Edward VI

King of England (r. 1547-1553)

• Born: October 12, 1537
• Birthplace: Hampton Court Palace, near London, Surrey, England
• Died: July 6, 1553
• Place of death: London, England

Edward’s reign definitively established the strong Tudor monarchy and English Protestantism. Despite his youth, the king played a significant role in both.

Early Life

Edward VI’s birth to Henry VIII and his wife, Jane Seymour, secured the Tudor male succession. Up to this point, Henry had had two wives and had separated the English church from the Papacy. With both of Henry’s previous wives now dead, illegitimacy did not shadow Edward as it did his two sisters, Mary and Elizabeth. Jane Seymour died twelve days after Edward’s birth; within the next six years, his father took three more wives, but he had no more children. The last marriage, to Catherine Parr in 1543, provided Edward with a stepmother who brought the king’s children together in a harmonious household and made the court a center of the New Learning (Protestantism).

Henry VIII was already forty-six at Edward’s birth and, though a fond parent, had little association with his son; the boy patterned himself on his tutors and grew up serious and scholarly. He found in the classroom separation from women, among whom he had spent his first six years. His first tutors, Richard Cox and John Cheke, were Cambridge scholars and staunch Protestants, friends of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. For schoolmates, they selected sons of noblemen; one of them, Barnaby Fitzpatrick, Edward’s whipping boy, remained a lifelong friend. In the Renaissance style, the boys learned classical and modern languages as well as music, astronomy, and athletics. Tutors of Princess Elizabeth, four years older, came from the same background; she and Edward wrote letters to each other as school exercises. Princess Mary, twenty-one years older than her brother and a devoted Roman Catholic, had completed her education, but with Queen Catherine’s encouragement, she translated from Desiderius Erasmus’s Latin.

Edward’s education continued for three years after he became king; he turned from analyzing classical texts to writing position papers on a variety of subjects that he presented to his council. Similarly, the chronicle he wrote in 1552 about his life and times (published as his Journal in 1857, and republished, with his political papers, in 1966) developed from early concentration on battles and tournaments to concern about various problems of government. From vicious political struggles in the Council, Edward early learned discretion; he took boyish delight in having his own locked desk. Being his father’s son, he showed interest in his own marriage; the characteristic restraint of the Journal gives way when he writes about his engagement to Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Henry II of France. Once, he jokingly suggested that he might marry Anne of Cleves, his father’s divorced fifth wife.

Portraits of Edward by Hans Holbein, the Younger, William Strates, and others show the young king as a fat baby growing into fragile adolescence: thin, shorter than average, with gray eyes, reddish hair, and a pale complexion. Gerolamo Cardano, the famous Milanese physician, praised Edward’s intellectual attainments in the last year of his life, but he also told of what portraits do not show: one shoulder blade higher than the other, nearsightedness, and slight deafness.

Life’s Work

Foreign diplomats remarked on the reverence shown to a mere boy and on his participation in government. Yet, though crowned king of England, Ireland, and France, at first he served as little more than a pawn, and he never stood against whatever faction controlled the Council.

His reign began, as it ended, with a challenge to the will of Henry VIII, which had prescribed government by a council made up of his executors. Instead, Edward’s uncle, Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford (soon to be the duke of Somerset), influenced the Council to turn authority over to him as governor of the king’s person and protector of the kingdom. Almost immediately, a contest for control developed between Somerset and his brother, Thomas Seymour, Lord Sudley, Lord Admiral, who shared booty with pirates he was supposed to pursue. Sudley supplied the young king with money and married Dowager Queen Catherine. More ominously, he flirted with Princess Elizabeth, who lived with Catherine, and paid her suit after Catherine’s death. Against Somerset’s plans, he intrigued for Edward’s marriage to Lady Jane Grey, granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister. Arrested and condemned to death, Sudley wrote secretly urging Mary and Elizabeth to conspire against Somerset, charging him with profiteering.

