17
With the death of Henry VIII, the supreme headship of the church in England, the authority to decide what every man and woman in the kingdom was required to believe about God and salvation and the nature of ultimate reality, passed to a nine-year-old child. Little Edward Tudor, upon becoming King Edward VI, was recognized by church and state alike as the one person empowered by God to resolve conflicts over doctrine and practice that divided the most powerful and learned of his subjects.
It would have been a challenging situation under the best of circumstances. England’s experience of being ruled by boys had been mercifully limited but not very happy. Even in the days before the Crown was responsible not only for the government but for a fractured and fractious church, it had been an experience of struggles for power punctuated with betrayal, bloodshed, and disorder. In the late 1540s, under the circumstances that Henry had created with his jumble of innovations, rule by a child-king was a recipe for trouble, little better than an absurdity. With a restless population kept quiet only by the threat of armed force, and with court and church divided into factions that hated each other mortally, the chances that Edward’s minority could be passed without serious difficulty must have seemed slim indeed.
The church of Henry’s making was, at the time of his death, emphatically not Roman Catholic but just as emphatically not Lutheran (the king having made it a capital crime to follow Luther in denying free will or believing in justification by faith alone). The new theology contradicted itself so boldly on so many points as to border on incoherence: in the King’s Book of 1543, for example, Henry had forbidden the very use of the word purgatory, but then in his will he made provision for thousands of masses to be said for the repose of his soul (which could only have benefited if it were in something like purgatory). The result was confusion, contention, and division on a scale without precedent.
The main points of dispute were familiar by now. They ranged from free will to justification by faith, from whether the eucharistic bread and wine were literally the body and blood of Jesus Christ (Henry and Luther had both affirmed this, but increasingly influential Swiss theologians denied it and were winning over Englishmen as eminent as Archbishop Cranmer) to whether religious statues and pictures should be destroyed as idolatrous and practices that had been at the center of English religious life for a millennium should be banned as superstitious. Disagreement was almost boundless, debate smoldered just below the surface of public life in spite of Henry’s readiness to condemn anyone who disputed his truth, and the dangers of the situation were compounded by the fact that so many people believed the questions at issue to be matters of eternal life and death. People in every camp, if not always prepared to die in defense of their positions, were prepared to kill to prevent others from luring the population into the fires of hell.
In the final weeks of Henry’s life, as the various organs of his huge body began to malfunction and he became incapable even of rising from his bed, he had focused the last of his strength on arrangements for holding the kingdom together until his son grew old enough to take charge. Someone, or some group, was going to have to manage the kingdom in Edward’s name, probably for almost a decade. Finding such a person would not be as simple as it had been in similar situations in the past. The royal family was small: Henry had no brother or uncle entitled by blood to rule on the boy-king’s behalf, and his only adult child, Mary, the former princess, remained illegitimate in consequence of the annulment of her parents’ marriage. Mary’s legal status would have made her an unsuitable candidate to serve as regent during her half-brother’s minority even if Henry had trusted her on the supremacy, which he rightly did not.
The central contest continued to be between the traditionalists, who wanted the religion of their ancestors regardless of whether they secretly accepted the leadership of the pope, and the evangelicals, a diverse party united by its contempt for the old church and a determination to restore what its adherents believed to have been the purity and simplicity of earliest Christianity. Henry, whether by craft or good luck, had since his break with Rome been able to maintain a balance between the two sides, dividing the highest offices of church and state between them while leavening his own conservative pronouncements on doctrine and dogma with enough reformist measures to keep both sides insecure. The traditionalists, the most prominent of whom were by the mid-1540s Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, undoubtedly represented by a wide margin the greatest part of England’s population. Though evangelicals hostile to the old ways had been prominent at court at least since the days of Anne Boleyn, King Henry’s conservatism had always required them to tread carefully and appear more conservative than they actually were. This had become more true than ever after Thomas Cromwell began to fall out of favor; it was then that Henry lost his appetite for religious innovation and made it a crime punishable with death to reject Catholic orthodoxy in favor of the Lutheran beliefs he despised. By the early 1540s it must have seemed inevitable that, if Henry ever made provision for the governing of England after he was dead and before Edward attained his majority, he would reinforce the position of the traditionalists. Even if he made no such provision, conservative dominance after his death must have seemed practically certain. Most of England’s clergy, most of the bishops included, belonged to the traditionalist camp. So did most of the population, the nobles, and the gentry. On their side they had the law of the land: the Six Articles, with which Parliament had upheld the real presence and clerical celibacy. On their side, too, they had the King’s Book, which to the horror of the evangelicals had affirmed the traditional creed and all seven of the Catholic sacraments. As a final bulwark they had Henry’s heresy laws, which made it a capital crime not to believe as the king believed.
Thus the evangelicals could preach as they believed only at the risk of their lives. Even if they had been left free to express themselves, they would have been a tiny and scorned minority almost everywhere except at the universities and in London and southeastern England, and even in those places they remained a minority, though not such a tiny one or nearly so scorned. Remarkably, however, from the start of Edward’s reign they assumed a position of such complete dominance that with astonishing speed the official religion became more radically evangelical and reformist than Henry could ever have intended or imagined. And it was Henry, improbably enough, who had made this possible. How did it happen? The answer is almost certainly not to be found in anything like an end-of-life shift in the king’s thinking in favor of justification by faith or any of the other foundation stones of evangelical thought. It lay, more likely, in the fact that in the last years of his life Henry was a solitary and profoundly lonely man.
