witness this with indifference. The Protector, to satisfy him, got him created Baron Seymour of Sudley, and with this title he received in August, 1548, the lordship of Sudley in Gloucestershire, together with other lands and tenements in no less than eighteen counties. He made him, moreover, high admiral, a post which had been held by the Earl of Warwick, who received instead of it that of lord great chamberlain. These honours and estates might have well contented a man of even great ambition, but the aspiring of the Seymours brooked no limits. The new Lord Seymour was still restless, and could not feel content till he stood on a level with his fortunate brother. The Protector was a man who, though he had been entrusted with great commissions, and had executed his military ones with a lion-like fury, was yet of a timorous nature. He grasped at the highest honours, yet he trembled to lose them, and, therefore, coveted popularity, and was careful to maintain an outwardly irreproachable moral character. He moreover was a zealous reformer of religion, and probably was sincerely so. We have no cause to deem that he feigned this attachment to Protestant principles, though he neither understood the humility nor the humanity required by the Gospel which he contributed largely to make known. We have seen the un-Christian cruelty of his campaigns; and, in his whole bearing, after his achievement of the supreme power, he displayed the most inflated arrogance, and even violence and insolence of temper. Shrinking at the faintest murmurs of the people, stooping to the domestic yoke of a coarse, proud, and imperious wife, he treated not only his inferiors, but even his equals at the Council board, with all the offensive airs of an upstart.
Latimer Preaching before Edward VI. From an old Print in the British Museum. (See page 310.)
That these traits have not been bestowed upon him by his enemies, we have the clearest proofs in the honest expostulations of his intimate friend Paget, who wrote thus to him:—"If I loved not your grace so deeply in my heart that it cannot be taken out, I could hold my peace as some others do, and say little or nothing. But my love to your grace, and good hope that you take my meaning well, hath enforced me to signify unto your grace, that unless your grace do more quietly show your pleasure in things wherein you will debate with other men, and hear them again graciously say their opinions, when you do require it, that will ensue whereof I would be right sorry, and your grace shall have just cause to repent, that is, that no man shall dare speak to you what he thinks, though it were never so necessary." And he adds, "However it cometh to pass I cannot tell, but of late your grace is grown great in choleric fashions whensoever you are contraried in that which you have conceived in your head;" and he entreats him to avoid this, or mischief might grow out of it.
The admiral, on the contrary, cared little for popular opinion. He was a handsome, gay man, free in his principles, by no means nice in his life or his morals.
