by Derek Wilson
Everyone expected Dudley or Somerset to make a dramatic move. The diplomatic wires were abuzz with rumour: Somerset was planning an alliance with reactionary peers and would ride into the Catholic north to place himself at the head of a formidable force, such as had troubled the realm in 1536–7; Somerset was sounding out potential allies at home and abroad; Somerset was about to make a bid to restore his Protectorate by capturing the Tower and raising London. There was little or no truth in all this gossip but that did not rob it of its power to make mischief. It created such an atmosphere of expectancy that Dudley, the military tactician, at last decided on a pre-emptive strike. And it was very much ‘at last’. There had been earlier provocations and opportunities to which Dudley had not responded. In February 1551 Richard Whalley had been clapped in the Fleet prison. Somerset’s servant had obviously not been won over by Dudley and he had been canvassing support among the nobility for a restoration of the Protectorate.
During the summer the issue of Mary’s freedom of worship provoked interference by the emperor. The princess appealed to him and he vigorously took up her cause. In a heated debate between Dudley and Charles’ representative the ambassador put forth his master’s claim that Edward’s Council had no right to make sweeping religious changes in his name during his minority. At one point the threat was actually made that an imperial army might cross from the Netherlands in order to ‘liberate’ the boy king from his heretical mentors. It was a passing crisis and Charles was soon too busy elsewhere to do any more for Mary than make vague protests but it was a reminder to the government that their religious settlement was very far from being firmly established and that it had powerful enemies at home and abroad. As Professor MacCulloch has observed, ‘Add to all this the undoubted evidence that Somerset was not only seeking out malcontent politicians, but was also actively using his continuing popular following to undermine Warwick’s position, and the former Lord Protector could only be seen as a dangerous loose cannon in a highly alarming situation.’1
This was the background to a series of actions by Dudley that were morally indefensible and constitutionally questionable but politically necessary. Somerset’s absence from court throughout the late summer weeks, because of sweating sickness in his household, gave Dudley the chance to confer with those who might be happy to see the duke brought low. His first act was to consolidate his own position by elevating himself to the top rank of the peerage and by distributing honours and lands to those whose support he relied on. He became Duke of Northumberland. Henry Grey was nominated Duke of Suffolk, William Paulet Marquess of Winchester, and William Herbert Earl of Pembroke. Cecil and six gentlemen of the household received the honour of knighthood.
The promotions were announced in Council on 4 October and the next day the court returned to Westminster from summer progress. Within a couple of days Dudley was locked in secret conference with Sir Thomas Palmer, a courtier and veteran soldier from an old Sussex family whom Dudley had known most of his life. From this meeting emerged a supposed plot of Somerset’s to invite Northumberland and Northampton to dinner and there cut off their heads. It was a wild accusation and it is extraordinary that Dudley could not conceive anything more convincing. Had he been a true Iago he would have made a better job of it.
The arrest of Somerset took place on 16 October in a time-honoured fashion. He attended a Council meeting in the morning, then, after dinner, guards were summoned to convey him to the Tower. Over the next couple of days other supposed conspirators joined him there. According to one later account Dudley confessed that of all his acts while in power none weighed more heavily on his conscience than rigging the case against Somerset. But he was irrevocably committed. His plot proceeded jerkily. He bribed a French adventurer to claim that he had been hired by Somerset as the assassin who would do the direful deed. He covered his back by receiving a pledge of troops from the French king in the event of a popular uprising or intervention by the emperor. He prevented the Council from interfering by announcing that in future royal instructions would appear over the signature of Edward alone and would not require the counter-signature of a councillor. Since that, in effect, meant that Dudley’s will had been elevated above that of his colleagues, he was now guilty of the same abuse of power for which Somerset had been deprived of office.
