The king, the fount of justice, was obliged to speak. ‘We do perceive’, the king said to his council, ‘that there is great things objected and laid to my lord admiral mine uncle – and they tend to treason – and we perceive that you require but justice to be done. We think it reasonable, and we will well that you proceed according to your request.’ On the following day, 25 February, a bill of attainder for treason was sent to parliament. One of the articles against Seymour charged him to have attempted ‘to get into your hands the government of the king’s majesty, to the great danger of his highness’ person, and the subversion of the state of the realm’.
On 20 March he was taken to Tower Hill, where he was beheaded. The protector had signed the death warrant, with a shaking hand, but had taken no part in the parliamentary proceedings against his younger brother. It has been surmised that some among the council were happy to pit brother against brother, hoping thereby to accomplish the ruin of both of them. Sure enough some denounced Somerset for fratricide. A ‘godly and honourable’ woman reproached him with the words, ‘Where is thy brother? Lo, his blood crieth against thee unto God from the ground.’ He was condemned as ‘a blood-sucker and a ravenous wolf’ and it was predicted that ‘the fall of the one brother, would be the overthrow of the other’.
19
The barns of Crediton
In the first years of the young king’s reign social, as well as religious, divisions became apparent. ‘In times past,’ Hugh Latimer, the most popular preacher of the day, said in a sermon, ‘men were full of compassion; but now there is no pity; for in London their brother shall die in the streets for cold; he shall lie sick at the door between stock and stock – I cannot tell what to call it – and then perish for hunger.’ The coinage had been debased by the authorities, thus unleashing further waves of inflation on a country already impoverished. In the seven years between 1540 and 1547 prices rose by 46 per cent; in 1549 they had risen by another 11 per cent. The trend of an ever-growing population meant that the plight of the poor, and of the agricultural labourer, increased. Food was dear; wages were low. It has become known as the ‘price revolution’, accompanied by dearth and distress on a national scale. In addition the administration itself could scarcely pay its debts.
Latimer knew where most of the blame might be laid. ‘You landlords,’ he said, ‘you rent-raisers, I may say you step-lords, you have for your possessions too much … thus is caused such dearth that poor men which live of their labour cannot with the sweat of their faces have a living.’ The principal complaint of the people was raised against the system of enclosure, a term that in fact covered a multitude of practices, which embodied a wholly different concept of land use. One of these movements was ‘engrossing’ whereby many smallholdings were concentrated in the hands of one person; a second amounted to the enclosure of previous common grounds by a landlord who claimed ownership; a third was the conversion of arable into pasture land. So it was that Latimer intoned against ‘these graziers, enclosers, rent-raisers … whereas have been a great many householders and inhabitants, there is now but a shepherd and his dog’. It has been suggested that the bulk of enclosures actually took place at an earlier date, but the fast rise in prices and the fall in wages created a climate in which all economic woes were magnified.
Hugh Latimer also addressed the problem of debasement. ‘We now have a pretty little shilling [12d.],’ he said, ‘the last day, I had put it away almost for a groat [4d.].’ A shilling was in other words worth only a third of its previous value. John Heywood phrased it differently:
These testons look red: how like you the same?
’Tis a token of grace: they blush for shame.
The copper, in other words, was showing through the thin surface application of silver. When money is not taken seriously, the economy begins to crumble. A reformer, John Hooper, wrote to William Cecil, even then beginning his career at court, that ‘the prices of things be here as I tell you, the number of people be great; their little cottages and poor livings decay daily; except God by sickness take them out of the world, they must needs lack. You know what a grievous extreme, yea, in a manner unruly evil hunger is.’
In the summer of 1549 a number of riots were specifically aimed at enclosures, in which the irate crowd pulled down the hedges that had been planted to separate the land. The hedge itself became a symbol of all the ills assailing the people, among them the encroachment upon waste and common land as well as the loss of tenants’ rights against landlords who persistently raised their rents. Custom was giving way to contract and competition. In response the government of the protector sent out a number of commissioners to investigate why it was that ‘many have been driven to extreme poverty and compelled to leave the places where they were born’; an inquiry would be instituted to ensure that the relevant statutes, from the two previous reigns, were still being obeyed.
It was a measure of the protector’s concern that the royal deer park at Hampton Court was ‘disparked’ or made open and that the common right to land was restored in many parishes. The imperial ambassador observed to his court that ‘I have heard in deep secret that the protector declared to the Council, as his opinion, that the peasants’ demands were fair and just; for the poor people who had no land to graze their cattle ought to retain the commons and the lands that had always been public property, and the nobles and rich ought not to seize and add them to their parks and possessions’. A further thought may have occurred to him. If the new faith did not help to promote social justice and to uphold the rights of the poor, surely it had failed in some of its first duties?
Yet dissent and discontent continued. In the previous reign ‘all things were too strait,’ Sir William Paget told Somerset at the end of 1548, but ‘now they are too loose’. In the old days ‘was it dangerous to do or speak though the meaning were not evil; and now every man hath liberty to do and speak at liberty without danger’. In the reign of a child king, there was disorder.
General discontent was rising. ‘All things in manner going backward and unfortunate,’ Paget also wrote, ‘and every man almost out of heart and courage, and our lacks so well known as our enemies despise us and our friends pity us.’ In the spring of 1549 rumours were circulating through the kingdom, and a proclamation was issued against ‘lewd, idle, seditious and disordered persons … posting from place to place … to stir up rumours or raise up tales’.
It was reported that the king was dead. ‘In the mean season,’ Edward wrote in his journal, ‘because there was a rumour that I was dead, I passed through London.’ It was said that the war in Scotland was a complete failure. Indeed it had not prospered. It was rumoured that a charge would be levied for weddings, christenings and funerals. It was whispered that the protector and the council were corrupt. The bad harvest of 1549 exacerbated these protests. As a precaution all wrestling matches were forbidden, and all plays or interludes were suspended; it was unwise to allow any large congregation of people. The poor were being accused of sedition, but the reason for discontent might be found elsewhere. Robert Crowley, in a volume entitled The Way to Wealth, accused ‘the great farmers, the graziers, the rich butchers, the men of law, the merchants, the gentlemen, the knights, the lords, and I cannot tell who’ for provoking popular revolt.
In May a rebellion was fostered in Wiltshire, but the forces of a local magnate scattered or slew the protesters. In Oxfordshire the rebels were defeated by an army of 1,500 men led by Lord Gray; some were taken and hanged, befitting a state of war, while others ran back to their homes. Similar abortive risings took place in Sussex and Hampshire, Kent and Gloucestershire, Suffolk and Essex, Hertfordshire and Leicestershire and Worcestershire. Something was gravely amiss in the entire kingdom, even if these pockets of resistance were quickly stifled.