Of all the Tudors, Edward VI is the least known. Coming to the throne aged nine, reigning barely half a dozen years, dying before his prime, overshadowed by the memory of his father and by the two dukes who successively ruled England on his behalf, Edward was in no position to make his own mark upon English history. His reign is the history of what was done in his name: first by the Duke of Somerset, his uncle Edward Seymour, and then by the Duke of Northumberland, John Dudley, who became the father-in-law of Edward’s nominated heir. Yet what was done in those half-dozen years made them among the most significant in English history. For those years saw nothing less than a religious revolution, the transformation of England into a Protestant country. Under the guidance of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, the broad outlines of the Protestant Church of England were laid down. The creative and adaptive genius of Cranmer added the stately and emotive phrases of the Book of Common Prayer to the plainer and more direct words of William Tyndale’s New Testament, defining what would for the next 400 years be the voice of English religion. Even if the moving target of those years only ended up by chance as the fixed point of the ‘Elizabethan Settlement’, even though the reign of Mary Tudor showed how shallow and vulnerable the achievement was, Edward’s reign was the cradle of English Protestantism.
As the son of Jane Seymour, who had been a young noblewoman of impeccably conservative religious inclinations (when the Pilgrimage of Grace broke out, she begged Henry on bended knee to reverse the dissolution of the monasteries), Edward VI might have seemed heir to an essentially Catholic religious tradition. Yet Jane had died within days of giving birth, and circumstances had given a rather different shape to the boy’s upbringing. His uncle, Edward Seymour, like many upwardly mobile young gentlemen in the king’s service, was sympathetic to the still fresh ideas of the Protestants, which were rendered doubly attractive by the sanction that they gave to asset-stripping the Church. His godfather was none other than Thomas Cranmer (his two other godfathers, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, were hardly in a position to influence his religious life). Most importantly of all, his formal education was in the hands of moderate Protestants.
Title-page to the first edition of the Book of Common Prayer, 1549. The scene above the title shows Edward VI sitting in council.
World History
