In this episode, we discuss the reign of the young King Edward VI, Henry’s son, up until his illness that would kill him.
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Episode Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I’m your host, Heather Teysko. A quick personal note before we get started, many of you have been wondering why I haven’t been around since sometime around mid-July. And the reason for that is that your intrepid Renaissance podcaster (that’s me), went and got herself pregnant with my husband. And then, in a truly medieval turn of events, I lost that pregnancy. And I delivered my stillborn son at 21 weeks pregnant. It’s been a rough couple of months. And I’ve kind of been hibernating from the world. So if you’re the praying kind, feel free to send some of those prayers my way. And if you’re more of the sending good vibes sort, I take some of those too. And if you’re just done with hearing my personal stuff, fortunately for you, I’m done sharing.
So when last we met, we were talking about Katherine Parr, Henry’s sixth and final wife, who had managed to outmaneuver all of the men who were trying to take her down and navigate her way through the sea of religious politics. This was no small feat, and she deserves a huge amount of admiration for her quick thinking skills. We also saw the death of our grand monarch Henry VIII and Lord Hertford, paying homage to his young son Prince Edward as king.
Prince Edward was born at Hampton Court in 1537, the son of Jane Seymour, who died 12 days after his birth. He’s Henry’s only legitimate son, a son that Henry had longed for, and prayed for and gone to war for, and divorced his wife for, was excommunicated for, and on and on. Basically, Edward was a wanted and needed child, but he bore the entire responsibility of the future of the Tudor dynasty on his small shoulders. He was much loved by his father, and there are many reports of Henry doting on Edward, playing with him, and showing him much more affection than was normal for fathers to show children at that time.
There’s been an opinion for a long time that Edward was a sick child, but it does not appear to have been true. Accounts describe him as healthy and merry and growing rapidly. He did fight off a life-threatening fever when he was four years old. But without one exception, he seemed to be in good health until the final six months of his life.
Edward had a miniature household of his own from the time he was six months old. He had governesses and nurses who took care of him, meeting Henry’s high standards of cleanliness and security. Visitors describe the prince as a happy and content child. When he was six years old, he began his formal education with Princess Elizabeth’s tutor, Roger Ascham, and learned foreign languages, philosophy, scripture, and science. He also studied geometry, he collected globes and maps. He learned musical instruments as well as writing and archery, and he was educated with the other sons of the other nobles of the court. He was most likely taught by those favoring religious reform, because by 1549, he had written a treatise on the pope as Antichrist.
After Henry married Katherine Parr in 1543, Edward was reunited with his half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth when Parr brought… It must have made for a very interesting family reunion. Mary was over 20 years older than Edward and was the daughter of the Catholic Catherine of Aragon. Elizabeth was closer in age but was the daughter of Henry and the Protestant Anne Boleyn. Still, the sisters apparently doted on their younger brother, and they enjoyed some happy times together and Henry reinstated both of his daughters in the succession.
On July 1, 1543, Henry signed the Treaty of Greenwich with the Scots with whom he’d been fighting wars for decades. The peace was sealed with Edward’s betrothal to the seven-month-old Mary, Queen of Scots. The Scots were in a weak bargaining position after their defeat at Solway Moss the previous November. And Henry seeking to unite the two realms stipulated that Mary be handed over to him and brought up in England. Well, the Scots repudiated the treaty in December of 1543, and they renewed their alliance with France and Henry was none too happy with this. In April of 1544, he ordered Prince Edward’s uncle, Edward Seymour to invade Scotland:
“Put all to fire and sword, burn Edinburgh town, so razed and defaced when you have sacked and gotten what ye can of it as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the vengeance of God for their falsehood and disloyalty.”
Seymour responded with the most savage campaign ever launched by the English against Scotland, and the war which continued well into Prince Edward’s reign has become known as the Rough Wooing.
By January 28, 1547. Henry VIII was dead. Those close to the throne agreed to delay the announcement of the king’s death until arrangements had been made for a smooth succession. Edward Seymour wrote to get Prince Edward from Hertford, and brought him to Enfield where Princess Elizabeth was living. He and Elizabeth were told of the death of their father and heard a reading of his will. His death was announced in Parliament after three days and general proclamations of Prince Edward succession are ordered.
The following day, the nobles of the realm pay their homage to Edward at the Tower, and Edward Seymour was announced his protector. Henry VIII was buried at Windsor on February 16, in the same tomb as Jane Seymour as he had wished. Edward VI was crowned at Westminster Abbey four days later on Sunday, February 20, the first coronation in England for almost 40 years.
On the eve of the coronation, Edward progressed on horseback from the Tower of London, to the Palace of Westminster through crowds and pageants, many based on the pageants for the previous boy-king Henry VI. He laughed at a Spanish tightrope walker outside St Paul’s Cathedral. And at the coronation service, Thomas Cranmer affirmed the Royal supremacy and called Edward a second Josiah, urging him to continue the reformation of the Church of England. Edward was too young to be much of a political match for the men of the council who were vying for the opportunity in the power vacuum that a young king provided.
There were two main factions, one behind Dudley and one led by Edward Seymour. Seymour won out and became the Lord Protector, Governor of the King’s person, and Duke of Somerset. He did have a thorn in his side though in the form of his younger brother Thomas.
