Edward VI

The Groundwork Of British History

By GEORGE TOWNSEND WARNER M.A. AND C. H. K. MARTEN M.A.

Published By Blacke and Sons Ltd - 1926

Henry, empowered by Parliament to settle the succession in his will, left the throne first to his son Edward; if he died with-out an heir, the crown was to go to his daughter Mary; if her line failed, to Elizabeth; and finally, to the descendants of his younger sister, Mary. It will be noticed that Henry's presage of the failure of descendants came true; but his will was not completely carried out, for the crown in the end passed to the descendants of his elder sister, the Scottish line, which he passed over.

Meanwhile, as Edward was only nine, a Regency was inevit-able, and everything would turn on the political and religious ideas of the Regency. Henry had nominated a council, with men of different shades of opinion included in it, in the hope that it would do nothing but maintain things as they were. Yet here again Henry's plans failed, for the young king's uncle, Seymour, managed to win over to his side Part of the council, and got himself declared Lord Protector of the Realm. With their help, and adding to himself the title of the Duke of Somerset, he prepared to put his ideas into practice.

Several serious dangers lay ahead of him; opportunities which might be taken, but which if neglected would prove fatal. To begin with, there was a growing party desirous of further change in religion, some of them genuinely religions anxious for a complete form of Protestantism, others troubles. merely greedy for further plunder of property devoted to religious uses. This party, though prominent, was small; large masses of the country, especially in the conservative north and west, were opposed to any meddling with their old faith. Besides reli-gious trouble there was serious economic distress. Ever since the Black Death the process of converting corn land into pas-ture, often by driving off the old manorial tenants, had been busily pressed. As sheep-farming employed fewer men, there were many left without work. This distress was aggravated by the dissolution of the monasteries. The monks had been old-fashioned lords, often well content with old ways. The new owners of the monastery lands were active "improvers ", with no respect for custom or old tenants. And where distress had existed the monasteries had done something to relieve it. Further trouble was caused by Henry's debased coin, for money no longer circulated at its face value; when men were in doubt whether a shilling was worth a shilling or only sixpence, all busi-ness transactions were upset, and the evil tended to grow. Not all the coin was bad; but men naturally were unwilling to part with good shillings when they got them, and strove to pay away the bad coins. The good money was hoarded, or even melted down for the sake of the silver, and the bad money took its place. Thus, with doubt and division in religious matters, widespread distress in agriculture, and confusion in all business transactions, the new Lord Protector would have his hands full. Another important, though less urgent question, would also demand attention - that of the young king's marriage. In all these matters Somerset failed, the more lamentably since, though he was an enlightened and honest man, the goodness of his ideas was quite obscured by the badness of the methods which he employed to carry them out. In aims his policy was ad-mirable, in results purely disastrous.

At the outset he had an opportunity which had not been given to any English statesman since Edward I - the chance to join England and Scotland by a royal marriage. Mary Scottish Queen of Scots, the little orphaned daughter of policy. James V, was the obvious future bride for young Edward VI. Scotland being divided between a French Catholic party, headed by the Queen-mother, Mary of Guise, and an "English" party, who favoured a Reformation, Somerset's plain duty was to take care not to unite these parties in the one thing in which they could be united, namely, in a common hatred of England. This, however, he at once proceeded to do. Finding that his scheme of betrothal was not at once kindly received, he marched an army into Scotland which utterly defeated the Scots at Pinkie Cleugh (1547). This was not the way to win Scotland. Huntly put the Scottish feeling into memorable words: "I mislike not the match, but the manner of the wooing". The little queen was sent over to France, where she was shortly affianced to the Dauphin. Somer-set's hasty violence had ruined his own plans.

In religious matters he acted just as rashly. Convinced that England was ready to go much further with the Reformation, he ordered. the abolishing of the mass and the use of Latin in the service, and sent commissioners round the country to pull down the images in the churches and destroy the pictures on the walls. As some of the commis-sioners' servants carried out these orders in an offensive way, parading the streets dressed as mock-priests, and burning the pictures with the same sort of spirit as a later generation burnt effigies of Guy Fawkes, this caused intense anger in all the old-fashioned parts of the country. Generation after generation had used the same service, and, whether they understood it or not, had treasured it as the sacred ground whereon men may approach to the presence of God; unnumbered prayers had been uttered before images which helped dull minds to contemplate their Redeemer and the saints; sacred pictures had hallowed and beautified churches, and had grown to be loved for the permanence of the blessed hopes they had given to one sorrowful heart after another. Now all were rudely swept away, and to the simple country folk it seemed as if the gateway of heaven had been closed, and new prison-houses with white-washed walls put in the place of the many mansions of the blest on earth.