Henry was alone as only a man can be who is feared by nearly everyone with whom he has contact, who believes that he alone has the truth on every subject of real importance so that there is no need to converse or listen but only to pronounce, and who has cast away or even destroyed one after another of the people to whom he had been closest earlier in his life when he was still capable of being close to anyone. At the end of his life he was no longer capable of any such thing. He exalted his little son as the jewel of England but rarely saw him. If he dined with his daughters, they sat not at the same table as their father but beneath him, and at a distance. He had threatened the life of his sixth and last wife, Catherine Parr, for her reformist religious views and summoned neither her nor any of his children to be with him for his last Christmas or the beginning of what would turn out to be his last year.
Still, the very fact that he had married Catherine despite being far along in his physical decline is suggestive of neediness, and the marriage was significant even if it produced no offspring and in all likelihood was never consummated. Catherine like Anne Boleyn before her was a fervent evangelical, and as the king’s wife she was able to take a hand in the education of his children. Thus was the child Edward placed in the care of tutors who began the process by which he became an evangelical of an exceptionally militant bent. Thus, too, Queen Catherine’s brother William Parr, an elegant gentleman of deficient judgment but like her a supporter of religious reform, was made Earl of Essex (the same title that Cromwell had been given not long before his death) and joined the increasingly influential evangelical faction on the Privy Council, the innermost circle of royal advisers.
The king’s neediness helps to explain the survival, almost alone among the men who had been important in church or state when Henry was still married to Catherine of Aragon, of Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer’s religious views had never meshed well with Henry’s, really, and for years he had to conceal the fact of his marriage from a king who to the end of his life insisted on a celibate clergy. But Cranmer became and was able to remain archbishop of Canterbury because no matter what happened, no matter what the king demanded, he was always compliant. Though he had his own beliefs and his own agenda for reform, and though those beliefs became increasingly radical with the passage of the years and he became increasingly ambitious in pursuit of his agenda, the side of himself that he allowed the king to see was unfailingly submissive. He lived in a style reminiscent of Wolsey’s, with four palaces and a small private army, but he was unfailingly careful never to do anything that might be construed as a challenge to royal authority. Thus Henry found it possible to trust Cranmer as he trusted no other man, perhaps even, in a way, to love him. And thus the senior bishopric of the English church remained in the hands of a confirmed enemy of the old religion, a man who in his innermost being utterly rejected many of the things that the conservatives, his royal master among them, believed most strongly. Cranmer was infinitely easier to work with, to manage, than the most prominent of the conservative bishops, Stephen Gardiner. Gardiner was too conservative, too proud, too firm in his beliefs ever to coexist comfortably with a ruler as self-willed as Henry even though the two of them were never far apart in doctrine. Gardiner came as close to displaying a mind of his own as it was possible for a bishop to do while retaining his position (and staying alive) in the England of the 1530s and 1540s. He never seemed as dependable as Cranmer made himself appear. And so it was almost inevitable, when Henry began to plan seriously for the succession, that Gardiner would be dismissed and Cranmer would prosper.
The same sort of dynamic worked to the advantage of other men whose religious opinions had little in common with Henry’s. The excellent family connections that had brought Jane Seymour to Henry’s court as a lady-in-waiting first to Catherine of Aragon and then to Anne Boleyn also created opportunities for her brothers Edward and Thomas. The elder of the pair, Edward, was about thirty-five years old when his sister became queen and had been in royal service almost from childhood. He had had some success, being knighted while with the English army in France in 1523 and later becoming master of horse to King Henry’s illegitimate son the Duke of Richmond, but he was still a mere esquire of the body when his sister was chosen as the king’s third bride. The marriage changed his life completely. In 1536, the year of the wedding, he was made a gentleman of the privy chamber—one of the privileged few with free access to the king’s private apartments—and raised to the nobility as Viscount Beauchamp. The following year, the year of Prince Edward’s birth and Jane’s death, he was made Earl of Hertford and given a number of coveted offices including a seat on the Privy Council.
Little is known of whether Edward and Jane Seymour had a close relationship—before her death she showed herself to be attached to the old religion, while he was strongly inclined in the other direction—but in any case her death did nothing to interrupt his rise. He retained the confidence of the king, who, when he resumed his wars in 1544, appointed Seymour lord lieutenant in the north and gave him an army with which to invade Scotland. Seymour proved a capable commander, hesitantly at first but then energetically carrying out the king’s instructions not only to capture Edinburgh but to lay waste to it and everything surrounding. Later that same year he was with Henry at the capture of Boulogne, which he was rumored to have made possible by bribing the commander of the French defenders. In 1545 he was in command at Boulogne, routing a superior French force that attempted to retake it. He then returned to Scotland, where he conducted a scorched-earth campaign even more devastating than the one of the previous year. In 1546, yet again in command at Boulogne, he negotiated a treaty under which England was to retain possession of that city until 1554 and then allow the French king to buy it. By this point it was clear that Henry had come to rely heavily on his brother-in-law in war and diplomacy, and that Seymour was not unworthy of the king’s confidence.
Henry had another reason to put his trust in Seymour. Born a commoner though with a tincture of royal blood, Seymour could never possibly aspire to the throne. He owed his place in the world, his title and position and the wealth he was rapidly accumulating, entirely to the fact that he was uncle to the Prince of Wales, who of course had no uncles on the paternal side. Seymour had every reason to want Edward to live and prosper, and everything to lose if Edward were to die or somehow be removed from the throne. In searching for someone who seemed capable of managing the kingdom during his son’s minority, of waging war if necessary and holding the government together, Henry had to look no further than to Seymour. Best of all, it was not necessary to fear that in a crisis Seymour would subordinate his nephew’s interests to his own. Seymour could never become a Richard III. He could help himself, save himself from the enemies that his rapid rise and his unfriendliness to the conservatives had inevitably created, only by preserving the child. The interests of the two were inextricably intertwined.
