Edward VI (The English Monarchs Series) by Jennifer Loach

Author:Jennifer Loach [Loach, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780300094091
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

The king’s acceptance of moral responsibility presented here accords well with the pietistic temper of the Reformation court, which took seriously the medieval themes of mutability and de contemptu mundi. This account reveals Edward dramatizing his own consciousness according to conventional attitudes of English ‘mirror’ tragedies, notably those concerning the evanescence of human life and the fickleness of fortune. Before Somerset’s fall, the king had dedicated his own handwritten translation of a collection of scriptural commonplaces to his uncle with the admonition that the Bible is the sole source of constancy in the face of ‘la vanite du monde, la mutabilité du temps, et le changement de toutes choses mondaines’.49 As exercises in language study, neither this collection nor another holograph manuscript entitled ‘A lencontre les abus du monde’50 displays any originality of thought. They do define, however, prevailing pietistic ideals that were inculcated at court during the royal minority. Another example is the courtier William Thomas’s de contemptu mundi treatise entitled The Vanitee of this Worlde (1549).

All this is very suggestive, even moving. But can this account of Edward’s reaction to Somerset’s execution be taken at face value? Is the Harleian MS an independent source, on which Hayward drew, as Barrett Beer, the most recent editor of The Life and Raigne, suggests?51 Or is it simply copied from Hayward’s text? Hayward, Diarmaid MacCulloch has suggested, was prone to inventing speeches or adapting them from Tacitus. It is possible, then, that what we have here is what the early seventeenth-century historian believed Edward ought to have felt, rather than compelling evidence that he did feel such emotions. And yet the possibility remains that Hayward or the author of the Harleian MS was drawing on credible memories.

It is clear from Edward’s Chronicle, full of rumours about ‘a stir’ here and a riot there – in June 1550, for instance, the watches were increased in London ‘because of the great frays’, a search was undertaken in Sussex for ‘all vagabonds, gypsies, conspirators, prophets, ill players and such-like’, there were rumours of a conspiracy in Essex52 – that king and council alike felt considerable anxiety during this period about the risk of another popular rising. The problem was attacked in a variety of ways. In the parliamentary session of November 1549 to February 1550 a bill was introduced to deal with the difficult legal status of riot. Introduced in the Lords as a measure against ‘the rioting of the common people’, this became, after a great deal of attention in both houses, a statute that made it high treason for twelve or more to assemble together to kill or imprison a member of the council, and for forty or more to break down enclosures. It also became a felony for twelve or more persons to destroy parks, or to seek to lower rents and prices.53 Another Act, for the control of poaching, sought to prevent the ‘owtragyous disorders’ produced by illegal hunting.54 The government also sought to improve its control of the localities – control which had proved in 1549 to be very weak – by a variety of means.

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