Among the pageants and devices with which the joyous Londoners graced the occasion when the young King rode through the festive streets, was a very quaint one, which Holinshed thus describes: “An argosine (a sailor) came from the batilment of Saint Poule’s Church, upon a cable, beyng made faste to an anker at the deane’s doore, liying uppon his breaste, aidyng himself neither with hande nor foote, and after ascended to the middes of the same cable, and tumbled and plaied many pretie toies, wherat the Kyng and other of the peres and nobles of the realme laughed hartely.” A few days before his coronation Edward had taken his place upon a throne in the Tower, and had had his little hand kissed by the peers, receiving the accolade of knighthood from the hands of his maternal uncle, the Protector Somerset. But whilst he received knighthood from one uncle, to another he gave lodging in the Tower. The latter was Thomas, Lord Seymour of Sudley, Lord High Admiral of England. Lord Sudley—or as it is also written Sudeley—was an over-ambitious personage. He had married the late King’s widow, Catherine Parr, and after her death, which he is supposed to have hastened, he began to pay very marked attentions to the Princess Elizabeth. Although one does not wish to allude to any scandal that may have attached itself in the gossip of the time to the name of that Princess, the flirtation—to give Elizabeth’s conduct with the Lord High Admiral its mildest description—was at one time too notorious an episode in the future “Gloriana’s” career to be wholly omitted from mention. Who has not read of the “high jinks” carried on between them? How on one occasion Seymour was found cutting the Princess’s gown “into a hundred pieces,” in the gardens of Hanworth, and how on another he had the audacity to pay Elizabeth a visit in her bed-chamber, on which occasion she “ran out of her bed to her maidens, and then went behind the curtains of her bed.” Seymour was certainly uncommonly handsome, and it is well known that Elizabeth was very impressionable in the matter of manly beauty. Probably Elizabeth’s chances of one day succeeding to the Crown may have helped to make Seymour so forward in his advances, but it was neither his flirtation with the Princess, nor his marriage with Catherine Parr, that brought about his ruin; he was discovered to be intriguing against his all-powerful brother, the Protector Somerset. A warrant was issued for his arrest on the 17th of January 1549, and he was taken to the Tower, in spite of his threat to poignard any person who dared to lay hands on him (“State Papers,” Dom. Ed. VI.). “By God’s precious soul,” he wrote, “whosoever lays hands on me to fetch me to prison, I shall thrust my dagger into him.” It is not recorded whether he carried his threat into execution. He was repeatedly interrogated whilst in the Tower, but without any effect, and on the 25th of February the bill of attainder against him was introduced into the House of Lords.