The world into which the future Edward VI was born had changed completely from that of his predecessors. In the space of a generation, England had been wrenched, by force of law and violence, away from its medieval, Catholic mindset towards a far more modern way of thinking. The children born in the 1520s and ’30s found themselves to be pioneers in a Renaissance world, where centuries-old traditions and ways of worship had been rejected in favour of a new faith, but the changes were still new enough to require definition and shape in order to become habits. While the Renaissance had forged new identities, the dramatic iconoclasm of the Reformation was still evolving. England no longer followed the dictates of a distant pope in the sacked city of Rome, its subjects owed their whole allegiance to their king. And Henry VIII had proved himself to be godlike in his kingship, restructuring his world to fit his needs. The issues of education, of life and death, and how the self and the nation were to be defined, were now under debate and there were some who still wanted to push the religious reforms further. In 1537, against this backdrop of change, the long-awaited fruit of Henry VIII’s labour arrived in the shape of a legitimate son. Fifteen months after he had lost Henry Fitzroy, the boy he had been preparing to name as his heir, the king’s dynastic ambitions were finally achieved.
Henry VIII’s transition from his second to his third wife had been swiftly accomplished. Eleven days after the death of Anne Boleyn, he had been married to Jane Seymour in a quiet ceremony at Whitehall. Just like Anne, the new queen was a maid of honour to her predecessor, but Jane’s mild, quiet compliance stood in stark contrast to the passion and fire of Henry’s previous queens. The daughter of Sir John Seymour of Wulf Hall in Wiltshire, she was in her late twenties when she attracted the king’s attention and their swift, secret wedding at Whitehall was followed, five days later, by her public proclamation as queen. Nine months later Jane fell pregnant and she had retreated to Hampton Court to enter her confinement by September. The sweating sickness was rife again and, given his experiences with illness, the king was understandably concerned. Norfolk wrote to Cromwell on 11 October that ‘the death is extremely sore in London’ and had also reached ‘other places near Hampton Court’ so that the king went to Esher, to reduce traffic around the queen. Precautions were being taken about admission to the palace, with a recognition that certain age groups were more likely to spread infection, and it was ruled that ‘no young folks may come within the gates’. Norfolk asked Cromwell for guidance about approaching the king, as he did not wish to come to him ‘out of any contagious air’.1
As Norfolk wrote, Jane was already in labour. She reputedly endured almost two days of struggling with the delivery before finally giving birth to a son in the early hours of 12 October. It was the day before St Edward’s day, and the boy was given the saint’s name, perhaps because of his mother’s old-style Catholic devotion, perhaps also in reference to the king’s grandfather. All the king’s previous sons, including those short-lived ones by Catherine of Aragon, had been given the name Henry, so this marked a departure. The king might have hoped it would break an unfortunate cycle. The queen wrote to Cromwell, informing him of the birth of her son ‘conceived in lawful matrimony’2 and guns were fired from the Tower of London. Plans went ahead for the boy’s christening, with careful precautions regarding the widespread sickness. Lord Maltravers wrote from Croydon that the king was ‘not willing that the writer should come to Court at present from fear of the infection’3 and the mayor and sheriffs were to forbid ‘the access of persons to the court … without special letters from the King … on account of the plague’. The number of people given access to the court was not to exceed six in the company of a duke, four for an earl, three for a baron and so on.4
The christening took place at Hampton Court on 15 October, when the baby was three days old. To celebrate the occasion, Te Deums were sung in Westminster Abbey and other churches across the country ‘and great fires [were lit] in every street, and [there was] goodly banqueting and triumphing cheer with shooting of guns all day and night, and messengers were sent to all the estates and cities of the realm, to whom were given great gifts’.5 There was a long and dignified procession into the chapel, with gentlemen, knights, bishops and abbots preceding councillors, lords, royal household and ambassadors then came the Earl of Sussex bearing two covered basins, Wiltshire holding a taper of wax and the Earl of Essex carrying the golden bowl containing salt. Princess Elizabeth, at just 4 years old, bore the baby’s chrisom, or baptismal cloth, and the wife of the Marquis of Exeter carried the child under a canopy. Princess Mary, aged 21, was a godmother and walked behind the canopy, her train carried by Lady Kingston.6 After he was named, and given the titles of Duke of Cornwall and Earl of Chester, tapers were lit, the baby was returned to his mother and spices, wafers and spiced wine were served to the guests.
Jane did not live to enjoy her new motherhood. The Earl of Rutland reported that on the afternoon of 23 October, she had suffered ‘an natural laxe’, or bleed, after which she appeared to improve a little. However, all through that night she was ‘very sick’ so that her confessor was summoned and, by eight the following morning, he was preparing to administer the last rites.7 Prayers were ordered for her recovery and, as Sir Thomas Palmer hoped, ‘if good prayers can save her, she is not like to die, for never lady was so much plained [lamented for] with every man, rich and poor’.8 Anticipating the worst, Norfolk ‘sorrowfully’ wrote to Cromwell, asking him ‘to be here tomorrow early to comfort our good master, for as our mistress there is no likelihood of her life, the more pity, and I fear she shall not be on lyve at the time ye shall read this’.9 Jane died of infection, or complications arising from the birth, on 24 October. John Hutton’s letter to Cromwell expressed the death of other hopes in the queen’s demise: ‘we hoped her grace should have brought forth more fruit, but the power of God ought to be esteemed all for the best.’10 On the same day, the king wrote to Francis I of his mixed emotions:
I have so cordially received the congratulations, which, by this bearer and by your letters, you have made me for the son which it has pleased God to give me, that I desire nothing more than an occasion by the success of your good desires to make the like. Notwithstanding, Divine Providence has mingled my joy with the bitterness of the death of her who brought me this happiness.11
However, life had to continue, except that now Henry had his legitimate son. Two weeks later, on 3 November, Sir John Wallop wrote to Lord Lisle that ‘the King is in good health and merry as a widower may be, the Prince also’.12
The funeral arrangements for Jane Seymour were the first in the royal family after the religious reforms of the mid-1530s. Catherine of Aragon had been buried as a widowed Princess of Wales in Peterborough Cathedral while Anne Boleyn’s remains had been laid to rest in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, the traditional site for the burials of important figures executed on Tower Green. Jane died in the estate of a queen but, more so, a queen who had recently delivered Henry the legitimate son he had longed for. She was also the first queen to have died with that status since Henry’s mother, Elizabeth of York and, like her, it had been a death shortly after childbirth. Therefore, her funeral on 12 November was a model of the most honourable practices of the moment. Although he had been critical of the way Norfolk had dealt with the burial of Henry Fitzroy, the king entrusted the duke and Sir William Paulet with the arrangements, as he took the traditional route of retiring ‘to a solitary place to pass his sorrows’.13 Norfolk sought out the accounts of Elizabeth of York’s funeral in 1503, although he was probably an eyewitness to that occasion, having been 30 at the time of her death. The honours that had been given to Elizabeth were now bestowed on her daughter-in-law, with a slight twist to take account for the religious changes.