Thomas had had a flirtation with Katherine Parr before she married Henry VIII. And after his death, she went back to flirting with the younger Seymour. She had Princess Elizabeth in her household, and in 1548, a pregnant Katherine discovered Thomas in a flirtation of his own with the princess, and quickly found Elizabeth a new home. Thomas also was urging them to kill the king to declare his majority and to end the protectorship. But Edward didn’t want to do anything without the council’s approval. And eventually, Thomas tried one trick too many and wound up being beheaded in 1549.
During much of 1548, England was going through a huge amount of social unrest, both economic and religious. With the closing of the monasteries, any resources that the poor could have had available to them through the monks were gone. And on top of that, there were now thousands of unemployed clergy on the streets. People didn’t like all of the changes, and there were two serious rebellions in 1549. Many felt that Edward Seymour the Protector was sympathetic to the rebellions, the responses to the rebellions were uncoordinated, and his proclamations often sounded contradictory and sympathetic to the rebels.
One big source of confusion were the findings on commission’s investigating the new landlords of previously common grazing grounds, and many common local groups interpreted the findings in a way that justified the rebellions. Whatever the popular view of Edward Seymour was, the disastrous events of 1549 were seen as evidence of a colossal failure of government and the council put the responsibility at the Protector’s door. In July 1549, one of his secretaries wrote to the Duke of Somerset, Edward Seymour,
“Every man of the council have misliked your proceedings … would to God, that, at the first stir you had followed the matter hotly, and caused justice to be ministered in solemn fashion to the terror of others …”
By the first of October 1549, Seymour had been alerted that his rule faced a serious threat. He issued a proclamation calling for assistance, took possession of King Edward, and withdrew for safety to the fortified Windsor Castle, where Edward wrote “Methinks I am in prison.” Meanwhile, a united council published details of Seymour’s government mismanagement. They made clear that the Protector’s power came from them and not from Henry VIII’s will. And on October 11, the council had Seymour arrested and brought the king to Richmond. Edward summarizes the charges against Seymour in his Chronicle. The charges were “ambition, vainglory, entering into rash wars in mine youth, negligent looking on Newhaven, enriching himself of my treasure, following his own opinion, and doing all by his own authority, etc.”
In February of 1550, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick emerged as leader of the council and in effect as Seymour’s successor. Although Seymour was released from the Tower and restored to the council, he was executed for felony in January 1552 after scheming to overthrow Dudley’s regime. Edward noted his uncle’s death in his Chronicle, “the duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine o’clock in the morning”. By the fall of 1549, the costly wars had lost momentum, and the crown faced financial ruins, and riots and rebellions had broken out around the country. Until recent decades, Seymour’s reputation with historians was high in view of his many proclamations that appeared to back the common people against the landowning class. But more recently, however, he has been often portrayed as an arrogant and aloof ruler, lacking in political and administrative skills.
John Dudley was never called a Protector, but he was the de facto head of the government. His mode of operation was very different from Seymour’s. Careful to make sure he always commanded a majority of the Counselors, he encouraged a working Council and used it to legitimize his authority. Lacking Seymour’s blood relationship with the king, he added members of the council from his own faction in order to control it. He also added members of his family to the royal household.
There’s great debate over how much Edward took part in his government as he grew into a teenager. The one area where he definitely held control was in religion, where the council followed his Protestant lead. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, introduced a series of religious reforms that revolutionized the English church from one that while rejecting papal supremacy, remained essentially Catholic, to one that was institutionally Protestant. The confiscation of church property that had begun under Henry VIII resumed under Edward, notably with the dissolution of the chantries – to the great monetary advantage of the crown and the new owners of the properties. Church reform was therefore seen as much as a political as a religious policy under Edward VI.
By the end of his reign, the church had been financially ruined, with much of the property of the bishops transferred into lay hands. After 1551, the Reformation advanced further with the approval and encouragement of Edward, who began to exert more personal influence in his role as Supreme Head of the church. The progress of the Reformation was further speeded by the appointment of more reformers as bishops.
In the winter of 1552, Cranmer rewrote the Book of Common Prayer in less ambiguous reformist terms. He revised canon law and prepared a doctrinal statement, the Forty-two Articles to clarify the practice of the reformed religion, particularly in the divisive manner of the communion service. Crammer’s formulation of the reformed religion finally divesting the communion service of any notion of the real presence of God and the bread and wine, effectively abolished the mass. The Prayer Book of 1552 is still the foundation of the Church of England services today. However, crammer was unable to implement all of these reforms once it became clear in the spring of 1553, that King Edward, upon whom the whole reformation in England depended, was dying.
So, in my next episode, I will discuss the plan that Edward’s advisors – the Council came up with to keep England Protestant, by naming his cousin the Lady Jane Grey queen instead of Mary I when it became clear that he was dying. And Mary I was the rightful heir according to Henry VIII’s throne. Lady Jane Grey winds up being queen for less than two weeks, basically a pawn in a game that was much bigger than anything she could have imagined.
And I promise it won’t take me another six months to do another episode. Thanks for listening this week and have a wonderful holiday.
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave us a rating on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]