Edward VI of England

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  The Age of Reformation

  The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485-1603

  • Alec Ryrie(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The English Revolution

  Edward VI, 1547–53

  The short reign of King Edward VI (1547–53) is easily overlooked. It has been treated either as a disreputably un-English interlude, or as a period of chaotic near-collapse, best hurried through en route to the sunlit uplands of Elizabeth I’s reign. Yet the reign was one of the most dramatic episodes in English history, when a series of profound changes were thrust on an unsuspecting country. It is the hinge on which the sixteenth century turned – for the whole of the British Isles, not merely for England. It was at least as momentous as the better-known ‘English Revolution’ of the mid-seventeenth century. Like all revolutions, this one failed. Like all revolutions, it changed everything that happened afterwards.

  Carnival: Protector Somerset’s Reformation

  From Henry VIII to Protector Somerset

  The succession crisis that had dominated the middle of Henry VIII’s reign finally abated in 1537, when his third wife Jane Seymour at last bore him a son (at the cost of her own life). Young Prince Edward was born not a moment too soon, for his father’s health was already deteriorating. Henry suffered a bad fall from his horse in 1536, and thereafter, with his ability to exercise curtailed, his weight ballooned. Contrary to popular belief, he probably did not have syphilis, but he was troubled by a recurring ulcer on his leg and also by impotence (it seems that none of his last three marriages was consummated). By the mid-1540s, although only in his fifties, he was decaying into a raddled, bloated parody of his former self. As his health failed, a new succession crisis emerged: the prospect of a child king.

  Was England still an elective monarchy (p. 34)? If so, would it choose a child? The last boy king, Edward V, had lasted less than a month. It was easy to imagine another usurpation. A claim could have come from England’s most powerful nobleman, the duke of Norfolk; or, more likely, from his eloquent, headstrong son, the earl of Surrey. In 1543 a servant of one of Surrey’s friends declared that ‘if aught other than good should become of the king, he [Surrey] is like to be king’. Such talk was explosive. One of Surrey’s friends fell out with him in 1546, declaring that he would rather murder Surrey himself than see a boy king in his or his father’s custody. Soon thereafter, Surrey had a new coat of arms made for himself, which emphasised his own royal blood. In the febrile atmosphere of late 1546, this was folly. In December, Surrey and his father were suddenly thrown in prison and declared guilty of treason. The young earl was beheaded; his elderly father was due to follow him soon after. It was Henry VIII’s last judicial murder.1

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  The Lost Kings

  Lancaster, York and Tudor

  • Amy Licence(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  9

  King Edward VI (1537–53)

  I

  The world into which the future Edward VI was born had changed completely from that of his predecessors. In the space of a generation, England had been wrenched, by force of law and violence, away from its medieval, Catholic mindset towards a far more modern way of thinking. The children born in the 1520s and ’30s found themselves to be pioneers in a Renaissance world, where centuries-old traditions and ways of worship had been rejected in favour of a new faith, but the changes were still new enough to require definition and shape in order to become habits. While the Renaissance had forged new identities, the dramatic iconoclasm of the Reformation was still evolving. England no longer followed the dictates of a distant pope in the sacked city of Rome, its subjects owed their whole allegiance to their king. And Henry VIII had proved himself to be godlike in his kingship, restructuring his world to fit his needs. The issues of education, of life and death, and how the self and the nation were to be defined, were now under debate and there were some who still wanted to push the religious reforms further. In 1537, against this backdrop of change, the long-awaited fruit of Henry VIII’s labour arrived in the shape of a legitimate son. Fifteen months after he had lost Henry Fitzroy, the boy he had been preparing to name as his heir, the king’s dynastic ambitions were finally achieved.

