Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (34 page)

So, on his arrival in London, Dudley at once began to consult and scheme with the principal councillors of the realm. Lady Mary was soon acquainted with the proposals to depose Somerset, and it seems very likely that she was asked to take part; it was even possible that she might be declared ‘regent’ in these early years of her brother’s rule. While consorting with the conservatives, however, Dudley was also ingratiating himself with the reformers. The council were united against the protector.

The leading members of that council addressed a letter to Charles V in which they stated their reasons for deposing Somerset. He had become ‘haught and arrogant’; he had been used ‘to taunt such of us as frankly spake their opinions’; he had shown ‘wilfulness and insolency’; he had by his proclamations and devices
brought the people ‘to such a liberty and boldness that they sticked not to rebel and rise in sundry places’; and, in the middle of these disorders, he still built for himself ‘in four or five places most sumptuously’.

As soon as he became aware of these stirrings against him, which had first become manifest in late spring or early summer, Somerset tried to mobilize support on his own behalf. He sent out letters and proclamations that were in turn answered by letters and proclamations from the council. On 5 October the young king summoned ‘all his loving subjects’ to Hampton Court, where he then resided, and to come ‘with harness and weapon’; the protector was clearly speaking through him. The young king was even brought before some of Somerset’s followers, where he requested that ‘I pray you be good to us and to our uncle’. Yet it is unlikely that Edward had any real affection for him, or even resented the turn of events. When he eventually returned to London the imperial ambassador said that the young king ‘certainly looked as if he had had a surprise’.

Two days later the protector removed Edward from Hampton Court to the castle at Windsor, where a group of his own men-at-arms were set to guard him. He issued a summons to the lords and to the people asking for their assistance; but no one rose in his defence. Even Cranmer, with whom he had planned the reforms of religion, seems now to have turned against him.

Dudley and the council informed the people by means of proclamation; they wrote to the ambassadors, and to the two princesses. They also took the precaution of sending a letter to the young king himself, professing their loyalty and condemning Somerset for ignoring their advice and exceeding his authority. The protector, seeing the forces now ranged against him, capitulated; any alternative strategy could only lead to civil war. A struggle between the nobles would be an unwelcome reprise of the Wars of the Roses. He surrendered on the understanding that he would be treated leniently. He was, however, together with his partisans, immediately sent to the Tower, where he ‘confessed’ to twenty-nine articles declared against him.

Although Dudley may have been the guiding hand behind these events, it is not at all clear that he was the immediate
beneficiary. It seemed for a time that the conservative faction in the council now held the ascendancy. A proclamation was therefore issued on Christmas Day condemning certain ‘evil disposed’ persons and denying that ‘they should have again their old Latin service, their conjured bread and water, with such like vain and superstitious ceremonies . . .’ Somerset had been so closely associated with such innovations as the Book of Common Prayer that his fall was always likely to arouse the hopes of his religious adversaries. Rumours spread that the conservative faction was about to strike at Dudley by accusing him of being complicit in all of Somerset’s actions; reports followed that Cranmer had to persuade the king to nominate reformers to the council in order to gain a majority. In the event, through a series of manoeuvres as obscure as they are intricate, Dudley defeated the conservative faction and expelled their principal members from the council. Somerset was released from the Tower in February 1550 and was given a free pardon. Yet the politics of state had changed for ever.

Dudley did not take the title of protector; he was too cautious to proclaim his primacy in that manner. Instead he determined to act and to govern through his colleagues on the council. The title Dudley assumed was, therefore, that of lord president of the council. The young king was now brought more firmly into the leading role; he attended certain meetings of the council, although it is likely that these were stage-managed for his benefit.

Yet even though Dudley did not take the name of protector he did assume another title. In due course, more confident in his power, he was ennobled as duke of Northumberland. Northumberland’s chaplain, John Hooper, hailed him as a ‘faithful and intrepid soldier of Christ’ and ‘a most holy and faithful instrument of the word of God’, thus announcing to the world the duke’s reformist credentials. It is difficult to search the heart and conscience of any man. At the time of his death Northumberland confessed that he had always in secret believed the old faith of Catholic England, which in turn would suggest that he had used the banner of reform simply to maintain and consolidate his power.

He also favoured the reforms of religion in the hope and expectation that he could profit from the spoils; a new bishop chosen for the see of Winchester was obliged to surrender his lands in exchange for an annual salary and Northumberland then took
these large territories for himself and his followers. The bishopric of Durham was dissolved and its revenues were directed to sustain Northumberland’s new dukedom. The lands of the bishops were described as the last course of the feast provided by the Church. A preacher at St Paul’s lamented that ‘covetous officers have so used this matter that even those goods which did serve to the relief of the poor, the maintenance of learning, and to comfortable necessary hospitality in the commonwealth be turned to maintain worldly, wicked, covetous ambition’. Charity had given way to bribery. In the reign of a boy king the adults in power were free to gorge themselves upon the kingdom.

Edward remained oddly pliant and passive in his dealings with the duke. A French observer noted that ‘whenever there was something of importance that he [Northumberland] wanted done or spoken by the king without anyone knowing that it came from him, he would come secretly at night into the prince’s chamber after everybody was in bed, unnoticed by anyone. The next morning the young prince would come to his council and, as if they came from himself, advocate certain matters – at which everyone marvelled, thinking they were his own ideas.’ It was noticed by another foreign observer that the king always kept his eyes upon the duke, and would leave a meeting or conversation ‘because of signs the duke of Northumberland had made to him’. Slowly he was being educated in the ways of the world, and in the ways of government, but in no sense did he possess independent authority. Northumberland controlled the grant of offices and lands. It was said that he encouraged the young king in all martial pursuits, including those of archery and hunting, thus keeping him out of the way.