Most people refused to believe in Somerset’s treason and credulity was further stretched when Palmer changed his story by making new extravagant revelations. Somerset, he alleged, had laid plans to call out the London apprentices (young hotheads of whom the City authorities were always wary), to secure the capital and then use the Isle of Wight as a mustering point for a large personal army. The government had to act with dispatch. Other detainees revealed under pressure words and stratagems of the incarcerated duke that were much closer to the truth. Somerset had discussed with the Earl of Arundel the possibility of arresting Dudley and assuming leadership of the Council and he had planned to marry the king to his own daughter. By late November Dudley was satisfied that he had as good a case as he was likely to get and Somerset’s trial was fixed for 1 December.
The prisoner was brought out of the Tower before dawn. He ‘was conveyed through London with the axe of the Tower before him, and with great preparance of bills, halberts, pikes and poleaxes, in most forcible wise; a watch also set and appointed before every man’s door through the high street of London.’2 At Westminster Hall he faced trial by his peers on sundry counts of treason and felony. The members of the jury had been well chosen but that does not mean that they were all happy to do Dudley’s bidding. When it came to a choice between the two principal antagonists they felt no great warmth for either and the mood of the crowd inside and outside the hall must have induced a certain nervousness. The trial went on, with an adjournment for dinner, until late in the winter afternoon. At last their lordships retired to consider their verdict and the cavernous space was but dimly lit by flaring torches when they returned and William Paulet, the new Marquess of Winchester, asked them to declare their findings. By a majority vote the jury concluded that the Duke of Somerset was not guilty of treason. However, they found that he had contemplated harm to Dudley and other members of the Council and that was a felony.
Dudley may have allowed himself to feel relief at the outcome, for felony, though a lesser crime, still carried the death penalty. In point of fact, there was no winner in this final contest between two men whose lives had been bound up together for a quarter of a century. Somerset would lose his life but Dudley’s reputation suffered just as fatal a stroke. In the aftermath of the trial he had to muster a thousand troops in Hyde Park to overawe the London citizenry and send messages to rural magistrates to deal firmly with malcontents and spreaders of seditious libels (such as the tale that a new currency was about to be issued bearing Dudley’s device of the bear and ragged staff). Elaborate security precautions had to be taken on the day of the execution. The scaffold on Tower Hill was ringed by pikemen of the royal guard and their number was augmented by a thousand members of the London militia. They were certainly needed to control the emotionally unstable crowd, ‘as great a company as have been seen’ according to one eye witness. Somerset went to his death in a quiet and dignified fashion, extolling the people to remain loyal to king and Council.
From the end of 1551 an ever-widening gap opened between Dudley and his ecclesiastical allies. Cranmer and Ridley had both tried to dissuade him from pursuing Somerset to death. Yet what stung Dudley even more sharply was the opposition of John Knox, a man whose career he had taken a personal interest in advancing. The zealous Scot preached against the execution of Somerset in Newcastle and wrote to his patron in frank disapprobation. When Dudley got over his anger at this he brought the Scot to London to enter the debate on the new Prayer Book – and by doing so gave further irritation to Cranmer. The arrangement for kneeling to receive communion to Knox smacked of the idolatry of the old mass and Dudley backed his complaint. Cranmer and other bishops were furious at this eleve
nth hour intervention and declined to make a major change in the book. Deadlock was only broken by a compromise: the so-called ‘black rubric’ was added, indicating that no suggestion of transubstantiation or worship of the bread and wine were involved. Once again the cracks were papered over but they were becoming more difficult to disguise.
Theologians, as Dudley was acutely aware, enjoyed the luxury of a two-dimensional approach to national problems. He had to tackle several interrelated issues, relating religious affairs to every other aspect of policy and, as he was already discovering, success in one area often led to complications in another. At the beginning of 1550, the state of the kingdom had presented the appearance of the Augean stables. The Treasury was empty. Relations with France and Scotland remained unresolved. Social and economic discontent smouldered unseen in several areas, ready to break out again as it had in 1549. He had made an impressive start on dealing with all these problems before being distracted by the need to hinder Somerset’s obstructiveness. In the spring of 1550 he had reached a settlement with France which had stopped the debilitating drain of men and gold. Boulogne was sold back to Henri II and an alliance drawn up involving the betrothal of Edward to one of the French king’s daughters. This counterbalanced the marriage of Mary Stuart to the dauphin and paved the way for the pacification of the Scottish border.