Jane’s body was prepared by the wax chandler, who removed her entrails ‘with searing, balming, spicing, and trammeling in cloth’ before passing her on to the plumber, who leaded, soldered and chested her. Her organs were interred in the chapel while her body was laid under a hearse and surrounded by twenty-one lit tapers and a crowd of waiting women who ‘put off their rich apparel, doing on their mourning habit and white kerchers hanging over their heads and shoulders’.14 In contrast, the queen’s effigy was dressed in cloth of gold and jewels. The chapel, chamber and galleries were hung with black cloth and decorated with images. A constant watch was kept over Jane’s remains, ensured by a relay of mourners from the court and the chief clergymen of the land taking it in turns to conduct the mass. Finally, after twelve days in state, the queen was placed upon a chariot drawn by six horses and borne in a procession led by men with black staves and 200 poor wearing the queen’s badge. Jane’s final journey took her the 15 miles from Hampton Court to Windsor, followed by five chariots of her waiting women and almoners distributing money along the way. Dirges were sung upon her arrival, as she was conducted into St George’s Abbey along a route lined with hangings more masses were said and watch was kept overnight. She was buried the following morning, and a feast was provided in Windsor Castle for the mourners. Jane was also commemorated in London, with dirges sung, 1,200 masses said and bells rung in St Paul’s Cathedral, also by Norfolk’s doing.15
There would be no chantry chapel for Jane and no fund set up to guarantee her swift passage through purgatory. In 1529, Henry VIII had passed an act forbidding payments for masses for the dead and his ban on the building of any more chantries was only eight years away. One of the last to be completed was that of Richard Fox at Winchester in 1528, featuring a cadaver tomb that showed the skeletal bishop with his head back and mouth open, appearing to writhe in agony. However, it is significant that, during this in-between stage, masses were still said for Jane’s soul. This would be banned during the reign of her son. Jane was placed in a vault under the quire, at the eastern end of the chapel under the choir stalls. She did not receive a formal tomb, but this was intended to be a temporary measure, as Henry planned to be laid to rest beside her, in a dynastic move to emphasise the heritage and legitimacy of their son. When drafting his will in 1546, Henry asked to be placed with her, halfway between the altar and the sovereign’s garter stall, until a more permanent tomb was created for them both. Once the tomb had been completed, he intended them to be moved into a separate chapel in the east of the church, imagining that this would take place fairly soon, as the tomb was ‘almost made’.
Yet the tomb which Henry intended for himself and his wife to lie under in eternal rest, was not his. Just as he had ‘appropriated’ the possessions and properties of his chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, he had also stolen the man’s tomb. Back in 1518, Henry had planned a magnificent joint tomb for himself and Catherine of Aragon, made by the Italian Pietro Torrigiano, who had created the representation of the king’s parents in bronze, in Westminster’s Lady Chapel. Following this example, the king’s sarcophagus was to be made of white marble and black touchstone, except it was to be a quarter bigger than that of his father. However, Torrigiano left England the following year, so Henry had to seek inspiration elsewhere. He turned, in 1527, to Jacopo Sansovino, who planned him a structure made from ‘oriental stones’ with life-size statues of Henry on horseback and Jane in gold, set amid white marble pillars, gilded angels and 143 saints, prophets and other figures. The details for this tomb were included in a manuscript seen by the seventeenth-century antiquarian John Speed, but have since been lost. For some reason, the project never came to fruition and, two decades later, Henry was still casting about for a suitable tomb. He found one, abandoned before completion, in the stonemasons’ Westminster workshops.
Back in 1524, Wolsey had commissioned another Italian Renaissance sculptor, Benedetto de Rovenzanno, to create him a memorial, and the marble base, pillars and statues were well underway by the time of the minister’s fall five years later. The tomb is a perfect symbol of the changes that Henry had instigated, rejecting the late medieval desire to control the manner of one’s remembrance after death, and also just how far Henry had unleashed forces of religious reform that even he had not anticipated. It is ironic that Henry did not get to enjoy this tomb either, and remains under a simple marble slab, set into the floor. Also, despite all his noisy iconoclasm, Henry could not ultimately relinquish the Catholic faith into which he had been born. As well as requisitioning Wolsey’s tomb, he left instructions for an altar to be constructed in his memorial chapel, topped by a canopy of angels, where daily masses were to be said for his soul and for Jane’s. There were to be statues of children and apostles carrying candles, as well as 9ft-tall free-standing candles. The entire area was to be enclosed in bronze and black marble walls, which all sounds rather like a chantry chapel. Rovenzanno and his assistant worked on the tomb from 1530 to 1536, by which point the effigy of the king had been cast and polished, and on into the 1540s, until the artist returned to Italy. After that, Henry employed Giovanni Portinari during December 1543, paying him £37 9s 2d for copper and his labour.16 It was incomplete at the time of Henry’s death and, despite the directions in his son’s will, was never finished. The tomb was broken up and sold to raise funds during the civil war, a century after the king’s death.17
But at the time of Edward’s birth in October 1537, his father’s death was still a decade away. Henry might have been plunged into deepest mourning, dressing in black for three months, but provision needed to be made for the young life he had created; his son, the prince, England’s future king. Whatever grief Henry might be feeling was offset by the existence of this legitimate prince, this new chance after the loss of Fitzroy, and Henry would spend his final years obsessing over the details to get it right. Edward’s first household was run by Lady Margaret Bryan, who had also been governess to the king’s three other children. She had been looking after Princess Elizabeth, but then stepped in to oversee Edward’s infancy, following the king’s detailed instructions about the standards of cleanliness and behaviour in the household. Edward was thriving and, ‘our Lord be thanked, is in good health, and sucketh like a child of his puissance’.18 Leland stated that his wet nurse was a Clara Domo but Holbein painted a portrait of a Margaret Clement (née Giggs) which was mislabelled as ‘Mother Jak’, a woman who was also reputed to be nursing the prince. There were four rockers and the lady mistress was Blanche Herbert, née Milborne, who later joined Princess Elizabeth’s household as Blanche Parry. Edward’s elder sister Mary was also a regular visitor to his nursery, travelling by barge along the river from her base at Richmond to Hampton Court, where her visits prompted payments to the prince’s minstrels.19
