32 INTRODUCTORY. 



loth. She reluctantly accepted the dignity which had been 

 affirmed to her by the acts and will of her uncle, and by the 

 letters patent of her cousin. Her father-in-law set out to 

 secure the eastern counties, that part of England which it had 

 always been most important, after London, to conciliate, which 

 had secured the crown on Edward's head, and which, a cen- 

 tury after the events on which I am dwelling, was associated 

 in order to maintain the cause of the Parliament, and to break 

 the power of the cavaliers. But the Protestants of the east 

 remembered who it was that had impoverished the guilds, and 

 Norwich, the head-quarters of the Reformation, protected and 

 supported Mary. She was nothing to them, but Northumber- 

 land and all his works were utterly hateful, and must be 

 rejected. The baffled schemer stood a moment at bay, then 

 proclaimed Mary at Cambridge, was captured, tried, and exe- 

 cuted. Among all the victims of the Tudor period, there was 

 none who deserve so little pity as Northumberland. He 

 tried to smooth his death, perhaps to postpone it, by pitiful 

 and hollow recantations. He died as he had lived a hypo- 

 crite. There never has been an English noble whose whole 

 career was so utterly mischievous and so dishonourable as that 

 of Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. 



The reign of Mary was one of almost unbroken misery. 

 The seasons were unpropitious, and famine was general. 

 The base money of her father and her brother's reign had 

 confused all things. The Queen, who seems to have been 

 anxious to put the currency on a better basis, was helpless. 

 Providence did not smile on her reign, and she strove 

 to conciliate Providence by burning the men who had put 

 her on the throne. Philip of Spain, who knew what 

 England had been in her father's earlier years, married 

 her, and soon found out that the England of 1554 was 

 a very different country from what it had been a genera- 

 tion before. So he left a people by whom he was always 

 hated, whose parliament had shown an unwonted courage in 

 defining his marriage settlement, took the pains to drag 



