HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-04-30T14:40:39.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00The 'Nine Days Queen' is one of England's most controversial monarchs - here's whyhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/nine-days-queen-england-controversial-monarch/2026-04-30T14:40:39.000ZIn April 2026, Bradgate House – the childhood home of Lady Jane Grey – was reopened to the public after extensive conservation work, bringing with it a new wave of interest in the so-called ‘Nine Days Queen’.
But what do we actually know about this enigmatic Tudor noble, who is often cast as a tragic victim?
Who was Lady Jane Grey?
In 1537, Jane was born into the noble Grey family. Her parents were the Duke of Suffolk, Henry Grey, and Lady Frances Brandon.
As the great-granddaughter of Henry VII and great-niece of Henry VIII, Jane was orbiting the English throne from birth. However, as historian Nicola Tallis explains on an upcoming episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, “she wasn’t ever raised as an heir to the throne. She was just this great-niece of Henry VIII who had been living in the countryside."
In 1553, that all changed.
King Edward VI was in increasingly ill-health but, being the first English monarch raised as a Protestant, he was desperate for his Protestant legacy to live on. So, he issued his Devise for the Succession. This legislation barred both of Edward’s half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, from succeeding to the throne.
“[Edward] didn’t want his Catholic half-sister [Mary] to be given the opportunity to reverse all of his good work in the cause of religion”, explains Nicola. “However, Edward realised that he couldn’t exclude one half-sister without also excluding the other. And so, he bars both Mary and his younger half-sister Elizabeth from the succession by reason of their illegitimacy."
This catapulted Jane to first in line for the throne – a place she didn’t want to be.
A reluctant queen
On 6 July 1553, just a few weeks after the Devise for the Succession, Edward VI died at age 15. This officially made Lady Jane Grey the Queen of England.
“She had no wish or desire to be queen whatsoever, but this was an impossible situation for Jane because she was pressured into accepting the throne," says Nicola.
So, Jane reluctantly took to the throne and was publicly proclaimed Queen on 10 July 1553.
Though, it would not last long; Jane would hold the title for a mere nine days. She was soon toppled by Mary I.
Was she really queen?
There has been some debate about whether Lady Jane Grey should be considered one of Britain’s monarchs, given the fact that the Devise for the Succession was never passed through parliament.
But as Diarmaid MacCulloch, speaking to HistoryExtra, points out, “the monarchy has never descended by strict primogeniture, and Queen Jane had a perfectly good claim to the throne: the sort of claim that brought James VI of Scotland to be James I of England in 1603."
Tudor historian Tracy Borman agrees.
“Edward’s Devise for the Succession was legally binding, so Jane’s claim was entirely valid – and arguably more so than other monarchs who claimed the throne without being legally named."
So, why is Jane often left off the list of British monarchs?
“Mary I [Edward VI’s half-sister who took the throne from Lady Jane Grey] had to ensure that her subjects saw her – not the woman she had supplanted – as the only true queen," explains Tracy. The dismissal of Lady Jane Grey was, therefore, a form of propaganda.
- Read more | Mary I: your guide to the life and rule of Henry VIII's daughter – plus a timeline and 7 little-known facts
In the battle over religious belief, Catholic Mary I had many supporters following the intense Protestantism of Edward VI’s reign, and that meant Lady Jane Grey – as a devout Protestant herself – made many enemies. As soon as Mary came to the throne on 19 July 1553, Jane was imprisoned in the Tower of London.
Why was Bradgate House so important?
Within the tumultuous story of Lady Jane Grey’s life, Bradgate House was the place that defined her childhood and provided the environment that shaped her.
“Jane would have grown up in an elite Protestant setting at Bradgate and, during the reign of Edward, some star Protestant preachers such as Bishop Hugh Latimer were welcome guests there," says Diarmaid. This moulded Jane’s Protestant beliefs, which made her such a good candidate to follow in Edward’s footsteps.
Living at Bradgate also gave Jane the opportunity to be educated, in a world where women were still often limited in this regard. Speaking to HistoryExtra, biographer James D Taylor explains that Jane’s scholarly abilities and intellect were nurtured in an environment where education was encouraged: “at a time when schools that we know of now did not exist, [growing up at Bradgate] allowed Jane to read and study with the guidance of tutors."
What can we learn from the story of Lady Jane Grey?
Whether or not Jane is considered a true queen, she was a certainly a definitive figure of the Tudor period, and representative of the era’s religious tensions.
“She’s a great symbol of historical might-have-beens,” says MacCulloch.
Of her short reign, Taylor adds, “though ill-prepared to rule, she did the best she could in the short amount of time she sat on the throne."
Jane refused to have her husband, Lord Guildford, proclaimed king without an Act of Parliament and, as Tallis explains, “the odds did seem to be very much stacked in Jane's favour to begin with. Even Mary's supporters were urging her to flee abroad for her safety because they were convinced that Jane's reign was going to be secure.”
- Read more | The curse of the nine-day queen
But despite her best efforts, Jane couldn’t compete with a vengeful Mary I, who, after being denied her birth right once before, was not willing to let it happen again. When Jane’s father was revealed as a key conspirator in Wyatt's rebellion – a 1554 uprising that aimed to prevent Mary I’s marriage to Philip II of Spain – Jane’s fate was sealed.
On 12 February 1554, Jane was executed at the Tower of London.
But perhaps she shouldn’t be remembered solely as a victim.
“Jane's story vividly illustrates how powerless women could be in the face of ambitious male relatives," says Borman. “Yet it also provides an inspiring example of a young woman with unshakeable religious convictions and principles – one who might, if history had turned out differently, have proved an excellent queen.”
Nicola Tallis was speaking to Isabel King on an upcoming episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, available soon.
]]>Think you know everything about the Tudors? Here are 15 facts that will prove you wronghttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/think-you-know-everything-about-the-tudors-here-are-15-facts-that-will-prove-you-wrong/2026-04-12T15:00:00.000Z1. The Tudors weren’t known as the Tudors
Although we use ‘Tudor’ as a nifty shorthand for both the era and the dynasty, it wasn’t used at the time either by the monarchs or their people. Neither did they see it as a distinct period: in fact, Henry VII went to great lengths to emphasise the continuity with his royal predecessors, even down to using the same tailor whom Edward IV had employed.
He also emphasised his Lancastrian roots and tried to downplay his Welsh origins, aware that his grandfather Owen Tudor had married well above him when he bagged Henry V’s widow Catherine of Valois as a bride. Throughout the period 1485–1603, the people identified as subjects of each successive king or queen, as well as taking pride in their local affiliations, rather than seeing themselves as ‘Tudor people’.
2. They had a pretty dodgy claim to the throne
When Henry Tudor won the crown from Richard III at the battle of Bosworth in 1485, he was quick to stress his legitimacy. But there was more than a hint of protesting too much. In fact, the Tudors were descended from Edward III’s fourth son, John of Gaunt, and his long-standing mistress, Katherine Swynford.
Moreover, Henry VII’s father Edmund was the child of Henry V’s widow, Catherine of Valois, by her Welsh attendant. With such a dubious bloodline, it’s little wonder that England’s first Tudor king wasted no time in marrying Elizabeth of York, the eldest child of Edward IV. Their marriage united the warring houses of York and Lancaster and, crucially, gave the Tudors some much-needed legitimacy.
3. Henry VII was no miser
The first Tudor king has a reputation for penny-pinching. But while he kept a close eye on his expenditure, he knew how to splash the cash when it was to his advantage.
In the early years of his reign, when he was under constant threat from rivals and pretenders and many of his subjects questioned his right to be king, he spent lavish sums on dressing the part. Just over a week after defeating Richard III at Bosworth, he ordered a set of new gowns fashioned from cloth of gold, satin and royal purple velvet at a cost of £336, which roughly equates to £225,000 in today’s money.
During the two years that followed, he spent an eye-watering £5,386 (£3.6 million) on his wardrobe. But his generosity had its limits. His wife, Elizabeth of York, struggled to make ends meet throughout their marriage.
4. You would smell Henry VIII before you saw him
For the last 20 years of his life, Henry was tormented by pain from a chronic leg ulcer, which was aggravated by a serious fall from his horse while jousting in 1536. The ulcer often became inflamed and – unsurprisingly – Henry was a difficult patient, refusing to rest for long enough for it to heal. At its worst, the suppurating wound could be smelt from three rooms away.
- Read more | Was this the moment Henry VIII became a tyrant?
5. Henry VIII’s love of hawking was almost the death of him
Henry’s love of sport was well known throughout the court. As a young king, he would spend hours hunting, jousting, shooting arrows and playing tennis. Hawking was another of his favourite sports and his private apartments contained an impressive array of falconry equipment.
But in 1525, Henry was almost killed while pursuing his hawk. Attempting to pole vault over a ditch, instead he fell headfirst into it and almost drowned. Thankfully, his quick-thinking footman, Edmund Moody, managed to pull him out in the nick of time.
6. Henry VIII was a bit of a prude
Contrary to popular belief, Tudor England’s most-married monarch wasn’t much of a lothario. In fact, he had twice as many wives as mistresses. There is only evidence of three extramarital affairs.
The women involved were Bessie Blount (the mother of Henry’s not-so-subtly-named illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy), Mary Boleyn (sister of his second wife Anne) and ‘Mistress Shelton’, who was either Margaret or Mary Shelton, both cousins of Anne Boleyn.
Although there was a rumour that he once had an affair with Anne’s mother Elizabeth, he stoutly denied it: “Never with the mother!”
7. Anne Boleyn did not have a sixth finger on one hand
This oft-repeated tale is based on scurrilous gossip written almost 50 years after Anne’s death. A host of hostile Catholic tracts about Anne appeared in the 1580s as part of a smear campaign against her ‘heretic’ daughter, Elizabeth I.
Nicholas Sander was one of the most influential and claimed that Anne had been Henry VIII’s daughter as well as his wife, the result of his clandestine affair with her mother. Feeding on the rumours of witchcraft that had circulated at the time of Anne’s demise, he asserted that she had a sixth finger on her right hand and a large ‘wen’ (a boil or mole) under her chin.
Such blemishes were commonly thought to be the ‘Devil’s Mark’ – a symbol of having made a pact with Satan. In fact, Anne was proud of her long, slender fingers and always took care to show them off to best effect… all 10 of them.
8. Anne of Cleves was not ugly
You may have heard the story: Henry VIII fell in love with Anne of Cleves’ portrait and immediately signed on the dotted line of the marriage contract. But when he met his bride in person, he was appalled that she was nothing like her profile picture. So, he had the marriage annulled before you could say ‘off with her head’.
In fact, Holbein’s portrait was faithful to Anne, and many contemporary accounts praise her beauty. If anyone had cause for complaint about their betrothed’s physical assets, it was Anne. Henry was no oil painting by the time she married him in January 1540. Pushing 50, he was bloated, ulcer-ridden and almost certainly impotent. It was with understandable haste that Anne agreed to an annulment just six months later.
9. Edward VI kept a diary
The boy king was the only Tudor monarch to leave behind a private journal. But if you’re expecting a tell-all exposé full of secretly expressed desires, grudges and hopes, you might be disappointed. In fact, it’s a rather dry summary of the events of his reign.