Soon, male appointments were made to Edward’s household too, as befitted his age and status. In March 1538, Sir William Sidney was appointed as his Chamberlain, Sir John Cornwallis as Steward, Richard Cotton vice chamberlain and Edward Cornwallis groom porter of the house.20 Sidney was a veteran of the Tudor court, having fought at Flodden, been appointed Squire to the Body for Henry VIII, accompanied him to France and fought under his brother-in-law, Charles Brandon. Sir John Cornwallis had served in Brittany. Their instructions included the need to take ‘alle diligent and honest heed, caution and foresight’ to avoid ‘all practises and evil enterprises which might be devised against his grace or the danger of his person’. It was Sidney’s job to have the ‘keeping, oversight, care and cure’ of ‘his majesty and the whole realm’s most precious jewel’ and see that ‘all dangers and all adversaries of malicious persons and casual harms shall be vigilantly foreseen and avoided’. He was to observe that good order was kept in the household, admitting no strangers and permitting no one except the appointed officials to be in the prince’s company to have access to his chamber, or to touch his person or cradle. Only those with a special token or express permission from the king should be admitted and no one under the position of a knight. Even then, they should only be allowed to kiss his hand. The household officials were to ensure that ‘good, sufficient and large’ quantities of all kinds of bread, meat and drink, eggs and butter were prepared for the prince and that his linen and clothing were to be ‘purely washed, clean dried, kept, brushed and reserved cleanly … without any intermeddling’ by other persons with no place there. All new purchases, whether it be clothing, wool, linen, silk or gold, was to be ‘newe wasshed, bifore his grace shall wear any of the same’ and should be brushed, made clean, aired and the fire and perfumed thoroughly so the prince should have ‘no harm or displeasure’.21
Crucially, the prince’s new servants were to ‘advoyde alle infection and daungier of pestilence and contagious diseases’ by preventing any members of the household who were in direct contact with Edward from travelling to London or other towns during the summer months or other peak times of contagion. If such a journey were essential, they should obtain a licence to visit but, upon their return, refrain from entering the boy’s presence for several days, until they could be pronounced clear of infection. If anyone in the household should unexpectedly fall ill, they were to be removed from the premises immediately. Henry was also concerned about the boys employed in places like the scullery and cellar, kitchen and woodyard, who ‘without any respect go to and fro, and be not warre [aware] of the daungers of infection and do often times resort into suspect places’. Therefore, none was to be admitted into the house. The king may have had his brother Arthur in mind when he set down rules concerning another potential source of illness. It was traditional for poor people to wait at the gates of aristocratic properties asking for alms, so to keep them at a distance Henry ruled that a place should be appointed for them to gather, a good distance away. Any who ventured closer to the house should be grievously punished as an example to others.
The conduct of the prince’s servants was of great significance. He was not to be served with anything to eat or drink, except that which was fed to everyone, allowing no one to meddle with it, and it was to be tested carefully from time to time.22 The king was clearly not prepared to take any chances after the losses he had experienced.
And yet, it was Henry’s health that was to cause concern in May 1538. As the French ambassador Castillon reported, it was the habit of the king’s physicians to keep open the fistula on his leg, to allow it to drain. Early in the month, it closed over for ten or twelve days, meaning that ‘the humours which had no outlet were like to have stifled him.’ He was in severe danger, unable to speak and turning ‘black in the face’. It sent the lords into turmoil, contemplating his demise, Castillon believing ‘there would be much folly’ with ‘one party … for the young Prince and the other for Madame Mary’.23 Fortunately, Henry recovered completely and, just three days after the ambassador had composed his letter, went to visit Edward, whose household had moved from Hampton Court to Hunsdon House in Hertfordshire. Despite his full recovery, this episode served to confirm the dangerous combination of the king’s volatile health and the prince’s extreme youth.
Edward was to spend much of his childhood on the Hunsdon estate. It had formerly been in the possession of the Duke of Norfolk’s father, but passed to the Crown on his death in 1525. Henry VIII had then developed the property, creating royal apartments and an estate including a moat. In February 1534 the ‘master surveyor of the King’s works at Hunsdon’ reported on the newly installed ‘parelles’ of freestone for the chimneys in the:
King’s watching chamber, palett chamber, privy chamber, and in the other chamber beneath the same; for lime, plaster, “rigge tyles,” corner tiles, paving tiles and plain tiles; for timber, and for wood bought by the acre; for wainscoats, laths, pails, tile pins, hooks, hinges, locks, clasps, keys … new glass bought of Galyon Hone and “sett with symond,” which cost the King £2,900.24
Hunsdon was also where Henry had fled to escape the sweating sickness in the 1520s, so it was clearly considered a healthy and secluded place. It is shown in a portrait of Edward, painted early in his reign, glimpsed in the distance through a window. That month, possibly on the occasion of this visit, Henry was observed holding Edward ‘dallying with him in his arms … and so holding him in a window to the sight and great comfort of the people’.
By 30 June, the prince’s household had moved to Havering Palace, or Havering atte Bower in Essex. It was from there that Margaret Bryan wrote to Cromwell, promising to dress the child well for a forthcoming engagement, even though her resources were ‘very bare’. She explained that Edward’s best coat was ‘tinsel and that he shall have on at that time. He hath never a good jewel to set in his cap’. She was also able to report that the prince was ‘in good health and merry’ and that he currently had four teeth, ‘three full out and the fourth appearing’.25 Perhaps Edward was to be readied for the visit of some of the king’s council that September, including Thomas Audley and the Earl of Oxford. On the eighth of the month, they thanked the king for ‘their licence to visit my lord Prince’ and agreed that they never saw ‘so goodly a child of his age, so merry, so pleasant, so good and loving countenance and so earnest an eye as it were a sage judgement towards every person that repaireth to his Grace’. Edward had grown, losing some of his baby fat; he could stand and ‘would walk if they let him’.26 However, Audley recommended that he be not allowed to push himself too far too fast, ‘considering that his Grace is yet tender … he should not strain himself, as his courage would serve him, till he come above a year of age.’27 In October, Sybille Penne, Sidney’s sister-in-law, was appointed as Edward’s dry nurse, suggesting that he was weaned around this time. Sidney wrote to Cromwell, thanking him for the appointment and stating that he would not have recommended her if he was not ‘right well assured of her good demeanor, ableness, honesty and truth’ and she would show ‘no want of diligence nor scarcity of goodwill’ in accomplishing her work.28 By the end of the year, George Owen had been appointed as the prince’s doctor, and would remain so until the boy’s death.
