The irresistible progress of the Reformation was signalled in the continuing harassment of Stephen Gardiner in 1550, a process recorded in some detail in the king’s diary. In 1549 Gardiner had endeavoured to adjust to the changing times by working out an interpretation of the Book of Common Prayer which enabled him to maintain that it was compatible with a traditionally Catholic theology of the Mass. This required all the ingenuity at his command, and was far from Cranmer’s intention. Steps were therefore taken to close the loopholes which Gardiner had opened. In summer, he was invited to sign up to a series of articles which would have committed him unequivocally to the Reformation programme. This he refused to do even in the face of personal orders from the king - and the diary at this point reveals the teenage Edward investing religious reform with his personal authority. He wrote of the bishop’s refusal to assent to the ‘books of my proceedings’. First Gardiner was deprived of the income from his bishopric, and then, as he still held out, he was subjected to lengthy judicial proceedings which began in December
1550. For all his adroit legalistic footwork, the trial ended in February 1551 with his removal from the bishopric of Winchester. He would not be released from the Tower of London until the reign of Mary Tudor. It is characteristic of Northumberland’s ecclesiastical policy that Gardiner’s successor at Winchester, the Protestant John Ponet, had to agree before being appointed bishop to surrender the entire property of the bishopric into the king’s hands (through which it passed rapidly into the hands of Northumberland and his cronies), settling instead for an annual salary of a little over ?1,300. If we did not know that these men were reformers, we might almost think the deal smacked of ‘simony’ (trading holy things for money).
Meanwhile, the pace of change quickened. In January 1550 the government ordered local authorities in Church and state to call in all old Catholic service books for destruction. Missals, breviaries, ordinals, hymnals, antiphoners, graduals, processioners - thousands upon thousands of volumes were consigned to the flames in what was probably the greatest episode of book-burning in English history. It was the accompaniment, of course, to the greatest single episode of vandalism in English history as the same imperative to dispose of ‘idolatry’ resulted in the systematic destruction of almost all religious images and pictures. The implementation of religious change depended heavily on the bishops and hierarchy of the Church, and the normal process of natural wastage was not giving a quick enough turnover in personnel in the higher echelons of the clergy. So the royal supremacy was now aggressively used to speed things up. Conservative bishops such as Day of Chichester followed Bonner and Gardiner into enforced retirement, and were replaced by
Reliable Protestants such as Nicholas Ridley and John Scory. Zealous bishops like Cranmer in Canterbury and Ridley in London went on to order the removal of the very altars from the churches. In November 1550, all bishops were instructed, as Edward put it, ‘to pluck down the altars’. The altar, the place of sacrifice, was the ultimate symbol of what the Protestants rejected as the idolatry of Catholicism. With the altars gone, there was no longer any need for the apparatus of plate, vestments and ornaments which had adorned the old religious services, so in 1551 the Crown, partly inspired by theological correctness but more urgently driven by dire financial need, commanded the liquidation of the remaining movable property of parish churches for the benefit of the royal coffers.
The rapid progress of the Reformation represented not the implementation of a single programme but a continuous revolution. Cranmer’s own theology was in flux throughout the reign, and had moved on beyond the first Book of Common Prayer probably even before it was brought into use in summer 1549. Assisted and advised by Protestant theologians from Europe who had taken refuge in England from adverse political conditions abroad, Cranmer was hard at work on a more radical revision of the liturgy, which resulted in the second Book of Common Prayer, issued in 1552. The firmly Protestant stance of this book was further clarified in a series of forty-two Articles of Religion, propositions on faith and worship which represented the official teaching of Cranmer’s Church of England. Cranmer was a healthy man and could have lived another fifteen years. His religious views had been in non-stop development since 1530, and there is no reason to suppose that he had finished yet. The Catholics of England had been on the back foot most of the time since 1534, and since 1547 they had been cornered and silenced. A few lurked in impotent exile, others languished in English gaols, but the majority were evidently stunned beyond all thought of resistance. Without the brief vindication of traditional religion under Mary Tudor, which brought back the exiles, freed the captives, and heartened the hitherto silent majority, Catholicism in England would have disappeared as totally as it did in Zurich and Geneva.
The records of the latter years of Edward’s reign, and in particular the political journal which he kept until the onset of his final illness, show him beginning to emerge as a political actor in his own right. The essays in political theory and practice which he wrote at the behest of his tutors are able enough efforts, although it is hardly realistic to look to them for signs of originality or insight, still less as hints as to how an adult Edward’s kingship might have developed. These were humanist exercises, educational rather than political. But they do show that his political education was taken seriously by those who had control of him. His political journal from this time shows that he had real concerns of his own. Foremost among them was the religious intransigence of his elder sister, Mary. His journal abounds in records of discussions about her refusal to abandon the Mass, and about the religious offences and obduracy of her chaplains and servants. All the notes smack of that combination of dogmatic self-righteousness with ignorance of human values and political realities which is the peculiar prerogative of the adolescent. The intolerant zeal for which that same
Sister would became notorious is all too evident in Edward’s anxiety lest his failure to prevent her hearing the Mass in her household would implicate him before God in what he regarded as her idolatry. ‘To give licence to sin was to sin’, he notes, from a conversation with a trio of worthy bishops, although he also notes their concession that ‘to suffer and wink at it for a time might be borne, so all haste possible might be used’. We can see the same youthful inflexibility in Edward’s refusal to attend the (Catholic) christening of the Spanish ambassador’s son in autumn 1552. By 1550, he considered himself a ‘true minister of God’, as he wrote in a letter to his sister. Had he reached maturity, he would probably have imposed his theological will with even more determination than Mary, given his youthful vigour and his obviously superior intellectual capacities.