  Henry VIII’s transition from his second to his third wife had been swiftly accomplished. Eleven days after the death of Anne Boleyn, he had been married to Jane Seymour in a quiet ceremony at Whitehall. Just like Anne, the new queen was a maid of honour to her predecessor, but Jane’s mild, quiet compliance stood in stark contrast to the passion and fire of Henry’s previous queens. The daughter of Sir John Seymour of Wulf Hall in Wiltshire, she was in her late twenties when she attracted the king’s attention and their swift, secret wedding at Whitehall was followed, five days later, by her public proclamation as queen. Nine months later Jane fell pregnant and she had retreated to Hampton Court to enter her confinement by September. The sweating sickness was rife again and, given his experiences with illness, the king was understandably concerned. Norfolk wrote to Cromwell on 11 October that ‘the death is extremely sore in London’ and had also reached ‘other places near Hampton Court’ so that the king went to Esher, to reduce traffic around the queen. Precautions were being taken about admission to the palace, with a recognition that certain age groups were more likely to spread infection, and it was ruled that ‘no young folks may come within the gates’. Norfolk asked Cromwell for guidance about approaching the king, as he did not wish to come to him ‘out of any contagious air’.1

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  British Kings (Volume-2)

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • White Word Publications

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter 4 Edward VI of England Edward VI Edward VI, by William Scrots, c. 1550 King of England and Ireland Reign 28 January 1547 – 6 July 1553 (6 years, 159 days) Coronation 20 February 1547 (aged 9) Predecessor Henry VIII Successor Jane or Mary I Regent Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset (1547– 1549) John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland (1549–1553) House House of Tudor Father Henry VIII of England Mother Jane Seymour Born 12 October 1537 Hampton Court Palace, Middlesex, England ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Died 6 July 1553 (aged 15) Greenwich Palace, Kent, England Burial 8 August 1553 Henry VII Lady Chapel, Westminster Abbey, England Signature Edward VI (12 October 1537 – 6 July 1553) became King of England and Ireland on 28 January 1547 and was crowned on 20 February at the age of nine. The son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, Edward was the third monarch of the Tudor dynasty and England's first ruler who was raised as a Protestant. During Edward's reign, the realm was governed by a Regency Council, because he never reached maturity. The Council was led by his uncle Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, (1547–1549), and then by John Dudley, 1st Earl of Warwick, (1550–1553), who later became Duke of Northumberland. Edward's reign was marked by economic problems and social unrest that, in 1549, erupted into riot and rebellion. A war with Scotland, at first successful, ended with military withdrawal from there and Boulogne-sur-Mer. The transformation of the Anglican Church into a recognisably Protestant body also occurred under Edward, who took great interest in religious matters. Although Henry VIII had severed the link between the Church of England and Rome, he never permitted the renunciation of Catholic doctrine or ceremony.

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  Reformation England 1480-1642

  • Peter Marshall(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  63 3 Edwardian revolution 1547–53 Overview Exiled on the continent in Queen Mary’s reign, the evangelical Richard Morison made an imposing claim about reformation in his homeland under Edward VI: ‘the greater change was never wrought in so short space in any country since the world was’. 1 The years 1547–53 witnessed an unprecedentedly intense campaign to transform the character of Christian worship and belief, one which fully justi-fies the label of revolution. 2 It was a revolution too in the more original sense of a complete rotation, an attempt to turn back to the purity of the Church of the apostles, and to strip away the accretion of centuries: the cult of the saints, pur-gatory, a warped theology of sacraments and the mass. The modern analogy is less with the overthrow of anciens regimes in 1789 and 1917 than with the ‘cultural revolution’ of 1960s China, in which central government worked in alliance with cadres of true believers to undermine unreliable elements in positions of author-ity, and radically reconstruct the outlook of the people as a whole. Despite all this, Edward’s reign has, until comparatively recently, been the neglected orphan of English Reformation studies. In part, this was because a nationalist historiography found little to celebrate in what seemed a brief and confusing interlude between the Tudor glories of Henry and Elizabeth. In part, also, it was because the crusading Protestant zeal of Edwardian reform-ers has been something of an embarrassment to an Anglican tradition which came eventually to define itself as a moderate arbiter between the best aspects of Protestantism and Catholicism. Thus, in the late 1940s, the Anglo-Catholic 1 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999), p. 102. 2 T. M. Parker, The English Reformation to 1558 (Oxford, 1950), Chapter 8, ‘The Protestant Revolution’; Philip Hughes, The Reformation in England (3 vols, London, 1950–4), ii.