Havering was considered a good house for the summer, but too cold for the winter, so the prince and his establishment returned to Hunsdon for the season. They celebrated Christmas and the New Year there, and the prince received gifts from his family and his father’s council. Lady Mary gave him an embroidered coat of crimson satin, Lady Elizabeth a cambric shirt she had made with her own hands, while the Earl of Essex gave him a gold bell and whistle, two oxen and twenty mutton, Southampton gave him a bonnet and others sent cups and bowls of silver and gilt, more meat.29 That March, Margaret Bryan wrote to Henry from Hunsdon to report that ‘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.’30 Around this time, Edward was also visited by ambassadors from Cleves, when Henry was negotiating his fourth marriage, but burst into tears at the sight of the strange gentlemen.31
It was also around this time that the first portrait of Edward appears. Painted by Hans Holbein in 1539, it shows the prince as a chubby toddler with bulbous cheeks, sitting upright and looking directly towards the viewer, although his gaze is slightly dropped. He has a large, broad head, like a childish version of his father, with a prominent small chin, a square jaw and rosebud lips. His nose is the same as Holbein’s depiction of Henry VIII’s in 1538 and his eyes appear dark and a little drooping under fair, scanty brows. A little fair hair appears on his forehead, trimmed into a fringe or scraped back under his cap. He is dressed in an outfit of red and gold, his bonnet gold with dark stripes and white lining sitting beneath a red velvet hat stitched with golden beads and topped with a white feather. His red doublet is piped with gold, nipped in at the waist and a mantle, or longer sleeves, falls back to reveal full sleeves in gold, embroidered with black, the white frilly of his chemise showing. He stands behind a bench draped in green velvet, his chubby right hand raised and a golden rattle, resembling a sceptre, clasped in his left. A Latin text inscribed on a scroll below exhorts him to become his father’s equal, or else to surpass him. The impression, despite his youth, is one of dignity, majesty and solidity.
The prince’s health was of critical importance. All the accounts of Edward’s young years repeat that he was a healthy child. The exception to this was a bout of quartan fever at the age of 4, a kind of malaria that recurs every three days. Returning from visiting the north in autumn 1541, Henry was deeply concerned and summoned ‘all the physicians of the country to advise’; ‘after long consultation’, they agreed that the fever would endanger the prince, one of them adding in secret to the French ambassador that ‘the Prince was so fat and unhealthy as to be unlikely to live long’.32 For around ten days, Edward’s life was despaired of, but then he began to rally and grew stronger. Dr Butts was dispatched to nurse the boy, who quickly grew impatient with the invalid diet he was prescribed, demanding meat instead of the broths and soups he was brought. In contrast, the king was so fearful of losing his only surviving son that he was unable to eat, being ‘sad and disinclined for feasting’ until the boy improved. It may be, though, that this illness recurred at this point, or created some weakness in his immune system, that prompted the doctors to fear in April 1542 that he would not enjoy a long life.
In 1536, Thomas Elyot’s Castell of Health laid out some very specific guidelines for diet and exercise. The Renaissance belief that the four Galenic humours governed the body dictated the kind of food that should be consumed, depending upon the time of year. In the winter, which Elyot defined as between 12 December and 9 March, ‘rheums and moisture’ were on the increase, meaning a greater risk of colds and illnesses, which should be balanced with the moderate use of hot meat and drink and the abundant consumption of wine. From the start of March until the end of April, with the onset of spring, sharp juices should be taken, while from April until June, sweet tastes were better for the health, and so on. Elyot also commented that ‘some children and young men, either by debility of nature, or some accidental cause, as sickness or much study, happen to gather humours phlegmatic or melancholy in the places of digestion so that concoction, or digestion, is weak in them.’ This acknowledgement of the frailty of male youth was accompanied by the recommendation that they follow the diet of old men and respect their own balance of humours, eating hot foods if their temperament was cold, or wet foods if it was dry. Elyot recommended that boys should eat three meals a day until the age of 11, with an interval of four hours between breakfast and dinner and six between dinner and supper. They should not drink too much, as drink could drown the meat they ate and engender too much phlegm. There were also important rules to be followed about the order in which meats were eaten, the importance of sleep, the nature of exercise and when it should be taken.33 It seems unlikely, given the importance of Edward’s health, that those in charge of his care did not follow the latest beliefs about nutrition, although Elyot’s attempts to place medical knowledge in the hands of those without an understanding of Greek may have been scorned by the court doctors. However, his writings were to prove very popular.
In addition, Elyot identified further maladies and weaknesses that were specific to gender and age groups. During their early infancy, children were particularly susceptible to vomiting, coughs, sores in the mouth, inflammation of the navel, moisture in the ears and fearfulness. When they started to cut their first teeth, fevers and cramps might accompany pain in the jaws and as they grew a little older, the dangers of worms in the belly and swellings under the chin might arise, along with the measles and small pox. It is also very interesting that Elyot saw the age of 14 and the middle to late teens to be a dangerous time for young men. They were prey to all kinds of fevers; pleurisy, the spitting and vomiting of blood, inflammation of the lungs, diseases of the sides, lethargies, frenzies, hot sicknesses and choleric passions.34 Some of these are clearly medically based and accord with information given by twenty-first-century institutions about the risks for the 14–19 age range, including asthma, bronchitis and tuberculosis, brain and nervous conditions, cancers, blood disorders and hereditary illness.35 Yet others may also straddle emotional and mental conditions, with ‘hot sicknesses’ and ‘choleric passions’ capturing a wider truth about the dangers of adolescence as a young man in both eras. While the ‘teenage angst’ of later times was not a recognised phenomenon in the sixteenth century, young people were biologically the same as today and experienced physical and hormonal changes that could bring about dramatic emotions. For the Tudors, these would have been manifest and interpreted in different ways, perhaps masked by the physicality of jousting or battle, or diagnosed as melancholy. The times are too different to draw direct parallels, but Elyot’s work is one of the first indicators that the teenage years were considered potentially dangerous for young men.
It is no wonder, therefore, that the dedication of those who cared for Edward during these years was well rewarded. Sybille Penne was mentioned in the royal accounts at the end of March 1541, ‘in consideration of her services in the nurture and education of Prince Edward,’ receiving the Manor of Beamonde, Bucks, and rectory of Little Myssenden, Bucks, Burcester; manor or farm called Aufrikkes in Little Myssenden, Godstow; rectory of Penne, Bucks, and two cottages in Penne, Chacombe; with advowsons of the churches of Little Myssenden and Penne.36 The following July, George Carleton was given properties, lands and fishing rights in Cambridgeshire for his services to Prince Edward, as well as ‘half the messuage called the Unicorn in Cheapside, London, lands in Cambridge and Ely, and 40 acres of marsh in the fen end of Wysbyche’,37 while Elizabeth Mustchamp, widow, a servant to Prince Edward was granted an annuity of £6 13s 4d for life.38 In May 1543, Sir William Sydney, ‘the King’s servant’ and Dame Agnes his wife were awarded the rents on leases belonging to St Swithin’s Cathedral, Winchester, in ‘consideration of [their] services to the prince,39 while Lady Margaret Bryan was given an annuity of £20.