It was a start on the process of balancing the books but the nation’s financial problems were complex and not completely understood. Nevertheless, certain facts were quite clear to Dudley and his advisers. The ruinous expenditure of Henry VIII’s last years had created a situation which Somerset had not addressed and a run of bad harvests had made the economic situation worse. Crown debts, a poor reputation for repayment and repeated debasements of the coinage had pushed up prices, reduced the value of the pound on the foreign exchanges and raised the cost of government borrowing. Dudley was no financial expert but he was a clear-headed pragmatist with a good head for business and he knew that firm measures had to be taken to redress a dismal situation. Crown expenditure and income had to be made to balance. That meant making economies and finding new ways of raising revenue; reducing reliance on loans from international bankers; obtaining better credit terms for money when it was borrowed, which involved creating confidence in the stability and reliability of the regime. It meant overhauling the Crown’s financial administration and cutting out bureaucratic waste; selling royal assets and, where possible, extracting money from subjects by way of taxation, forced loans and unvarnished confiscation; doing everything possible to encourage trade with the continent. The solutions adopted by the son were not the same as those of his father Edmund – but they were no less unpopular in certain circles.
He found a spectacularly talented lieutenant to help him construct and implement a programme of economic recovery. Thomas Gresham was, in his early thirties, already an astute, not to say ruthless, businessman. He came from merchant stock and his father had been Lord Mayor of London. He had extensive commercial contacts in Antwerp and had been employed on government business there before April 1551, when Dudley appointed him royal agent in the Netherlands. No one understood the international money market better than Gresham and no one was better equipped to manipulate it to best advantage. He set about restoring confidence in the English currency. In little more than a year he had repaid over £75,000 of foreign debt and by 1553 he had restored the exchange rate to the value it had enjoyed at the beginning of the reign. His tactics ranged from lavish hospitality offered to the ‘right’ people to downright bullying. He used government money to buy up sterling in Antwerp, thus raising its value. He badgered the Council to be more prompt in making interest payments. He impounded the property of his fellow merchants until they had made short-term loans to the government at favourable rates. On the other hand he urged the government to bring to an end the long-running conflict between London merchants and the German Hanseatic League over the privileges foreigners enjoyed to the detriment of their English counterparts. Those privileges were duly abrogated in the spring of 1552. Not all Gresham’s schemes were successful. When the government took up his suggestion to establish a Crown monopoly on the mining and selling of lead there was an understandable outcry from landowners and industrialists. ‘The clamour grows great and may breed more damage than can now be seen,’ Dudley commented. It makes me ‘sorry I was ever a meddler in it. Princes’ affairs, especially touching government and trade . . . though they are full of devices with appearance of profit, they must be weighed with other consequences.’3 Gresham was not immediately successful in persuading Dudley to abandon the debasement of the currency and a final issue of adulterated specie was made in the summer of 1551. Thereafter the practice ceased.
Borrowing, restoring confidence in sterling, boosting trade and forcing down interest rates were all very well but they were no substitutes for raising income. In the light of recent events and his own general unpopularity Dudley was chary about approaching parliament with the government’s financial needs. When the houses assembled the day after Somerset’s execution he did not risk asking for taxes, a wise precaution, since a bill concerning the disposition of the late duke’s estate had a rough ride through the Commons. It was eventually passed and the Crown was able to appropriate the extensive property Somerset had accumulated since 1541. Dudley looked elsewhere and set in train a rigorous examination of income and expenditure. The easiest way of raising ready cash was the sale of Crown lands and the Council set up various commissions to market royal property and ensure prompt payment.
However, the source of income most favoured by Dudley for a mixture of ideological and economic reasons was the church. One of his notes to Cecil, ‘scribbled in bed as ill as I have ever been’ indicates how Dudley conceived ‘God’s service and the king’s’ being happily advanced by the same means. He was writing about the break-up of the vast see of Durham after Tunstall’s deprivation.