It was much the same in the case of the leading lay conservative, the leader of one of the last of the grand old noble families that for centuries had possessed so much land and had at their command so many armed men as to make them an effective counterweight to royal power. Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, was seventy-three in 1546, still tough and vigorous though nearly old enough to be the father of a king supposedly dying of old age, and he had spent his long life serving the Tudors at home and abroad, in peace and in war. Grandson of the Duke of Norfolk who had died fighting on the side of Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485, son of the Howard who was restored to the Norfolk title after destroying a Scots army at Flodden in 1513, he himself had led his father’s vanguard at Flodden and had gone on to serve as lord lieutenant in Ireland and commander of English armies in the north and in France. His shrewd if unscrupulous management of the Pilgrimage of Grace may very well have saved King Henry from ruin. Though the Howards like the Seymours (and, for that matter, like a number of noble and gentry families) had a touch of royal blood from generations back, and though Norfolk’s first wife had, like Henry VIII’s mother, been one of the numerous daughters of Edward IV (she died young, and none of their four children survived), the family had no plausible claim to the throne and no illusions on that score. Three times in the space of a decade, marriages had created the possibility that the Tudors and the Howards would be permanently linked by blood. Norfolk’s daughter Mary had been wed to Henry Fitzroy, the king’s bastard, but that had come to nothing as a result of Fitzroy’s early death. King Henry’s disastrous marriages to two of Norfolk’s nieces, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, had served as persuasive reminders of the dangers of aspiring too high. As an ambitious but sensible dynast, Norfolk would have been content to remain first among the peers of the realm and a faithful servant first of Henry and then of his son.
That did not, however, turn out to be possible. To the Seymours and other “new men” around the king—men who had not inherited their high places, but had been elevated to them in consequence of winning Henry’s favor—Norfolk was like Gardiner a rival, an obstacle, and a threat. Both had to be neutered, removed if possible, if the Seymour faction were to achieve and maintain control. From about 1544 events began to turn in the Seymours’ favor. Norfolk found himself criticized by the king for not conducting his military operations more aggressively in France. (He replied, not unreasonably, that he had been given neither the men nor the munitions to accomplish what Henry demanded.) Edward Seymour, at almost the same time, was ravaging Scotland and delighting the king with his reports of devastation. Two years later, in the last year of Henry’s life, Norfolk’s son Henry, Earl of Surrey, was replaced by Seymour as commander of the garrison at Boulogne. Upon negotiating his settlement with the French, Seymour returned to court, where he found himself in higher favor than ever with the failing king and therefore easily able to win the friendship of the most well placed of the evangelicals. Among them were William Paget, the king’s principal secretary; Queen Catherine and her brother Essex; second gentleman of the privy chamber Anthony Denny; and—most fatefully for the long term—a hitherto obscure soldier named John Dudley, recently elevated to the Privy Council and to the post of lord high admiral. Even conservatives as prominent as Thomas Wriothesley, the new lord chancellor, sought to establish good relations with Seymour as they saw which way the political winds were blowing, and with what force. Seymour’s importance even before the death of the king is apparent in the fact that the Privy Council began holding its meetings at his home rather than at any of the royal palaces.
Norfolk and his son Surrey found themselves elbowed aside by the very men who wanted to persuade the king that the entire Howard clan was not to be trusted. The enmity between the two groups was bitter and had deep roots: as early as 1537, Surrey, then only about twenty, had been taken into custody for striking Edward Seymour, who that very year became King Henry’s brother-in-law and a viscount with a place on the council. This happened at Hampton Court Palace, and the prescribed penalty for such an act of violence on royal premises was loss of the right hand. Surrey, whose hopes for a military career hung in the balance, was saved by the intervention of Cromwell. As recently as 1546 an argument around the Privy Council’s table had ended with Seymour striking Bishop Gardiner, who as a leading conservative was linked to the Howards, in the face. Two years before that, with the council increasingly under Seymour domination, the bishop’s personal secretary and nephew, Germaine Gardiner, had been put to death after being charged with denying the royal supremacy. Much more than political advantage was at stake here, obviously. These were men who hated and feared each other intensely and had good reason to do so.
No one was more intense than Surrey, who shared his father’s high pride in their family’s ancient lineage (actually far more ancient and noble in the female than in the male line, the Howards themselves being rather recent upstarts who had married well) and his disdain for the new men by whom they saw themselves being supplanted. What he lacked, tragically, was the political savvy, the craftiness, that had made it possible for his grandfather to erase the stigma of having fought on the wrong side at Bosworth Field and finally claw his way back to preeminence among the noble families of England. Surrey was brilliant—an accomplished classicist, a poet of very nearly the highest order—but also arrogant and reckless almost to the point of madness. He had an obsessive, anachronistically medieval conception of personal honor. His lifelong pursuit of military glory had been punctuated with pridefully self-destructive acts; his striking of Edward Seymour, whom he was incapable of accepting as an equal, much less as senior in rank, was merely a remarkably vivid example.