One of Edward’s first friends during these early years was Jane Dormer, later the Duchess of Feria. She was a frequent visitor to Edward’s household, being a granddaughter of William Sidney, borne by the Sidneys’ eldest daughter Mary, who had married William Dormer, a servant of Cromwell. Younger than Edward by three months, Jane was encouraged to play with the prince, who seemed to have become genuinely fond of her, calling her ‘my Jane’. They read together, played and danced, ‘and such like pastimes, answerable to their spirits and innocency of years’. Jane described him as being ‘of great towardness to all virtuous parts and princely qualities, a marvellous sweet child, of very mild and generous condition’. Reputedly, when he beat her at cards, Edward laughed that ‘now Jane, your King is gone, I shall be good enough for you.’40
Things changed for Edward in 1543. Firstly, his position changed at the age of 6, which he reached that October. He was no longer considered an infant who could live in an all-female sphere, but had entered the next phase of life, requiring new clothes, a new household and influences, even a new regime. On a personal level, though, with the king’s last two marriages, to Anne of Cleves and Catherine Howard, proving to be disasters, it was with some relief that all Henry’s children welcomed a new stepmother, Catherine Parr. Twice widowed already, Catherine had been a member of Princess Mary’s household, just as her mother Maud had served Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Born around 1513, when the Spanish queen was at the height of her power and popularity, it is quite likely that she had been named after the queen, or was even perhaps her goddaughter. Catherine Parr’s influence upon the king was to be a positive one. She encouraged him to reunite his children and welcomed them at court. She was also an educated, intelligent woman, dedicated to the reformed cause that Edward would embrace. It may even have been her influence that set him on that path. In December 1543, they all spent Christmas together at Whitehall and, the following spring, Edward’s sisters were restored to their place in the succession after their brother, although he would later choose to ignore this.
The remodelling of Edward’s household introduced him to new figures and new influences. Among his early tutors were Roger Ascham, one of the best Greek scholars of his day, who taught the prince calligraphy; Edmund Grindal, who wrote that the boy was ‘wonderfully advanced of his years’; Richard Cox his almoner, whom Ascham considered to be ‘the best schoolmaster of his time’;41 and John Belmaine, his tutor in French. He also received instruction from Randolph, a German, and Anthony Cooke, a humanist scholar whom the prince described as speaking ‘weighingly’.42 He was taught to play the lute by Philip van Wilder and showed typical Renaissance interest in the world by making a collection of globes and maps. Later, in 1544, Sir John Cheke would be confirmed as Edward’s tutor to teach him ‘of tongues, of the scripture, of philosophy and all liberal sciences’. Ascham described this appointment as ‘full of hope, comfort and solace to all true hearts in England’, which prayed daily that the prince would surpass his tutor in ‘learning and knowledge, following his father in wisdom and felicity, [and] may so set out and maintain God’s word, to the abolishment of all papistry, the confusion of all heresy that thereby he, feared of his enemies, loved of all his subjects may bring to his own glory, immortal fame and memory, to this realm wealth, honour and felicity, to true and unfeigned religion, perpetual peace, concord and felicity’.43 John Cheke wrote that ‘with God’s blessing he will prove such a King, as neither to yield to Josiah in the maintenance of the true religion, nor to Solomon in the management of the estate, nor to David in the encouragement of godliness.’ Edward was being raised in an environment of Protestant humanism.
Following the usual tradition for royal heirs, a number of young men were appointed to Edward’s household, to ‘be attendant upon [him] as by example of good education, as well in nurture as in good learning [who] might the more fairly induce him to profit in his learning’.44 Chief among them was Barnaby Fitzpatrick, around two years older than the prince, who had been sent to England by his Irish father as a guarantee of peace between the two countries. Fitzpatrick was the prince’s lifelong friend and whipping boy, receiving the corporal punishments that Edward earned, yet which were deemed inappropriate to be meted out to one of such rank. The pair continued to correspond after Fitzpatrick returned to Ireland at the end of 1552 and, by the following summer, four young men were resident at court as Edward’s companions. There was Thomas Howard, son of Henry Fitzroy’s closest friend Henry, Earl of Surrey; and Giles Paulet, a younger son of the Marquis of Winchester John, Lord Lumley, to whom Edward restored the titles of his executed father; and James Blount, Sixth Lord Mountjoy, later an ardent Protestant and alchemist.
When Blount’s father contemplated his mortality in 1544, he left a striking memorial for his family, to remind them to always be mindful of their duty and of the possibility of imminent death. Charles Blount, the Fifth Lord Mountjoy had been tutored by John Palsgrave, whose former pupils had included Henry Fitzroy, and by the antiquarian John Leland and humanist scholar John Luis Vives. A secret Catholic, he gave shelter to the controversial priest Richard Whitford, who lived under his roof from 1539 to 1542, and tutored his children, although James would later shake off this influence in favour of the new faith. As he was about to embark for France with Henry VIII at the end of April 1544, he drew up a will with a very specific request, that, in case he was killed abroad, a stone be laid over his grave, ‘with the following epitaph thereon, for a monument to my children to continue and keep themselves worthy of so much honour as to be called hereafter to die for their Master and Country’:
Willingly have I sought
And willingly have I found
The fatal end that wrought
Me hither, as duty bound.
Discharg’d I am of that I ought
To my country by honest wounde
My soul departed, Christ hath bought
The end of man is ground.45
Charles Blount returned in one piece from France, but he may have contracted there the illness that led to his death on 10 October that year. His son James, the contemporary of Prince Edward, lived on until 1582, when the title passed, in turn, to his eldest son.
By March 1543, Edward was being described as ‘the goodliest child in the world’46 in a letter from the Privy Council to Duke of Suffolk. An undated miniature of him in profile can be identified as dating from the years 1543–46, although the attribution to Hans Holbein has been challenged. Edward is seen looking to the left, against a blue-grey circular background. He appears to be about 8 years old, and has changed considerably since Holbein’s depiction of him as an infant, his features having more of an adult cast. His profile is delicate, the eyes watchful, the nose pointed and sensitively drawn, with the lips closed in a thoughtful pout. The prominent chin is still visible but his cheeks have hollowed out and his face is pale. His hair appears to be a light brown, with little hint of his father’s red, close-cropped where it appears under the brim of his black hat, which is embellished with jewels and topped, as before, with a flamboyant white feather. He wears a pale red tunic with a high collar and a black cloak trimmed with fur. The overall impression is delicate and a little melancholic.
