The Tudors (57 page)

The revolution proceeded apace, receiving fresh impetus from the many reformers who had come hurrying from the continent after the death of Henry (who would have had many of them killed for their beliefs). Seven of Henry’s bishops were replaced with men of solidly evangelical credentials—men who impressed king and council with their
zeal to make England a fitting home for the elect. The Dudley administration launched yet another assault on what remained of the church’s wealth, confiscating most of the endowments of the dioceses and destroying the last of the guilds and chantries. Such raids served an array of purposes. The government’s financial state remained dizzyingly precarious, and Dudley and his cohorts welcomed opportunities to funnel fresh revenues into the treasury while skimming off a share for themselves. The most radical of the reformers would have been pleased not merely to reduce the bishops to penury but to rid the church entirely of its traditional structures, bishops and dioceses included. These, too, were regarded as vestiges of the old Roman decadence.

The religious landscape was growing more complicated by the year. Cranmer’s difficulties were compounded by the fact that the uniformity he hoped to establish at any given time was always based on what he himself happened to believe at that time, and his beliefs were endlessly developing. Thus he repeatedly found himself demanding that everyone believe what he himself had previously denied, and forbidding beliefs that he had previously held to be compulsory. There were of course no longer any avowed
Roman
Catholics in positions of importance in the central government or the national church, and anyone conservative enough to try to retain the old forms without the old connection to Rome was rendered voiceless when not purged. It was the radicals, therefore, who now presented the most serious challenge to consensus. Their beliefs differed bewilderingly; the innovations with which Martin Luther had rocked Europe just three decades before could seem conservative if not reactionary when compared with the ideas more recently imported from Geneva and Zurich. Confusion was inescapable, and discord followed inevitably in its wake. When Cranmer introduced his revised Prayer Book, the fiery Scottish preacher John Knox (trained in Geneva and a protégé of Dudley, who had given him employment as a royal chaplain) complained loudly because it did not ban the old practice of kneeling to receive communion. Though Cranmer was archbishop of Canterbury and Knox by comparison was scarcely more than a nonentity, there followed a struggle for royal approval during which Edward himself intervened to postpone the issuance of the new service. Cranmer finally prevailed, at least to the extent that worshippers were instructed
to kneel, but he was obliged to insert into the Prayer Book a so-called Black Rubric explaining that the practice was a gesture of respect, not a worshipping of bread and wine.

It is hardly surprising if many men and women, faced with endless surprises and reversals and disagreements, witnessing the abandonment of one aspect after another of the church in which they had been raised, simply lost interest in religion. That this was happening is suggested by the Second Act of Uniformity, which deplored the emptiness of pews and compelled regular attendance at approved services. But it was too late for Parliament, or any archbishop or king, to restore uniformity on any basis. England had become a religiously divided nation and would remain one until, after four more centuries, it became essentially postChristian.

John Dudley, soon after Somerset’s fall, had made himself a kind of father figure for Edward, coaching him and encouraging his involvement in governance of church and state. At first Edward was most active in religious matters—delaying, as we have seen, issuance of the 1552 Prayer Book—and always his aim was the acceleration of evangelical reform. Always he acted in the conviction that he was charged by God to lead the people to the truth, and always he was applauded for this by Dudley and Cranmer in spite of the fact that those two worthies were often at odds with each other. In affairs of state, too, Edward gradually became not only active but important. By 1553 he was signing the Crown’s financial warrants not only with but in place of the council. Though it would be saying too much to claim that he was actually
ruling
, certainly he was receiving a thorough preparation for the responsibilities of kingship. His apprenticeship, reinforced by his intelligence and immense self-assurance and an education probably more rigorous than that received by any English king before or since, suggested that a remarkable career lay ahead.

