons an hour long. The boy received an excellent education, and being intelligent, quick, and thoughtful, he made great progress. Even before he was eight years old he had written Latin letters to his father.

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2. Fall of Somerset.-The first enemy Somerset had to deal with was his own brother, Thomas, Lord Seymour of Sudeley, High Admiral of England, an ambitious and unprincipled man, who had married the widowed Queen Katharine Parr. Aiming at supplanting the Protector, he was himself destroyed by a bill of attainder, without being heard in his own defence, and was beheaded March 20, 1549. That Seymour had been plotting to upset the government by force is likely enough; but, ruthless as the age was, there were yet many who thought it a horrible thing for one brother to send another to the block. Somerset's rule did not last much longer, his government proving a failure both at home and abroad. His predecessors in authority had left him a difficult task. To meet the expenses of the government the coinage had been depreciated. Prices had in consequence risen; while, the demand for labour having fallen off, wages had not risen in proportion. Large sheep-farms had been found to pay better than tillage-farms; and though in the long run it was best that the land should be employed to the most profit, at the time the change caused great distress. Tenants and labourers were turned away, villages were pulled down -where once many had found homes and work, there was now but a shepherd and his dog." The new owners courtier nobles, or wealthy traders and graziers -were stricter landlords than the old monks and nobles; and wherever they could, they enclosed the extensive waste and common lands on which the poor had partly found their livelihood. Unemployed labourers and dispossessed squatters turned beggars or thieves, and it was in vain that law after law was passed against vagrants. The peasantry had thus many grievances, which in some parts they charged upon the change of religion. turbances in many quarters. the West rose in arms to

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There were soon disThe common people of demand the restoration

of the mass, which had given place to the English Prayer-book; the Norfolk men, headed by Robert Ket, a tanner by trade, but lord of three manors, broke out into insurrection against the landowners who were enclosing commons and turning arable land into pasture. The Norfolk rebellion was quelled, not without a sharp struggle, by John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, at the head of a force partly made up of German mercenaries. With these Norfolk insurgents the Protector had at first somewhat sympathised, and it was charged against him that by having appointed commissioners to remove illegal enclosures, he had encouraged the peasantry to revolt. Moreover he was harsh to the young King, and haughty to the nobles. "Of late," one of his friends wrote to him plainly, "your Grace is grown into great choleric fashions, whensoever you are contraried in that which you have conceived in your head." His administration was wasteful; he had made a vast fortune out of the Church property, and had given offence by building for himself a splendid palace (on the site of which stands the present Somerset House), pulling down churches and the cloister of St. Paul's to supply materials or to make room. The Earl of Warwick and many other lords of the Council joining together to get rid of him, he was in 1549 deposed from the Protectorate, and heavily fined. One of the faults alleged against him was having left in a defenceless state Boulogne, which was now threatened by the French; and, the country being unprepared to carry on a war for it, his successors in the government were obliged to give it back, though they received in compensation only a fifth of the sum promised to Henry VIII., and virtually surrendered the annual pension. But to the last Somerset was beloved, especially as the administration of his successors proved worse than his had been; and when, in 1552, he was beheaded on a charge of conspiring against his rival, Warwick, now Duke of