On minds still in bewilderment, seeking reasons for this change, fell another blow, but this time chiefly on the towns. The old guilds, so common in every town, were almost as familiar in men's lives as their religion. They had many objects: some, such as the regulation of property. trades, declining in value; some taking the shape of festivities and miracle plays, more amusing perhaps than useful; some chiefly religious in aim; others, however, were of great practical use. Were a guilds man sick or in distress, he looked to his guild for aid; if his tools were stolen or his house burnt, his guild helped him. If he died in poverty, his guild buried him, educated his children, looked after his widow, and paid for masses for the repose of his soul. If a man wished to leave money or lands in charity, he left it to his guild, and, as this form of be-quest was common, many of the guilds were rich. The greedy eye of the Government fell on them; they, like the monasteries, held much property devoted to religious uses in the shape of masses for the dead; in some respects, too, they might be de-scribed as effete. And so an act was passed confiscating their property. The effect was something as if at the present day the Government were to seize the property of all benefit societies, sick clubs, and workmen's friendly societies. Here again was a measure angering and injuring masses of poor men, all the more offensive because the London guilds were spared, being, it may be supposed, too dangerous to molest.

Trouble was not long in coming. Somerset's brother, Lord Seymour of Sudely, first plotted a rebellion. He had married Henry VIII's widow, Catharine Parr, and sought to make for himself a position like that of Warwick the Kingmaker. He coined money and forged cannon in his own foundries, fortified Bolt Castle, and intrigued against the Protector. The Council dealt with him by act of attainder, and had him executed, but the treasonable schemes of so near a relation did Somerset no good. Next came further proof of the Protector's failure in the shape of two insurrections, which burst out at the same time in the west and in the east, and here once more Somerset's incapacity was made plain. The insurrection in the west, where men were still mainly Catholic in faith, was entirely religious in character; it was caused by the New Prayer Book of 1549 which had been put in place of the old service. In the eastern counties there was no religious discontent, for Norfolk and the east, owing partly to immigrants from the Low Countries, was strongly Protestant. Rebellion here sprang from social causes: the enclosures of commons and amble land for the purpose of sheep-farming had thrown many out of work; the debased coinage had upset all manufacturers and all workmen, all wages and all prices; in Norwich and the towns men were indignant at the confiscation of the guilds. Thus at the same moment the most widely severed parts of the country, the poorest and the richest - the backward, agricultural, Catholic west, and the progressive, manu-facturing Protestant east - were each driven to rebellion.

There is only one thing which a Government can do with rebellion, and that is to put it down. Inquiry into the reasons for it, sympathy with men misled into it, remedy for the causes of it, can only come after, namely, when the rebels have laid down arms and become once more citizens. This the well-meaning Somerset did not see. For the Devonshire rebels, in arms for their old religion, he had no sympathy and no mercy. It was indeed some time before he had the upper hand of them. Through the summer of 1549 the west was in a flame; 10,000 men, under Pomeroy and Arundel, in arms; the mass everywhere celebrated; and Exeter besieged. So instant was the danger that a body of German mercenaries had to be taken into the Govern-ment service. These under Lord Grey de Wilton met the rebels at St. Mary Clyst and Sampford Courtenay, and, with every advantage of arms and discipline, had hard work to overcome them. No such fighting had been seen in England since the battle of Stoke. Some four thousand were killed in these fierce combats, and at the end the leaders were hanged at Tyburn, and so order was restored.

So stern in the west, where German firelocks were turned against English peasants, Somerset in the east was mild to the point of feebleness. With the great body of rebels, who, under their leaders Robert and William Ket, encamped on Mouse-hold Hill, outside Norwich, dominating the town, and levying provisions from the gentry round about, he felt some sympathy, for he had realized himself the evils of the enclosures and of the bad money, and meant in time to mend them. Hence he tried to make terms. This only encouraged the rebels to remain under arms. Inevitably, fighting began between them and the neighbouring gentry, and the Council naturally turned from Somerset to a stronger man. They ordered the Earl of Warwick to attack the rebels, which he did with great vigour, slaughtering a number and dispersing the rest.

With this reputation as a man of energy, Warwick turned to overthrow Somerset. The Protector's failures had been many; his rivals in the Council were jealous of him; he had no strong party behind him. In 1551 he submitted to the Council, and was sent to the Tower; pardoned for the time, he was restored to his place in the Council; but Warwick feared him too much to leave him in peace, and in January, 1552, he was executed on a charge of conspiracy .

