These “covetous hands” were the privy councillors. Henry had not intended that any member of the board should have precedence, but the king’s body was not cold before Edward Seymour began an intrigue to make himself protector. To consolidate a party behind him, he opened his administration by distributing all the spoil he could lay hands on; and Mr. Froude estimated that “on a computation most favourable to the council, estates worth ... in modern currency about five millions” of pounds, were “appropriated--I suppose I must not say stolen--and divided among themselves.”[282] At the head of this council stood Cranmer, who took his share without scruple. Probably Froude’s estimate is far too low; for though Seymour, as Duke of Somerset, had, like Henry, to meet imperative claims which drained his purse, he yet built Somerset House, the most sumptuous palace of London. Seymour was put to death by Dudley when he rose to power by his military success in Norfolk. Dudley as well as Cromwell was fitted for the emergency in which he lived; bold, able, unscrupulous and energetic, his party hated but followed him, because without him they saw no way to seize the property they coveted. He too, like Cromwell, allied himself with the evangelical clergy, and under Edward the orthodoxy of the “Six Articles” gave way to the doctrine of Geneva. Even in 1548 Calvin had been able to write to Somerset, thanking God that, through his wisdom, the “pure truth” was preached;[283] but when Dudley administered the government as Duke of Northumberland, bishops did not hesitate to teach that the dogma of the “carnal presence” in the sacrament “maintaineth that beastly kind of cruelty of the ‘Anthropophagi,’ that is, the devourers of man’s flesh: for it is a more cruel thing to devour a quick man, than to slay him.”[284] Dudley resembled Henry and Norfolk in being naturally conservative, for he died a Catholic; but with them all, money was the supreme object, and as they lacked the physical force to plunder alone, they were obliged to conciliate the Radicals. These were represented by Knox, and to Knox the duke paid assiduous court. The Scotchman began preaching in Berwick in 1549, but the government soon brought him to London, and in 1551 made him a royal chaplain, and, as chaplain, he was called upon to approve the Forty-two Articles of 1552. This he could do conscientiously, as they contained the dogmas of election and predestination, original sin, and justification by faith, beside a denial of “the reall and bodilie presence ... of Christes fleshe, and bloude, in the Sacramente of the Lordes Supper.”