The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

In the aftermath of the risings 'a most dangerous conspiracy' formed against the Protector. At Hampton Court at the beginning of October 1549, Somerset waited with the King, the Archbishop, a few counsellors, and an army of 'peasants' with pitch forks who had answered the call for a general array. In London the rival lords of the Council, led by the Earl of Warwick, waited with the City fathers. In Andover, Lord Russell and Sir William Herbert waited with the army which had suppressed the Western rebellion, fearing 'an universal calamity and thraldom' and hoping that 'no effusion of blood may follow'. Everyone was waiting to see which side would win the greater support, fearing reprisals against the losers.
War among the nobility, not seen since the Wars of the Roses a century before, seemed likely. On 6 October the London Lords, Somerset's rivals in Council, had ridden armed through the City with liveried bands of retainers. A year before Thomas Seymour had dreamed of raising 10,000 men, had imagined England divided into power blocks of 'noble men to countervail such other noble men', and had boasted of his own 'goodly manred' in the Marches of Wales. Now Somerset's tenants might have rallied to him from his estates in Wiltshire had not Russell and Herbert delayed in Hampshire with their troops to prevent them. At this moment of great insecurity an older world of lordship surfaced.
New forces in politics also now appeared. During the conspiracy to bring down the Protector, popular support was rallied in the name of the new religion. Somerset's cause was proclaimed by those who feared that his downfall would end both patronage for the poor and evangelical reform. Yet his supposed championship of the estate of poverty and of the Gospel might lose him as much support as it gained. Proclamations were issued accusing the Protector's enemies both of conservatism in religion and of oppressive social policies, but such was the confusion that rumours spread too that Somerset would restore the Mass. His ruthlessness in pursuit of power made anything seem possible. Hearing that the Lords sought 'his blood and his death', Somerset moved with the King to Windsor to be better defended. 'Me thinks I am in prison,' wrote Edward. So he was, for possession of his person was the key to power. By 9 October, when London's governors and Russell and Herbert declared for the London Lords, the prospect of civil war was averted. The King was safely handed over. Offered his life, though not his liberty, Somerset surrendered. Who would rule instead? Behind the conspiracy there lay a group of politicians, conservative in religion, led by Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, whom Somerset had ousted in 1547. Originally, the conspirators had planned to make the Lady Mary regent, with or without her collusion. But some evangelicals - among whom John Dudley, Earl or Warwick was one - had moved against Somerset partly to save their cause from his reckless egoism, and they were alarmed by any prospect of a conservative revanche with the Lady Mary as its figurehead. Any alliance between such subtle and deadly politicians as Dudley and Wriothesley would be fraught, and conspiracy did not end with Somerset's fall. Now Wriothesley, allied with the Earl of Arundel, conspired against the evangelicals. They determined that Somerset should die, and with him Warwick, whom they would implicate in Somerset's designs: they were 'traitors both and both worthy do die'. Early in January 1550 Warwick, knowing that his fate and Somerset's were bound together, told Wriothesley: 'My lord, you seek his blood, and he that seeketh his blood would have mine also.' Wriothesley and Arundel were evicted from court.
Warwick's control of the court, his 'great friends around the King', placed there in mid October through Cranmer's influence, allowed him to prevent another conservative coup or any future attempt to abduct the King, and to save himself. Now he moved to purge his erstwhile conservative allies and to add his own supporters to the Council. Since it was safer to have enemies within, and to be vigilant, than to have enemies without, Somerset was allowed to return. Bishop Hooper had preached to Somerset in prison at Christmas 1549, urging him not to seek revenge, but in vain. Somerset's evident ambition to return to the principal place remained one of the gravest dangers to the new regime. Acute social distress was reason enough to fear insurrection, but more alarming still was the knowledge that the loyalty of the poor was to Somerset, and if they rose again it would be in his name. As 1550 began, a court observer warned that 'by the divisions of the great the mad rage of the idle commoners is much provoked . . . so that this year to come is like to be worse than any was yet'.