Historians have championed one or another of the politicians around Edward as comparatively high-minded or as victims of circumstances, but all struggled for power in order to despoil the Church in the name of their Protestantism. The exclusion of Catholics, such as Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, from the Council, and Edward’s youth gave them a free hand. By the time Sudley died, John Dudley, earl of Warwick (later the duke of Northumberland), was challenging Somerset’s control. Archbishop Cranmer, who shepherded the establishment of English Protestantism, remained financially disinterested. He had already shown himself a trimmer, however, and his basic Erastianism remained suspect from a strictly Protestant viewpoint. Parliament enacted religious changes, and the courts enforced them, in the king’s name, emphasizing the question of loyalty rather than theology.

At first, religious changes from Henry VIII’s church attracted limited resistance. Few complained about the repeal of heresy laws, and chantries disappeared gradually. A crisis came with the implementation of the Act of Uniformity on Whitsunday, 1549, requiring a new order of worship, Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer , with the obvious change from Latin to English. The rising in Cornwall and Devon (the Western Rebellion) represented a protest in favor of a return to the “old” ways of Henry VIII. A contemporaneous rising in Norfolk (Robert Kett’s Rebellion) came mainly from secular problems. Somerset had already attacked enclosure of common lands by the gentry as causing the dislocation of peasants, whose hardship was aggravated by bad harvests and debasement of the coinage. Causes for rebellion varied greatly, however, within the larger pattern.

Somerset’s failure to control the uprisings brought his fall from power. Northumberland took control, ended the Protectorate, and imprisoned him. The Council’s new leaders put down the rebellions ruthlessly, using German and Italian troops brought over the channel to fight in Scotland. Somerset had proved as inept in foreign affairs as at home. He went to war in 1547 with the intention of aiding Scottish Protestants and undermining French influence by a marriage, discussed almost from Edward’s birth, with the child queen Mary Stuart (Mary, Queen of Scots ). His armies harried the country and thus drove the Scots into a firm alliance with France, including the queen’s marriage to the dauphin. War between England and France followed in 1549.

Even more than Somerset, Northumberland controlled through Edward. From fall, 1551, the young king presided over the Council and signed official documents without a countersignature. He did nothing to save his uncle from execution in January, 1552; Somerset, released from prison, had tried to rally support against Northumberland. Before 1552, Edward had lived close to London; his progress from July to September of that year, taking him as far as Salisbury, showed growing maturity. Without Edward’s strong backing, Cranmer would not have pushed the church reform called for by Bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley . A second Prayer Book and Act of Uniformity (1552) mandated attendance at the reformed service, and the Forty-two Articles of Religion defined Englishmen’s creed. Northumberland’s regime remains controversial. The loss of religious freedom and the destruction of Catholic books and artifacts were balanced by ideals of a Puritan Commonwealth.

Northumberland sacrificed Boulogne to gain peace with France, but Somerset had begun that war. If that peace, including Edward’s engagement to the princess, endangered relations with the empire, Charles V had threatened to intervene in England in Princess Mary’s interest.

Northumberland’s partnership with the king became very clear from the late winter of 1553. Edward’s health, deteriorating rapidly from tuberculosis, caused both to feel concern about the provision in Henry VIII’s will for Mary’s succession. Northumberland bolstered his own position for any eventuality by arranging marriages between his son Guildford Dudley and Lady Jane Grey and their siblings with sons of other counselors, the earls of Pembroke and Huntingdon. Edward, characteristically, had written up a plan for his succession: Before he died, he turned it into a will leaving the throne to Lady Jane Grey. As Edward lay dying, the Council summoned Mary to London, but she retreated to Norfolk, and after Edward’s death, on July 6, she proclaimed her succession. In London, the Northumberland faction proclaimed Lady Jane Grey’s succession.

Few resisted Mary’s triumphant progress to London. Men deserted from the army Northumberland led against her, and the Council did not send reinforcements. When London’s populace boisterously welcomed Mary on July 19, the Council proclaimed her queen and ordered Northumberland to disband his army.

