The Tudors (55 page)

The door to wealth and power opened wide for both of them in 1536, but from then on, thanks to his sister Jane’s marriage to the king, it was Seymour who took the lead while Dudley followed doggedly in his tracks. When Seymour became an earl and member of the Privy Council, he helped to secure Dudley’s appointment as vice-admiral with responsibility for driving pirates from the English Channel. When Seymour took command of King Henry’s invasion of Scotland, Dudley assumed the key supporting role of warden-general of the Scottish marches. But Dudley was far more than a mere sycophant riding the crest of his friend’s good fortune. In the chronicles of the time he seems to pop up everywhere: as envoy between the king and the Duke of Norfolk
during the Pilgrimage of Grace, delivering to Henry the terrible news of Catherine Howard’s confession, negotiating treaties, commanding troops. Wherever he was sent, he was effective. In 1543 Dudley (himself a viscount by now, having been given the title vacated by the death of his stepfather) was made lord high admiral and a knight of the garter, and he joined Seymour on the Privy Council. No one could doubt that he had earned these honors. Nor could anyone have been surprised when, after Henry’s death, Dudley joined with Seymour in dominating the executors of the king’s will, became Earl of Warwick when Seymour made himself Duke of Somerset, and commanded the frontline troops when Somerset again attacked Scotland. In alliance with Cranmer, who looked after their interests where the church was concerned, Somerset and Dudley had control of nearly everything.

But by the summer of 1549, with Kett’s rebels in possession of Norwich and disturbances continuing to erupt in many places, it was all in danger of falling apart. Somerset’s behavior became more and more erratic, his leadership more and more confused. He appeared to be sinking into a paranoia that made it impossible for him to trust even his oldest allies. In a pair of mistakes either one of which might have been enough to doom him, he distanced himself both from William Paget, the canny master of court politics who had steered him through the first days of the protectorate, and from Dudley. He had refused to restore Dudley to the post of lord high admiral, an assignment Dudley loved and took seriously, after the execution of Thomas Seymour left it vacant. He had forced Dudley to give up Warwick Castle, a demand that made no sense unless he regarded the new Earl of Warwick as too untrustworthy to be left in possession of such a mighty stronghold. Dudley by now was himself an immensely wealthy landowner—that followed more or less automatically from political success in the Tudor kleptocracy—and so had much to lose. Like his whole class, he was alarmed by the rebellions and convinced that Somerset was encouraging and condoning them.

It may have been distrust that caused Somerset to send the inexperienced William Parr rather than Dudley to put down Kett’s Rebellion, but whatever the reason it was another of the duke’s mistakes. Parr’s ignominious expulsion from Norwich left Somerset with no alternative to Dudley unless he were willing to take command himself, which would
have destroyed the image that he had built for himself as the special friend of the people. And so Dudley advanced on Norwich with an army of some eight thousand men, a quarter of whom were German cavalry. His performance there confirmed his reputation for courage and resolution and his image as a charismatic commander. Upon arrival he offered the rebels pardon in return for their abandonment of the struggle, and when they refused he attacked, penetrating the city’s outer defenses. The city fathers of Norwich, fearful that if the rebels bested Dudley as they had Parr they would go on a rampage of destruction, implored him to take his campaign elsewhere. Instead he gathered his lieutenants and in a moment of high drama kissed his sword, made the sign of the cross, and swore to fight to the death rather than surrender or withdraw. When his subordinates took the same oath, the spines of the townsfolk were stiffened and the fighting resumed. Step by bloody step Dudley’s men bludgeoned Kett’s out through the city gates and into open country. The rising ended with the last of the rebels surrounded and shouting defiance at a final offer of pardon. They didn’t believe the offer to be genuine and said they would rather die fighting than on the gallows. Dudley, in probably the noblest act of his life, rode forward to tell the rebels face-to-face that if they would lay down their arms he would personally guarantee their safety. They decided to believe him, and Dudley was as good as his word. Kett was executed, inevitably, and so were ten other rebel leaders, but that was the end of the killing. When the landowning gentlemen of the neighborhood said they wanted revenge, Dudley asked if they intended to do their own planting after their tenants had been exterminated.