Even the execution of his once-cherished uncle is afforded only the following curt line: “The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off today.” Overall, the diary reveals a boy who was precociously intelligent, as might be expected for Henry VIII’s “precious jewel”, who had the best of everything growing up.
But he also appears cold, unfeeling and uncompromising – a dangerous blend of traits that might have made him an even greater tyrant than his father if he lived to maturity.
10. Lady Jane Grey was queen for 14 days, not nine
Jane has gone down in history as the ‘Nine Days’ Queen’. But while it’s true that she was proclaimed queen on 10 July 1553 and deposed by Mary Tudor on 19 July, her reign technically began as soon as Edward VI had breathed his last on 6 July.
On his deathbed, Edward changed the succession in favour of his Protestant cousin Jane to prevent his Catholic half-sister Mary claiming her right. He was heavily influenced by John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who had married his son Guildford to Jane.
Even so, Edward’s ‘Device’ for the succession was legally-binding, so Jane was the rightful queen as soon as the young king died. Yet she is always referred to as ‘Lady’ rather than ‘Queen’ and is often omitted from the roll call of English monarchs altogether. That owes much to Mary Tudor’s propaganda: to seize the throne, she had to present Jane as a usurper.
11. ‘Bloody Mary’ wasn’t all that bloody
Mary I’s obsession with returning England to the Roman Catholic faith spurred her to have around 300 Protestant heretics burned at the stake. But while there is no doubting the horrific nature of their deaths, Mary acted out of conscience rather than brutality.
Blinded by her own faith, she genuinely believed that she was saving her subjects from eternal damnation by bringing them into the Roman Catholic fold. Furthermore, the number of people who died on Mary’s orders was just a fraction of those who suffered at the hands of her far bloodier father, Henry VIII.
He sent more men and women to their deaths than any other Tudor monarch. Anyone who refused to fall in with his will was sent to the block – commoners, statesmen and wives alike. It even became a crime to think differently from the king. Contemporary records are patchy and inconsistent, so it’s impossible to quantify exactly how many deaths Henry was responsible for. Estimates vary from a few thousand to as many as 72,000.
12. Mary Tudor was a bit of a party girl
Despite her reputation for sober-mindedness and piety, Mary loved to have fun. One of her favourite companions was Jane Fool, a female jester. The queen was also an avid gambler and loved to play cards and board games. She also entertained lavishly and spent huge sums on feasting and drinking.
A scandalised Spanish ambassador reported: “There is plenty of beer here, and they drink more than would fill the Valladolid river [known as the Pisuerga river today]… The ladies and gentlemen put sugar in their wine, with the result that there are great goings on in the palace.”
13. Elizabeth I employed the original James Bond
The queen’s personal astrologer Dr John Dee was one of her closest advisers. She would regularly consult him about the most apposite moment to undertake key events, such as her coronation.
An astrologer, astronomer, mathematician and philosopher, Dee was one of the most learned men of the age. But he also carried out more covert assignments for his royal mistress. She employed Dee as a spy, and he would report on intrigues abroad using complex codes. He signed his letters with the numerals ‘007’.
14. Elizabeth I was (apparently) a man
The ‘Bisley Boy’ legend states that in 1542, the future Elizabeth I (then aged around nine) was sent to Overcourt House in the Cotswold village of Bisley to escape the plague in London. Whilst there, she sickened with a fever and died. Knowing that Henry VIII was on his way to visit his daughter, her panic-stricken governess searched the village in vain for a girl who resembled Elizabeth closely enough to fool the king.
The only child of the right age and colouring was a boy, so in desperation she dressed him in the princess’s clothes and the deception was complete. This unlikely tale dates from the 1800s and was made popular by Dracula author Bram Stoker in his book Famous Impostors.
There is no contemporary evidence to support it and more than a whiff of misogyny about the whole thing. How else could Elizabeth have ruled so successfully for so many years? She must have been a man.
15. Elizabeth I didn’t leave her throne to James VI
But as she lay dying at Richmond Palace in March 1603, she finally settled the matter, gasping that she would have none but “my nearest kinsman the King of Scots”.
This deathbed scene was recorded by the contemporary historian William Camden, who had been commissioned to write a biography of the celebrated queen during her lifetime. But dramatic new research by the British Library has proved that Camden was forced to rewrite it on the orders of the new king to make his accession look more predetermined than it had been.
Using transmitted light, the researchers found that in his original manuscript, written at the time of Elizabeth’s death, Camden had recorded that she died without naming a successor. But a few years later, his words were covered over with the lie that ushered the Stuarts to the Tudor throne.
]]>The lie of succession: did James I steal Elizabeth I's crown?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-lie-of-succession-did-james-i-steal-elizabeth-is-crown/2025-10-13T08:00:19.000ZRichmond Palace, 22 March 1603. Elizabeth I – the self-proclaimed Virgin Queen who had ruled England for 44 years, seeing off the Armada, healing religious divisions and creating a court so magnificent it was the envy of Europe – lay dying. Her anxious advisers clustered around her bedside, urging her to do the thing she had resisted throughout her long reign: name her successor.
Rousing herself from her stupor, the 69-year-old queen declared: “I will that a king succeed me, and what king, but my nearest kinsman, the king of Scots?” Wanting to make completely sure, her chief minister, Robert Cecil, asked whether that was her “absolute resolution” – to which she irritably retorted: “I pray you trouble me no more, I’ll have none but him.”
That “kinsman” was James VI of Scotland, son of Elizabeth’s old rival Mary, Queen of Scots. Her closest surviving blood relative, he had emerged as the front runner in the race for the English crown. He had the support of Cecil and most of his fellow privy councillors, who had been working behind the scenes to smooth James’s path to the throne. The queen, too, had shown him favour, sharing the pearls of her monarchical wisdom during their 20-year correspondence, as if grooming him as her successor. But she had always flinched from actually naming him as such. Now, almost with her last breath, she had. Elizabeth died two days later – and the Tudor dynasty gave way peacefully to the Stuarts.
This dramatic depiction of Elizabeth’s last-gasp naming of the Scottish king as her heir is based solely on an account by the contemporary historian and antiquarian William Camden. He had begun writing his monumental work Annales: The True and Royall History of the Famous Empresse Elizabeth (first published in Latin in 1615) during Elizabeth’s lifetime. Camden was close to some senior members of the queen’s court, and had access to the voluminous state papers of her reign, so historians have relied on his manuscript as one of the most important and accurate sources for the period.
However, none of those present at Elizabeth’s deathbed testified that she had spoken the words Camden quoted in his account, only that the dying queen had raised her hand to her head when James’s name was mentioned – an ambiguous gesture at best.
Rewriting history
Now, groundbreaking new analysis of Camden’s original manuscript by a team at the British Library has revealed that key passages were covered over and rewritten after Elizabeth’s death to make them more favourable to her successor. No fewer than 200 pages have been pasted in, 65 of which replaced original text with a new version. The use of imaging technology has enabled researcher Helena Rutkowska to see the words underneath for the first time in 400 years. Among the findings are that Elizabeth’s naming of James as her heir was a work of fiction, designed to make his accession appear more predetermined than it had been. In fact, she had been the only monarch in English history not to make provision for the succession.
- Read more | The Virgin Queen? Elizabeth I's forbidden love
If this had been more widely known at the time, it might have had profound repercussions for the Stuart dynasty. Rather than welcoming James as the king to whom ‘Good Queen Bess’ had given her blessing, the people of England might have refused to accept him. After all, England and Scotland had been bitter enemies for centuries, with fleeting periods of peace cut short by the clash of arms or threat of invasion. And James was by no means the only candidate with a strong claim to Elizabeth’s throne.
Holding on by his fingertips
Camden had first been commissioned to write his history of Elizabeth’s reign in 1596 by William Cecil (Robert’s father), Lord Burghley – Elizabeth’s most trusted advisor, whom she dubbed her ‘Spirit’. It was not a task that the author had embraced with any alacrity, grumbling about the “piles and heaps of papers and writings of all sorts” that had been placed at his disposal. He made only a faltering start during Elizabeth’s lifetime and, as soon as she died, he quietly set down his quill, hoping that the idea would be forgotten.
Fast forward to 1607 and James VI & I had been on the English throne for four years. The initially peaceful transition from Tudors to Stuarts had given way to turbulence and uncertainty, conspiracy and persecution, witchcraft and gunpowder. With the accession of England’s first Stuart monarch, everything had been transformed – from court culture to royal ceremony, religious tolerance to parliamentary authority, morality to witch-hunting. Two countries that had been fierce rivals for centuries were now forged into an uncomfortably united kingdom. The fleeting popularity that James had enjoyed as the “bright star of the north” had been extinguished, and he was holding onto his new crown by his fingertips.
It was at this moment that James heard about Camden’s stalled biography of his predecessor, and spied an opportunity. To have a published account of Elizabeth’s reign – and, in particular, the succession – written by one of the most esteemed historians of the age would help silence any whispers of usurpation. If, that is, the author was prepared to write it to the king’s satisfaction.
It was with good reason that Camden expressed reluctance when first approached by the king to restart his history of Elizabeth. Quite apart from the heavy burden of research it entailed, writing the history of a queen who, even in death, was eclipsing her unpopular successor was fraught with difficulty. Camden knew that James would not want an unbiased appraisal but one written in his favour. Only the previous year, the king had ordered an account of the gunpowder plot to be rewritten so that it was even more complimentary towards him.
Restarting the history of Elizabeth was the very definition of a poison chalice, and Camden tried everything to avoid drinking from it. But James gave him no choice. At the king’s command, work on the book resumed in 1608. Camden was his subject to command, and the succession was his to rewrite.
Reviving the queen
By the time Camden again took up his quill, rewriting sections to James’s benefit, the cult of ‘Gloriana’ was already in full swing. Elizabeth’s former subjects were quick to forget that they had grown tired of “an old woman’s government” and had longed to have a king ruling over them. One contemporary reflected that, a few short years after Elizabeth’s death, “when we had experience of the Scottish government, then… in hate and detestation of them, the queen did seem to revive. Then was her memory much magnified.”
It was not long before praising the last Tudor queen became a powerful weapon used to attack her Stuart successor. Donning their rose-tinted glasses, her former subjects harked back to a halcyon time when England had enjoyed decades of peace and prosperity, triumphed over the might of Spain, and was presided over by a glorious queen and her court. The anniversary of Elizabeth’s accession day, 17 November, began to be celebrated each year with “joyful ringing of bells, running at tilt, and festival mirth… in testimony of their affectionate love towards her”.
But this sentimental reverence masked the intense uncertainty that had been generated by the persistent refusal of ‘Good Queen Bess’ to name her heir. It’s worth revisiting the history of this reticence and the concerns it had fomented among court and populace.
On 10 February 1559 Elizabeth had told the first parliament of her reign that “in the end this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin”. She then declared that God would provide for the succession and would name an heir “peradventure more beneficial to the realm than such offspring as may come of me”.