Edward was buried in Westminster Abbey on August 8 with little ceremony; no marker was ever raised to his memory. After a futile effort to appease Mary by converting to Catholicism, Northumberland died for his treason against her. Lady Jane Grey and her husband survived until the Thomas Wyatt rebellion in 1554 proved them dangerous. Many Edwardian church reformers died as Marian martyrs.

Significance

Mary’s triumph came neither from lack of parliamentary ratification of Edward VI’s will nor from a reaction against his religious reforms. It did not even depend on Northumberland’s unpopularity. She triumphed as the generally recognized embodiment of the hereditary English national monarchy. Confirmation and continuation of that tradition proved Edward’s principal achievement. His youth, like Mary’s womanhood, emphasized the monarchical principle, in clear contrast to the situation of Edward V sixty-five years before.

For a brief moment, European attention focused on Edward’s England in a new way. Cranmer failed in his effort to organize a general Protestant equivalent of the Council of Trent, but Edward’s church became the great experiment in national Protestantism. Though refugees such as Martin Bucer and Pietro Martire Vermigli (Peter Martyr) contributed to it, it remained a clearly English phenomenon that found its great spokesman in the Elizabethan theologian Richard Hooker.

In other ways, too, Edwardian beginnings found Elizabethan fulfillment. This shows in the careers of men such as William Cecil, Henry Sidney, and Thomas Gresham. Despite upheavals in the Council, government and business continued to cooperate in commercial exploration overseas. A government pension tempted Sebastian Cabot to return from Spain, forging a link between the first exploratory voyages under King Henry VII and the great trading companies of the seventeenth century.

Bibliography

Alford, Stephen. Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Study of Edward VI’s brief reign, emphasizing its stability and the lasting legacy of Edward’s conception of the nature of monarchy, which decisively influenced the much longer reign of his sister Elizabeth. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, index.

Beer, Barrett Lynn. Northumberland: The Political Career of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1973. Frankly revisionist, this biography searches beyond Jordan’s monumental history of the reign. It sees Northumberland in context, not worse than other members of the council.

Beer, Barrett Lynn. Rebellion and Riot: Popular Disorder in England in the Reign of Edward VI. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1982. A useful, scholarly effort to focus away from court politics. Evident are imperfectly developed classifications and methodology, inevitable in a pioneering work.

Bush, Michael Laccohee. The Government of Protector Somerset. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975. Like Beer, Bush demythologizes his subject. Somerset was an ordinary man, a pragmatist governed by consequences of his Scottish war.

Edward VI. The Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI. Edited by Wilbur Kitchener Jordan. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966. The indispensable journal kept by Edward between the ages of ten and fifteen. Careful editing and copious notes make this the best edition.

Hoak, Dale Eugene. The King’s Council in the Reign of Edward VI. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Traditional constitutional history and interpretation, blaming Somerset and Northumberland as opportunists. A study of the working of the Council, which Somerset tended to ignore, Northumberland to dominate.

Jordan, Wilbur Kitchener. Edward VI: The Young King, the Protectorship of the Duke of Somerset. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968.

Jordan, Wilbur Kitchener. Edward VI: The Threshold of Power, the Dominance of the Duke of Northumberland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970. A long-needed, exhaustively scholarly study of Edward’s reign. Carefully revisionist, sees Somerset as being beyond his depths, and the usurpation of Lady Jane Grey as Edward’s scheme more than that of Northumberland.

Loach, Jennifer. Edward VI. Edited by George Bernard and Penry Williams. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999. This entry in the Yale English Monarchs series contests the accepted notion of Edward as a fragile child, portraying him instead as enjoying a bodily vigor that matched his intellectual prowess. Includes photographic plates, illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

McConica, James Kelsey. English Humanists and Reformation Politics Under Henry VIII and Edward VI. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Continuity of the Henrician Renaissance beyond the death of Thomas More, misses its Edwardian Protestant culmination.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation. New York: Palgrave, 2001. In addition to making sense of the complexities of the Renaissance theological and political allegiances that shaped Edward’s court, Diarmaid provides a striking account of Edward’s lasting legacy. He draws connections between Edward’s reign and the English Civil War and examines the impact of Edward on contemporary British culture.