With the king visibly failing and increasingly susceptible to their suggestions, Seymour and his following saw an opportunity to finish off their rivals. They ensnared Gardiner in a clumsy but effective trap, telling the king that the bishop had refused a request that he exchange some properties belonging to his see of Winchester for lands belonging to the Crown. It is understandable if Gardiner had in fact been reluctant to agree to such a deal—trades advantageous to the Crown had become a subtle way of plundering the dioceses—but it is unlikely that he would have flatly refused. Gardiner himself protested that he had simply expressed a wish to discuss the matter with the king. In the end he had to submit an apology and surrender his seat on the council. If there had ever been any chance that he would figure in the king’s plans for the management of the kingdom after Prince Edward succeeded, that chance was now lost. He did, however, survive. He remained not only free but bishop of Winchester.
The Howards were not so fortunate. On December 12 father and son were confined in the Tower amid rumors that they had been planning to seize control of the government in the event of the king’s death, planning to abduct Prince Edward, and other, similar nonsense. When in January 1547 they were charged, however, it was for no such offense. Surrey was accused of committing high treason by using the heraldic emblems of Edward the Confessor, a Saxon monarch whose reign had preceded the Norman Conquest, and thereby staking a claim to the crown. Norfolk was charged with being aware of his son’s treason and failing to report it. When put on trial, Surrey defended himself vigorously and at length, pointing out that his ancestors had displayed the same arms that were now alleged to be treasonous and had experienced no difficulty as a result of doing so. It was by no means clear that the jury was prepared to convict until Secretary Paget brought word that the king demanded a guilty verdict. Surrey was beheaded six days later. Thereafter Norfolk, in an effort to save himself, sent the king a letter of submission in which he pleaded guilty to “keeping secret the acts of my son, Henry earl of Surrey, in using the arms of St. Edward the Confessor, which pertain only to kings.” It did no good. Norfolk was attainted by Parliament, so that he had no opportunity to answer the charges against him, all his possessions became the property of the Crown, and the king could order his execution whenever he wished. On January 26 Henry signed the necessary order, which was to be carried out the next day; but when the sun rose on January 27, Henry was dead and the council became afraid to proceed. The old duke, a pauper now, paced his cell waiting to learn his fate.
Henry’s Third Succession Act had authorized him to appoint a Regency Council to govern if his son inherited while still a child. Many of the king’s last hours of consciousness were spent in consultation first with his secretary Paget, then with Paget and Edward Seymour, and finally with a wider circle to decide who would be named executors of his will and the new king’s regents. Gardiner and Norfolk were out, absolutely. So was anyone too closely associated with either of them—the bishop of the new see of Westminster, for example, because he had been “schooled” by Gardiner, whom Henry described as being of “so troublesome a nature” that if he were included no one would be able to control him. The Regency Council was by no means uniformly evangelical; Henry ensured a measure of balance by appointing such figures as Cuthbert Tunstal, the bishop of Durham who, a decade and a half before, had made himself a nuisance with his objections to the royal supremacy. But when all the names had been filled in, the list was dominated on the clerical side by Archbishop Cranmer and bishops affiliated with him, and on the lay side by Seymour and his cohorts. The evangelicals had won the last throw of the dice, the one that decided the long contest for control of policy that the whole final decade of Henry’s reign had turned into.
Under the terms of Henry’s will, the sixteen members of the Regency Council were to be equals and all decisions were to require approval of the group as a whole. If this is really what Henry intended, he was being exceedingly unrealistic: his arrangement left not only the council but the kingdom in desperate need of a chief executive. Edward Seymour recognized this need and put himself forward to fill the void, and his friends on the council were so quick to support him that the public learned of his appointment as lord protector of the realm and governor of the new king’s person almost before they knew that the old king was dead. It is not certain that this was a usurpation; Charles V’s ambassador reported seeing a letter bearing King Henry’s signature that bestowed the duties of lord protector upon his brother-in-law.
Nor is there any way of knowing whether Seymour and his cohorts were, as they claimed, simply carrying out the king’s wishes when they made it almost their first matter of business to heap rewards upon themselves. Henry’s will instructed his executors to make good on any promises that he had made before his death, and when the Regency Council sought to find out what was intended by this, it could turn only to the three of its own members who had been most in the king’s company during the last weeks of his life: Anthony Denny, William Paget, and Seymour himself. They reported that “the king, being on his death-bed put in mind of what he had promised, ordered it to be put in his will [emphasis added], that his executors should perform everything that should appear to have been promised by him.” They then went on to provide details. What they disclosed was, if a true statement of Henry’s intentions, an act of extraordinary generosity on the part of a king who knew all too well that he was leaving his son an empty treasury, heavy debts, and ruined credit. If it was not true, Seymour and the others were thieves on a breathtaking scale. Certainly it is reasonable to suspect that the whole thing had been fabricated for their benefit. The statement that Henry was on his deathbed when he added to his will instructions for the carrying out of his promises is not easily squared with the fact that the will itself was almost certainly completed and signed weeks before he died and well before he or anyone else had reason to think that death was imminent. But the entire record of the king’s final weeks—of what he actually did and said, and when he did and said it—is an impossible tangle of contradictions and ambiguities.