This was all very well but, without the wisdom of hindsight, Elizabeth’s subjects had no idea that she would reign longer and more successfully than any of the other Tudor monarchs. Her three predecessors, Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey and Mary I, had reigned for six years, nine days and five years, respectively, and there was no reason to suppose Elizabeth would escape the ill health that dogged the Tudor dynasty. Indeed, nearly four years into her reign she almost died of smallpox. This catapulted the succession to the forefront of people’s minds and, once there, it would not be forgotten. “Now all the talk is who is to be her successor,” reported the Spanish ambassador, Bishop Álvaro de la Quadra, in 1562.
Elizabeth’s determination not to name her heir was born of direct experience. Being heir presumptive during her sister Mary’s brief, bloody reign had placed her in great jeopardy, including a spell in the Tower under threat of execution. “I stood in danger of my life, my sister was so incensed against me,” she told a delegation from parliament in 1566 that had been sent to persuade her to settle the succession. Elizabeth feared that, as soon as she named her heir, the individual chosen would be the focus of plots and rebellions, just as she herself had been during Mary’s reign. “Think you that I could love my winding-sheet?” she demanded to an ambassador, likening a named heir to a shroud.
Fierce rivalry
In remaining tight-lipped about the succession, Elizabeth gave rise to fierce rivalry between the blood claimants to her throne. Principal among them were Mary, Queen of Scots and her son James VI; his cousin Arbella Stuart; Lady Katherine Grey and her descendants; Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon; and the Infanta Isabella, daughter of Philip II of Spain. As Elizabeth’s reign progressed, most of the rival claimants fell by the wayside, either through natural death, disinheritance or execution. In the race for Elizabeth’s throne, it was less a case of ‘who dares wins’, more ‘survival of the fittest’.
In 1600, the English government official and keeper of records Thomas Wilson opined: “This crown is not like to fall to the ground for want of heads that claim to wear it.” Although he admitted that it was “straightly prohibited” to discuss the succession, he went on to give an account of at least 12 people with some kind of claim to the English throne who, in his words, “gape for” Elizabeth’s death. Of these, eight were home-grown candidates and four were from overseas. James VI might have emerged as the odds-on favourite, but his accession was by no means certain.
As her long reign wore on, Elizabeth showed through her subtle, steady guiding of the king of Scots that he was, if not her ideal candidate, then at least the best of a bad lot. In the years leading up to her death, she did as much as she could to secure the succession without placing herself in danger by naming an heir. For all the anxiety, intrigue and rivalry that this engendered, the wisdom of her policy was proved by the fact that, to her last breath, her personal power in England had not been challenged by any “rising sun”.
But the ultimate success of Elizabeth’s plan depended on James following the advice she had drip-fed him over the years. And that is where it fell apart. It soon became clear that the king had paid only lip service to Elizabeth’s guidance, and proceeded to flout it altogether when he took her throne. He refused to “play the king”, as she had urged, by investing in the magnificence of his court and public appearances, and instead spent most of his time in private with just a handful of favourites.
Parliamentary revolt
More ominously, James had no intention of sustaining the delicate relationship between crown and parliament that had been the cornerstone of Elizabeth’s success. Instead, he stood firmly by the Stuart belief in the divine right of kings, which in his view gave him the right to ride roughshod over the wishes of his people and his parliaments.
This soon sparked resistance from his new English subjects. After a series of bad-tempered exchanges, parliament refused to agree to James’s plan for a formal union between his two kingdoms. Undeterred, he announced that a shared currency would be issued – a 20-shilling piece known as the ‘unite’ – and commissioned a new flag, the ‘Union Jack’ (for Jacobus, or James). Thereafter, rather than working in partnership with his government, he abandoned it altogether, spending his days hunting and cavorting with his favourites. One contemporary noted that this was “the cause of indescribable ill-humour among the king’s subjects, who in their needs and troubles find themselves cut off from their natural sovereign”.
Meanwhile, growing popular resentment against the king erupted in numerous conspiracies to remove him from the throne. In June 1603, just three months after his accession, the ‘Bye’ plot came to light, involving a group of Catholics who planned to kidnap the king and secure concessions for the practice of their religion. More serious was the ‘Main’ plot to oust James and replace him with his cousin Arbella Stuart.
The most dangerous conspiracy of all came in 1605, when a group of Catholics led by Robert Catesby schemed to blow up the king and his parliament. It was only thanks to an anonymous tip-off that Westminster was searched by the royal officials, and Guy Fawkes was discovered with a huge cache of gunpowder beneath the Houses of Parliament just hours before he was due to light the fuse.
Lessons not learned
All of this might have made James pause to consider that perhaps he ought to follow his predecessor’s advice after all. Instead, he doggedly continued his preferred style of monarchy, no matter the cost. Worse still, in preparing his son and heir, Charles, for the throne, James passed on none of the lessons that Elizabeth had tried to teach him. Charles would be a king in the mould of his Stuart father, not his Tudor predecessor. He took his divine right to even greater extremes than his father, and dissolved parliament whenever it refused to carry out his will.
As Charles’s turbulent reign wore on, the spectre of uncertainty over the Stuarts’ right to the Tudor throne – uncertainly that, we now know was all too valid – was thrown into sharp relief. By 1642, he had pushed the supremacy of the royal will too far on both sides of the border. The kingdom was plunged into bitterly fought civil wars that culminated in Charles’s execution and the destruction of the monarchy. In the space of half a century, the crown that had glittered so brightly on Elizabeth’s head had been consigned to the flames.
CONTENDERS FOR THE CROWN
There was no shortage of people with designs on Elizabeth I’s English throne. But who had the best chance of success?
The Scottish thorn
Mary, Queen of Scots had the strongest blood claim to Elizabeth’s throne. She was the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret, who married James IV of Scotland. As a Catholic, she enjoyed considerable support among those in England who opposed their queen’s Protestant faith. But Henry VIII’s will had barred his Scottish relatives from inheriting the crown of England. Furthermore, a law passed in 1350, during the reign of Edward III, decreed that “aliens” (those not born on English soil) could not inherit any land there. Nevertheless, Mary campaigned tirelessly to be named heir, and was executed for trying to take the English throne by force. (Contender rating: 6 out of 10)
The front runner
James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, succeeded to his mother’s throne when she was ousted from it in 1567. He also inherited her claim to Elizabeth’s throne, though Mary’s execution in 1587 threw that into jeopardy, because those related to a convicted traitor were tainted by association. In his favour was the fact that by the time of Elizabeth’s death he had a proven track record of ruling a kingdom and, even better, was male. He also enjoyed the strongest support within the English government, and the tacit support of Elizabeth herself – though Henry VIII’s and Edward III’s statutes meant that James’s accession in 1603 was technically illegal. (Contender rating: 7 out of 10)
The arrogant orphan
Like James, Arbella Stuart was the great-granddaughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret, but had the advantage of being born on English soil. Team Arbella was also bolstered by the efforts of her two indomitable grandmothers, Lady Margaret Douglas (Henry VIII’s niece) and Bess of Hardwick, who promoted the claim of “poor orphan Arbella”. Arbella, though, was her own worst enemy. Haughty and arrogant, she alienated Queen Elizabeth, and her unstable temperament made her ill-suited for the throne. During James’s reign, she secretly married another blood claimant, William Seymour, grandson of Lady Katherine Grey (see below), and spent the rest of her life a prisoner in the Tower. (Contender rating: 5 out of 10)
The marrying type
Henry VIII had decreed that, in the event that his three children died without issue, the crown would pass to the descendants of his younger sister Mary. This gave Katherine Grey (Mary’s granddaughter) and her descendants the strongest legal basis for their claim, strengthened by the fact that Edward VI had made the Greys his primary heirs. Katherine sought to boost her chances further by secretly marrying Edward Seymour, the nephew of Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane Seymour. But this backfired: Elizabeth condemned Katherine to life behind bars, and had her two sons declared illegitimate. However, they and their descendants continued to be seen as strong contenders for Elizabeth’s throne for years afterwards. (Contender rating: 6 out of 10)
The "nearest in blood"
Lady Margaret Stanley was the daughter of Eleanor Brandon, younger daughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary. Margaret alleged that her cousins were debarred from the succession because of Lady Jane Grey’s treason, leaving her next in line by Henry VIII’s will and “as the nearest in blood… legitimately of English birth”. Also in her favour was the fact that she had two living sons, Ferdinando and William. She was, though, Catholic. (Contender rating: 4 out of 10)
The uninterested Yorkist
Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon was of the old Yorkist line. His great-great-grandmother was Lady Margaret Pole, niece of King Edward IV. His grandfather had for a time been a close personal friend of Henry VIII. In stark contrast to all the other contenders, though, Hastings showed no interest in the crown, and spent his life in loyal service to Elizabeth. Still, she didn’t trust him, and it was only after years in the political wilderness that she finally appointed him to office. (Contender rating: 5 out of 10)
The Spanish princess
When his own attempts to seize Elizabeth’s throne by force failed, Philip II of Spain promoted those of his daughter, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. She was said to be “of the ancient blood royal of England” through her mother, Elisabeth of Valois. As such, she was a legitimate descendant of John of Gaunt, the fourth son of Edward III, whereas the Tudors were descended from his illegitimate line. But the people of England were notoriously xenophobic, viewing even James of Scotland as an “alien”, and unlikely to ever accept a Spanish queen. (Contender rating: 3 out of 10)
]]>Explore Hampton Court Palace with Professor Tracy Bormanhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/explore-hampton-court-palace-with-professor-tracy-borman/2024-05-14T11:20:37.000ZView Green Video on the source website
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]]>The Prayer Book Rebellion: Mark Stoyle on how the 1549 rising almost changed Tudor historyhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/prayer-book-rebellion-1549/2023-05-22T07:02:00.000ZListen to a version of this article:
On Whit Monday 1549, William Underhill and William Seagar – two respectable inhabitants of the little Devon village of Sampford Courtenay – got into an argument with their vicar at the parish church. They told him that they disliked the new Book of Common Prayer in English, which had recently been introduced by an act of parliament and which he had read in church the day before. They urged him to revert to the traditional service in Latin instead and, after some debate, he acceded to their request.
Within hours, the church had become the centre of a popular demonstration against the Protestantising religious policies of King Edward VI, which sought to remove all vestiges of the traditional Catholic faith. Within days, that protest had spread to the surrounding country parishes, and within weeks it had engulfed the whole of Devon and Cornwall.
- On the podcast | Mark Stoyle charts the Prayer Book Rebellion and how the rising almost changed the course of Tudor history
Self-appointed captains soon emerged to lead the protesters, prominent among them being Underhill and Seagar themselves. In July, they assembled an army of common people and laid siege to the regional capital, Exeter. From there, they sent a list of demands to the government in London, insisting that all further moves towards Protestantism should come to a halt, and that the Church of England should be restored to the position in which it had been left by the king’s father, Henry VIII, at the time of his death.
The rising is widely remembered today as the “Prayer Book Rebellion”. This epithet perhaps suggests a somewhat softer episode – more like a theological debate – than the bloody reality. In truth, the strength of feeling among the “rebels” fuelled a rapid and violent response to enforcement of the Protestant Reformation. And new analysis shows that the rising wasn’t merely a minor, localised “stir”, but came close to succeeding in its goals in the West Country – and even in the very seat of government.