. . . if the dean of Durham is appointed bishop with 1,000 marks more than his deanery, the houses he now has in the city and country will serve honourably – so may the king receive the castle, which has a princely site, and the other stately houses the bishop had in the country. The chancellor’s living to be converted to the deanery and an honest man placed in it; the vice-chancellor to be turned into the chancellor; the suffragan . . . may be removed, being neither preacher, learned nor honest, so pernicious that the country abhors him. The living, with a little more to its value – 100 marks – will serve the erection of a bishop of Newcastle. Thus the king may place godly ministers in these offices and receive £2,000 a year of the best lands in the north . . .4
Secularization of ecclesiastical property was popular with those in society who stood to gain from it and also with religious radicals who believed that ecclesiastical ‘fat cats’ were an affront to the Gospel. The dismantling of the Church’s vast territorial wealth had been going on ever since 1536. Somerset had followed Cromwell down this route and now it was Dudley’s turn do the same. It was not a new policy. Nor was it necessarily hypocritical. He believed that a slimmed down church would be a more effective church. But the leaders of that church, despite their evangelical convictions, did not agree.
Cranmer was becoming increasingly disturbed by the encroachment of secular control and he was suspicious of Dudley’s motives over the breaking up of the Durham episcopate. Not only had Dudley chosen the title of ‘Northumberland’, he had begun to build up a considerable landholding in the north and had exchanged some of his other properties in order to shift his centre of operation to the border region. He held the office of Warden General of the Marches and he became steward for all those lands confiscated from the bishopric. The removal of the Prince-Bishop of Durham looked like a cynical manoeuvre in a purely political game that had nothing to do with purifying the church and little to do with strengthening the power of the Crown. When the bill for Tunstall’s deprivation came before the upper house of parliament Cranmer was one of only two peers who voted agai
nst it. This may have emboldened some of the Commons to question the legislation for they raised an amendment which the Council refused to accept and the measure had to be withdrawn. Yet again Dudley felt that he was being balked by the very man who should have been leading the assault on the last redoubts of conservative opposition and he was furious. The breach between the two men was never healed.
Dudley was coming under increasing criticism from around the country. He was sensitive to such comments but by no means paranoid. In November he ordered a reprieve for one John Borroghe who was condemned to the pillory ‘for telling news of me concerning certain of the king’s coffers.’ The man’s imprisonment, Dudley suggested, had been punishment enough. ‘I trust he will amend. His brother is of the best sort for favouring the king’s godly proceedings and has no heir but this young man.’5 Attacks from the pulpit were another matter. Clergy and people were still trying to get used to the new liturgy and the unfamiliar layout of church interiors for the demystified communion service. But at least it seemed that the threat to some of their ancient treasures had been lifted. Somerset had ordered an inventory of all church goods at the beginning of the reign preparatory to confiscating everything not in keeping with the new style of worship. This had caused widespread apprehension but nothing had happened because the government did not want to provoke yet more unrest. But, in January 1553, the Council, hard pressed for money, ordered the seizure of church plate, vestments, jewels and pewter vessels. This sparked a wave of pulpit denunciation which provoked Dudley to anger.
The parliament of January to April 1552 had been largely preoccupied with religious legislation, primarily the Second Act of Uniformity, imposing the revised Prayer Book and ordering all subjects to attend church every Sunday and use the new services. The government also shouldered the Christian responsibility of motivating individuals to acts of practical charity. Alms boxes were compulsorily installed in every church and a harsh Vagrancy Act of 1547 was replaced with legislation to enforce weekly collections for the relief of the parish poor. Official encouragement was given to private acts of charity and the king set a personal example by donating the palace of Bridewell for use as a house of correction for vagabonds and harlots, founding Christ’s Hospital school and endowing St Thomas’s Hospital for the care of the sick. Yet, for all that Dudley could see, it was the clergy who were the main obstacles to reform, ‘so sotted with wives and children that they forget their poor neighbours and all else pertaining to their calling’,6 as he put it. Commission reports indicated that the total wealth of the English church, despite fifteen years of ‘redistribution’, still stood at over £3,500,000, while royal revenue collectors were scratching around for every penny. And Cranmer’s preachers had the gall to call him rapacious and question the sincerity of his faith!