The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (30 page)

THE REIGNS OF EDWARD VI
(1547–53)
AND MARY I
(1553–8)

The accession of a baby queen, Mary, and a boy king, Edward, to the thrones of Scotland and England offered the chance to solve an ancient problem: how should two alien powers share the same island? This seeming coincidence was taken by England’s governors as a sign of divine providence, of God’s plan that the heir and heiress should marry and unite their two kingdoms as ‘Great Britain’. By the Treaty of Greenwich of 1543, Mary, who had ascended the Scottish throne in 1542, one week old, was promised to marry the young Prince Edward. Yet the Scots saw the advantage as all on England’s side. As Sir Adam Otterburn sagely asked, ‘If your lad were a lass and our lass were a lad, would you then be so earnest in this matter?’ Rather than have an Englishman as king of Scotland, ‘our common people and the stones in the street would rise and rebel against it’. The Scots soon broke their treaty, and when they jilted the English a terrible retribution followed. The English ‘Rough Wooing’ of 1544 and 1545 left the Scottish Lowlands a smoking waste and the Borderers condemned to live wretchedly in the ruins of their countryside. The Scots grew ever more determined to remain free from the ‘thraldom of England’, while the English still asserted their putative sovereignty, increasingly regarding the Scots not so much as foreign enemies but as domestic rebels. Scotland did not stand alone. While England was at war with Scotland the King of France, Henry II, bound to the ‘auld alliance’, would never be at peace with England. Both England and Scotland faced long and dangerous minorities of their rulers.

In Scotland, as in England, divisions in religion transformed the nature of politics, as the factions struggling for ascendancy fought also for the advance or the destruction of reform. Henry VIII, having broken papal power in England, sought to subvert it in Scotland too. As Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford laid waste the Borders, he despoiled the great
religious houses also. He met stalwart resistance at Kelso Abbey in September 1545, where twelve monks, with about one hundred supporters, made their last stand. Those who held out in the steeple were slaughtered, and the Abbey was destroyed lest it be used as fortress against the English. The leader of Scottish resistance to English aggression, and the chief French partisan, was David Beaton. As Cardinal, he was leader too of the Catholic cause in Scotland. The death of the Cardinal was devoutly hoped for by his political enemies; not least by Henry VIII, who countenanced the assassination of Beaton as he had once before of Cardinal Pole. In the spring of 1547 Beaton was murdered by a group of Fife lairds. As his desecrated body swung from the castle walls at St Andrews the Catholic people were invited to ‘see there their god’. Beaton’s assassins and other opponents of the regency of James Hamilton, Earl of Arran held out in St Andrews, with English support, until in July 1547 the French arrived to break the siege. Among those conveyed to France in the galleys was John Knox, who would return to lead the Scottish Reformation. Mary, Queen of Scots was brought up and remained a Catholic. Not so her Tudor cousin and spurned bridegroom.

Edward VI was a king not only born but educated to rule. Even Erasmus would have approved so perfect an education for a Christian prince. The celebrated humanists Richard Cox and John Cheke became tutors to the ‘godly imp’, and from them he learnt not only languages but a profound biblical piety. Other princes received ideal educations and learnt nothing, but here was a prince who prepared himself with great discipline for what he saw as the divine obligation of his kingship. He studied history. Its lessons must be put into practice; so he took notes upon English rule in France in Henry VI’s reign. He studied geography. He knew all the ports and havens in England, France and Scotland, and the favourable winds and tides for entering them, for a king needed strategic information. He learnt the names and religion of every magistrate, the better to govern. He studied moral philosophy from Cicero and Aristotle. He studied rhetoric. But above all, he knew the scriptures; at the age of twelve he read twelve chapters daily. Edward’s youthful passion was to hear sermons, and as he listened he took notes, especially when the preachers touched upon the duties of kings.

When the preachers urged not only spiritual but moral regeneration,
Edward took heed. He had a commanding sense that true religion must be introduced and the abuses in society redressed. From Bishop Latimer he heard that ‘to take away the right of the poor is against the honour of a king’, and that kings must show the way to their covetous subjects. Not for him a worldly court like his father’s, where courtiers had gambled for Church booty, throwing dice to win Jesus bell tower in St Paul’s churchyard, and where courtly – and less courtly – love had flourished. Did not Latimer urge the death penalty for adultery? Edward was intent upon emulating Josiah, the young king of the Old Testament who had destroyed the idols of Baal. To his ‘dear and beloved uncle’, Edward Seymour, Edward dedicated his own collection of Old Testament texts against the veneration of images. Sometime before 1550 Edward had been won to a ‘pious understanding of the doctrine of the Eucharist’; that is, to the evangelical faith.

