Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth. Lucy Aikin
no lenger. Beseeching you, my lord, that you will see that her grace may have that is needful for her, as my trust is ye will do—that I may know from you by writing how I shall order myself; and what is the king's grace's pleasure and yours, that I shall do in every thing.
"My lord, Mr. Shelton saith he is the master of this house: what fashion that shall be, I cannot tell; for I have not seen it before.—I trust your lordship will see the house honourably ordered, howsomever it hath been ordered aforetime.
"My lord, Mr. Shelton would have my lady Elizabeth to dine and sup every day at the board of estate. Alas! my lord, it is not meet for a child of her age to keep such rule yet. I promise you, my lord, I dare not take it upon me to keep her in health and she keep that rule. For there she shall see divers meats and fruits, and wine: which would be hard for me to restrain her grace from it. Ye know, my lord, there is no place of correction there. And she is yet too young to correct greatly. I know well, and she be there, I shall nother bring her up to the king's grace's honour, nor hers; nor to her health, nor my poor honesty. Wherefore I show your lordship this my desire. Beseeching you, my lord, that my lady may have a mess of meat to her own lodging, with a good dish or two, that is meet for her grace to eat of.
"God knoweth my lady hath great pain with her great teeth, and they come very slowly forth: and causeth me to suffer her grace to have her will, more than I would. I trust to God and her teeth were well graft, to have her grace after another fashion than she is yet: so as I trust the king's grace shall have great comfort in her grace. For she is as toward a child, and as gentle of conditions, as ever I knew any in my life. Jesu preserve her grace! As for a day or two at a hey time, or whensomever it shall please the king's grace to have her set abroad, I trust so to endeavour me, that she shall so do, as shall be to the king's honour and hers; and then after to take her ease again.
"Good my lord, have my lady's grace, and us that be her poor servants in your remembrance.
"From Hunsdon." (No date of time.)
On the day immediately following the death of the unfortunate Anne Boleyn, the king was publicly united in marriage to Jane Seymour; and an act of parliament soon after passed by which the lady Elizabeth was declared incapable of succeeding to the crown, which was now settled on the offspring of Henry by his present queen.
CHAPTER II
Vague notions of hereditary succession to the English throne.—Henry's jealousy of the royal family.—Imprisonment of lord T. Howard and lady M. Douglas.—After-fortunes of this lady.—Princess Mary reconciled with her father.—Dissolution of monasteries proceeds.—Insurrections in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.—Remarkable trait of the power of the nobles.—Rebellion of T. Fitzgerald.—Romantic adventures of Gerald Fitzgerald.—Birth of prince Edward.—Death of the queen.—Rise of the two Seymours.—Henry's views in their advancement.—His enmity to cardinal Pole.—Causes of it.—Geffrey Pole discloses a plot.—Trial and death of lord Montacute, the marquis of Exeter, sir Edward Nevil, and sir N. Carew.—Particulars of these persons.—Attainder of the marchioness of Exeter and countess of Salisbury.—Application of these circumstances to the history of Elizabeth.—Decline of the protestant party.—Its causes.—Cromwel proposes the king's marriage with Anne of Cleves.—Accomplishments of this lady.—Royal marriage.—Cromwel made earl of Essex.—Anger of the Bourchier family.—Justs at Westminster.—The king determines to dissolve his marriage.—Permits the fall of Cromwel.—Is divorced.—Behaviour of the queen.—Marriage of the king to Catherine Howard.—Ascendency of the papists.—Execution of the countess of Salisbury—of lord Leonard Grey.—Discovery of the queen's ill-conduct.—Attainders passed against her and several others.
Nothing could be more opposite to the strict principles of hereditary succession than the ideas entertained, even by the first lawyers of the time of Henry VIII., concerning the manner in which a title to the crown was to be established and recognised.
When Rich, the king's solicitor, was sent by his master to argue with sir Thomas More on the lawfulness of acknowledging the royal supremacy; he inquired in the course of his argument, whether sir Thomas would not own for king any person whatever,—himself for example,—who should have been declared so by parliament? He answered, that he would. Rich then demanded, why he refused to acknowledge a head of the church so appointed? "Because," replied More, "a parliament can make a king and depose him, and that every parliament-man may give his consent thereunto, but a subject cannot be bound so in case of supremacy3." Bold as such doctrine respecting the power of parliaments would now be thought, it could not well be controverted at a time when examples were still recent of kings of the line of York or Lancaster alternately elevated or degraded by a vote of the two houses, and when the father of the reigning sovereign had occupied the throne in virtue of such a nomination more than by right of birth.
But the obvious inconveniences and dangers attending the exercise of this power of choice, had induced the parliaments of Henry VIII. to join with him in various acts for the regulation of the succession. It was probably with the concurrence of this body, that in 1532 he had declared his cousin, the marquis of Exeter, heir to the crown; yet this very act, by which the king excluded not only his daughter Mary, but his two sisters and their children, every one of whom had a prior right according to the rules at present received, must have caused the sovereignty to be regarded rather as elective in the royal family than properly hereditary—a fatal idea, which converted every member of that family possessed of wealth, talents, or popularity, into a formidable rival, if not to the sovereign on the throne, at least to his next heir, if a woman or a minor, and which may be regarded as the immediate occasion of those cruel proscriptions which stained with kindred blood the closing years of the reign of Henry, and have stamped upon him to all posterity the odious character of a tyrant.
The first sufferer by the suspicions of the king was lord Thomas Howard, half-brother to the duke of Norfolk, who was attainted of high treason in the parliament of 1536, for having secretly entered into a contract of marriage with lady Margaret Douglas, the king's niece, through which alliance he was accused of aiming at the crown. For this offence he was confined in the Tower till his death; but on what evidence of traitorous designs, or by what law, except the arbitrary mandate of the monarch confirmed by a subservient parliament, it would be difficult to say. That his marriage was forbidden by no law, is evident from the passing of an act immediately afterwards, making it penal to marry any female standing in the first degree of relationship to the king, without his knowledge and consent.
The lady Margaret was daughter to Henry's eldest sister, the queen-dowager of Scotland, by her second husband the earl of Angus. She was born in England, whither her mother had been compelled to fly for refuge by the turbulent state of her son's kingdom, and the ill success of her own and her husband's struggles for the acquisition of political power. In the English court the lady Margaret had likewise been educated, and had formed connexions of friendship; whilst her brother James V. laboured under the antipathy with which the English then regarded those northern neighbours, with whom they were involved in almost perpetual hostilities. It might easily therefore have happened, in case of the king's death without male heirs, that in spite of the power recently bestowed on him by parliament of disposing of the crown by will, which it is very uncertain how he would have employed, a connexion with the potent house of Howard might have given the title of lady Margaret a preference over that of any other competitor. Henry was struck with this danger, however distant and contingent: he caused his niece, as well as her spouse, to be imprisoned; and though he restored her to liberty in a few months, and the death of Howard, not long afterwards, set her free from this ill-starred engagement, she ventured not to form another, till the king himself, at the end of several years, gave her in marriage to the earl of Lenox; by whom she became the mother of lord Darnley, and through him the progenitrix of a line of princes destined to unite another crown to the ancient inheritance of the Plantagenets and the Tudors.
The princess Mary, after the removal of Anne Boleyn, who had exercised towards her the utmost insolence and harshness, ventured upon some overtures towards a reconciliation with her father; but he would accept them on no other conditions than her adopting his religious creed, acknowledging his supremacy, denying the authority of the pope, and confessing the unlawfulness of her mother's marriage.
See Herbert's Henry VIII.