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  Tudor and Stuart Britain

  1485-1714

  • Roger Lockyer, Peter Gaunt(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Edward VI and Mary I

  The mid-Tudor period in perspective

  Falling between the two longest English reigns of the Tudor and Stuart age – those of Henry VIII and his younger daughter, Elizabeth – are the short and often troubled reigns of his son and his elder daughter. The status of the monarchs themselves created immediate problems, as one was male but a child and the other was an adult but a woman. Both situations gave rise to difficulties. Although Edward VI held opinions of his own, which increasingly had to be taken into account towards the end of his reign, by which time he was in his mid-teens, his smooth succession at the age of just nine and his early death, still a few months short of his sixteenth birthday, meant that throughout his reign real power and leadership were exercised by others acting in his name. Royal minorities often gave rise to factional infighting, power struggles, fluctuating policies and general uncertainty and to some extent all these features can be seen during Edward’s six-year reign. The occupation of the throne by a queen regnant was almost unprecedented in English history – while there had been queens of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia who ruled alone and in their own hereditary right, the only previous attempt to pass the English crown to a woman, to Henry I’s daughter Matilda in the twelfth century, had almost immediately created bitter dispute, led to counterclaims by a male cousin and provoked civil war and Matilda was never crowned and in practice failed to establish her claim. In fact, Mary I fared much better, not least because in 1553 there was no plausible male claimant to the throne after her much younger half-brother’s death, and – active, determined and in her mid-thirties – she quickly overcame limited resistance mounted in the name of a rival female claimant and established herself securely as queen regnant. But her gender continued to be an issue during her five-year reign, seen especially in reaction to her quest for a husband and her subsequent marriage to a man who was both a foreigner and heir to or ruler of European territories.

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  Tudor and Stuart Britain

  1485-1714

  • Roger Lockyer, Peter Gaunt(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R 5 Edward VI and Mary I The mid-Tudor period in perspective F alling between the two longest English reigns of the Tudor and Stuart age – those of Henry VIII and his younger daughter, Elizabeth – are the short and often troubled reigns of his son and his elder daughter. The status of the monarchs themselves created immediate problems, as one was male but a child and the other was an adult but a woman. Both situations gave rise to difficulties. Although Edward VI held opinions of his own, which increasingly had to be taken into account towards the end of his reign, by which time he was in his mid-teens, his smooth succession at the age of just nine and his early death, still a few months short of his sixteenth birthday, meant that throughout his reign real power and leadership were exercised by others acting in his name. Royal minorities often gave rise to factional infighting, power struggles, fluctuating policies and general uncertainty and to some extent all these features can be seen during Edward’s six-year reign. The occupation of the throne by a queen regnant was almost unprecedented in English history – while there had been queens of the Anglo-Saxon king-dom of Mercia who ruled alone and in their own hereditary right, the only previous attempt to pass the English crown to a woman, to Henry I’s daughter Matilda in the twelfth century, had almost immediately created bitter dispute, led to counterclaims by a male cousin and provoked civil war and Matilda was never crowned and in practice failed to establish her claim. In fact, Mary I fared much better, not least because in 1553 there was no plausible male claimant to the throne after her much younger half-brother’s death, and – active, determined and in her mid-thirties – she quickly overcame limited resistance mounted in the name of a rival female claimant and established herself securely as queen regnant.

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  Rebellion and Riot

  Popular Disorder in England During the Reign of Edward VI

  • John A. Andrew, III(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • The Kent State University Press

    (Publisher)

  And the first degree is to look backward, whether at your first setting forward, you took not a wrong way as (saving your favor) I think you did; for you have cared to content all men (which is impossible and specially being subjects in such a subjection as they were left) and be loth or rather afraid to offend any. Extremities be never good, and for my part I have always hated them naturally too much in our old majesty’s time (I speak with reverence and in the loyalty of a true heart to my sovereign lord that was and that now is) and too much in our majesty’s time that now is.… Then all things were too straight and now they are too loose; then was it dangerous to do or speak though the meaning were not evil; and now every man hath liberty to do and speak at liberty without danger.

    Sir William Paget to Protector Somerset, Christmas Day, 1548

  2. THE ENGLAND OF EDWARD VI

  In 1547 Englishmen of all ranks and degrees mourned the death of Henry VIII, a titan among kings who successfully defied the Pope and wrested Boulogne from the French. Henry, for all of his failings, remained popular among the great majority of his subjects. The king’s robust zest for life counted for more among the commons than his failure to live up to the expectations of his early admirers. Now that the old man was gone, attention inevitably focused on his nine-year-old-son, Edward VI.