In the matter of religion, however, Edward may have already formed his own opinions. At the time of the fall of Somerset he was twelve years old. That is age enough to be enamoured of faith and piety, and his condemnation of Mary’s religious practices suggest that he was already something of a martinet in this sphere. In the previous year he had completed a treatise on papal pretensions, in which he concluded that the pontiff was ‘the true son of the devil, a bad man, an Antichrist and abominable tyrant’. He may have been instructed by his tutors in this regard, but the tone is surely his own. When he went through the service of consecration
for a new bishop he came upon an invocation of the saints; with a stroke of his pen he cancelled it as a blasphemous addition. It was he who decided that there should be weekly sermons in his country’s churches. ‘Believe me,’ one reformer wrote, ‘you have never seen in the world for these thousand years so much erudition united with piety and sweetness of disposition.’

He was known as the ‘godly imp’, as we have observed, and there may have been a strong element of youthful idealism in his character. Had he not been hailed as ‘the young Josiah’? It was a title that he may have wished to fulfil. Thus he was asked to provide judgement, early in his reign, on the curious case of the bishop’s vestments.

John Hooper, Northumberland’s chaplain, had been promoted to the see of Gloucester. But the putative bishop saw an obstacle in his path. For the ceremony he would be obliged to wear the ecclesiastical habits, the white rochet and black chimere, that he had in the past denounced as the dress of the harlot of Babylon. He said that he would not become a magpie in white and black. The surplice was the magic robe of the conjuror. He was also supposed to swear obedience to the archbishop of Canterbury, where before he had promised to defer to no authority other than the Scriptures. His opposition threatened to split the new church discipline, and as a result he was confined for a period to the Fleet prison. Cranmer asked for the king’s judgement on the matter and, at the behest of Edward, a compromise was agreed. Hooper would don the vestments at the service of consecration, but he would not be obliged to wear them for his diocesan affairs. The bishop has since that time become known as ‘the father of nonconformity’. We may say, in the words of St James, ‘how great a matter a little fire kindleth’.

A parliament had been summoned towards the end of 1549 that confirmed the movement of religious change. The eight orders of the medieval church were abolished to make way for the less complex order of bishops, priests and deacons. This was now largely to be a simplified preaching ministry. The priest was no longer expected ‘to offer sacrifice and celebrate Mass both for the living and the dead’, as desired in the past, but to preach the plain
gospel and administer the sacraments. Yet many clandestine papists were still to be found among the clergy; they recited the communion office with the same cadences and whisperings as the old Latin Mass; they bent down over the communion table; they genuflected and lifted up their hands; they struck their breasts and made the sign of the cross in the air. These were the vile rags of popery, infinitely comforting to many in the congregation.

An Act was passed prohibiting any statues or figures in the parish church except ‘the monumental figures of kings or nobles who had never been taken for saints’; since the Book of Common Prayer provided all necessary instruction, other prayer books, manuals or missals were to be destroyed. If they were not burnt, they could be sold to book-binders as convenient material; they could of course also be used in the jakes. In the spring of the following year it was decreed that stone altars should be removed and replaced by wooden communion tables. ‘A goodly receiving, I promise you,’ one conservative bishop declared, ‘to set an oyster table instead of an altar . . .’

The altar of St Paul’s Cathedral was taken down in the dead of night, in case of popular protest, and a table set up at the foot of the steps before a curtain. Yet a chronicle of the time reports that, three days later, ‘a man was slain in Paul’s church and two frays within the church that same time afterwards’; these ‘frays’, or disturbances, became so frequent that a royal proclamation was issued against them, lamenting that ‘many quarrels, riots, frays and bloodshed have been made in some of the said churches, besides shooting of handguns to doves’. Churches had now become the centre of bitter controversy.

The parish church was now a plain, bare room; no decoration was to be seen except, perhaps, for a memorial text or two and a painted wooden board bearing the royal arms. Where once the altar had stood was now a table and bench for communicants. William Harrison, at a slightly later date, wrote that ‘dead cold is our age . . . there is blue ice in our churches’. Yet in these bare churches the laity participated much more openly in the service; Bible reading was given primacy, and the fundamentals of the Christian faith – the creeds, the confession of faith and prayer – were properly
and fully emphasized. In the royal court itself biblical and prophetic poetry took the place of sonnets and ballads. Edwardian drama, too, concerned itself with scriptural themes.

It was still possible to go too far. In the spring of 1550 Joan Bocher, known as Joan of Kent, was arrested for preaching the doctrine that Christ was not incarnate of the Virgin Mary; he had passed through her by miracle like a ray of light through a glass. At her interrogation she ably pointed out the changes of doctrine already accommodated by the religious authorities. ‘Not long since,’ she said, ‘you burned Anne Askew for a piece of bread [the denial of transubstantiation] and yet came yourselves to believe and propose the same doctrine for which you burned her . . .’ That was true enough. Yet she was sentenced to death by burning and when a preacher intoned against her as she stood at the stake in Smithfield she called out that ‘he lied like a knave’. And so she died. She was condemned as an ‘Anabaptist’, a catch-all title of opprobrium that was attached to anyone with beliefs that might lead to subversion or anarchy within the body politic.