rancorous spirit of envy and hostility against his brother, and
gradually involved him in a succession of dark intrigues, which, on
account of the embarrassments and dangers in which they eventually
implicated the princess Elizabeth, it will now become necessary to
unravel. The younger Seymour, still in the prime of life, was endowed in
a striking degree with those graces of person and manner which serve to
captivate the female heart, and his ambition had sought in consequence
to avail itself of a splendid marriage.

It is said that the princess Mary herself was at first the object of his
hopes or wishes: but if this were really the case, she must speedily
have quelled his presumption by the lofty sternness of her repulse; for
it is impossible to discover in the history of his life at what
particular period he could have been occupied with such a design.

Immediately after the death of Henry, he found means to revive with such
energy in the bosom of the queen-dowager, an attachment which she had
entertained for him before her marriage with the king, that she
consented to become his wife with a precipitation highly indecorous and
reprehensible. The connexion proved unfortunate on both sides, and its
first effect was to embroil him with his brother.

The protector, of a temper still weaker than his not very vigorous
understanding, had long allowed himself to be governed both in great and
small concerns by his wife, a woman of little principle and of a
disposition in the highest degree violent, imperious, and insolent.
Nothing could be more insupportable to the spirit of this lady, who
prided herself on her descent from Thomas of Woodstock, and now saw her
husband governing the kingdom with all the prerogatives and almost all
the splendor of royalty, than to find herself compelled to yield
precedency to the wife of his younger brother; and unable to submit
patiently to a mortification from which, after all, there was no escape,
she could not forbear engaging in continual disputes on the subject
with the queen-dowager. Their husbands soon were drawn in to take part
in this senseless quarrel, and a serious difference ensued between them.
The protector and council soon after refused to the lord-admiral certain
grants of land and valuable jewels which he claimed as bequests to his
wife from the late king, and the, perhaps, real injury, thus added to
the slights of which he before complained, gave fresh exasperation to
the pr