  Everyone rejoiced at the young king’s festive coronation, for not many could remember his father’s accession in 1509. At the same time there was apprehension, because it was plain to all that a small boy could not govern the country. Before the establishment of the Tudor dynasty, factionalism, court intrigue, and even civil war had accompanied minority rule, but that was part of the distant past. King Edward was said to be a young Josiah, a just and powerful lawgiver under whom the country would rise to new heights of greatness. The aristocracy may have doubted whether the frail and studious child would ever equal much less exceed his father’s renown. The king’s potential for leadership, however, was not the major concern of the vast majority of the population whose world centered on the village or hamlet. Among the commons few had any reason to expect that life under Edward VI would be better than in the past, but all must have prayed to God that it would not be worse.

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  Bishops and Power in Early Modern England

  • Marcus K. Harmes(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  49 Foxe’s work became an early anti-papal benchmark; in it Farrar’s ungodly preoccupations with worldly issues offered a contrast with the more suitable activities of godly, reformed bishops. As he listened to Cranmer preach at his coronation, Edward VI may have been nodding in agreement, while Parker may have squirmed uncomfortably through his consecration. For a moment, let us consider the major contours of the political and religious backdrops to both events. Three points of significance immediately present themselves as relevant to the identities claimed by bishops in the wake of the reforms enacted under Edward VI and consolidated, albeit conservatively, by Elizabeth I. First, apart from the years 1646–1660, the status, duties and resources of the episcopate largely withstood assaults from different sources during reforms. Their exclusive functions (such as laying on of hands, consecrating churches and ordaining and licensing clergy) remained the province of bishops and an imparity of ministers prevailed in the English Church. Bishops enacted their powers through means such as visitations of the churches in their dioceses, demonstrating as they did so their superiority to the other layers of clergy. 50 As the Elizabethan Archbishop John Whitgift informed his Presbyterian disputant Thomas Cartwright (d.1603) during an exchange of polemical tracts on church government in 1570 known as the Admonition Controversy: ‘To say that a bishop and a priest is equal, how can it be possible? For the order of bishops is the begetter of fathers’. 51 The wealth, revenues and status of bishops also largely withstood assault; in fact Bishops and Power in Early Modern England 16 Tudor monarchs were a greater threat to episcopal revenues than Protestant polemicists.

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  Princely Education in Early Modern Britain

  • Aysha Pollnitz(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 Holbein portrayed the twelve- or fourteen-month-old prince as born with the capacity to assume Henry VIII’s office as supreme head of the church and state in England. Edward’s education was arranged to give the prince the skills and knowledge he would need to govern men’s souls as well as their bodies. It succeeded with aplomb, though it is unlikely that Henry VIII would 1 ‘Parvule patrissa, Patriae virtutis et haeres / Esto, nihil maius maximus orbis habet’: Richard Morison on Hans Holbein, Edward VI as a child (c. 1538), oil on panel, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, National Gallery, Washington, DC; FSL, MS Z d 11; ‘Expressam toties videor mihi cernere formam / Magnanimi patris, quo nitet ore, tui’: John Leland, Principum, ac illustrium aliquot & eruditorum in Anglia virorum, encomia, trophaea, genethliaca, & epithalamia, ed. Thomas Newton (London, 1589), STC 15447, p. 96. Educating Edward VI 140 have approved of the end result. Before departing for France in 1544, the king had selected Edward’s schoolmasters, Richard Cox (c. 1500–81) and John Cheke (1514–57) to provide his son with the liberal education that would enable him to govern a church as well as a state. Both men had the scholarly reputations to merit their appointments, yet Henry’s choice has puzzled historians. The first section of this chapter will consider the way in which Cheke presented his pedagogical and confessional identity as Erasmian. In fact the schooling of Edward VI, which began in July 1544 and continued until July 1552, represented an apogee of Erasmus’ influ- ence in princely education in early modern Britain and, perhaps, Europe. 2 As the second section of this chapter will demonstrate, Edward’s tutors adopted the humanist’s prescriptions, methods and textbooks with enthu- siasm. Indeed Edward’s Erasmian education continued and intensified after his accession in 1547.

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