It was at this point that his father’s thoughts turned to the boy’s future marriage. Despite the connection established between Henry Fitzroy and James V, relations with Scotland had soured and, the previous December, the Scottish king had died shortly after a terrible defeat by Henry’s troops at the battle of Solway Moss. He left a week-old daughter, Mary, whose hand Henry now sought for his young son. He hoped that the union would obtain ‘for his son and their posterity, a root of foundation of perpetual honour’ and promised that the pair would be ‘so provided for as he could hardly desire better’.47 According to agreement reached with the Scots ambassadors, the new queen was to remain in her native land, under the care of the lords appointed by Parliament, but ‘for her education, instruction, safe and wholesome nurriture [nourishment] the King may appoint English folk about her.’ Six Scottish barons and two bishops were to be hostages in England to guarantee her delivery, which would take place at the age of 8 or 10 ‘at the furthest’, and the marriage would be solemnised when she reached the age of 12. This would take place at the end of 1554, when Edward would be 17.48 The Treaty of Greenwich was signed on 1 July 1543 and the prospect of the two countries united under one crown seemed like a distinct possibility.
In autumn 1543, Edward stayed at Ashridge House, which had recently been the Convent of Bonhommes, while the king stayed at nearby Ampthill. The convent had been founded in a former manor house in Hertfordshire, which housed a phial of reputed holy blood. The house had been large enough for Edward I and his court to spend Christmas 1290 there, but it was considerably enlarged by the Black Prince in the 1360s. Having been surrendered to the Crown in November 1539, it reverted to use as a private house. Disappointing news came, though, when the Scots repudiated the marriage treaty that December, just six months after the signing of the agreement at Greenwich. Worse still, they renewed their former alliance with France, betrothing the young Queen Mary to the grandson of Francis I, also named Francis, who was the son of Henry Fitzroy’s ally and contemporary, the Dauphin Henri. Mary and Francis would marry in 1558 and would reign in France for eighteen months before his premature death at the age of 16. Another young royal male dead in his teens, Francis II suffered from prolonged ill health, including spasming and fainting, but finally succumbed to an ear infection, which may have been meningitis or mastoiditis, which developed into an abscess. The French royal physician suggested alleviating his suffering by trepanning his skull, but this was rejected as too dangerous, and the short-lived king died in December 1560.
Back in 1543, Henry VIII was furious at the Scottish rejection and began an aggressive campaign against Mary’s kingdom, known to history as the ‘rough wooing’, during which he dispatched Edward Seymour to raze Edinburgh to the ground. He also turned his wrath against France and, despite his increasing girth, poor health and lack of mobility, he began to plan a campaign against Francis I. The following July, he established a regency under his sixth wife, Catherine Parr, to rule during his absence. She was to be advised by the king’s council and Prince Edward was to remove to Hampton Court under the care of his chamberlain, Sir Richard Page, along with William Sidney, Cox and Cheke as almoner-tutors and Jasper Horsey as chief gentleman of his privy chamber.49 The cost of Edward’s household at Hampton Court during the three months of his father’s absence was £2,000, while that of the queen was £5,000.50 At the end of July 1544, after Henry’s departure, the queen wrote to him to report that ‘the Prince and the rest of the King’s children are in good health.’51 The same year, under the influence of who brought all his children together, Henry passed the Third Act of Succession, which restored princesses Mary and Elizabeth to the throne and lay down plans for a potential minority government for Edward.
At the end of 1544, Edward pushed against the boundaries of his tutor, Richard Cox. Although Cox was able to report that his pupil was ‘a vessel apt to receive all goodness and learning, witty, sharp and pleasant’,52 was also confident that he was above the discipline of his master. This brings to mind the occasion when Henry Fitzroy demonstrated a similar rebellion, around the same age, at Sheriff Hutton. Cox described how Edward’s stubbornness, which he refers to as ‘Captain Will’, provoked the tutor to lose his temper, giving the boy ‘such a wound that he knew not what to do’. Startling as this sounds to a modern reader, it appears to have been a turning point. Edward learned his lesson, and Cox never heard from ‘Captain Will’ again. Nor does the tutor seem to have incurred any wrath from the king as a result: discipline was considered part of his duty. Exactly what the ‘wound’ was, or how well Edward recovered, is not recorded.
Inventories of Henry VIII’s goods made in 1547–48 recorded a number of items that help illuminate the daily life of Prince Edward. Based at Hampton Court, Durham House and other country residences like Hertford and Hunsdon, Edward’s possessions pertained to his schooling, including a personal writing desk covered in black velvet, embroidered with the letter E, and another with green velvet, in which were stored writing implements. He also had wooden slabs for writing on, a set of chessmen in a black coffer, bells for hawks, astronomical instruments, an hourglass, a puppet, a box topped with a horse and rider, papers relating to his mother, a red box with ‘sorcery’ equipment, bells for hawks and two pairs of glasses.53 The inventory also creates a sense of the rich environment that Edward grew up in, among his father’s moveable goods: the paintings, musical instruments, tapestries, maps, venetian glass, books, jewellery and chapel items. Edward might have been a child, subject to his tutor’s discipline, but he was a king in waiting.