When Dudley returned to London, he was the hero of the governing class, the one man who had proved capable of restoring order. Somerset by contrast, though the rural peasantry continued to revere him, was so discredited in the eyes of the elite, so alienated even from a majority of the Privy Council, that he found it necessary to leave the capital and withdraw with his nephew the king to Hampton Court. There ensued a power struggle of great complexity. After first and briefly allying himself with the religious conservatives, Dudley embarked on a purge of those same conservatives as soon as he no longer needed them, thereby freeing himself of a connection that the young king could never have found acceptable. The turmoil continued for months, with many twists and
turns. In October Somerset was deprived of the protectorship and became a prisoner in the Tower. Four months later he secured a pardon by confessing on his knees that he had abused the powers of his office. Still later he was readmitted to the council, and eventually he achieved such an advanced state of rehabilitation that his daughter Anne was married to Dudley’s eldest son. Like his late brother, however, Somerset proved incapable of being satisfied. He wanted to be lord protector again, and with that in mind he plotted a marriage between King Edward and another of his daughters, a girl bearing the name of her aunt Jane Seymour. Dudley could not possibly trust him; in practical terms it was becoming difficult even to permit him to remain alive. Dudley arranged to have himself elevated to Duke of Northumberland in October 1551, which put him on an equal footing with Somerset at the apex of English nobility, and a few days later Somerset and his wife and most powerful allies all were arrested. Somerset was charged with having committed treason by planning to capture or murder Dudley, and of having feloniously involved others in his plot. He was tried in the House of Lords and somehow found guilty of the felony but not of treason. The outcome was inevitable in any case: early in 1552 he was beheaded on Tower Hill before a crowd of thousands of his lowborn admirers. The execution was a scene of immense tension, with the onlookers appearing to be on the verge of turning on the authorities.

Thus the king, in early adolescence now, lost a second uncle to the headsman’s ax. As with the first of those losses, there is no record of his having been affected emotionally to even the smallest extent. It is not clear that Edward had much capacity for affection, which is understandable in light of how little he appears to have received in the course of his young life and how many of the people to whom he might have been close had gone to their graves. Two of the closest friends of his childhood, the sons of the Duke of Suffolk and the woman he had married after the death of King Henry’s sister Mary, had been carried off by the sweating sickness. Another had been sent off to study in France. Of his two half-sisters, he appears to have been closer to Mary, who was old enough to be his mother, but as he matured Edward came to regard even her with a prim and prudish disapproval. Mary insisted on remaining a papist, after all, and therefore, sadly, was damned. Nothing Edward said, nothing he did to pressure her, could deflect Mary from having the
old Catholic mass said regularly in her private quarters. That had to be a cause of deep distress to a boy schooled to be very serious about his role as supreme head, and to take nothing so seriously as his duty to show everyone in England the way to the true religion.

John Dudley, now the Duke of Northumberland and rapidly becoming the richest man in England thanks to an appetite for church and Crown lands no less voracious than Somerset’s, knew that he needed the king’s favor in order to maintain his place. He was adroit at winning that favor and at keeping it. He dared make no claim to the title of lord protector—that had never been held by anyone outside the royal family—but he adopted and made good use of “lord president of the Privy Council.” He invited the king to attend council meetings, seeing to it that he was briefed in advance on matters to be discussed and even given words to say at the appropriate times (words that the boy, always conscientious, would memorize for delivery). In so doing he encouraged Edward to believe that he was not merely participating in the governance of the kingdom but beginning to
rule
. At the same time, Dudley embraced the increasingly Calvinistic theology of the king and his tutors. It would be unfair to accuse Dudley of adopting whatever beliefs were most certain to please the king; he had been, as we have seen, a member of the evangelical faction before Edward was born. Still, he was a man of action, and his proper arena was that in which power, not ideas, was in play. It is not impossible that he would have become a conservative if doing so would have helped him to maintain control of king and council.

