While England was disturbed with these changes, many of them rational
and necessary, but all of them hasty and rash, Somerset had succeeded
in plunging the realm into two foreign wars. The English party north
of the Tweed had promised the hand of their little five-year-old Queen
Mary to King Edward, but when they proved unable to fulfil their
promise, owing to the hatred of the majority of the Scots for England,
the Protector resolved to use coercive measures. He declared war, and
invaded the Lowlands in the autumn of 1547, wasting the country before
him till he was met by the whole levy of Scotland on the hillside
of Pinkie, near Musselborough. There he inflicted on them a bloody
defeat, but gained no advantage thereby; for the Scots sent their
child-queen over to France, to keep her safe from English hands, and
when she reached the court of Henry II. she was wedded to his son,
the Dauphin Francis. Thus Somerset entirely lost the object of his
campaign, and only earned the desperate hate of the Scots for the
carnage of Pinkie.
[Sidenote: =Plots and Rebellions in England.=]
The war with Scotland brought about a war with France, in which the
Protector wasted much money. The struggle went against the English,
and ultimately led to the loss of Boulogne, the sole conquest of
Henry VIII. While this war was in progress, Somerset was involved in
serious troubles within the bounds of England itself. He detected his
own brother, Lord Seymour of Sudely, plotting to marry the Princess
Elizabeth, and oust him from the regency. Seymour was pardoned once,
but, on renewing his conspiracy, was apprehended and beheaded. But
domestic plots were less to be feared than popular risings. In 1548-49
two dangerous rebellions broke out in West and East. In Devonshire the
old Catholic party rose in arms, clamouring for the restoration of the
Mass and the suppression of Protestantism. In the Eastern Counties an
insurrection of another sort was seen; the peasantry banded themselves
together under the tanner Robert Ket, who called himself the "King of
Norfolk and Suffolk." They dreamed of a social revolution such as that
which Wat Tyler had demanded in an earlier age, though their grievances
were not the same as those of the fourteenth century. They complained
of the rapacity of the new landholders who had superseded the old
monastic bodies, and who were evicting the old peasantry right and
left, and turning farms into sheep-runs, because wool paid better than
corn. The enclosure of common lands, the debasement of the coinage, and
the slowness and inefficacy of the law when used by the poor man, were
also denounced. Ket and his fellows began seizing and trying unpopular
landholders, and spoke of making a clean sweep of the upper classes.
[Sidenote: =Ket's rebellion put down.=]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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