What is certain is that, well before Henry’s body was put to rest, the closest associates of his last days declared that among the “unfulfilled gifts” he would have bestowed if he had lived were new titles for them and their friends. Thus, supposedly in keeping with the king’s wishes, Edward Seymour was elevated from Earl of Hertford to Duke of Somerset, William Parr from Earl of Essex to Marquess of Northampton, and Seymour’s henchmen John Dudley and Chancellor Wriothesley to the earldoms of Warwick and Southampton respectively. Six knights, Thomas Seymour, Richard Rich, and Paget among them, were made barons, and to all these men and to others besides (Cranmer, for example, who as a clergyman could not receive a title, and Anthony Denny, who for some reason got no title) there were munificent disbursements of money and land. The new Duke of Somerset—we will use that name for Edward Seymour henceforth, to distinguish him from his brother Thomas Lord Seymour of Sudeley—did best of all. He was given four manors previously belonging to the Diocese of Lincoln, seven from the Diocese of Bath and Wells, and tracts of church land at Westminster on which he would soon begin building the magnificent Somerset House with stones hauled in from ruined monasteries. He was also granted the incomes of the treasurership of one cathedral, the deanship of another, and prebends (chapter memberships) at six others. Overall this splendid payday transferred lands generating income of £27,000 annually to private hands, nearly half in the form of gifts for which the recipients paid nothing. If these benefactions were in fact expressions of the late king’s wishes and not merely an act of plunder by which Somerset enriched himself and rewarded his allies, they did in fact accomplish the second purpose as well as the first.
There was trouble all the same. Thomas Seymour was as ambitious as his elder brother, he would soon show himself to be every bit as ruthless, and now he was unable to see why he—no less an uncle of the king than Somerset—should not have a more important part in the new regime. Somerset, in addition to being lord protector and governor, had taken for himself the offices of high steward, great chamberlain, lord treasurer, and earl marshal. Thomas Seymour regarded it as an indignity that he was only a baron, and that his only office—aside from his seat on the council—was that of master of ordnance, a job he had been given more than two years earlier, when King Henry was still alive and active. He argued that the posts of protector and governor should not be held by one man, and that he, by virtue of his blood relationship with the king, should have one of them. Somerset refused but attempted to appease his brother by surrendering the office of great chamberlain (a lucrative one involving custodianship of royal lands) to John Dudley, the new Earl of Warwick, who in turn resigned the office of lord high admiral in favor of Thomas Seymour. But Seymour was not at all satisfied, turning his attention and energy not to his new naval responsibilities but to securing the kinds of honors to which he thought himself entitled. Later in the year, when Somerset and Dudley went north to resume the war on the Scots, Seymour remained behind in London to make mischief in his brother’s absence and pay court to Dowager Queen Catherine, with whom he had had a budding romance years before until the king took an interest in the lady.
A more pressing problem emerged in the person of Thomas Wriothesley, lord chancellor and new Earl of Southampton. During the last half-decade of Henry’s reign Wriothesley had been one of the chief instruments through whom the king discouraged religious innovation and tried to achieve a national uniformity based on the kind of conservatism set forth in the Six Articles. He himself was as conservative a major figure as was to be found on the Regency Council, and though he had offered no objections to Somerset’s appointment as lord protector (his share in the “unfulfilled gifts” must have helped to make him cooperative), soon thereafter he began to make a nuisance of himself. He insisted that there should be no significant departures from the terms of the late king’s will and that no religious reforms should be undertaken until the new king reached his maturity and could act in his own right. What gave particular offense was his insistence that Somerset must—as had been stipulated when he became lord protector—take no action without the approval of a majority of the council.
Somerset had no intention of accepting any of these strictures, but he quickly ran up against a complication. Wriothesley, as chancellor, had custody of the king’s Great Seal, without which no order that Somerset might issue or have issued over the king’s signature could be binding. And, being a strong-willed politician who knew how to use the powers of his office to good advantage, Wriothesley would allow no use of the seal in matters of which he did not approve. The solution proved to be relatively simple. Judges subservient to Somerset declared Wriothesley guilty of having abused his office. (The charge was transparently trumped up; Wriothesley was technically guilty, but only of the previously acceptable practice of delegating judicial responsibilities that his duties at court left him with no time to perform.) He was stripped of his office and placed under arrest. The newly ennobled Richard Lord Rich, ready as always to do whatever was required by whoever was in power, was dispatched to collect the seal. Somerset then used the seal to stamp and thereby make official a letter of patent, signed by his nephew the king, by which he was given the power to appoint and remove members of the Privy Council, into which the Regency Council was now absorbed. He also empowered himself to assemble the council (or just as important, decline to assemble it) “as he shall think meet … from time to time.”
This was all Somerset needed to begin exercising the authority of a king. He secured Rich’s appointment as chancellor, thinking that this would ensure his control of the Great Seal. He began to live in royal fashion, ordering that two gold maces be carried before him wherever he went. That his rule would be less savage than Henry’s was signaled when Wriothesley was freed, excused from paying the heavy fine that had been levied against him, and allowed to keep most of the winnings of his long career at court. He was even allowed to return to the council where, while taking care not to go so far as to put himself at risk, he continued to resist the majority’s efforts to shift the church in a markedly evangelical direction.
At the center of all this turmoil, sometimes seen but almost never heard, was the small figure of King Edward VI. He was a solitary figure: a boy who had never known a mother, had grown up worshipping a distant father who appeared to be the mightiest man in the world, and had spent most of his life in a household separate from those of his father and two half-sisters. Though Catherine Parr appears to have been an attentive and even affectionate stepmother, soon after Henry’s death her attention was drawn in other directions. Edward was a lad of above-average intelligence (all the Tudors were that), if not necessarily the prodigious genius that some of his tutors and courtiers claimed. He was also an exceptionally conscientious child, so serious about the rigorous course of study to which he was subjected from the earliest possible age and his responsibilities as a great king’s heir that in learning about his upbringing one begins to wish for more evidence of play, and playfulness. Probably it would have been better, if only for Edward himself, if he had been less obedient to the learned men who were always on hand to direct his development into a great, good, and wise ruler worthy of his father. If he had been given more time and space in which to be a child.