So fell Somerset, one of those tragic failures, an honest and well-meaning man, whose real fault was that he was in advance of his time. Misled into thinking that the opinions round him in London and at court were held throughout the country, mis-taken in his belief that the nation, which under Henry VIII had thrown off the yoke of Rome with such enthusiasm, was really anxious for a reform in doctrine, rash in his changes, yet, in spite of his failures, many in England loved him. At his execution those near the scaffold dipped handkerchiefs in his blood to trea-sure as relics of a good man. He was, after all, honest, which is more than can be said for the man who followed him.

At the date of Somerset's death Edward VI was nearly fifteen. All had the highest hopes of him. He was intensely popular, as his father had been as a young man. Those round him at court knew his ability, his earnestness, and his sincere Protestantism. The nation looked forward to the rule of a king who would sweep away all the failures of the Regency. "When he comes of age," cried an enthusiastic Hampshire squire, "he will hang up an hundred heretic knaves." Probably such methods would not have overmuch distressed a king who noted coldly in his diary his uncle's death thuswise:
"This day the Duke of Somerset had his head cut off between eight and nine o'clock in the morning" As it happened, Edward was destined never to rule.

'The last two years of his reign serve in some ways, however, to illustrate his ideas. A "Second Prayer Book", issued in 1552, went much further towards Protestantism than the first; more of the ceremonies of the Church were abolished; Articles of Re-ligion - forty-two in number - were published, and other changes made, all following the ideas of the more extreme Reformers. At the same tine some useful steps were taken. To relieve the distress from which the labourers were suffering efforts were made to check the enclosures and to revive agriculture; the first Poor Law enacted that collections were to be made in each parish for the poor; and the expenses of the royal household were lessened. Unluckily time, the one great healing element in all political troubles, was lacking; what England needed was stable government, and it became increasingly clear that another change was at hand. Edward's health failed, and the next heir was the Catholic Mary. Where the future was so uncertain, the present was bound to be dark, unsettled, troublous.

To no one was the prospect more menacing than to the Earl of Warwick, who had contrived Somerset's fall, and now ruled in his place. The son of Henry VII's minister, that Dudley whom Henry VIII had put to death chiefly because his enterprise in collecting money for the Crown had made him bitterly hated, John Dudley - now created Duke of Northumberland - had proved himself a capable soldier and a successful, if unscrupulous, politician. He had at any rate the politician's instinct of being on the crest of the wave. Neither sincere nor trustworthy, he had taken the side of the extreme Reformers, partly because it agreed with the young king's ideas, partly because he knew that the old nobility who favoured the system of Henry VIII would, if they returned to power, at once overthrow him. But if the honest Somerset could not succeed in making the country accept a form of Protestantism for which it was not yet ready, the dishonest and selfish Northumberland was certain to fail. Balancing thus upon the favour of the young king and the unsteady support of the Council, Northumberland in 1552 found his position be-coming more and more precarious as Edward VI's health failed. Accordingly he set to work to secure himself. It was not diffi-cult to convince Edward that, if Mary came to the throne, the Reformation would be undone, and Edward was sincere in his support of the Reformation, even if Northumberland was not Accordingly, by Northumberland's advice, he made a will setting aside both Mary and Elizabeth as illegitimate, and leaving the crown to Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of Henry VIII's youngest sister. As Northumberland had shortly before married his second son, Lord Guildford Dudley, to Lady Jane, this stroke would not only have secured the Protestant succession, but also the family influence of the Duke himself. He would at any rate be safe, and as father-in-law of the new queen he might hope to be ruler of the kingdom.

If the nation had been set on having a Protestant sovereign, Northumberland's scheme was sound enough. Lady Jane certainly had all the good qualities of a queen. It soon became clear, however, that the nation was not so set. When Edward died, in 1553, Northumberland tried to lay hands on Mary ere she learnt the news. But a friend brought her immediate warning, and she slipped away to her Catholic friends, the Howard's, in Norfolk. She at once declared herself queen, and everyone supported her claim. Even in London Northumberland's plans failed hopelessly. His pro-clamation of Lady Jane as queen was received in silence or with protest. His son, Lord Robert Dudley, sent to arrest Mary, reached her in Norfolk, but his men would not fight. The fleet declared for Queen Mary. Thousands of men were rallying to her cause. Even Northumberland's own force, which he led into the Eastern Counties, mutinied and deserted him, and on July 20, less than a fortnight from Edward's death, he was forced to give up hope, and himself proclaimed Mary queen at Cambridge. If he thought to disarm the anger of a Tudor in this way he was soon undeceived. He was arrested the next day, and sent to the Tower. There he grovelled further, and announced that he had been always at heart a Catholic, and only a forced supporter of the Reformation. Having thus made
him do the cause of the Reformation all the harm he could, Mary had him beheaded.