The Duke of Somerset, overtaken by events and his colleagues, found his grip on power irretrievably weakened. Once the disorders had been suppressed, Somerset was slow to wake up to the manoeuvres of the Earl of Warwick, John Dudley. When he finally did so, early in October, he attempted to cling on to power by taking control of the king’s person and printing an appeal to the people to come to the aid of their king and his Lord Protector. First he battened down the hatches at Hampton Court, preparing for the worst. But except for those holed up with him, his former colleagues melted away. So, on the night of 6 October, he made a dash for the surer refuge of Windsor Castle. But the gentry did not rally to him, as in his vanity he had imagined they would, and the studied moderation of the Privy Council in London, under Warwick’s shrewd leadership, made it impossible
For him to do anything other than surrender - albeit with guarantees of his safety, property and honour. He soon found himself in the Tower.
The fall of Somerset was expected in many quarters to lead to the reversal of the drastic measures of Protestant Reformation which had been introduced in the previous two years. The religiously conservative politicians who had been politically marginalised since the fall of Wriothesley early in 1547 certainly thought so. Wriothesley himself made a political comeback, returning to the council table in October 1549, and, with the Earl of Arundel and others, threw in his lot with Warwick on the assumption that the disorder of 1549 and the collapse of Somerset’s regime spelled the end for Cranmer’s Reformation. For a brief moment, it looked as though Wriothesley would emerge from the ruck carrying the ball. It was reported that he was lodging close to the king, that ‘every man repaireth to Wriothesley... and all things be done by his advice’. Yet circumstances were still against the conservatives, and the frustration of their hopes was almost inevitable. Dudley himself, though hardly a man consumed by evangelical fervour, had been broadly sympathetic to the cause of Reformation since the mid-i53os, mostly no doubt because of the modest veil it provided for the pillage of the Church. He abandoned his new-found conservative friends just in time to assume command of the reformers as they abandoned Somerset’s lost cause. The fall of Somerset was thus strangely akin to the fall of Anne Boleyn back in 1536. On each occasion, adroit manoeuvring saved the cause of the Reformation, albeit at the cost of one or two heads.
As in the wake of Henry’s death, so in the wake of Somerset’s fall, the key moment was the exclusion of Wriothesley, now for a second time, from the Privy Council. Not much is known about Wriothesley’s political style, but it begins to look as though he was short on leadership qualities. To lose one power struggle may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like mismanagement. His brief return to the council table was curtailed by illness, and by February 1550 he was once more on the sidelines. Among the conservatives who had served Henry VIII, only Stephen Gardiner had the ability and the ambition to lead a government. He remained in gaol. The primary objective of the conservative Privy Councillors over the winter of 1550-51 was to get him out. They failed, and with that failure went their hopes.
In the meantime, Warwick was consolidating his grip on the young king and thus on the reality of power - in the interests of which he was happy to dispense with much of its outward display. His regime differed in many respects from that of his predecessor. Most obviously, Edward was now encouraged to associate himself more closely with political discussions and actions. Warwick was careful from the start to foster in the boy a proper sense of his own place and person. Indeed, the first issue which Edward raised with the council on his own account was the fate of his fallen uncle. In an inspired example of reculer pour mieux sauter, Warwick seized the initiative by appearing to surrender it, calling upon his colleagues to respect this, the first royal wish proposed to them. Somerset was spared for the time being, and in February 1550 was released from the Tower. From April he was even back on the Privy Council, and a reconciliation between him and Warwick was sealed by the
Marriage of Anne Seymour to Dudley’s eldest son, Lord Lisle. However, the following year Warwick began a relentless pursuit of Somerset, which culminated in the duke’s trial on trumped-up charges of treason in December 1551. He gave as good an account of himself as the Earl of Surrey had done five years earlier, and to as little avail. Although the charge of treason was dropped, he was still found guilty on three counts of felony, and condemned to death just the same. Warwick, who had now been promoted Duke of Northumberland, made a show of interceding for Somerset’s life, but in fact systematically misinformed Edward about the trial in order to ensure that the king signed the death warrant. As far as we can tell, Edward, who showed no cruelty in his nature, sought to preserve his uncle’s life, but the execution was presented to him as an unpleasant but unavoidable duty. Clearing his conscience before his own execution less than two years later, Northumberland was to admit that he had falsified the charges against Somerset.
By thus owning up to his rather crude elimination of his rival, Northumberland set himself up for posterity as a villain, while his victim, Somerset, who was always careful to set his own actions in the best possible light, successfully imposed upon posterity his own valuation of himself as a benevolent statesman selflessly devoted to the common good. Only recently have historians challenged these enduring myths. While the ‘Good Duke’ of Somerset has been turned by ‘revisionist’ historians into not simply a villain but, which is worse, an incompetent villain, the ‘Bad Duke’ of Northumberland has undergone an equal and opposite transformation. He has emerged from the process as not merely a competent administrator but a talented statesman adept at consensus politics and genuinely concerned for reform. In short, the historical reputations of Somerset and Northumberland have been simply exchanged. What historians should really abandon is the notion that the two men were so very different. Somerset was a self-serving arriviste who feathered his nest at the expense of king and Church. Northumberland was just as self-serving as Somerset, but less hypocritical and more capable. Where Somerset’s arrogance alienated powerful interests, Northumberland’s superior management skills created more consensus behind his policies (which were for the most part cautious and sensible enough). But the net effect was the same. Northumberland, like Somerset before him, ruled the king and therefore the kingdom.
The events of 1549-50 left Northumberland understandably preoccupied with the security of his regime, and many of his measures were directed towards enhancing it. The most important of these was the introduction in some counties of Lords Lieutenant (an office which survives in largely honorific form to this day) to fill some of the gaps left by the disappearance or marginalisation of traditional regional magnates, gaps which had contributed to the troubles of 1549. Except in the controversial areas of religion and the succession, his policies were not so much initiatives as facing up to the inevitable. Peace with France was the only sensible course of action, and Northumberland secured a reasonable deal in exchange for the surrender of Boulogne in 1550. And in the context of fiscal exhaustion and economic slump, it was only sensible to try and retrench on expenditure, rationalise
Royal finances, and begin to remedy the catastrophic debasement of the currency by which first Henry VIII and then Somerset had staved off financial collapse through the wars of the 1540s.
World History