His coronation, the first of a king of England in nearly four decades, was an outsize event, grandiose but rather sadly overwhelming for a child to have to endure alone. It was preceded, three weeks after Henry’s death and just days after his embalmed corpse had been lowered into a crypt beneath the floor of St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, by a four-hour parade during which the new king, dressed in cloth of silver and gold and mounted on a horse draped with satin and pearls, was put on display for the people of the metropolis. The next day, February 20, Edward entered Westminster Abbey at the center of a vast procession, a bishop flanking him on one side and an earl on the other, the long train of his crimson robe carried by John Dudley, William Parr, and his uncle Thomas Seymour. There he was anointed king. The ceremony was conducted according to a formula that had been used on every such occasion since 1375. Cranmer, however, in his capacity of master of ceremonies, had introduced changes underscoring the new powers that Henry VIII had gathered to the Crown and the fact that for the first time in history a new king was becoming not only head of state but also head of the church. A traditional promise to respect the laws and liberties of the English people was expunged from the coronation oath; henceforth the king would decide which laws and liberties to grant and which to deny. “Peace and concord” were promised to the church and the people but not, as in the past, to the clergy; now it was for the king to decide whether the clergy deserved peace. Somerset and Cranmer together placed three crowns in succession on Edward’s head—one each for England, France, and Ireland, Henry VIII having been the first English king to fashion himself king of Ireland. Then all the bishops and nobles came forward in pairs to pay homage, lowering themselves to their knees and swearing in unison to be loyal. Finally Cranmer delivered a sermon that he addressed not to the whole assembly but to Edward alone. The boy was told that nothing he had just sworn should be interpreted as limiting the right that God had bestowed on him to rule in whatever way he thought best. There was a half-concealed message in this, and it was unmistakably evangelical: the king was not bound by law. Emphatically he was not bound by such laws as Henry VIII’s Six Articles. To the extent that the king was bound by anything, Cranmer said, he was bound by a duty that was primarily religious, and religious in an evangelical way. It was, “as God’s viceregent and Christ’s vicar, to see that God be worshipped and idolatry be destroyed; that the tyranny of the bishop of Rome be banished and images be removed.” Cranmer, who by this time had abandoned whatever belief he might once have had in transubstantiation, then went through the elaborate motions of the traditional solemn high mass.
He had placed a heavy burden on the shoulders of a boy of nine, one that many normal and healthy boys might have cheerfully ignored. But the melancholy fact is that Edward regarded such matters with a solemnity that would have seemed more fitting in a pious cleric deep into middle age. His early education, under the supervision first of his stepmother Catherine Parr and then, from age six, of Archbishop Cranmer, had provided intense exposure to evangelical doctrine along with inoculation against what he was taught to see as the monstrous absurdities of the old religion. Cranmer placed him in the hands of scholars as accomplished and committed as any that evangelical England had produced up to that time. Hugh Latimer, who in 1539 had lost his position as bishop of Worcester because his insistence on radical reform had put him too far out of step with Henry’s orthodoxy, was brought to court soon after Edward became king. From a special pulpit installed for the purpose, he delivered hour-long sermons that Edward dutifully watched from one of the windows of his privy chamber, taking detailed notes. The boy embraced what he was taught, forming firm opinions on immensely complex subjects at a prodigiously early age. It is more pathetic than impressive to see him, at age ten, producing under the approving eyes of his tutors a lengthy treatise in which he considers the claims of the pope to headship over the church and concludes not only that these claims are invalid but that the bishop of Rome is “the true son of the devil, a bad man, an Antichrist and an abominable tyrant.” By this time he was certain, as he would remain for the rest of his life, that the religion of his father with its seven sacraments and toleration of images and purgatory and free will was nearly as great an abomination as Roman Catholicism itself. If he rebelled, it was against the traditionalism of his dead father, not against his own mentors.
All of which was entirely acceptable to his uncle Somerset, most of whose supporters in the court and council were zealous reformers genuinely committed to the evangelical cause. The coronation of the new king had been a thrilling event for these people, promising an outlet for their contemptuous opinion of the old dogmas and an opportunity to cast off the dead weight of the past in favor of something cleaner, something capable of remaking the world. They wanted a religious revolution vastly more ambitious than anything Henry VIII had attempted, a replacement of idols and false sacraments and empty superstitious practices with the direct authority of Scripture. If they also had a hearty appetite for whatever riches it might still be possible to extract from the church, that did not mean they were necessarily less than sincere in their convictions.
They faced formidable obstacles—so much so that, in spite of controlling the person of the king and the principal levers of power in both state and church, they continued to think of themselves as a beleaguered and even oppressed minority. Virtually all the laws and pronouncements of Henry VIII were against them: the Six Articles, the King’s Book, and the heresy statutes that put their lives at risk at least theoretically every time they gave voice to what they believed. Most of the people of England, even most of the clergy, had no liking for their ideas. Throughout the first year of the new reign, therefore, they had to proceed carefully. They began the process of imposing their theology on the kingdom, but always with an eye to keeping their adversaries off balance. When accused of preaching what was unlawful, they replied ingenuously that they were merely saying what the late king had believed at the time of his death but had not lived long enough to express in law. To complaints that they were advocating change of a kind that should not be attempted before Edward came of age, they responded in tones of innocence that they were doing no such thing—that they accepted the Six Articles as the law of the land and recognized that heresy remained a capital crime. Meanwhile they were actively carrying out their revolution, but by such small steps that it was difficult for the traditionalists to know where to lay down a challenge. Even as they advanced their agenda, the evangelicals continued to insist that they wanted nothing more than peace and continuity and the unity of the church.