What happened in the Prayer Book Rebellion?
Lord Russell had been sent down from London to quell the disturbances. Vastly outnumbered by protesters and finding it almost impossible to raise local support, he was forced to dispatch a series of desperate pleas for help to the government. Only after Russell had been sent substantial reinforcements – including several bands of hardened mercenary soldiers from Italy, Burgundy and Albania – was he finally able to break through the besieging forces and advance, to relieve Exeter.
Russell’s troubles were not yet over. His opponents had regrouped at Sampford Courtenay, from where they continued to defy him. Russell gathered still more reinforcements, and in mid-August he marched out from Exeter at the head of an army of 8,000 men. With this force he finally crushed the protesters, slaughtering them in a brutal, day-long battle fought out amid the fields and hedgerows surrounding the village where the trouble had initially begun.
Scores of captured rebels were subsequently executed, with at least one local priest being hanged in chains from his own church tower. The civilian population also suffered. A contemporary writer noted that, in the wake of the rebels’ defeat, Russell’s troops “ravage[d] the land, as did the foreign horsemen… who did great destruction in the country… by taking goods, as well as by capturing people and forcing them to pay ransom like soldiers”.
According to the best contemporary estimate, the insurrection resulted in the deaths of some 4,000 “rebels”. Bearing in mind how much smaller the population of the West Country was in the 16th century than it is today, this was an enormous figure. Indeed, it seems fair to suggest that the so called Western Rising of 1549 was the single most traumatic event in the region’s history between the Black Death of the 1340s and the Civil War of the mid-17th century.
What sources are there for the rising?
The insurrection was the most determined attempt to reverse the course of the Reformation, yet for centuries its importance has been overlooked by historians. This is partly because we know surprisingly little about it. And much of what we do know comes from a single writer, the antiquarian John Hooker. Born in Exeter, Hooker was still in his twenties when he helped to defend the city against the insurgents.
This experience obviously had a profound effect upon him because he later wrote a series of increasingly detailed accounts of what he termed “the Commotion or Rebellion in the counties of Devon and Cornwall”. (“The Commotion” was the conveniently neutral term subsequently used by local people to refer to the rising.) Without Hooker’s accounts we would know almost nothing about how the protests began or what happened during the siege of Exeter.
All of the subsequent histories of the insurrection have been based chiefly on his testimony. It is important to stress, though, that Hooker’s accounts, which were composed during the reign of the Protestant Elizabeth I, were written from a very particular standpoint. Hooker himself was both an ardent Protestant and a proud Exonian. He had no sympathy for the protesters, whom he dismissed as “Papists” (Catholics); his writings chiefly aimed to celebrate their defeat and to commemorate the role Exeter played in it.
Moreover, because he had spent that summer confined to the city, Hooker was not as well informed as he might otherwise have been about the developments that had taken place elsewhere. His view of the insurrection is very much that of the man on the Exeter city walls, in other words. And because Hooker’s accounts were relied upon so heavily by later historians – including Frances Rose Troup, whose formidable book The Western Rebellion of 1549, first published in 1913, still remains the standard history of the rising – we continue to see the tragic events of that summer through a slightly distorted lens.
Prayer Book Rebellion timeline
1547 Disquiet brews in Devon and Cornwall as proponents of the Reformation challenge religious conservatives. 21 January 1549 The Act of Uniformity establishes the new Book of Common Prayer as the only legal liturgy in England, replacing Latin missals. 10 June 1549 On Whit Monday, parishioners of Sampford Courtenay in mid-Devon decry the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer. Within days, the protests have spread across Devon and throughout Cornwall, with “captains” assembling an army of local men. c18 June 1549 Lord Russell, the former lord president of the Council of the West, is sent from London to quell the rising – initially with only a small band of troops. 2 July 1549 Protesters outside Exeter, bolstered by volunteer forces – thousands later arriving from Cornwall under the leadership of Humphrey Arundell – begin a siege of the city that lasts five weeks. c29 July 1549 Having penetrated no farther west than Honiton, Russell is confronted by a rebel advance and wins a pivotal battle at Fenny Bridges just west of the town. 6 August 1549 After finally receiving reinforcements, including foreign mercenaries, Russell’s army arrives in Exeter, where the siege is lifted. 17 August 1549 Having regrouped at Sampford Courteney, the protesters are routed by Russell’s 8,000-strong army in a bloody one-day clash. Hundreds of rebels die in the battle and subsequent repression. 27 January 1550 Leaders of the rising who had been imprisoned in the Tower, including Humphrey Arundell, are hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in London. The rising is comprehensively crushed.
How much of a threat did the Prayer Book Rebellion pose?
In my own recent study of the rebellion, A Murderous Midsummer, I have attempted to readjust the focus. By pulling together the many new fragments of evidence about the rising discovered during the century since Rose-Troup laid down her pen, I have sought to reduce our reliance upon Hooker and to produce a new history of the “Great Commotion” in the west. My new account not only challenges the traditional narrative in various respects, but suggests that the protesters posed a far more serious threat to the central regime than has generally been recognised.
In fact, the roots of the rebellion stretched back some time before the outbreak of violence recognised as the Western Rising. Already, two years earlier, a doctrinal dispute had sprung up between a traditionalist Exeter Cathedral canon, Richard Crispin, and Philip Nicolles, a young Protestant firebrand. Crispin, who in 1547 had denounced reformed theology from the pulpit, had been challenged in print by Nicolles, and soon found himself imprisoned in the Tower of London.
For local religious conservatives, this was a clear sign of just how uncomfortable life was likely to be for them under the new, zealously Protestant regime. The resentment sparked by this affair may well have helped to pave the way for the later explosion of violence in 1549.
The ire expressed by people in the West Country at the imposition of liturgy in English was particularly virulent in Cornwall. The year before the much larger rebellion that began at Sampford Courtenay, a short-lived popular rising dubbed the “Cornish Commotion” erupted in the far west of Cornwall. This revolt, which was perhaps triggered by the regime’s imposition of a new “order of communion” in English, reflected the fierce determination of local people to protect both traditional religious practices and Cornwall’s unique cultural identity.
Having killed William Body, a royal commissioner who had attempted to implement the government’s religious changes in the district around Helston, the insurgents are said to have declared that: “Whosoever would defend Body, or follow such new fashions as he did, they would punish him likewise.”
What was the course of events in 1549?
Though Cornwall may not (as believed by Rose-Troup) have been where the disturbances of 1549 began, the speed with which its people responded to that event demonstrates the strength of feeling there. The protests that built to become the Western Rising began in Sampford Courtenay on 10 June, spreading to Cornwall in early July. Subsequently, in the space of just three weeks, Humphrey Arundell – a gentleman from near Bodmin – managed to raise a 6,000-strong army in Cornwall and march with it to Exeter.
There they joined the Devonian forces in a siege of the city that continued for five long weeks before government forces were able to regroup and drive the rebels back to Sampford Courtenay. In other words, there was a rapid mobilisation of and advance by large numbers of Cornishmen. This would have made the combined forces of the rebellion far more dynamic, assertive and threatening than has previously been recognised.
And from the government’s point of view, the rebels’ movements in July 1549 must have looked far more purposeful and menacing than traditional tellings of the rising would suggest. Conversely, the royal forces under Lord Russell’s command that were initially tasked with subduing the rebels were much weaker than has previously been appreciated. It is now clear that, right up until the end of July, Russell had remained extremely short of men – and, therefore, extremely vulnerable to attack.
- Read more | 9 places associated with the Prayer Book Rebellion
On or around 29 July, just such an assault had seemed to be in the offing when the rebels advanced in force upon Russell’s camp at Honiton, forcing him to sally out to meet them. The resulting battle fought at Fenny Bridges proved to be a crucial turning point. Russell managed first to defeat the rebel forces that had already assembled at the bridge over the Otter west of Honiton, and also to disperse a “new supply” of 800 insurgents who had hurried up to reinforce them. Specifically described as “Cornish men”, these latecomers probably represented the advance guard of the main Cornish host.
It had been a desperately close thing. If Arundell had managed to bring up more of his Cornishmen to east Devon just a day or two earlier, he might well have been able to force the king’s general into headlong flight. If that had happened, the inhabitants of the restive counties at Russell’s back might well have joined hands with the insurgents, opening the way for the rebellion to catch fire right across the south of England and Wales – and, potentially, for the regime of the Duke of Somerset (the man who led Edward’s government) to be toppled altogether.
As it was, Russell himself was reinforced almost at once by the first of the mercenary soldiers for whom he had been pleading for so long, and was thus able to move onto the offensive at last. What followed was bloody defeat for the rebels on 17 August at Sampford Courtenay. Yet those protesters’ aims came close to being achieved during the factional struggle that then raged in the capital.
“We the Cornishmen utterly refuse this new English”
The Prayer Book Rebellion was an expression of cultural as well as religious defiance
An intriguing point about the Western Rising is that it appears to have been partially fuelled by a desire to protect the distinctive Cornish culture. At the start of the 16th century, Cornish – a Brythonic language closely related to Welsh – was still widely spoken in western Cornwall. But the onset of the Reformation accelerated its retreat, and the reformers’ determination to ensure that English, rather than Latin, became the chief language of religious instruction meant that the Cornish found themselves increasingly obliged to learn it. In 1548, Edward VI’s government directed that a new “order of communion” in English should be incorporated within the traditional Latin mass. The fact that a popular insurrection broke out in west Cornwall within days of the new order of communion being introduced seems unlikely to be coincidence. And when, a year later, the regime replaced the Latin liturgy with the Book of Common Prayer, it provoked a powerful sense of Cornish “cultural defensiveness”. Among the demands sent to the government by the western rebels in 1549 was one declaring that: “We will not receive the new service… we the Cornishmen (whereof certain of us understand no English) utterly refuse this new English.” Tragically, the protesters’ defeat helped sound the death knell for the Cornish tongue. By making an issue of the language, they had inadvertently ensured that it would be tainted, in the eyes of the ruling classes, with the stain of sedition. As a result, the Cornish were denied the liturgy in their own tongue that was later granted to the Welsh, and – English having become the language of daily worship throughout Cornwall – the Cornish language went into steep decline. Within 150 years, it had all but disappeared.
- Read more | Top 10 historical Cornish words
What was the legacy of the Prayer Book Rebellion?
The West Country was by no means the only part of the kingdom to experience serious outbreaks of disorder in 1549. Another huge popular rising, known today as Kett’s Rebellion, was taking place in East Anglia at the same time, and lesser “stirs” occurred in a score of other counties. As a result, many powerful figures turned against the Duke of Somerset, believing that his policies had brought England to the brink of anarchy.
In October, Somerset was brought down by an aristocratic coup in London – a coup in which Sir Thomas Arundell, a wealthy Cornish gentleman and cousin of the rebel Humphrey Arundell, played a leading role. For several months, it was then widely believed that a clique of religious conservatives resistant to the Reformation were on the point of taking power. They would make Edward’s adult half-sister, Mary – a devoted Catholic – the young king’s “governor”, halting the drive towards Protestantism.
