matter. It is probably true that the Duke of Somerset was, to some extent at least, sincere in his reforms, and that his successor was not so; but Northumberland had little choice, if he meant to prosecute his ambitious schemes, but to throw himself upon the support of the Protestant party,[1] and the Protestant party was running constantly into greater extremes: added to which a man who is not really himself by conviction a member of the party with which he acts, or which he aspires to lead, is certain to ally himself with its extreme wing. Thus the substitution of Northumberland for Somerset rather urged on than retarded the changes made. The moving powers among those actually engaged in the work were in both cases Cranmer and Ridley. Cranmer was a man always, in a greater or less degree, under the influence of those about him; and we know that under that of Ridley, and of the foreign Protestants, his opinions progressed rapidly during the later years of his life, in the direction of more and more extreme Protestantism. When, upon the occasion of his second trial at Oxford, Dr. Martin[2] said to him, 'Then from a Lutheran you became a Zwinglian, and for the same heresy you did help to burn Lambert the Sacramentary,' &c., he did not deny it, but merely answered, 'I grant that I did then believe otherwise than I do now, and so I did until my lord of London (Ridley) did confer with me,' &c.
- ↑ Edward himself had inherited no small portion of his father's determination and self-assertion, and although it seems absurd to attribute any considerable influence to a mere boy, as he was, yet it is to be remembered that he was an absolute monarch in the making, that his intelligence was very precocious, that he was fanatically Protestant as far as he was able to be anything, and that he was surrounded by influences which made him even more so. His nearest relative, Somerset, was the head of the Protestant party, and his domestic tutors and governors, Aylmer and Cheke, belonged to the same faction.
- ↑ Foxe (Edit. 1641), vol. iii. p. 656.
