The Tudors by Richard Rex

Author:Richard Rex [Rex, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 15th Century, 16th Century, Royalty, Nonfiction, England/Great Britain, Tudors, History, Reference
ISBN: 9783884004364
Publisher: Amberley Publishing
Published: 2009-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

Edward VI’s ‘devise for the succession’ of June 1553. There are six paragraphs in the Devise, which is entirely in the handwriting of the youthful king. The ‘s’ in ‘L. Janes’ is seen to be deleted by a stroke of the pen, and words ‘and her’ to be interpolated above the line. This amendment shows the plan changing from a preference for male heirs if possible to a transfer of the crown to Lady Jane in person (this privilege is not accorded to her younger sisters). It thus tightens the grip on power of her father-in-law, the Duke of Northumberland.

Had Edward VI survived, the history of England and of Europe would have been vastly different. Although Mary Tudor, like many others as Catholic as she, persuaded herself that the Protestant Reformation was little more than a self-seeking conspiracy by a court cabal, and that Edward would repudiate it upon attaining his majority, she was quite wrong. This is not to deny that the Protestant Reformation in England was a self-seeking conspiracy by a court cabal – even dedicated Protestants like Hugh Latimer and Thomas Lever said as much, in sermons preached to the court! – but it was much, much more. For a start, it was an evangelical religious movement offering a new heaven and a new earth, capable of inspiring its followers to virtuous lives and heroic deaths. As Mary was to find, the removal of the cabal and the withdrawal of royal support did not mean that Protestantism would simply melt away like a morning frost. Even more importantly, Protestantism was in a real sense Edward’s religion. There was no way that he would have repudiated it had he grown up. And once the young zealot had taken personal control of his government, there is every reason to believe that the Protestant politics of Somerset and Northumberland would have been the keynote of his reign. He had been groomed by Cranmer, Somerset and Northumberland to be the champion of European Protestantism, a sort of evangelical crusader. Even allowing him the modest life expectancy of his father and grandfather, around fifty years, he might have ruled England until the 1580s.

A solidly Protestant England, united under a vigorous Tudor king, would have been well placed to take full advantage of the religious and political chaos which spread through France and the Netherlands in the later sixteenth century. Of course, not even under a vigorous and mature king could England have threatened the hegemony of Spain under Philip II. But it would certainly have shifted the balance of power, it would probably have driven Spanish power back to the Pyrenees, and it might possibly have established the total dominance of Protestantism in northern Europe. With England’s political leadership and full royal support for the international vision of Thomas Cranmer, who under these circumstances would have become the veritable patriarch of European Protestantism, the history of Protestantism itself might have been very different, a solid ecclesiastical block in the north ranged against the Catholicism of the south and the Orthodoxy of the east.

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