Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector during the minority of Edward VI, had governed with an authority that disquieted a faction of the Council. He had likewise consented to the condemnation of his brother Thomas, the Lord Admiral, by bill of attainder. In George Borrow’s account, this fateful resolution marked the inception of his own undoing: the Admiral’s death rendered the Protector odious to the common people and furnished his adversaries with fresh ammunition against him. With the fraternal bond severed, the contest to rule in the name of the boy-king proceeded shorn of one of its two most formidable actors.
Somerset’s detractors, rallying around the Earl of Warwick, seized upon this juncture to challenge his administration. The Duke had commanded the demolition of a parish church and two episcopal palaces to erect his residence, Somerset House. This act provoked widespread indignation, according to Borrow, and rumours proliferated concerning further projected demolitions. His opponents accused him, moreover, of concentrating all power within his own hands, of browbeating the councillors, and of subverting the established maxims of governance. The political feud thus drew sustenance alike from public policy, private avarice, and the malicious reports whispered abroad against him.
The crisis broke into the open when Warwick secured the allegiance of several members of the Council and Somerset withdrew from court. The Protector assembled armed men and stationed guards at the gates. He conveyed the young monarch from Hampton Court to Windsor under an escort described by Borrow as a diminutive army. The lords convened in London countered by seizing control of the Tower and issuing a proclamation to the King’s subjects, charging Somerset with misrule and commanding them to withhold their obedience. The minor sovereign found himself the prize between two factions, each professing to act solely for his preservation.
Letters were dispatched to Windsor. The councillors denounced Somerset before the King, insisting upon his unfitness to govern. The youthful Edward suffered himself to be persuaded. The Duke was placed under arrest, conducted to London, and committed to the Tower. This scene marked the close of his initial tenure of supreme authority. Articles were exhibited against him, charging that he had exceeded the warrants of his protectorship, sidelined the councillors, obstructed the course of justice, debased the coinage, fomented discontent over enclosures, and furnished his retainers with royal arms. The indictments encompassed both acts of statecraft and the unlawful employment of armed force.
Somerset was not immediately brought to the block. He was stripped of the protectorate, the treasurership, and the office of Earl Marshal, together with a considerable portion of his estates. He addressed letters of submission to the Council, confessing his errors and protesting that they proceeded from infirmity of judgment rather than malice of intent. He cast himself upon the King’s mercy. Shortly thereafter, Edward received him and reinstated him in the Privy Council. A marital alliance between the Duke’s daughter and Warwick’s son was intended to cement this reconciliation. Yet the new kinship failed to disarm Warwick’s ambition.
The following year, Warwick—now created Duke of Northumberland—accused Somerset of having plotted his assassination, together with that of the Marquess of Northampton and the Earl of Pembroke. Sir Thomas Palmer, a creature of Northumberland, deposed that a design had been laid to execute the slaughter either at a banquet or as the lords rode abroad with slender escort. He spoke likewise of confederates ready to take up arms and of alleged adherents within the Tower. The chronicle cites Secretary William Cecil, who recounted an interview wherein Somerset had confided fears of plots brewing against his person. The accusations issued from partisans firmly entrenched in Warwick’s camp; the record does not present them as untainted evidence.
The Duke was brought once more before his peers at Westminster. The Marquess of Winchester presided as Lord High Steward, attended by seven-and-twenty peers. Somerset pleaded not guilty and put himself upon his trial by his equals. The charges were divided into five distinct counts: the levying of men in the North; the gathering of partisans to slay Northumberland; armed resistance to his arrest; the slaughter of men-at-arms; and the assault upon the lords or the plotting of their deaths. The tribunal was called upon to determine whether these actions amounted to high treason or to another species of crime.
The defence was denied the assistance of counsel, notwithstanding the intricate legal points involved. The King’s lawyers contended that the levying of men, the intent to kill members of the Council, and armed resistance to lawful arrest were sufficient to substantiate treason or grave felony. Several peers recoiled from the notion of construing every private fray between subjects as high treason. Northumberland himself was said to have declared that he would never consent that an enterprise levelled against his own person should be deemed treason against the Crown. Opinions were sharply divided, revealing that the demarcation between rebellion against the sovereign and factional violence was far less clear-cut than the prosecution maintained.
The verdict acquitted Somerset of treason, but pronounced him guilty of felony. The populace initially gave voice to their exultation, only to fall into a stunned silence upon learning that a sentence of death must nevertheless ensue. Yet this legal distinction carried profound weight: the jury of peers declined to sanction the capital charge in its most heinous degree. Borrow records that many held that a conviction for felony, in the absence of any consummated homicide, ought never to bring so near a kinsman of the King to the scaffold. But political mastery remained in the hands of those who governed access to the youthful sovereign.
The King was hedged about by his councillors and insulated from any supplications on behalf of his uncle. Somerset’s adversaries reminded Edward that the prisoner had already brought about the destruction of his own brother, and that he had now contemplated the slaughter of the realm’s chief nobility. According to Borrow, courtly spectacles and state business kept the sovereign remote from the Duke’s plight. Acquitted of treason yet condemned for felony, Somerset was sentenced to be beheaded and was led to Tower Hill on the 22nd of January 1552. A vast concourse mourned his end; some dipped their kerchiefs in his blood to preserve a relic of his passing. Borrow carries this scene forward into an episode of retributive memory: when Northumberland was in his turn conducted through London as a captive, a woman stepped forth to shake in his face a handkerchief steeped in Somerset’s blood, upbraiding him with the Duke’s murder. The cloth gathered at the foot of the scaffold had become an enduring indictment which the fallen conqueror was powerless to silence.