That they actually wanted nothing of the kind first became plain in August 1547, seven months after the old king’s death, when Somerset sent official “visitors” to every diocese. These representatives of the Crown delivered to the bishops a set of sermons to be read in every church every Sunday. This was provocative: the sermons were the work of Cranmer, who by now had abandoned any pretense of believing what he had professed during the reign of his master Henry, and their content was in direct contradiction not only to Henry’s Articles but to what an overwhelming majority of the clergy and indeed the population still believed. Even more provocatively, the visitors had oral instructions that went far beyond their written commissions, and in pursuit of those instructions they launched a campaign—shocking to most people in every part of the country—of physical destruction. Magnificent stained-glass windows, an irreplaceable part of England’s medieval legacy, were condemned as idolatrous and smashed to bits. The same thing happened to statuary, to paintings, and to the ancient adornments of church buildings everywhere. Whole libraries of Latin works, even the library of Oxford University, were put to the torch. Barbaric as such acts may seem today, to the radical evangelicals they were something to be celebrated, a necessary step in freeing England from a filthily papist past.
For Stephen Gardiner, the disgraced bishop of Winchester, all this was too much to be borne. Protesting that the Cranmer sermons contradicted the doctrines of the English church as established by Parliament under the late king, he accused the archbishop of contradicting what he himself had claimed to believe when Henry was alive. For this he was thrown into prison; clearly the evangelicals no longer saw any point in trying to seem conciliatory. Neither Somerset nor Cranmer could afford to have Gardiner at liberty to rally the forces of tradition when a new Parliament was called later in the year. The evangelicals had big plans for that Parliament—plans that Gardiner was likely to oppose to his last breath.
First, however, Somerset wanted to deal with Scotland, which had been almost an obsession for him since his two invasions in the closing years of Henry’s reign. Scotland at this time was in a state approaching civil war, with an evangelical faction friendly to England fighting a Catholic, pro-French faction for control of Edinburgh and custody of Queen Mary, still a child of four. Somerset assembled an army of twenty thousand men, many of them mercenaries recruited at great cost from distant parts of Europe, and started north with John Dudley as his second in command. They crossed the River Tweed early in September, and on the tenth day of that month they met and destroyed the Scottish defenders at the Battle of Pinkie, a rout that ended in the slaughter of nearly ten thousand Scots. Edinburgh remained in the hands of England’s enemies, however, and Somerset surprised those enemies and his own followers by declining to exploit the tremendous advantage his victory had given him. Instead he allowed his troops four days of pillaging and then hurried back to London.
He was now England’s greatest living military hero in addition to having control of the Crown, Parliament, and the church. England was his to do with as he chose. It was also his to lose. Everything now depended upon his ability to manage what fate and his own boldness had put into his hands.
Background
INSTRUMENTS OF POWER
THE REGENCY COUNCIL THAT HENRY VIII HAD CREATED TO manage England until the boy Edward grew up was a new variation—the latest of many variations—on an old, old theme. The rulers of England had always had councils, weak kings no less than strong ones all the way back to Saxon times, but the makeup and importance of those councils had varied drastically from one reign to the next. The idea of the royal council was a kind of blank slate on which each generation was free to write as it chose according to its own circumstances.
Why councils at all? Because history offers no examples of leaders of nations, even tyrannical leaders of nations, who were able to survive without finding competent advisers and listening to them, sharing some portion of their power with somebody and accepting the fact that, no matter how much they may have wanted to do everything themselves, that was simply impossible. For many hundreds of years, until the evolution of more modern instruments of government, royal councils were the best mechanisms available for dealing with that reality.
Even that flinty old killer William the Conqueror, after he crossed over from Normandy in 1066 and by brute force turned the whole of England into his personal property, immediately put a council in place. The most important men in the kingdom sat on it—the bishops, the half-civilized warlords who were William’s tenants-in-chief—but everyone understood that it was the king’s creature and existed to do his bidding. That would remain the rule for more than half a millennium, and England would depart from it only when something was deeply, seriously wrong. When the king was insane, for example, or otherwise unable to maintain control. Or when he was, like Edward VI, simply too young to take command.
The earliest Norman councils did everything: executed the king’s orders, heard and passed judgment on complaints and appeals, settled disputes, and offered as much advice as the king was willing to take. But as the population grew and the economy developed and society grew more complicated, such a workload became unmanageable. Various functions were spun off one by one—an exchequer to manage the Crown’s money, courts for the handling of different kinds of cases—and turned into governmental departments. One function, however, was never spun off: that of advising the king, of having a voice when policy was being decided. That was what made a seat on the council a prize. Always in principle and almost always in fact, being a councilor meant having access to the king, being able to speak directly with the king, having a chance to influence the king and win his favor.
The value of this access fluctuated, increasing at times to the point where councils became more powerful than the monarchs they formally served. This happened late in the fourteenth century, after Richard II came to the throne as a half-grown boy, and again in the fifteenth during the reign of Henry VI, the half-brother of Edmund and Jasper Tudor, who became king as an infant and even when grown was too weak a character to take back control of the council from magnates who were using it to bend the government and the judicial system to their own advantage.
