position to bring him to book. The accession of Mary would almost inevitably be followed by his own attainder; and the prospect drove him to make one last desperate bid for life and for power.
There were other temptations which led him to stake his all on a single throw. No immediate interference need be feared from abroad. Scotland, now little more than a province of France, had no desire to see a half-Spanish princess on the English throne, and France was even more reluctant to witness the transference of England's resources to the hands of Charles V. The Emperor was fully occupied with the French war, and Mary had nothing on which to rely except the temper of England. Northumberland's endeavour to alter the Succession might well seem worth the making. He could appeal to the fact that no woman had sat on the English throne, and that the only attempt to place one there had been followed by civil war. Margaret Beaufort had been excluded in favour of her son; and in the reign of Henry VIII there were not wanting those who preferred the claim of an illegitimate son to that of a legitimate daughter. He could also play upon the dread of religious reaction and of foreign domination which would ensue if Mary succeeded and, as she probably would, married an alien. The Netherlands, Hungary, and Bohemia had all by marriage been brought under Habsburg rule and with disastrous consequences; might not England be reserved for a similar fate? Some of these objections applied also to the Princess Elizabeth, but not all, and Northumberland would have stood a better chance of success had he selected as his candidate the daughter of Anne Boleyn. But such a solution would not necessarily have meant a continuance of his own supremacy, and that was the vital point.
Hence the Duke had recourse to a plan which was hopelessly illegal, illogical, unpopular, and unconstitutional. Edward VI was induced to settle the Crown on Lady Jane Grey, the grand-daughter of Henry VIII's sister, Mary, Duchess of Suffolk; she was married to Northumberland's fourth son, Guilford Dudley, and Dudley was to receive the Crown matrimonial, and thus mitigate the objections to a female sovereign. The arrangement was illegal, because Edward VI had not been empowered by law, as Henry had, to leave the Crown by will; and any attempt to alter the Succession established by Parliament and by Henry's will was treason. It was illogical, because, even supposing that Henry's will could be set aside and his two daughters excluded as illegitimate, the next claimant was Mary, Queen of Scots, the grand-daughter of Henry's elder sister Margaret. Moreover, if the Suffolk line was adopted, the proper heir was Lady Jane's mother, the wife of Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk. There was thus little to recommend the King's "device" except the arbitrary will of Northumberland, who in May, 1553, endeavoured to implicate his chief supporters in the plot by a series of dynastic marriages. His daughter Catharine was given to Lord Hastings; Lady Jane's sister Catharine to Pembroke's son, Lord Herbert; and Lady Jane's cousin