Here was a king with an iron sense of duty and justice. His own chronicle records with apparent lack of regret the fate of malefactors, even or especially those close to him. Edward had inherited the sovereign will and implacability of his father. Also his suspicion. ‘A great noter of things that pertained to princely affairs’, Edward ciphered those notes into Greek letters, safe from the prying eyes of his attendants. He had reason for suspicion, for he was anxiously guarded, ‘not half a quarter of an hour alone’, with no one to trust at his court except his dog. He was guarded against kidnap by those who would use him as the most powerful political pawn, and soon became aware of his own vulnerability. For July 1549 he recorded dispassionately in his chronicle that ‘because there was a rumour that I was dead, I passed through London’. Although he was king, he was still, as his reign began, a little boy (aged nine), without the power, even if he had the will, to govern in his minority. The evangelicals had their reasons to urge him to use his regal power before the end of his minority to implement religious change; conservatives, like Bishops Bonner and Gardiner, argued otherwise, denying the legality of such precipitate use of the Royal Supremacy.

When Henry VIII was dying, those around him conspired to subvert his plan for the rule of the realm during Edward’s minority. The King’s death was kept secret, while behind locked doors in the Privy Gallery councillors and courtiers bound each other to overturn the royal provisions for a Regency Council of sixteen equal members. Together, they
all agreed – save one – that Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the brother of Henry’s third queen and the new king’s uncle, should be elevated above them all as Lord Protector, ‘thinking it the surest form of government and most fit for that commonwealth’. By doctoring the royal will to reward themselves with lands, offices and titles – gifts unfulfilled in the King’s life, but intended by him, so they claimed – the loyalty of some and the silence of others was bought, for a time. These secret moves left a dangerous political legacy. The conspirators always looked for further favours and for a share in the power which they had handed over. ‘Remember what you promised me in the gallery at Westminster, before the breath was out of the body of the king that dead is,’ William Paget, the prime mover, reminded Hertford. That promise was to listen to Paget’s advice above all others’, and Hertford soon broke it. He also broke his promise to the others that he would do nothing ‘without the advice of us, the rest of the Council’. Within days of Edward’s accession Hertford, who was now created Duke of Somerset, had effectively assumed the royal prerogative of forming a Privy Council, and began to call it, and not to call it, at will. The policies of the Protectorate were soon exclusively Somerset’s own. When Paget wrote to him offering advice to which Somerset did not listen, he wrote of ‘
your
matters of policy’, ‘
your
determinations for the year to come’, ‘
your
debt’, ‘
your
navy’, ‘
your
foreign affairs’. Since Somerset had taken the devising of policy to himself, his would be the blame if, and when, it failed.

The precedents for a Protectorate were hardly propitious. No one could forget Richard III. Like the boy king Henry VI, Edward had two feuding uncles. The Protector’s brother, Thomas Seymour, was convinced that the Governorship of the King and the Protectorship of the realm should be two different offices and that one of these must be his. The treacherous John Dudley, Lord Lisle, urged Thomas Seymour to bid for the Governorship, and by fomenting the quarrel between the two brothers led them to play into his hands. Over the dead body of Henry VIII, who had in his last days tried to exclude him, Thomas Seymour was admitted to the Council. Failing to gain control of his nephew officially, Seymour sought it by stealth; by suborning members of the Privy Chamber, leaving notes under the carpet for the susceptible Edward, sending him pocket money (which the King gave to Latimer), and urging him to ‘bear rule as other kings do’. Possession of the King’s person gave the essential resource of power – legitimacy – and over him
the two uncles fought. Only the barking of the royal dog which guarded the doors of the Privy Chamber saved the King from kidnap by Thomas Seymour in February 1549, and nothing could save Seymour, who was executed for treason in the following month.

Somerset ruled alone. He was, first and last, a military commander and his guiding obsession was the conquest of Scotland; not, as before, by fire and sword, but by permanent garrisoning. This was a policy with consequences for all his others. As the reign began, England was at peace with France and with Emperor Charles V, and ‘in an indifferent concord with the rest of the world (except Rome)’. But war with Scotland also came to mean war with France, for Henry II vowed that he would rather lose his realm than abandon the Scots. When Mary, Queen of Scots left for France in August 1548 to marry the Dauphin, England’s primary reason for waging the war was gone. By Christmas 1548 Paget was inviting Somerset to consider ‘whether at your first setting forward you took not a wrong way’. The defence of Boulogne and of the Scottish garrisons was dragging England towards catastrophe. Only the most desperate financial expedients could meet the prodigious war expenditure, which ran to £200,000 annually in Scotland alone. The great debasement of the coinage, which had begun in Henry VIII’s last years, continued recklessly under Somerset, racking an economy which was suffering enough without such sabotage. Latimer in his Lenten sermon of 1549 spoke of the debased silver coin so reddened with copper that it ‘blushed for shame’. Extraordinary inflation followed the currency manipulations. Between 1544 and 1551 prices in London – where food could not be grown, only bought – rose by almost 90 per cent. Observing the suffering and social misery, Somerset never admitted that war expenditure and debasement might be the causes. Debasement could not end until the war did but, having embarked upon the conquest of Scotland, Somerset, the proud victor of the Battle of Pinkie in 1547, could not end the haemorrhage of money and men, nor abandon his policy. Nor could he countenance defeat, except, so he confessed upon the walls of Berwick, in his dreams. He could not even admit the massive military superiority of the French and the folly of being drawn into war with them from August 1549. Unable to blame his own policies, Somerset and those advisers to whom he listened placed the cause of society’s ills elsewhere.