There seems little reason to doubt Jane Dormer’s comments that Edward was fond of his sister Mary, who was 21 years his elder and, perhaps, something of a mother figure. On 11 January 1546, he wrote to her from Hunsdon, hoping she did not think that his failure to write meant that she had been forgotten. On the contrary, he wrote that ‘affection ever holds the chief place in my heart both for you and my dearest mother.’ He hoped to see her soon, to be able to tell her ‘in truth how much and how greatly I esteem you’.54 That May he wrote again, pleased to hear that she had recovered from an illness and exclaiming that he loved her greatly, even though he wrote infrequently, just as he loved his best clothes the most although he hardly wore them. He also wrote to their stepmother, Queen Catherine Parr, about concerns he had for Mary, asking the queen to preserve her ‘from all the wiles and enchantments of the evil one, and beseech her to no longer attend foreign dances and merriments which do not become a most Christian princess’.55
Early in 1546, Cox reported that Edward, aged 9, was ‘of such towardness in learning, godliness, gentleness and all honest qualities’, that he was considered ‘a singular gift sent of God and an imp worthy of such a father’. By this point, Cox added he had learned four books of Cato and knew the Bible, Vives, Aesop and ‘Latin-making’.56 That August, as Henry was concluding his peace with France, Edward received the ambassador Monsieur de Morette, who later wrote that he had rejoiced ‘very much to have seen my lord prince’s grace, of whose praises he cannot speak enough’.57 By the autumn, the boy was at Hatfield House, studying French according to a letter from Cox to the king’s secretary, William Paget. A second letter expressed Cox’s hopes that the prince would meet his father’s expectations. Edward was also praised by William Thomas, later clerk of the Council, who depicted him in a dialogue entitled Peregrine:
If ye knew the towardness of that young Prince, your heart would melt to hear him named, and your stomach abhor the malice of them that would him ill; the beautiest creature that lived under sun, the wittiest, the most amiable and the gentlest thing of all the world. Such a spirit of capacity, learning the things taught him by his schoolmasters, that it is a wonder to hear say. And finally he hath such a grace of porte and gesture in gravity which he commeth in to any presence, that it should seem he were already a father and yet passeth he not the age of ten years. A thing undoubtedly much rather seen than to be believed.58
Though all were in agreement that Edward was ‘toward’ or advanced beyond his years, he had still not reached the age of majority. At the end of December 1546, Henry’s health failing and he summoned his council in order to consider the terms of his will. In an attempt to prevent any one faction from gaining too much power, the king had appointed sixteen executors to oversee his will, in which Edward took precedence over his sisters by virtue of his gender and his legitimacy. Either Henry never saw the final changes to his will or else he was too ill to approve them; the last draft was ‘signed’ by his dry stamp, allowing for the possibility that certain changes were made as he lay incapacitated, or even after his death, which occurred in the early hours of the morning on 28 January 1547. As had been the case with his father, Henry VIII’s death was kept secret for a few days to allow for the smooth transition of power.
There were parallels with Edward VI’s situation and the accession of Edward V in 1483, but the new king’s uncle was no Richard III. Upon hearing news of Henry’s death, Edward Seymour rode to his nephew at Hertford and carried him to his sister Elizabeth at Enfield to secure his person. It was there that he broke the news of their father’s death to the children and the terms of his will. The crown was to go to Edward, followed by Mary then Elizabeth and, if they should die without issue, it would pass to the Grey and Suffolk families, descendants of Henry’s second sister, Mary, Duchess of Suffolk. The issue of Henry’s elder sister, Margaret, who had married James IV of Scotland, were excluded from succession, although Margaret’s great-granddaughter, Mary Queen of Scots, would continue to assert her superior claim to the English throne.
Despite having broken with Rome and rejected centuries-old beliefs about the afterlife, Henry’s final words leave no doubt that he was still a firm believer in the rituals of the Catholic Church. He expressed hope that his words would be acceptable to God, repented of his sins and bequeathed his soul in the traditional way, although his imperious tone shows that he expected his will to be done, even in the afterlife:
We do instantly require and desire the blessed Virgin Mary, his mother, with all the whole company of heaven, continually to pray for us, and with us, whiles we live in this world, and in the time of passing out of the same, that we may the sooner attain everlasting life after our departure out of this transitory life, which we do hope and claim by Christ’s passion and word. We also will and specially desire and require that where and whensoever it shall please God to call us out of this world transitory to his infinite mercy and grace … that our executors, as soon as conveniently they may, shall cause all divine service accustomed for dead folk to be celebrated for us in the next and most proper place.59
The services of placebo and dirge were to be ‘devoutly done, observed and solemly kept’ with the poor prompted to pray for the ‘offences and wealth of his soul’. The Dean and Canon of Westminster, and their successors forever, were to appoint two priests to say eternal masses for his soul and four solemn obits should be kept for him in the college at Windsor.60 It is deeply ironic that Henry set in motion the chain of events that would come to fruition in the year of his death, preventing the fulfilment of his final wishes.
From Enfield, Edward was conveyed to London, as related by a record in the College of Arms:
Upon Monday next following they accompanied his highness in goodly order from his place of Enfield to his tower of London, to which he came about three of the clock in the afternoon of the same day, where all the nobility of his realm were ready to receive him, to their great joy and comfort. And at his approaching near unto the same was great shot of ordinance in all places there about as well out of the Tower and out of the ships.61
His noble escort conducted him to his rooms, which had been ‘richly hung and garnished with rich cloth of arras and clothes of estate’ which befitted a king. The following day, the Council assembled in the king’s presence under the lead of his uncle, Edward Seymour, Lord Hertford. After doing homage to the young king, they elected Seymour Lord Protector and elevated him to the position of Duke of Somerset, a title which had formerly belonged to Henry Fitzroy. This seems to have been done according to the boy’s wishes, as he justified this to the Council by their blood relationship, simply stating it was because he was ‘the King’s uncle on his mother’s side’.
Henry VIII’s coffin had lain in the chapel at Whitehall Palace since 2 February 1547, between burning tapers and banners depicting saints in gold thread. An account in the College of Arms describes how masses and observances were continually made around his body, over which watch was kept, day and night. Above him stretched a canopy in rich cloth of gold with a valance of black silk and fringe of black and gold silk. Later, the coffin was placed under a pall of gold, studded with precious stones, and there were more masses and dirges and requests to ‘pray for the soul of the high and mighty prince, our late sovereign lord and King’. On 7 February, 21,000 Londoners packed into Leadenhall and the churchyard of St Michael, at Cornhill, to be issued with alms of a silver groat each as encouragement to pray for the king’s soul. It seemed very much as if the king had retreated considerably from his former religious hard line. Henry had left detailed instructions regarding the location of his burial in St George’s Chapel, Windsor:
Our last Will and Testament, doe will and ordaine, that our bodie be buried and enterred in the quire of our College of Windsor, midway between the stalls, and the high altar; and there be made and set, as soon as convenientlie maie be donne after our descease, by our executors, at our costs and charges (if it be not donne by us in our life time), an honourable tombe for our bones to rest in, which is well onward and almost made therefore already, with a fair grate about it, in which we will also, the bones of our true and loving wife Queen Jane be put also.62
Early on the morning of 14 February 1547, a 4 mile-long procession of 1,000 horsemen and followers gathered at Charing Cross. There, they awaited the arrival of the king’s immense hearse, which was due to depart from Whitehall Palace. The gilded chariot was seven storeys high and featured an effigy of the monarch, carved, painted and dressed to appear as Henry had in life. It had probably been produced by Nicholas Bellin of Modena, who was the latest Italian hired to work on the king’s tomb.63 A Spanish visitor who witnessed the moment related how the effigy ‘looked exactly like that of the King himself and he seemed just as if he were alive’. It wore robes of crimson velvet, furred with miniver and powdered with ermine and a red satin doublet embroidered with gold. On its head was a black satin nightcap set with precious stones, on top of which sat ‘a crown imperial of inestimable value’, while a collar of the garter was placed around its neck and a garter on its leg. Its legs were encased in scarlet hose and its feet had been fitted with slippers of crimson velvet. The hands were covered in gloves and diamond rings had been placed on the fingers, while gold bracelets set with stones and pearls encircled the arms. The effigy carried the sceptre in its right hand and the orb in its left; an armorial sword lay at its side. The event required almost 33,000 yards of black cloth and over 8,000 yards of black silk, purchased from London merchants at a cost of £12,000.64 It clothed the mourners, draped the church and was hung in the chapels, making a solemn swathe of death across the English countryside.