The soldier Dudley broadened Edward’s daily regimen to include the kinds of martial exercises in which his own sons were being trained, skills needed to make him a warrior-king in the ancient tradition. The boy underwent instruction in horsemanship, jousting, archery, hunting, and the latest weaponry, and though he had inherited little of his father’s strength and vitality he appears to have responded with enthusiasm. If it is idle to wonder about what sort of man Edward might have become, it
is nonetheless irresistibly interesting. What he revealed of himself suggests that he would have ruled as flamboyantly as his father: while still little more than a child he showed a passion for gambling, lavish dress, and other extravagances. In true Henrician fashion he spent outlandish sums to acquire some of the costliest gems to be found on the continent even as his government struggled to stave off insolvency. He appears to have been like his father, too, in taking no interest in whatever misfortunes—hunger resulting from failed harvests, outbreaks of plague or the sweat—might be afflicting his subjects. Perhaps his least attractive characteristic was his apparent conviction, which could easily look like priggishness anchored in arrogance, that he possessed not only the authority but the wisdom to manage the lives of his elders. He not only attempted to prevent his sister Mary from hearing mass but admonished her to refrain from dancing, an innocent pleasure that that thwarted and unhappy spinster must have badly needed. When his schoolmate Barnaby Fitzpatrick went off to study in Paris, Edward sent him hectoring letters cautioning him to avoid not only Catholic observances but the company of women. On the other hand, he displayed no thirst for blood; so far as is known, the fact that neither Somerset nor Dudley killed a single conservative for resistance to reform was perfectly acceptable to the king.

As for what the future might bring—for Edward VI it brought almost nothing. What sixteenth-century medical science could not know was that at some point in childhood or early adolescence he had contracted tuberculosis. The infection had been confined inside the healthy tissue of his lungs but not eliminated, and his brief illness of April 1552 amounted to a sentence of death because measles destroys the immune system’s ability to keep latent tuberculosis in check. As the year proceeded he continued with his studies, continued to pursue the military exercises that Dudley had introduced, and continued to participate in the work of the council and the formalities and festivities of what remained a fairly splendid Renaissance court. But he was slowly, inexorably, invisibly dying. He had never been an impressive physical specimen (an Italian physician named Hieronymus Cardano, upon meeting him, reported that he was “of a stature somewhat below the middle height, pale-faced with gray eyes … rather of a bad habit of body than a sufferer from fixed diseases” and “carried himself like an old man”), and in the course of growing up he had occasionally been seriously
ill with diseases including malaria. Overall, however, through most of 1552 he seemed healthy enough and even engaged in jousting for the first time. Eventually, it became evident that something was wrong. By year-end a chronic cough and increasing weakness were making it obvious to all, the king himself included, that something was
seriously
wrong. He continued to deteriorate through the first months of 1533, then experienced a remission that sparked hopes of a recovery, and finally relapsed so severely that in the first week of June both he and his councilors were advised that death was now not only inevitable but likely to come soon.

He makes a melancholy picture: this solitary boy, his father and mother and stepmothers all long dead, separated by religion from the one sister to whom he appears to have had a strong bond of affection, faced with oblivion just as a life of limitless possibility was opening before him. It is difficult to comprehend, today, the extent to which his life as a juvenile king in an almost fantastically formal court had cut him off from normal human interaction. Not even Edward’s sisters could speak to him without first kneeling, and when either of them dined “with” him, she had to sit not at the same table but off at a distance, on a low cushion. His food was served by nobles and gentlemen who were obliged to kneel before placing their offerings on the table. All this went far beyond the protocols of even the French court, where serving was done by pages rather than mature men of high rank, and where even the pages had only to bow rather than kneel. Everything reinforced in Edward the sense that he was a being apart, existing on a plane beyond the reach of ordinary humans. Eventually some suitable marriage might have brought him companionship. Though his early betrothals—first to Mary, Queen of Scots, and then to a French princess—had come to nothing, and though a nearly bankrupt English Crown no longer could play as weighty a role in continental affairs as it had during his father’s prime, Edward was still as marriageable a young bachelor as any in Europe. Now, however, none of that meant anything. There would be no marriage, no fourth generation of Tudor kings … no companion.