For Humphrey Arundell and the other captured rebel leaders, by now imprisoned in the Tower, it was a moment pregnant with hope. Alas for them, the moment passed all too soon. Sir Thomas Arundell and his conservative allies were outfoxed by John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who seized power and set up a regime even more strongly Protestant than the one that had been led by Somerset.
In January 1550, Humphrey and the other rebel captains in the Tower were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, thus bringing the bloody story of the Prayer Book Rebellion to an end. Yet this remarkable episode was never forgotten by those who had lived through it. Lord Grey, one of the royal commanders, subsequently remarked of the rebels that “such was the valour and stoutness of these men… that he never, in all the wars he had been in, did know the like”.
Another loyalist similarly marvelled at the courage shown by the protesters in the face of Russell’s mercenaries, later recalling that “the archers of the rebels did so behave themselves with their volleys of arrows against divers… bands [of]… Arquebusiers, Italians and Spaniards, that they drove them from… banks, ditches, hedges and other advantages of ground, to the great mischief of many of those strangers.”
Few of those who had taken part in the rising ever dared to speak of it openly after wards, for fear of harsh punishment. But at least one piece of evidence shows that the rebels’ courage and determination was remembered with pride by their children and grandchildren. In the early 17th century, the Devonian antiquarian Thomas Westcote wrote of the events of the rising that, if he should record what was still commonly said by the local people about “the strength, and force and resolution of these commons (the archers especially), you might, peradventure, take it with some doubt lest it increased somewhat by time or penning”.
The protesters may have gone down to bloody defeat, but their martial exploits lived long in the memories of their descendants.
Mark Stoyle is professor of history at Southampton University. His new book is A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549 (Yale University Press, 2022)
This article was first published in the Christmas 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>Edward VI: why the forgotten Tudor king had the makings of a monsterhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/edward-vi-forgotten-tudor-king-henry-son-legacy-death-when-how-did-he-die/2022-08-08T15:00:41.000ZAt around 2am on 12 October 1537, Jane Seymour, the third wife of King Henry VIII, was delivered of a healthy son – “the most beautiful boy that ever was seen”.
This was the defining moment of Henry’s reign: he had waited more than 20 long years for a healthy son and heir. Beset with joy, the King rode to Hampton Court to meet his “precious jewel”, the saviour of his dynasty.
Meanwhile, the news was conveyed to all corners of the kingdom, sparking widespread celebrations. A lavish christening was held three days later in the chapel at Hampton Court Palace, and the child was christened Edward.
Edward VI: quick facts
When was he born? 12 October 1537 Who were his parents? Henry VIII and Jane Seymour When did he die? 6 July 1553 (aged 15) Who succeeded him? Lady Jane Grey, the 'nine days queen', ruled briefly following the death of Edward VI until she was usurped by the former king's sister, Mary I
It is one of the great ironies in history that the boy upon whom Henry lavished so much care and attention, and in whom all his hopes were vested, would reign for just six and a half years.
It would be the younger of Edward’s half-sisters, Elizabeth, largely disregarded by their father, who would rescue the fortunes of the Tudor dynasty and become its greatest monarch.
- Read more | To kidnap a king: the foiled plot to abduct Edward VI
But if Edward’s reign was short, it was far from insignificant, heralding some of the most significant religious reforms that England has ever seen.
Edward and his advisers, notably Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, would lay the foundations for the modern Church of England.
Neither was Edward the fragile boy that he has so often been portrayed as. He enjoyed robust health for most of his young life, and had a will of steel to match. Far from being dominated by ambitious councillors such as the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland, he had strong opinions, ideas of his own and all the makings of a tyrant. In short, he was a chip off the old block.
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Edward VI's early life
Edward spent most of his early years at Hampton Court and a series of other palaces outside London, where the air was cleaner and the risk of plague much lower. He was widely reported to be a happy, healthy child. His lady governess, Margaret Bryan, who had also cared for Mary and Elizabeth, wrote an enthusiastic report of the Prince’s progress to Thomas Cromwell in March 1539: “My lord Prince is in good health and merry. Would to God the King and your Lordship had seen him last night. The minstrels played, and his Grace danced and played so wantonly that he could not stand still.”
As was common practice for royal children, Edward was raised among women for the first few years of his life. But upon reaching his sixth birthday, his life underwent a dramatic transformation. The Tudors considered this the age at which a child became an adult. As a result, Henry VIII ordered that his son’s apartments be remodelled so that they exactly mirrored his own, including Flemish tapestries showing the same classical and Biblical scenes that the King favoured. The Prince was also given a new wardrobe of clothes so that he could dress like his father.
- Read more | Did Henry VIII love his last wife Katherine Parr?
The other significant change in Edward’s upbringing was that his female attendants were dismissed, replaced by the care of a predominantly male household. The respected scholars Richard Cox and John Cheke were appointed as his tutors. The latter was greatly impressed with his new charge and claimed that he “has accomplished at this early period of his life more numerous and important objects, than others have been able to do when their age was more settled and matured”. This was no flattery. Edward was a precocious student who applied himself with a discipline beyond his years.
Henry took a close interest in his son’s education, and although he accepted that it should follow humanist lines, with an emphasis on Latin, Greek, grammar and rhetoric, he insisted that Edward should also be taught fencing, horseback riding, music and other courtly pursuits. The King also ensured that Edward received a religious education that was at least broadly evangelical: after all, it was crucial that his heir should respect and promote the royal supremacy over the Church. Religious conservatives had no place in his schoolroom.
Edward soon grew close to Cranmer who, with an eye to the future, was determined to inspire in the young prince a passion for the reformed faith. In 1544, Edward wrote to thank Cranmer for his “very kind letter”, and assured him: “I am not unmindful either of your attention to me or your kindness which you study every day to show me.”
The archbishop was so successful in cultivating the Tudor heir that Edward soon came to look upon him as a fatherly figure. His letters to Cranmer reveal how close they had become. “I affectionately receive and honour that truly paternal affection which you have expressed,” he told Cranmer on one occasion, “and I hope that you may live many years, and continue to be my honoured father by your godly and wholesome advice.” The archbishop called the Prince, “My dearest son in Christ,” and assured him, “My life is not to be called living unless you are in health and strength.”
Was Edward VI a zealot?
Edward became king in January 1547, at the age of nine. By that time, he was fired with an evangelising zeal. “In the court there is no bishop, and no man of learning so ready to argue in support of the new doctrine as the King,” reported the Imperial ambassador. Edward spent several hours a day in private devotion and, determined that his subjects should conform to his faith, he spent much of his short reign implementing a series of radical reforms that would establish a strong Protestant doctrine in England.
Did you know? Young though he was, Edward attracted several potential brides, including Mary, Queen of Scots, and Lady Jane Grey. None of the proposed marriages came to anything.
In January 1549, the first Book of Common Prayer was published. Its aim was to establish uniformity of worship for all, and it was followed by an even more extreme version three years later. This, the second Book of Common Prayer provided a model for worship within the Church of England for the next four centuries. At the same time, Edward's council banned a number of old Catholic rituals, such as the use of rosaries, the casting of holy water and the undertaking of pilgrimage.
This had a profound impact upon the lives of Edward’s subjects – including those closest to the King. An entry in Edward’s journal for January 1552 records: “The Emperor’s ambassador moved me severally that my sister Mary might have mass, which, with no little reasoning with him, was denied him.” If he had lived to maturity, there is little doubt that Edward would have persecuted any nonconformists with increasing severity – even more so, perhaps, than his elder half-sister later did.
Though young, Edward had a maturity beyond his years. The Italian physician and astrologer Hieronymus Cardano described how Edward “carried himself like an old man; and yet he was always affable and gentle, as became his age”. He also wrote that Edward was “of stature somewhat below the middle height, pale-faced with grey eyes, a grave aspect, decorous and handsome”. But for all his accomplishments, the inescapable fact was that Edward remained a minor.
While he was able to put his stamp on religious policies, thanks to his close relationship with Cranmer, his political authority was limited by the men his father had appointed to form a regency council. Foremost among them was the young monarch’s uncle, Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset. Since his nephew’s birth, Seymour had lusted for power and he was quick to seize the advantage when Henry VIII breathed his last. His close kinship to Edward made him the natural choice to take charge of the regency council as Lord Protector and Governor of the King’s Person.
Although Seymour’s position seemed assured until his nephew reached maturity, it would soon become obvious that vesting so much power in one man was ill advised. The fatal flaw in the arrangement was that, although the council had decreed that the Lord Protector “shall not do any act but with the advice and consent of the rest of the co-executors” of Henry VIII’s will, Seymour was determined to exercise the full power of a regent. As one contemporary observed, he sought to make himself “the King of the King”.
Seymour was ruthless in his quest for absolute authority, not flinching even to have his own brother, Thomas, put to death in March 1549 on charges of plotting to kidnap Edward, marry Elizabeth and make himself Lord Protector. His arrogance soon made an enemy of his erstwhile ally John Dudley, another member of Edward’s council. In October 1549, Dudley led a coup to oust his rival from office, and Edward was persuaded to order his uncle’s arrest.
- Read more | Did Thomas Seymour sexually abuse the teenage Princess Elizabeth?
Edward’s private diary
Edward was raised in an environment that was as cossetted as it was sumptuous. His household was a palace in miniature, with every conceivable luxury. He was regularly spoilt with gifts and allowed to indulge in a diet of rich foods. A troupe of minstrels was appointed to entertain the Prince by his indulgent father, who was determined that he should have everything that his young heart might desire. Lessons were made more palatable by school books with covers of enamelled gold set with rubies, sapphires and diamonds. His cutlery was studded with precious stones and his napkins sparkled with gold and silver thread. The result of all this was that the Prince grew up to be rather spoilt and, if crossed, his temper could be vicious. A contemporary claimed that in a fit of rage, Edward once tore a living falcon into four pieces in front of his tutors. When he became king, Edward started to keep a diary. A rather staid account of the key events of his reign, it also portrays him as cold, unfeeling and uncompromising – a dangerous blend of traits that might have hardened into tyranny if he had lived. Although he had been close to his uncle and Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset, Edward afforded his demise no more than the following cursory mention in his journal: “The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine o’clock in the morning.”
Although Seymour was subsequently released and readmitted to the Privy Council, he was deprived of any real power from that day forward. Dudley was now the dominant force behind Edward’s reign – but he soon became as blinded by ambition as his predecessor.
Having secured himself the dukedom of Northumberland in October 1551, Dudley had Seymour arrested a few days later on trumped up charges of treason. The former Lord Protector was executed in January 1552. This served to increase the ranks of Dudley’s enemies, but he ruled undeterred, with ever greater tyranny.
- Read more | The Dudley dynasty: the family behind the Tudors
How did Edward VI die?
As his reign descended into chaos and disorder, Edward’s health began to fail. In April 1552, he contracted measles. Although he recovered, his immune system was fatally weakened, and he soon fell prey to what was almost certainly tuberculosis.
Royal doctors reported his symptoms with a mixture of alarm and confusion: “The matter he ejects from his mouth is sometimes coloured a greenish-yellow and black, sometimes pink, like the colour of blood.” Exhausted by a hacking cough and a high fever, Edward also developed ulcers across his swollen body.
