Edward VI in 1552 |
Tudor treachery at the court of the boy king
His six year reign is often overlooked
but Edward VI’s rule was as important as his father Henry VIII’s or his half-sister Elizabeth’s, writes Stanley Johnson
Edward VI: The Lost King of England by Chris Skidmore. Weidenfeld and Nicholson. £20.
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EDWARD VI founded Sherborne School in Dorset, the educational establishment where I spent five happy years in the 1950s. The school song, lustily sung at the end of each term by more than six hundred boys, had a stirring chorus: Vivat Rex Eduardus Sextus! Vivat! Vivat! Vivat!
I left Sherborne in 1958 knowing, I am ashamed to admit, almost nothing about the life of the school’s illustrious founder. Happily, almost 50 years later, that gaping hole in my knowledge has now been filled. Chris Skidmore’s biography of Edward VI: The Lost King of England is a totally gripping read.
Without giving any secrets away, let me summarize the plot. Henry VIII, who has divorced Katherine of Aragon and beheaded Anne Boleyn, finally achieves after a 27-year wait a male heir through his marriage to Jane Seymour. Edward is born on October 12, 1537. Te Deums are sung in parish churches up and down the land. Mary and Elizabeth (Edward’s half-sisters) are written out of the succession. The Duke of Somerset takes over as Protector, though he has to watch his back constantly, for this is Tudor England and men with daggers lurk behind every pillar.
Behind the personal rivalries and enmities, and often bound up inextricably with them, lurk profound religious and constitutional differences. Henry VIII has repudiated Rome, the monasteries have been dissolved, the Chantries abolished, yet the habit of Catholicism runs deep. There are, as ever, reformers on one side and conservatives on the other.
Though he succeeded to the throne when he was only nine-years-old and died when he was only 15, Griswold paints a picture of a surprisingly mature young man. Edward’s tutors gave him a thorough grounding in the classics, though his grasp of French obviously left something to be desired. Towards the end of his brief reign, when he becomes more immersed in the affairs of state, he seems more than capable of bearing the burdens of a king. Some of those burdens were on his very doorstep.
Mary’s determined Catholicism, and her celebration of the mass within her own household, elicits a veritable broadside in Edward’s hand-written letter of January 28, 1551: “Your near relationship to us, your exalted rank, the conditions of the times, all magnify your offence. It is a scandalous thing that so high a personage should deny our sovereignty; that our sister should be less to us than any of our subjects is an unnatural example; and, finally, in a troubled republic, it lends colour to faction among the people.”
What a joy it would be if today’s early-teenagers showed such a mastery of prose.
There is no doubt where Edward stood in the great conservative versus reformers (Catholic v Protestant) debate. Archbishop Cranmer himself, the architect of the Reformation, told John Cheke, Edward’s tutor, that the young king “hath more divinity in his little finger, than we have in all our bodies”.
Though Skidmore tells us there is no evidence that Edward was personally involved in the production of the second Book of Common Prayer in 1552, the emergence of that great work was one of the glories of his reign and has marked the life, language and literature of England as much, if not more, than any other single volume.
As he lay dying – possibly from tuberculosis – Edward exerted every effort to ensure a Protestant succession by naming Lady Jane Grey as heir to the throne. But he had not counted on Mary’s wily determination. She asserts her claim, rides off to Norfolk and raises the banner of revolt. Vox populi, vox dei! The Council sends Dudley, now Duke of Northumberland, to apprehend her, but it is Northumberland who returns in chains to the capital. His last-minute ‘conversion’ to Catholicism is not enough to win Mary’s pardon.
Did Edward VI ever enjoy himself? According to Skidmore, he played tennis 293 times a year and followed other manly pursuits such as hunting and jousting. Apart from mentioning the proposed marriage to Mary, Queen of Scots and his betrothal to Princess Elizabeth of France, Skidmore is silent on the subject of the young king’s girlfriends. This may be through lack of evidence, or it may simply be a reflection of Skidmore’s own high seriousness.
According to the blurb, he has recently been appointed adviser to David Willetts MP, Shadow Secretary for Education. You can hardly be more serious than that.
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