Kings & Queens by Peter Snow & Ann MacMillan

Author:Peter Snow & Ann MacMillan [MacMillan, Peter Snow & Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WelBeck

27

EDWARD VI

1547–53

Edward VI was a pale shadow of his father, Henry VIII – pasty-faced and impassive, a child of nine when he was crowned, a sickly youth of 15 when he died. But King Edward was far from empty-headed. Painstakingly educated and an eager student, he was soon enveloped in the fervour of radical church reformers. Henry VIII’s religious practice had been Catholic practice, without the Pope. His son wanted to go further. He backed the eradication of any remaining trappings of Catholic ritual.

Edward’s six years on the throne fell under the shadow of two powerful grandees who succeeded one another as single-minded protectors of the young king. First, his dead mother’s brother, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, who became Duke of Somerset. Second, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who assumed the title Duke of Northumberland. Both were remorseless opponents of the Catholic Church. Both ended up with their heads on the block.

Somerset neatly browbeat all the other members of the Regency Council that Henry had intended to mentor Edward and became Lord Protector. He and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, Edward’s godfather and another arch reformer, ran the country without a peep from Edward, who was largely preoccupied with his studies of Cicero and Aristotle. They bolstered Henry VIII’s severance from the Pope and took further measures to abolish Catholic ritual. Priestly celibacy was scrapped, conveniently for Cranmer, who was married. Churches were stripped of relics, rosaries and all the trappings of the mass. Stained-glass windows were destroyed, mural paintings of saints whitewashed over. Emphasis was placed on the truth of the gospels. The English Bible was already in widespread use, and in 1549, Cranmer produced a new English Book of Common Prayer.

At Edward’s coronation service, Cranmer proclaimed the new king accountable to God, not the Pope. Now was the time, he said, to “banish the tyranny” of the Pope of Rome and to see “idolatry destroyed”. A more open-minded Edward might have felt torn between his half-sister Princess Mary’s devout Catholicism and his uncle’s and Cranmer’s virulent Protestantism, but the young king never doubted which side he was on. He was a convinced Protestant from the start. As early as Christmas 1550, when he was 13, he had a spirited confrontation with Mary, who was more than 20 years older than him. Edward and his councillors tried to persuade her to change. She refused, and with the forthright support of her powerful Spanish cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, chose to ignore Edward and his uncle, the Lord Protector.

And Mary wasn’t alone. The actions against the traditional Catholic Church angered large sections of the population, particularly outside London. Cranmer’s new prayer book provoked widespread rumblings of discontent and in the south-west there was a rebellion that had to be forcibly suppressed. Somerset ordered John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, to cope with the unrest and Dudley launched a savage military clampdown that left many dead. He emerged with such prestige and authority that he challenged Somerset’s position. Somerset was packed off to the Tower of London for reacting to the crisis too slowly and incompetently.

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