Facing the end, the certainty that he could hope for nothing in this world, Edward turned his attention to what would happen after he was gone. In all of England and Wales hardly anyone could have been more passionately devoted to the cause of religious reform, more certain that
the Protestant revolution being carried out during his reign was a triumph for divine truth and that a reversal of that revolution would be a disaster worse than war or plague. But under the terms of his father’s last will, the throne was to pass next to his sister Mary, who in Edward’s presence had proclaimed herself ready to die rather than abandon her Catholic faith. The affection that Edward had always shown for Mary did not keep him from recoiling at the prospect of a Catholic queen. Thus was he moved, as his life began to ebb away, to search for a way to pass the crown to someone other than Mary and also other than his other sister. (Elizabeth, whatever her religious inclinations, was burdened with the same liability as Mary: though Henry’s will recognized her as third in line to the throne, she like Mary remained illegitimate under a statute that Parliament had never repealed. Thus if Mary were to be set aside on grounds of bastardy—probably the best available way of denying her the crown—Elizabeth, too, would be disqualified.)

Edward needed an heir of royal blood and impeccable legitimacy. At least as important, because this was the point of everything he was setting out to do, his heir must be solidly Protestant. But the condition of the Tudor family tree in 1553 was such that, to find someone who satisfied all three criteria, he was going to have to stretch the law in awkward ways.

The first problem was the curious fact that, among the descendants of Henry VII then living in England, Edward was the only male. As a result of the early deaths over two generations of several Scottish princes, the only surviving product of his aunt Margaret Tudor’s marriage to King James IV of Scotland was the young Mary, Queen of Scots. Henry VIII, perhaps because Margaret’s offspring were foreigners and perhaps out of pique with her irregular marital history, had excluded her entire branch of the family from the succession. Had he not done so, Edward would have found Mary unacceptable anyway. She was reputed to be almost as fervent a Catholic as he was an evangelical. Nearly as bad, she was not only living in France but betrothed to the heir to the French throne.

This left the fruit of the love match between Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. Four children had been born of this union, two sons and two daughters, but the boys had both died in childhood. When Mary herself died at age thirty-seven, she was
survived only by the girls Frances and Eleanor, who were married to Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset, and Henry Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, respectively. Eleanor Clifford was dead by 1553, but she and her sister between them had four living children, the eldest just reaching maturity. All, as it happened, were female: Frances’s daughters Jane, Catherine, and Mary Grey, and Eleanor’s daughter, Margaret Clifford. (The Grey sisters, incidentally, were granddaughters of one of the sons that Elizabeth Woodville had before her marriage to Edward IV.)

If Frances or any of her children or Eleanor’s one child had been male, Edward would have had no difficulty in selecting his heir. The absence of a single male among them, however, complicated matters considerably. Throughout the thousand-plus years of post-Roman English history, there had been only one attempt to place a female claimant on the throne, and that had led (back in the twelfth century, when King Henry I died leaving only a daughter) to years of disorder and war. A pair of documents survives showing the steps by which the dying Edward groped toward a solution. In the first, a draft in Edward’s own hand, he proposes leaving the throne of England to “the Lady Fraunces’s heirs masles” first (Frances was still in her mid-thirties, possibly still capable of producing a son), then to the male heirs of Frances’s daughters beginning with “the Lady Jane’s” because she was the eldest. The problem was that none of the Grey girls had heirs male or otherwise—Jane was only sixteen, her sisters scarcely more than children. According to this first plan of Edward’s, after his death the throne would have to remain vacant until someone in the Grey family gave birth to a boy. And what if one of the younger sisters had a son before Jane? Would the succession remain in abeyance until Jane either bore a son or grew too old to do so?

It was impossible. Edward in his next draft removed Frances from the succession—there is no evidence that she objected—and with a few strokes of his pen outlined an almost outlandishly ambitious new plan. The deletion of an apostrophe and a single letter turned “Jane’s” into “Jane,” and the words “and her” were inserted immediately thereafter. Now the crown was to pass not to the male heirs
of
Jane Grey but to “
the Lady Jane and her heirs masles.”
(Edward was of course highly literate, but spelling was a kind of free-form creative art in the sixteenth century.)
Thus did a doomed youth put his mind at rest. The Greys were confirmed evangelicals. In their hands his church, his legacy, would be safe.