Despite his rapidly deteriorating condition, the King’s mind remained sharp. He was determined to prevent the accession of his elder half-sister Mary, aware that she would undo all of the religious reforms for which he and Cranmer had worked so hard. But he also proposed to disinherit his other half-sister, Elizabeth, on account of her bastardy.
This ran contrary to the laws of inheritance, not to mention his late father’s wishes. But Edward was under pressure from Dudley, who had his own family’s interests at heart.
In late May 1553, the dying King signed a ‘Devise’ for the succession, leaving his crown to Jane Grey, granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary – and also Dudley’s daughter-in-law.
Did you know? Early in his reign, Edward achieved a major victory against the Scots at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh – but the ‘Rough Wooing’ of Scotland proved cripplingly expensive and resulted in ignominious failure.
By July, Edward was unable to keep any food down and was wracked by constant pain. Little wonder that he whispered to one of his attendants: “I am glad to die.”
On the 6th of that month, between 8pm and 9pm, the 15-year-old prepared for the end. To his last breath, he tried to safeguard the Protestant religion: “O Lord God, save thy chosen people of England! O my Lord God, defend this realm from papistry and maintain thy true religion.”
He then whispered, “I am faint,” to one of his servants, who cradled his body in his arms, “Lord have mercy on me, and take my spirit.” They were the last words that Edward spoke.
Who succeeded Edward VI?
Edward’s wishes for the succession were carried out, but only briefly: Jane Grey was queen for just nine days.
The dispossessed Mary rallied thousands of subjects to her cause, and soon her late brother’s council turned its coat and declared for her.
On 19 July, Mary was proclaimed queen amidst great rejoicing. She wasted no time in overturning all of Edward’s reforms, but her victory too would be short-lived.
She died after just five years on the throne, leaving their younger half-sister, Elizabeth, to continue the work that he had begun.
Edward VI's youth – four key questions answered
The young prince had lost his mother and suffered a typically absent father, but his youth was marked with care and affection
Was Edward VI a sickly child?
Far from being the sickly child that history has often portrayed him as, Edward was a robust little boy and, as Thomas Cromwell put it, “sucketh like a child of his puissance”.
Lord Chancellor Thomas Audley paid a visit to his nursery and noted that Edward “waxeth firm and stiff”. Having enjoyed a rich diet since he was weaned, the boy was well on the way to mirroring his father’s generous proportions.
In October 1541, one visitor to Edward’s household described the Prince as “well fed”, hastily adding that he was also handsome and remarkably tall for his age.
A rather less tactful report claimed that the four-year-old was “so gross and unhealthy that he could not believe, judging from what he could see now, that he would live long”. Edward also contracted malaria, much to his father’s alarm, but recovered and was put on a strict diet. It did the trick: the Prince remained in good health for the next ten years.
What was Edward VI's relationship like with his father?
As might be expected for the long-awaited son that he had gone to so much trouble (and so many marriages) to beget, Henry lavished excessive care upon Edward from the moment of his birth. He ordered that “this whole realm’s most precious jewel” should be raised primarily in newly built apartments at Hampton Court, well away from the perpetual sickness that plagued the capital. A strict regime of care, hygiene and security was put in place to protect the infant prince’s health and welfare. No detail was overlooked. A rare glimpse of the Prince’s bedchamber at Hampton Court is provided by a reference to the making of “a frame of scaffold polls over the Prince’s bed to keep away the heat of the Sun”.
All of the King’s assiduous care was administered at a distance: Henry adhered to royal tradition by being as absent a father to Edward as he was to Mary and Elizabeth. A rare glimpse of him paying a visit to his infant son was recorded in May 1538, when he spent the day with Edward “dallying with him in his arms a long space and so holding him in a window to the sight and great comfort of all the people”.
- Read more | Henry VIII: confident young king or insecure son?
What was Edward's relationship like with Katherine Parr?
Edward never knew his mother: Jane Seymour died just 12 days after his birth. Of the three stepmothers who followed, he was closest to Katherine Parr.
- Quiz | Henry VIII’s wives quiz: how well do you know the six women he married?
Henry's sixth and final wife was a loving and caring figure to all her stepchildren. Keen to present a united Tudor family to the court, she employed a number of personal touches. For example, for the New Year celebrations of 1544/5, she had matching clothes made for herself, the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, and Prince Edward, all in cloth of silver.
Recognising Edward's intellectual abilities, Katherine took a keen interest in his schooling – and that of his half-sister Elizabeth – and may have influenced the appointment of their tutors. The young prince, who shared Elizabeth’s love of learning, gratefully enthused to his "most dear mother": "I received so many benefits from you that my mind can hardly grasp them".
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What was Edward's relationship like with his siblings, Mary and Elizabeth?
Edward’s elder half-sister Mary was a regular visitor to his nursery. Aged 21 at the time of his birth, she had a strong maternal instinct and lavished affection on her motherless baby brother. She also gave him various gifts – all of which were more personal than those he received from his father.
On New Year in 1539, for example, she presented him with a made-to-measure coat of crimson satin embroidered with gold and pearls and with sleeves of tinsel. Throughout his childhood, and before their relationship was soured by diverging religious views, Edward was very fond of his elder sister. He “took special content” in her company and once assured her that, despite his infrequent letters, “I love you most.”
Edward was also fond of his other half-sister Elizabeth, to whom he was much closer in age – she was just four years his senior – and with whom he was educated. Their lessons were heavily influenced by the curriculum known as bonae litterae (good letters), espoused by northern European humanists.
It emphasised the importance of Latin and Greek grammar and rhetoric, classical authors and scripture above more traditional elements of a prince's education, such as hunting, hawking and dancing. Edward also shared his sister Elizabeth's fascination with magic and astrology; among his toys was a red box filled with "small tools of sorcery".
Above all, though, the siblings grew to share a passionate commitment to the reformist faith.
This article was first published in the October 2018 edition of BBC History Revealed
]]>Edward Seymour: the fall of the dithering dictatorhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/edward-seymour-the-fall-of-the-dithering-dictator/2021-08-03T10:02:00.000ZOn 7 July 1549, Sir William Paget, secretary to the royal council, wrote a letter to Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset. “I see at hand the king’s destruction and your ruin,” Paget declared. “The people are out of discipline because of your softness… I know your good meaning but it is a pity it should have caused the present evil. Society is maintained by religion and laws: you have neither.”
As denunciations go, Paget’s was devastating. And it was made all the more damaging by the fact that he was merely communicating what had become an open secret in aristocratic circles: Edward Seymour – regent to the boy-king Edward VI, self-styled autocrat and the most powerful man in England – was heading for a fall.
How different things had seemed a couple of years earlier when King Henry VIII had breathed his last. Then Seymour had capitalised on his status as a powerful magnate, influential court insider, and brother of Henry’s beloved third wife Jane Seymour, to step seamlessly into the vacuum created by the old king’s death. With Henry’s son and heir, Edward VI, too young to rule in his own right, Seymour had himself appointed Protector of the Realm. For the next two years, he was the de facto ruler of England.
But by the time Paget dispatched his missive, Seymour’s fortunes had taken a nosedive. His powerbase was crumbling, the country was in revolt and his enemies were sharpening their knives. Within a few months he would be thrown into the Tower of London, languishing there while his fellow councillors decided what to do with him.
Festering divisions
So where did it all go wrong? The answer can probably be located in the divisions that festered in the second half of Henry VIII’s reign. The religious reformation that Henry had begun sundered England into violently opposed religious camps. There were radical Protestants who wanted to push reform further, and conservatives who craved a return to the ‘good old (Catholic) days’. There were also social reformers who opposed many of the new landlords who had acquired land during Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries and were, it was claimed, riding roughshod over the rights of the common people.
At his death in 1547, Henry had left power in the hands of a moderately reformist body that was to act as Edward VI’s council until he reached 18. However, in the back rooms of Whitehall where secret deals were done, it was agreed that much of that power should be concentrated in one man’s hands: Seymour.
Over the centuries historians have offered many explanations as to why the councillors agreed to Seymour’s power-grab – including the need for a strong government to fend off any conservative reaction, the fact that Seymour was Edward VI’s uncle, and the dishing out of sweeteners to pliable supporters. Whatever the reason, Seymour was now Protector of the Realm. Soon, he was consulting the council less and less and ruling by decree in his nephew’s name.
Hero of the have-nots
The historian Diarmaid MacCulloch has written of Edward Seymour that he “combined the reforming zeal of Thomas Cromwell, the chutzpah of Cardinal Wolsey and the flashy populism of Queen Elizabeth I’s doomed Earl of Essex”. At first, that “flashy populism” appears to have borne fruit. Declaring that he was committed to creating a fair society, Seymour appointed royal commissions to enquire into such agrarian grievances as the enclosure of the common land. In doing so, he made himself something of a hero among the disenfranchised: England’s ‘have-nots’ genuinely believed that the ‘Good Duke’, as they called Seymour, was on their side.
Unfortunately for Seymour, a growing number of these ‘have-nots’ began interpreting his policies as a cue to take the law into their own hands. Following his lead – or so they thought – bands of iconoclasts started smashing up church windows and tearing down rood screens. Other malcontents uprooted the hedges and fences built by ‘grasping’ landowners – reclaiming land they thought was rightfully theirs.
It was now that Seymour betrayed a weakness that would continually undermine his attempts to dominate England’s political landscape: an unwillingness to meet force with force. He issued pardons to offenders, promised new legislation and, as Paget later pointed out, only encouraged further lawlessness. So it proved when a rebellion broke out in the South West, where militant conservatives began protesting at the government’s religious policy and the attempt to force an English Prayer Book on Devon and Cornwall. On 2 July 1549, 2,000 rebels laid siege to Exeter.
- Read more about the Prayer Book Rebellion
It was not only in the shires that Seymour faced problems. His autocratic style had alienated several members of the council in London, whose support he now needed. He did not dare leave the capital himself but he did not know which of his conciliar colleagues he could trust with an army. On 9 July, Lord Russell, sent to quell the western rebellion, halted at Honiton, refusing to advance on Exeter until Seymour sent reinforcements.
At the same time a commotion at Wymondham, Norfolk, involving the breaking of hedges, turned into a mass movement when Robert Kett, a landowner of moderate means, accepted the leadership of the rebels and set off to attack Norwich, then the second largest city in England. By 11 July he had amassed a force of 16,000 followers and set up camp on Mousehold Heath, close by the city. When news of this and other disturbances reached London the following day, the city was placed under martial law. The capital was wracked by mounting fear of demonstrations of sympathy for the rebels.
Seymour, meanwhile, was with King Edward at Hampton Court and under virtual siege. Landowners demanded that he take action against unruly tenants, and his councillors urged him to send troops to the trouble spots to make examples of rebel ringleaders. Instead, he hesitated.