Under the Tudors, the flexibility of government by council was put to new tests and not found wanting. In the course of his twenty-four-year reign the wily Henry VII appointed upward of 150 men to his council, but his doing so was an exercise in public relations intended to win the support of different interest groups—merchants, lawyers, soldiers—by allowing them to think that they were represented at the highest level. Real power was limited to an inner circle of perhaps a dozen men, many of them officers of the royal household and therefore the king’s dependents, and council meetings were typically attended by only between six and ten members. Henry VII used the council’s adaptability to devise a quick and simple solution to one of the most serious problems inherited from the Yorkists: England’s sclerotic, cumbersome, and too-often-corrupt courts of law. He resurrected the council’s aboriginal judicial function, encouraging subjects to bring their suits to it with the promise of receiving an impartial hearing at tolerable cost. Thus the councilors’ traditional meeting place, the room at Westminster called the Star Chamber because of the decorations on its ceiling, became a famous and, for a long time, a respected source of royal justice. The lord chancellor, as the Court of the Star Chamber’s presiding officer, would gradually be so burdened with its caseload that he was unable to function as the king’s chief minister as in the past and became what he is today: Britain’s senior law officer.
We saw earlier how young Henry VIII, when he first became king, had no interest in the routines of administration and so left the business of governing in the hands of his father’s councilors, and how this ended when Thomas Wolsey became chancellor and drew the reins of power into his own hands. Throughout the decade and a half of Wolsey’s ascendancy the council sank into unimportance, a development much resented by those nobles and others who felt excluded from decision-making. The workaholic Wolsey performed the considerable feat, never to be repeated by his successors, of simultaneously overseeing both the entire government and the courts, continuing to preside at sessions of the Star Chamber and giving high priority to improving the delivery of justice to ordinary subjects. On the negative side, he displayed an occasional tendency to use the Court of the Star Chamber as an instrument of discipline, a political weapon with which to punish people perceived as enemies. A century on, under the next dynasty, this tendency would become so pronounced that hatred for the court finally caused it to be destroyed.
Another action of Wolsey’s that merits attention in this connection is his unprecedented capture of all the royal seals, the coinlike bas-relief carved figures that, when pressed into a blob of hot wax, certified the authenticity of documents such as grants, writs, warrants, subpoenas, and correspondence. In becoming chancellor, the cardinal had automatically taken custody of the king’s Great Seal, which since its origins in pre-Conquest times had become so essential to the operations of government that its removal from the chancery at Westminster was forbidden. This had led to the creation of what was called the Privy Seal; it was smaller, simpler (it showed the king’s arms rather than his picture), lawfully transportable, and so useful to the peripatetic monarchs of the Middle Ages that by the early fourteenth century its official keeper was one of the court’s most important members. As administrative machinery was erected even around the Privy Seal, again the need arose for something simpler. Hence the signet, at first a “secret” seal, which was kept by the king’s secretary and by the advent of the Tudors was even more important than the older, grander seals in the origination and authentication of important documents. It is a measure of Wolsey’s unprecedented power that he became the first minister ever to achieve control of all three seals and thus of every item of official business.
It was however Thomas Cromwell, not Wolsey, who broke the patterns of the past and found genuinely new uses for old institutions including the council. He was content to allow Thomas More and then his own protégé Thomas Audley to occupy the office of lord chancellor and disappear into its judicial responsibilities. Instead he transformed the unencumbered position of king’s principal secretary into a power base from which he made himself chief executive and, on the king’s behalf, managed everything from the treasury to the church, from diplomacy to military affairs. Though Cromwell was far too canny to ignore the seals—as secretary he had possession of the signet, and in 1536 he took over the office of Lord Privy Seal from the ruined Thomas Boleyn—he demanded obedience on the basis of his own signature and by doing so allowed the use of seals to become an almost empty formality.
It was however in his use of the Royal Council that Cromwell displayed the full reach of his political genius. Wolsey had treated the council much as he treated Parliament: as a nuisance to be ignored when possible, bullied when necessary. Cromwell, by contrast, saw that the council, like Parliament, could be shaped into a tool of enormous value. In the mid-1530s he carved out of Henry VIII’s excessively large and essentially useless council what would become one of the principal institutions of government: a Privy Council of purposely limited size (only nineteen members in the beginning and thereafter never many more than that). This new council was no longer too big to function but did have enough size to carry an important load of work. And it was, most importantly, a working council: each of its members brought either influence or special expertise to the table, and various members were put in charge of various activities—always, of course, under Cromwell’s careful supervision—almost like a modern cabinet. In selecting the membership Cromwell strove for, and to a considerable extent achieved, a balance of power among the leading factions. Cranmer sat as representative of the religious reformers, Gardiner and Tunstal for the conservatives. There were members of the ancient nobility—the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Sussex—and of families recently raised to the peerage. Among the commoners were representatives of the old landowning gentry and men (solicitor-general Sir Richard Rich being once again among the favored) who had risen from obscure origins to positions of prominence in the royal service. Together they formed an instrument beautifully engineered to perform exactly as Cromwell, and the king, desired.
When Cromwell fell and no one emerged to take his place, the Privy Council simultaneously grew in importance and became the cockpit within which the factions suddenly found themselves free to fight for dominance. And fight they did, with the results we saw in the last chapter: by the start of Edward’s reign, chiefly as a result of King Henry’s choices, the evangelicals had overcome long odds and routed the conservatives. Norfolk was in prison, Gardiner was in prison, and Tunstal and his kind had been utterly marginalized. The kingdom and the future were in the hands of the new and evangelically inclined nobility of whom Edward Seymour had made himself chief. The power of that new nobility, in turn, was rooted in the council.