Be that as it may, King Edward was a sincerely fervent evangelical, and Dudley, by displaying his own fervor in the same cause, found it possible to have things almost entirely his way. And he was never as feckless as Somerset in the exercise of his power. He gave up Boulogne, and though many Englishmen thought the terms he accepted from the French were humiliating, doing so was vastly wiser than continuing a struggle that the kingdom could not afford and could gain nothing from. Peace with France brought peace with Scotland, too, and after a final, desperate devaluation of the coinage (the Crown remained in terrible financial condition), Dudley began taking painful steps to restore it to respectability. The conservatives were required to absorb blow after blow: the venerable Cuthbert Tunstal was losing not only his bishopric
but his freedom, the altars were being torn out of every church, and a revised and unmistakably Protestant Book of Common Prayer was made compulsory while attendance at mass became unlawful. But justifications for such acts seemed in good supply. To the victors go the spoils, after all. And there was no reason to think that the conservatives wouldn’t have been just as vindictive if given the chance. Religious tolerance remained inconceivable: in sixteenth-century Europe almost no one could imagine a kingdom surviving while its people were separated into camps with incompatible beliefs.

Dudley had achieved everything that an Englishman not of royal blood could ever have imagined achieving. He was rich beyond the dreams of avarice, he was so powerful that no one dared challenge him, and he had five fine and faithful sons to whom to pass on what he was building. And if it all depended on the goodwill of the king, he had every reason to expect that the king, if properly handled, would continue indefinitely to be Dudley’s fine and faithful instrument.

It was all perfect. And from the point in the spring of 1552 when the king was briefly bedridden with measles and smallpox, it was all doomed.

WHEN EDWARD VI BECAME KING, MARTIN LUTHER HAD been dead for thirteen months and the Lutheran part of the Reformation had largely run its course. After changing the world, the former Friar Martin had withdrawn into a relatively quiet life as the father of a growing family and a writer of biblical commentaries. In the last decade of his life he was tortured by constipation, hemorrhoids, and kidney stones, plagued by the scandal that had erupted when he endorsed bigamy, and increasingly consumed by a virulent anti-Semitism. (Three days before his death he preached a sermon urging the expulsion of the Jews from Germany.) His theology, having conquered half of Germany and all of Scandinavia, had been overtaken on the cutting edge of the religious revolution by newer varieties of Protestant belief.

Edward became king, therefore, at the point where a second generation of evangelical thinkers, based in Switzerland rather than Germany, was making itself heard. Its increasingly dominant member was a Frenchman living in Switzerland, John Calvin, one of history’s most paradoxical figures. In assuming the leadership of a revolt against the authority of the Roman church, Calvin came to claim for himself more power than any Renaissance pope had ever dared to do. He not only declared himself to be something very like the infallible head of a one true church of his own devising—any lunatic might have done that, and one or two of the sixteenth century’s more interesting lunatics did—but through willpower, sheer force of intellect, and unshakable integrity he largely made good on that claim. In the little city of Geneva, a place not particularly friendly to reform, he constructed a regime that came about as close as anything in Europe ever had to an enduring totalitarian theocracy. In laying down the rules by which the people of Geneva (and, by implication, the whole Christian world) were to live, and more important by articulating a rationale for the validity of those rules, he made
himself one of the most influential theologians in history. In places as remote from his home base as Scotland (where his disciples transformed not only the church but the culture) and England (where his teachings triggered the Puritan movement), it was Calvin more than Luther who defined what it was to be Protestant. The reach of his ideas is evident in the fact that from 1550 to 1650, a century that encompassed the careers of Shakespeare and other writers of gigantic stature, Calvin was England’s most published author. This happened although Calvin never set foot in England, rarely showed more than passing interest in its affairs, and was reviled by an Anglican church that persecuted his followers and attempted to suppress his teachings.