On the night of 21–22 July, Kett’s ‘army’ attacked Norwich, bombarding the city with confiscated cannon. His men stormed through breaches in the wall and, fighting their way hand-to-hand through the narrow streets, reached the market place. Kett set up his own court, passing judgment on prisoners dragged before him and authorising foraging parties to commandeer provisions from houses and surrounding farms. He sent the government an ultimatum of 29 demands, insisting that they were in line with Seymour’s policy, and directed only against landowners who were “enemies of king and commonwealth”.
Once again, Seymour dithered. It was the 28th before he sent a mere 1,300 mercenaries and local levies, under the command of William Parr, Marquess of Northampton, to face Kett’s vastly superior force. Parr had little military experience, and it showed. Soon after Parr’s arrival, Kett’s army attacked, inflicting on Parr a humiliating defeat. An eyewitness described the scene: “Lamentable and miserable was the state of the city at this time when nothing was seen or heard but lamentation and weeping… the clashing of weapons, the flames of the burning, the ruin and fall of houses, and many other fearful things which… struck with incredible sorrow the hearts and ears of all that heard it.”
Too little, too late
Now, at last, Seymour seems to have stirred from his stupor. Fearing that Kett’s army would march on London, he doubled the guard on the city gates, set up gibbets as a warning to disaffected citizens and instructed the bishop of London to preach at St Paul’s that “those who resist temporal authority resist God’s ordinance, and are utterly damned. The rebels deserve death as traitors and receive eternal damnation with Lucifer.”
But for most members of the political class, Seymour’s intervention was too little, too late. With the capital in a state of panic, several councillors now abandoned him, quitting Hampton Court and meeting in Westminster – to all intents and purposes a rival government.
However, better news for Seymour came from the West Country. Russell, having been granted reinforcements, defeated the rebels at Fenny Bridges, Clyst Heath and Clyst St Mary and raised the siege of Exeter. He arrived none too soon. A contemporary chronicle related the suffering of Exeter’s besieged citizens: “Many assaults and sundry skirmishes were made, the gates set afire, the walls undermined, the suburbs burned and divers killed… the citizens, having no bread, were driven… to eat bread made of bran and worse and the prisoners in the gaol… were fed with horseflesh.”
If William Parr was condemned for weakness at Norwich, Russell was soon being accused of undue brutality. At Clyst Heath the commander ordered 900 bound prisoners to have their throats cut. Russell pursued the king’s enemies over a wide area and hanged those he hunted down in places as far away as Minehead and Bath. On entering Exeter, he unleashed vengeance so gruesome that it appalled even seasoned warriors. It is estimated that the Prayer Book Rebellion cost 5,500 lives.
Edward VI: the pitiless king
Did the young king revel in his uncle’s disgrace? We can’t be sure what was going through Edward’s mind as Seymour lurched from one disaster to the next in the autumn of 1549. But an extract from his diary gives us a clue. In it the king relates how the London councillors sent him “A very gentle letter… to declare [the Protector’s] faults, ambitions, vainglory, entering into rash wars in my youth… enriching himself from my treasure, following his own opinions and doing all by his own authority, etc. [The next day] the lords came to Windsor, took him and brought him through Holborn to the Tower.” Edward’s tone is emotionless, with no suggestion of regret for his uncle’s fate. So did he resent Seymour’s control? Edward was an orphan. The boy’s only close relatives were his uncles, Edward and Thomas Seymour. In the game of thrones that was Tudor politics, they both played for the highest stakes. Thomas was a charmer. He married Henry VIII’s widow, Katherine Parr, and had designs on Princess Elizabeth. He also courted the boy king’s friendship by giving him money and pointing out how badly the protector treated him. As for Edward Seymour, he kept young Edward on a tight rein, restricting access to his royal charge and planting spies in the royal household who informed him about everyone who approached the king. The tactic may have worked in the short term. But Edward VI, no less than Seymour himself, took the wilful Henry VIII as his model. Now, it appears that he was ready to cast off Seymour’s avuncular tutelage.
Rival armies
By now, order was also being restored in eastern England – though, unfortunately for Seymour, one of his greatest rivals would take the credit. At the end of August, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick – at the head of an army of 10,000 levies, fortified by a further thousand German mercenaries – seized Norwich, cut Kett’s supply lines and confronted him at nearby Dussindale. In the resulting battle, hundreds of peasants were slain.
Dudley returned to London a hero. As his mercenaries set up camp outside the city, the “ruin” that William Paget had predicted for Edward Seymour in his letter of 7 July appeared an inevitability. Feeling himself increasingly isolated, Seymour ordered all armed levies to be stood down. The Westminster councillors ignored him.
The next few weeks saw the rival governments at Hampton and Westminster locked in stalemate. On 5 October, Seymour, now panicking, sent a flurry of messages to local officials ordering them to come to Hampton Court with as many armed men as possible, “to defend the king and the lord protector, against whom a most dangerous conspiracy has been attempted”.
The accusation of treason galvanised Seymour’s rivals into action. Astonished Londoners saw them processing through the city “weaponed and had their servants likewise weaponed, attending upon them in new liveries”. Seymour responded by ordering the lieutenant of the Tower of London, Sir John Markham, to hold the fortress against the rebels. Instead, Markham handed it to the councillors. Seymour now fled by night with the king to Windsor, calling on all loyal Englishmen to come to his aid. It was a forlorn hope. The force was now decidedly with Seymour’s opponents.
The protectorate was all but over and on 14 October Seymour was escorted to the Tower. But that wasn’t the end of the story. In 1550, Seymour made a dramatic return to the council, and there he might have stayed if he had been content to accept a subordinate position to his old comrade-in-arms, John Dudley. He was not. Seymour was drawn into personal rivalries within the council – and he lost. In January 1552, the man who had held England’s fate in his hands just a few years earlier, was executed for trying to overthrow Dudley.
By any standards, Seymour’s fall from grace was precipitous. Its root cause may have been his attempt to imitate Henry VIII’s model of absolute rule. The trouble is, Seymour was not Henry. He lacked the king’s legitimacy and, above all, his ruthlessness. Seymour was plagued by contradictions. He declared his opposition to money-grubbing landowners, but spent hugely on a new London palace – Somerset House – and other grandiose projects. He abhorred violence but was indirectly responsible for thousands of deaths. When firm action was required, he wavered. All this alienated England’s political class. And when they withdrew their support, Seymour was doomed.
Derek Wilson is a historian and novelist. His books include The Plantagenets: The Kings that Made Britain (Quercus, 2014) and The Devil’s Chalice (MadeGlobal Publishing, 2016), a novel based around Kett’s rebellion
This article was first published in the April 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>To kidnap a king: the foiled plot to abduct Edward VIhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/to-kidnap-a-king-the-foiled-plot-to-abduct-edward-vi/2020-01-15T16:30:45.000ZEveryone in the vicinity came running, and it was with relief that the boy king – 11-year-old Edward VI – was found safe in his bed. Whoever had killed the dog had fled in the commotion. All the evidence pointed to the king's uncle, Thomas Seymour. Here, historian Elizabeth Norton investigates...
When Henry VIII died in January 1547, power was quickly grasped by Edward Seymour, who became both lord protector and Duke of Somerset. He was unwilling to share power with his younger brother, who had been little esteemed by the old king. The relationship between the pair was further soured when Thomas married Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s widow. The younger Seymour hoped to be appointed guardian of the king, but there was little prospect of his brother relinquishing the role.
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Thomas Seymour had been pleased to be appointed Lord High Admiral early in 1547, telling his friend Sir William Sharington that it gave him “the rule of a good sort of ships and men. And I tell you it is a good thing to have the rule of men”. He suffered disappointment, however, when Lord Clinton was instead appointed to head the English navy that summer in the Protector’s invasion of Scotland. Thomas Seymour remained in London, kicking his heels about the court as Somerset surged northwards, winning a victory against the Scots at the battle of Pinkie, east of Edinburgh, on 10 September 1547. With the protector gone, Thomas Seymour was able to gain access easily to the king in his apartments at Hampton Court.
Sitting with his royal nephew one day, Thomas told Edward that Somerset would never be able to dominate in Scotland “without loss of a great number of men or of himself; and therefore that he spent a great sum of money in vain”. This hit a nerve with the king, since Somerset was widely believed to be embezzling Henry VIII’s treasury and alienating his lands. Thomas chided his nephew that he was “too bashful” in his own affairs, and that he should speak up in order to “bear rule, as other kings do”. Edward shook his head, declaring that “I needed not, for I was well enough”, yet he registered his uncle’s words.
When Thomas came to him again that September, he told the child that “ye must take upon you yourself to rule, for ye shall be able enough as well as other kings; and then ye may give your men somewhat; for your uncle is old, and I trust will not live long”. Edward’s reply was chilling: “it were better that he should die”. Indeed, there was little love lost between the monarch and the lord protector. Thomas also informed Edward that “ye are but even a beggarly king now,” drawing attention to the fact that he had no money with which to play at cards or reward his servants. Thomas would, he assured Edward, supply him with the sums required. In return, Edward assured his uncle that he was happy to take “secret measures” to ensure that he replaced Somerset as royal governor.
Somerset’s absence in Scotland had handed the king to his brother, and Thomas meant to capitalise on it. He trawled through royal records, seeking out precedents to support his bid to become the king’s governor, and he began to build support at court. He was, however, incapable of concealing his actions: word soon reached Somerset that a plot was afoot and, abandoning a promising situation in Scotland, he hurried southwards. He re-established control, banning his brother from meeting with the king. This had little effect, however, since Thomas was friends with several members of the privy chamber. It was a simple matter to communicate with the boy over the coming months.
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The relationship between the brothers remained frosty into the following year. The death in childbirth of Thomas’s wife, Katherine Parr, on 5 September 1548 also failed to heal relations. Although Katherine had once been so furious with the protector that she had threatened to bite him, she had been a restraining hand on her husband. With her death, he moved headlong towards his ruin.
Henry VIII’s younger daughter, Princess Elizabeth, had originally lived with Katherine and Thomas, but had been sent away after the queen had caught her husband embracing the girl that June. Thomas Seymour had toyed with marrying the teenager before he wed the queen, and had carried out a flirtation with her for more than a year at the queen’s residences at Chelsea and Hanworth and in his own London residence, Seymour Place. With Katherine’s death, Thomas became, as Elizabeth’s governess, Katherine Ashley, informed her, “the noblest man unmarried in this land”. Soon, her cofferer, Thomas Parry, was meeting privately with Seymour in London. It seemed that Elizabeth was prepared to consider marriage with the king’s younger uncle.
At the same time as his negotiations with Elizabeth’s servant, Thomas Seymour was also plotting to bring down his brother. For some months he had been attempting to win friends in the counties by visiting important local men. In October 1548 he informed his ally, Sir William Sharington that from his own tenants and servants he could muster 10,000 men. Sharington was himself a useful ally, since he was the under-treasurer of the Bristol mint and had been counterfeiting testoons [silver coins] since the spring of 1548, stamped with his own initials and a bust of Henry VIII.
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In the autumn of 1548, Seymour asked Sharington how much money would be required to pay and ration 10,000 men for a month, before declaring “God’s faith, Sharington, if we had £10,000 in ready money; that were well, could not you be able to make so much money?”. The coiner agreed that it could be done and set to work. Thomas began to provision Holt Castle, a fortification that stood at an important crossing point on the River Dee, giving access to south Wales.