One who knew John Dudley, Earl of Warwick well said that 'he had such a head that he seldom went about anything but he conceived first three or four purposes beforehand'. Past master of the double-cross and double bluff, he had learnt in the hard school of Henry's last years, but not even he could have foreseen the dangers of alliance with Wriothesley, nor his own subsequent betrayal of Wriothesley and its consequences. Having purged the conservatives in Council and repudiated Mary's regency, Warwick needed new allies and a way to prevent any Catholic resurgence which would threaten him. His new allies would be evangelicals, principally Archbishop Cranmer, whose influence over his royal godson was high. Warwick's source of power was the Council, of which he became Lord President, and the court, which from February 1550 he controlled as Great Master of the Royal Household, staffing the Privy Chamber with his own men, who guarded access and patrolled the precincts. He needed also the support of the King, who became more attached to the evangelical cause and more imperious as he grew older. Soon Warwick advanced evangelical reform with such commitment that he confounded contemporaries. While the concillors fought for primacy during that winter of 1549 to 1550 the imprisoned Catholic Bishops Bonner and Gardiner had eagerly awaited their release. The reformers despaired, thinking that Christ had abandoned England. But on Christmas Day 1549 orders came for the destruction of all Catholic service books and for the enforcement of the Book of Commons Prayer. The Lady Mary, thinking Warwick 'the most unstable man in England' and alarmed by the Council's moves to force her to renounce her religion, sought sanctuary with her Habsburg cousin. In May 1550 she prepared for escape by boat down an Essex creek to the Emperor's waiting ships on the coast. Mary's flight was foiled by a general watch for disorder in Essex. There were watches everywhere that spring, for this government lived in permanent terror of popular disturbance. Tudor government rested upon consent and popular support, and Warwick's regime possessed neither. A general hostility grew against Warwick and his followers. By January 1551 it was said that he governed 'absolutely' (which was not true), and that he was 'hated by the commons and more feared than loved by the rest' (which was). The social distress was palpable. As the effects of the debasement of the coinage bit more deeply, inflation compounded the penury caused by the appalling harvests of 1550 and 1551. The annual rate of inflation in London for 1549-51 was 21 per cent. The price of flour doubled, shrank. In February 1551 the governors of St Bartholomew's hospital, seeing that the half-penny loaf would no longer feed two men at a meal, increased the ration by half. The suffering looked for scapegoats. Though the Council was concerned with social justice, and sent out commissions to ensure the equitable provision of wheat, it won no credit for it. The attempts in the spring and summer to restore the coinage were sadly mismanaged and only brought rumours that the rich were profiting from the misery of the poor and that Warwick, in his greed and pride, was creating his own coinage, bearing the stamp of his own badge, the bear and ragged staff. Spring was the 'stirring time' when the people might rise. In the springs of 1549, 1550, and 1553 Parliament was dissolved and the lords and gentry were sent back to their localities to keep order. Warwick began to elevate powerful nobles to the Council: not only to secure their support but to keep their 'countries' quiet. These men, chosen as experienced military leaders, were licensed to retain fifty or a hundred horsemen and given strategic defensive commands.
So long as Warwick's regime remained so unpopular, Somerset's restoration to primacy was always looked for. Everyone murmured about it; Warwick dreaded it; but was Somerset working towards it? From the moment of his release he began to gather adherents and they laid plans to raise support in Parliament. Somerset saw his best hopes now in leading the leaderless conservatives. Rumour followed rumour: that Somerset would reverse the Edwardian reforms; that he would free Bishop Gardiner; that the Catholic Earls of Derby and Shrewsbury would raise the North. Rumour turned to reality when Somerset and Arundel conceived a plot to assassinate the Earls of Warwick and Northampton at the St George's Day feast on 23 April. The plot was uncovered, but so uncertain were the times that Warwick could not yet risk arresting his enemies.
The spring and summer of 1551 was a time of grave political instability and economic distress, of portents and prodigies. Most devastating of all was an epidemic of sweating sickness in July, an illness as sudden as it was deadly. Not until October did Warwick arrest Somerset.