It has been argued, on the basis of this same journal, that Edward was less interested in theology and the content of religious belief and practice than historians of his reign have customarily believed, and that any concern the journal evinces with matters of religious observance was really concern about political loyalty. What really bothered Edward about Mary’s stand, it has been argued, was not the intrinsic significance of her actions and omissions, but was rather her refusal to obey the royal will. It is certainly true that he resented the slight to his authority: ‘It is a scandalous thing that so high a personage should deny our sovereignty’, he wrote to her in 1551. Yet his appeal to doctrines of obedience was an attempt to outmanoeuvre her by appealing to a virtue she herself claimed to respect and value (she professed obedience to her father’s will). Edward’s fear that indulgence towards Mary amounted to giving licence to sin shows that his concern was a matter of conscience as well as of politics. His detailed account of the harassment and eventual dismissal of Stephen Gardiner, the elderly and experienced bishop of Winchester, gives a similar impression. Edward’s astonishment that Gardiner should dare to refuse a direct command from his youthful and inexperienced sovereign is recorded with an almost endearing naivety. True, the Tudor expectation of unquestioning obedience is seen here in its purest form, untempered either by frailty of sex (as under his sisters) or by dynastic insecurity (as under his father and grandfather). Yet Edward is evidently concerned with the religious content as well as with the political form of Gardiner’s disobedience.
The attempt to separate religion and politics is the biggest misunderstanding in this view of Edward - as it would be for any issue of religion or politics in the Tudor century. Edward’s concern was clearly for more than the outward obedience which satisfied his sister Elizabeth. The recurrent interest in religious affairs visible throughout his journal also testifies to a depth of religious engagement far greater than hers, though no greater than Mary’s. His lengthy discussions of Mary’s disobedience in his journal reveal not simply the tyrannical (or perhaps merely adolescent) expectation of unquestioning obedience, but also a concern for the state of his own soul if he allowed political pressure for freedom of observance for Mary to keep him from what he saw as the path of righteousness. Of course obedience was a paramount concern as well. But here he shows a typical Tudor trait. Enormous
Pressure had to be brought to bear on Edward to induce him to grant the Imperial demand that Mary be allowed to retain the Mass unmolested in her household.
Several sources report that Edward listened most attentively to sermons, and a later reference to a notebook of his (now lost) in which he summarised each sermon that he heard corroborates them. As early as 1550 the Spanish ambassador noted that nobody about court was readier than the king to argue for the new doctrines, and that the king was assiduous in noting sermons. Edward was particularly taken with the foreign reformers who had sought refuge in his kingdom. They eagerly bestowed upon him copies of their many books, which he just as eagerly perused. When one of them, Martin Bucer, died in 1551, Edward copied into his journal passages from a memorial volume which his tutor, John Cheke, collected and published in the great man’s memory. Nor should it be forgotten that Edward himself wrote a book - a brief treatise against the authority of the Pope, remarkable not only because it was composed in French, but also because it shows that he inherited his father’s taste for amateur theology. His own drafts for a revision of the statutes of the Order of the Garter, inspired perhaps by his attendance at the Garter ceremony on 23 April
1551, are the fruit of his realisation that this chivalric gathering still invoked the patronage of a Catholic saint, and a saint of dubious historicity at that. The Order’s dedication was to be altered to the somewhat cumbersome ‘Defence of the Truth wholly Contained in Scripture’, and St George himself, along with his dragon, was to be erased from the Order’s heraldry, to be replaced by a knight bearing a sword and a Bible: a suitable enough emblem for Edward’s militant Protestantism.
If 1552 saw the Reformation reach new extremes, it also saw the beginning of the end. In April, the young king, who had hitherto enjoyed robust good health, fell seriously ill - ‘of the measles and the smallpox’, his physicians told him (an unlikely combination, although whatever it was, it left him very weak). Recovering somewhat, Edward was taken on a progress around the southern counties in summer
1552, perhaps undertaken partly with a view to furthering his recuperation. The personal appearance of the king was a traditional medieval technique of governance intended both to instil fear and respect into the hearts of those who had challenged central authority and to inspire the loyalty of his ‘loving subjects’. Both Henry VII and Henry VIII had found it useful to parade themselves before their people in this way. In Edward’s case, it was also part of the political nurturing of the young king by his ministers, a task which Northumberland took more seriously than Somerset before him - perhaps because he realised the significance of having to manage a youth rather than a mere boy. It says much for Northumberland’s confidence in his own position and in his relationship with the king that he felt no need to accompany Edward on tour. Edward, freed for a while from Northumberland’s tutelage, was able to meet some of his greater noblemen in their homes and see some of the major towns of his realm, such as Southampton and Portsmouth. The royal progress told Edward, as well as his subjects, that he was their king, and confirmed the general message about the reality of royal authority even during a minority which was vital to establishing the legitimacy of the regime’s most contentious policy, the Protestant
Reformation, now nearing its high-water mark. However, the progress may have come too soon after his illness, for he became visibly drained as the weeks of activity went by, and the progress was cut short, to end in September. Soon after his return to London, his political journal peters out, and in February 1553 he once more fell seriously ill - never to recover.
That towards the end of his reign Edward was gaining in political maturity can hardly be denied. However, the argument must not be taken too far. The governmental initiative still lay firmly with the Duke of Northumberland, and it is impossible to allow, in what was still a personal monarchy, that the king could be fully politically mature until he had shown his mettle by dispensing with the services of his novice-master. Northumberland was Mazarin to Edward’s Louis XIV, and Edward’s emergence from political dependence and tutelage could only have been impressed upon his people by his emancipation, and there was no sign of this when Edward died.
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