Thomas Seymour was a regular visitor to the king’s chambers during the winter of 1548–9. He was there on the evening of 6 January 1549, where he spoke jovially to the king’s attendants, unaware that the Bristol mint had been searched by the protector’s servants that day. While Thomas Seymour appeared nonchalant at Sharington’s arrest a few days later, he understood the implications that it had for his own plot. On the night of the arrest, John Fowler, who was Seymour’s chief contact in the king’s privy chamber, came to him in a state of alarm, lamenting that “I am utterly undone”. Privately, Seymour resolved to bring his plot forwards.
From around 10 January, he began to invite the Marquess of Dorset and the Earl of Huntington – both men he believed he could trust – to Seymour Place in the evenings. The talk was mundane, but on each evening the meetings would break up suddenly, with Seymour setting out alone for the court at Westminster. There, his behaviour was suspicious. He would go quietly into the buttery, where alcohol for the court was kept. Pouring himself a drink, he would wait alone among the bottles and barrels until John Fowler appeared. Each time, he asked “whether the king would say anything of him?” “Nay in good faith” replied Fowler. At once melancholy, Thomas wished aloud that Edward was five or six years older. At the end of each visit, the king’s younger uncle would insist that Fowler “bring him word when the king was rising”. Every morning he did so.
By day, Seymour was still attending parliament, but his strange behaviour was beginning to be noticed. While talking to John Fowler on one occasion, Seymour was informed about orders that had been given to ensure that the king remained safely locked away at night. Thomas asked what was meant by this, but Fowler said he could not tell. Thomas concurred: “No I neither. What is he afraid that any man will take the king away from him? If he think that I will go about it, he shall watch a good while”. It was hardly a baseless concern, as Fowler himself could attest, since Seymour had once commented to him that “there is a slender company about the king”, before stating that “a man might steal away the king now, for there come more with me than is in all the house besides”. Such a course, if successful, would, de facto, give Seymour the coveted governorship of the king’s person.
On 16 January, a servant informed Thomas Seymour that the Earl of Rutland, whom he considered a friend, had made a deposition against him to the council. Hearing this, he began to suspect “by diverse conjectures” (as he later admitted) that the council intended his arrest. That evening, Seymour’s brother-in-law, the Marquess of Northampton, found him in a state of high agitation, rehearsing the day’s events out loud.
After sending Northampton away, Seymour went to court, arriving in the evening. Once there he spoke to the king’s guards, scattering their watch as he sent them on various errands. With a key that had been given to him by one of the king’s chamberlains he was able to open the door to the room adjoining the king’s bedchamber, “which he entered in the dead of night”. There, he disturbed the little dog, which usually slept in the king’s bedroom, and was his “most faithful guardian”. In the ensuing panic he stabbed the dog to death with his dagger, before fleeing home once more to Seymour Place.
The next day Thomas Seymour was arrested and sent to the Tower of London. Later, he would be accused of trying “to instil into His Grace’s head” the idea that he should “take upon himself the government and managing of his own affairs”. In his evening visits to court the week before, did he meet with the king and plan an “abduction” with him? It would seem plausible that the bedchamber key had been given to him on Edward’s command, since none of his attendants was ever accused of this.
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In the Tower, Seymour, while at his lowest ebb, wrote the lines of verse: “forgetting God to love a king / Hath been my rod, or else nothing”. His protests of innocence, too, insofar as he made any defence, were based on the claim that he had had the king’s confidence and approval in everything. How could it be treason to do as the king asked? He probably hoped to collect Princess Elizabeth at Hatfield on the way out of London. At Holt Castle, the three could then wait for the protector to fall before Thomas Seymour – the king’s new brother-in-law – emerged to take his place.
Unfortunately for Seymour, by leaving his dog in the chamber outside his bedroom the boy-king had botched his own escape attempt. On 20 March 1549, Thomas Seymour lost his head for it.
Elizabeth Norton is a historian of the queens of England and the Tudor period. She is author of The Lives Of Tudor Women (Head of Zeus, 2016), England's Queens: The Biography (Amberley, 2015) and The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (Head of Zeus, 2015), which looks at the relationship between the future Elizabeth I and Thomas Seymour, the uncle of King Edward VI.
This article was originally published by History Extra in 2016
]]>Edward VI: boy king and religious zealothttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/edward-vi-boy-king-and-religious-zealot/2018-04-16T12:50:19.000ZAt Edward VI's Westminster Abbey coronation in February 1547, archbishop Thomas Cranmer supposedly urged the nine-year-old supreme head of the church to follow the example of Josiah, the young king of ancient Judah, in seeing God truly worshipped and idolatry destroyed.
Cranmer’s exhortation was a sign of things to come: far from reversing Henry VIII’s break with Rome, Edward would go on to quicken the pace of his father’s religious reforms. The result was that England would, for the first time, become an officially Protestant country during the six-year reign of the boy king.
Henry VIII had ended the pope’s ecclesiastical supremacy, but he kept the mass. Edward didn’t share his father’s devotion to a rite that, for Protestants, was the prime example of idolatry, and in 1547, the Chantries Act condemned intercessory masses for the dead. Then, the 1548 Order of Communion and the two prayer books of 1549 and 1552 cut the heart out of the mass and finally abolished it altogether. English replaced Latin in parish church services, while the removal of a host of ‘idolatrous’ religious images, abolition of many ‘superstitious’ ceremonies, and replacement of stone altars by communion tables transformed the outward face of religion.
Fervent reform
Edward remained a minor throughout his reign. His maternal uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, was protector of the king’s realms from 1547–49. He combined strong support for religious reform with a resolve to address social and economic ills such as the supposedly widespread enclosure of land for conversion to pasture. His 1547 invasion of Scotland resumed the ‘rough wooing’ begun by Henry VIII in order to achieve Mary Stewart’s marriage to Edward. Seymour also tried to enlist Scottish support for an ambitious vision of a united and Protestant Britain. However, French help for the Scots ensured its failure.
Unsettling religious changes and economic grievances triggered a formidable wave of rebellions in 1549. Somerset’s sympathetic response to some economic demands, coupled with his arrogance towards his fellow councillors, led in October to his arrest at Windsor and removal from the protectorship. John Dudley, created Duke of Northumberland in 1551, led the government as lord president of the privy council from February 1550.
Edward’s now fervent Protestantism encouraged Northumberland to support reformers more militant than Cranmer, especially John Hooper, who wanted to get rid of surviving elements of Catholic priestly dress, and John Knox, who bitterly criticised the retention of kneeling to receive holy communion in the 1552 prayer book.
In March 1551 the 13-year-old king told his Catholic elder sister Mary that he could no longer bear her disobedience in having mass celebrated in her household. His strong feelings on the issue embarrassed his advisers when the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Mary’s cousin, allegedly threatened war if she were not allowed her mass. Needing insurance against Charles’s hostility, the government agreed in July 1551 a treaty with France providing for Edward’s eventual marriage to one of King Henri II’s daughters. It now seemed safe to try once more to end Mary’s mass, and then arrest Somerset, who was tried for treasonable plotting and executed in January 1552. But Henri II was not a close or trusted ally. There were soon renewed fears of French schemes against England.
A sharp fall in English cloth exports during the early 1550s – when England’s relations with Charles V, overlord of Antwerp, London’s main trading partner, were already frosty – prompted the formation of a partnership between London merchants and the court under Northumberland’s patronage to finance a quest for new markets by way of the North-East Passage (along the Russian Arctic coast). The expedition that set off in May 1553, watched by Edward from Greenwich Palace, never reached China as intended, but resulted in the opening of a profitable trade with Russia. This venture, and the stimulus it gave to English advances in navigation and cartography, played a key part in launching the Elizabethan age of exploration.
After the marriage treaty with France, Edward was encouraged to attend the privy council. In 1551–53 he wrote various papers demonstrating his close interest in the making of policy. In January 1553, however, he began to suffer from the illness that caused his death on 6 July. At some stage he wrote a “devise for the succession” that omitted his sisters Mary and Elizabeth and, in its final form, made Lady Jane Grey his successor. Mary Tudor’s fervent Catholicism was widely thought to be Edward’s chief reason for altering the succession. However, the illegitimacy of both Mary and Elizabeth was the chief pretext mentioned in letters patent that gave effect to the devise.
We shall never know for certain whether Edward, Northumberland or some other adviser first planned the succession scheme. But the king clearly made it his own, and insisted upon it in face of strong objections.
Had Mary Tudor lived longer as queen, Edward’s reign might have come to seem a disruptive but ultimately rather unimportant interlude in English history. In the event, Mary died in 1558 and Elizabeth succeeded her.
Elizabeth did not share the hopes of further reform that the Puritans inherited from the Edwardian radicals. However, the Elizabethan religious settlement was a modified version of Edward’s legacy. Urged by Sir William Cecil – her principal secretary who had served under Northumberland – Elizabeth helped the Scottish lords of the congregation who threw off French tutelage and introduced a Calvinist Reformation. John Knox, exile in Edward’s England, was its leading architect.
Ralph Houlbrooke taught history at the University of Reading. His books include Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480-1750 (OUP, 1998).
This article was first published in the August 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>How could the son of Henry VIII become Edward VI?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-could-the-son-of-henry-viii-become-edward-vi/2016-12-12T10:00:01.000ZA king is still a king if he has not been crowned. Edward V is one of only four English monarchs since the Norman conquest not to have been crowned (the others being ‘Empress’ Matilda, Lady Jane Grey and Edward VIII). Although the date – and circumstances – of his death are uncertain, it is likely that he died before his 15th birthday, which would make him the shortest-lived monarch in English history.
Edward was the son of the Yorkist king Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. He was born in November 1470 in a sanctuary within Westminster Abbey, where his mother had sought refuge from the Lancastrians who had temporarily removed her husband from power during the Wars of the Roses. Upon his father’s restoration to the throne in 1471, Edward was created Prince of Wales and was formally recognised as the heir to the English crown a year later.
Edward IV died in April 1483, and his eldest son and namesake became king. Edward V’s uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was appointed protector during his minority. He wasted no time in escorting the young king to the Tower of London, where Edward was joined by his younger brother, Richard, Duke of York. Edward’s coronation was repeatedly postponed while his uncle plotted to seize the crown for himself.
Evidence was brought forward that Edward IV had been precontracted when he had married Elizabeth Woodville, thus rendering their union invalid and their offspring illegitimate. Richard of Gloucester was declared king on 25 June. What happened to Edward and his brother (known as the Princes in the Tower) has been the source of intense controversy ever since.
The Lancastrian Henry Tudor, who defeated Richard at the battle of Bosworth in 1485, portrayed Richard as a murderous usurper, so strengthening his own tenuous claim to the throne.
Henry’s successors took up the theme, notably Henry VIII, whose choice of name for his son was highly significant. By christening him Edward, he was reminding the people of the last king of that name, whose usurpation and murder the Tudors had avenged.
Answered by Tracy Borman, author of Matilda: Queen of the Conqueror (Jonathan Cape, 2011).
This Q&A was first published in BBC History Magazine in 2011
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