![]() But Paget's influence was stronger than Wriothesley's, and the chancellor reluctantly acquiescing, the form of Government as disposed by Henry, was modified on Hertford's appearance in the following instrument. had been murdered by the Duke of Gloucester. had ruined the finances and lost France Edward V. ![]() Protectorates, especially when they had been held by the uncles of kings, had been occasions of disaster and crime the Protector in the minority of Henry VI. Lord Wriothesley, the chancellor, spoke earnestly in opposition. The council was in session, and Paget had already proposed a protectorate. The death of Henry had been formally made known only in the morning of that day. In the afternoon of Monday the 3ist he arrived at the Tower with Edward. ![]() The world should experience the benefit of the alterations before it was made aware of the nature of them. In returning it, he recommended that for the present some caution should be used in communicating the contents to the world. In his haste he took with him the key of the will, for which Paget was obliged to send after him. The King had died at two, and after this hurried but momentous conversation, the Earl hastened off to bring up the Prince, who was in Hertfordshire with Elizabeth. It was now three o'clock in the morning of the 28th of January. Before the King's body was cold, in the corridor outside the room where it was lying, he entreated Paget to assist him in altering the arrangements, and Paget, with some cautions and warnings, and stipulating only that Hertford should be guided in all things by his advice, consented. He was himself a believer in liberty he imagined that the strong hand could now be dispensed with, that an age of enlightenment was at hand when severity could be superseded with gentleness and force by persuasion.īut, to accomplish these great purposes, he required a larger measure of authority. He had lived in a reign in which the laws had been severe beyond precedent and when even speech was criminal. He saw in imagination the yet imperfect revolution carried out to completion, and himself as the achiever of the triumph remembered in the history of his country. He saw England, as he believed, ripe for mighty changes easy of accomplishment. The Earl of Hertford, ardent, generous, and enthusiastic, the popular successful general, the uncle of Edward, was ill satisfied with the limited powers and the narrow sphere of action which had been assigned him. He had formed other schemes, and he had determined in his own mind that he was wiser than his master. Whatever he said, however, the Earl of Hertford never afterwards dared to appeal to the verbal instructions of Henry as a justification of the course which he intended to follow. It is known only that the King continued his directions to them as long as he could speak, and they were with him when he died. So much they communicated to the world with respect to the rest they kept their secret. He urged them to follow out the Scottish marriage to the union of the Crowns, and by separate and earnest messages he commended Edward to the care both of Charles V. He spent the day before his death in conversation with Lord Hertford and Sir William Paget on the condition of the country. But the King did not leave the world without expressing his own views with elaborate explicitness. In anticipation of the contingency which had now arrived, an Act of Parliament had been passed several years before, empowering sovereigns who might succeed to the crown while under age, to repeal by letters patent all measures which might have been passed in their names and this Act, without doubt, was designed to prohibit regents, or councils of regency, from meddling with serious questions. Gardiner was struck from the list as violent and dangerous Lord Parr the Queen's brother, Lord Dorset who had married Henry's niece, were passed over as sectarian or imprudent and, whatever further changes the King might himself have contemplated, he may be presumed to have desired that the existing order of things in Church and State should be maintained as he had left it till Edward's minority should expire. On both sides names were omitted which might naturally have been looked for. No individual among them was given precedence over another, because no one could be trusted with supreme power. was guided by the desire to leave a Government behind him in which the parties of reaction and of progress should alike be represented, and should form a check one upon the other. IT has been said that, in the selection of his executors, Henry VIII.
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