From Westminster, the mourners travelled slowly west, covering a distance of 11 miles before stopping for the night at Syon Abbey, which had been the wealthiest convent at the time of the Dissolution, but was now in the possession of the new Lord Protector. It was here, overnight, that a macabre event reputedly occurred during: Henry’s coffin burst open and leaked fluids that were eagerly licked up by a dog.65 Whether this is true, or belongs to the legends and prophecies that attached themselves to the ‘mouldworp’, it is a visceral illustration of the humbling processes of death and serves as a powerful memento mori. The next morning, the procession set off again, along roads that had been repaved and stripped of their overhanging trees to allow the hearse to pass, bridges that had seen emergency repairs and towns where the streets were swept and the inhabitants railed off. After a journey of 15 miles more, they arrived at Windsor. Along the route from the castle bridge to the door of the chapel, the crowds were held back by wooden railings draped in black and bearing the king’s arms.
The service of interment took place the following day, 16 February. Henry had specified that the requiem mass be read in Latin by the Catholic Bishop Stephen Gardiner and that a sum of 1,000 marks was to be distributed among the poor with instructions that they were to pray for his soul. One eyewitness account related the final symbolic act by which the king’s household was disbanded:
… with their staves and rods in their hands … first the lord great master and after him, the lord chamberlain and all the rest, brake their staves in shivers upon their heads and cast them after the corpse into the pit with exceeding sorrow and heaviness, not without grievous sighs and tears … then the trumpets sounded with great melody and courage, to the comfort of all them that were present.66
Then the titles and right of Edward VI were pronounced and repeated three times. Henry VIII was dead and buried, and his 9-year old son was king. On 8 and 12 February, gold and gems were issued from the Westminster jewel house, to be made into a crown for the boy. 67
Just eight weeks after the death of Henry VIII, his closest rival, Francis I of France, also died. They had competed in the arena of international politics and wrestled at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, vying to outdo one another in clothing and jewels. They had also been at war, taking advantage of each other’s weaknesses, making and breaking alliances with their mutual rival the emperor, steering their way through the tumultuous sixteenth century. But while Henry had broken with Rome, Francis had remained staunchly Catholic and, on the afternoon of 31 March 1547, he died in that faith, at Rambouillet, halfway through a journey he proved unable to complete. Just as with Henry, years of extravagant living had caught up with the king, but unlike his English counterpart, Francis was suffering from syphilis. This may have accounted for his death, although a contemporary Swiss doctor suggests that his right lung was diseased, while a second physician, Saint-Mauris, described the king’s kidneys as ‘wasted, his entrails decayed, this throat cankered and a lung affected’.68
Francis’s son, the new King Henri II, ordered a joint interment for his father, beside his two elder brothers, the Dauphin Francis and Charles, Duke of Orléans, whom he had outlived. Their bodies were exhumed and brought from Tournon and Beauvais to accompany the old king to Notre-Dame, in Paris. Following the English tradition, an effigy of Francis was created, based on his death mask. It wore state robes, an imperial crown and the collar of St Michael about its neck. On pillows to either side lay the sceptre and hand of justice, and a canopy was stretched overhead, illuminated by four candles. For the eleven days that the effigy lay in state, it was served continually with meals and drink, which were laid before it on a fully dressed table, with attendants, before being removed untouched. Then the effigy and coffin were drawn by a wagon and six horses to Notre-Dame and placed in the choir, alongside the coffins of his sons, while the usual masses and prayers were recited, and the king’s household broke their wands to throw into the grave. Henri II commissioned a magnificent memento mori tomb for his father, designed by Philibert de L’Orme, a master Renaissance mason. It comprised a Roman triumphal arch and an arcaded area for the sarcophagus, with kneeling mourners and the figure of the king, with tableaux depicting his feats in battle. His heart was placed inside a white marble urn decorated with representations of architecture, painting, sculpture and geometry, astronomy, song, music and poetry.69 Underneath the arch, Francis and his first queen, Claude, are graphically depicted as life-sized naked corpses. The French king’s tomb, created in this religiously pivotal year, shows just how much funereal fashions in England had undergone a transformation.
On 19 February, Edward followed the traditional route on horseback from the Tower to the Palace of Westminster, where the streets had been gravelled and railed. Riding under a canopy alongside the Lord Protector, Edward had been dressed in a gown of cloth of silver embroidered with damask gold, with a girdle of white velvet wrought with Venice silver, garnished with rubies, diamonds and true lovers’ knots made from pearls. He wore a matching white velvet doublet and cap, also with gems and embroidery. His horse was trapped in crimson satin, embroidered with pearls and damask gold. Aldermen and guildsmen lined the route, and priests and clerks stood at intervals with crosses and censors, while the houses were draped with arras tapestries, cloth of gold and silver, streamers and banners. Pageants had been prepared along the route and the king paused to hear speeches and songs, stopping for a long time outside St Paul’s to watch a Spanish rope-dancer. At Fenchurch Street, a scaffold had been erected and draped with tapestries, containing a choir and musicians, while the conduit in Cornhill ran with wine. Two children and two figures dressed as Valentine in moss and ivy, and Wild Urson with a yew club, delivered speeches to the king. 70 Four more children represented Grace, Nature, Fortune and Charity, along with the figures of Sapience (wisdom) and the seven Liberal Sciences (grammar, logic, arithmetic, rhetoric, geometry, astronomy and music), who bestowed brief blessings upon the king. There followed a dumb show, or tableau, of Edward’s parentage, through the symbolic creatures of Jane Seymour’s phoenix and Henry VIII’s lion giving way to the young lion representing Edward.71 Further along the route he was met by Jason and the Golden Fleece and St George, before arriving at Westminster.
Edward’s coronation took place in the Abbey on Sunday 20 February. Due to his age, a shorter version of the traditional ceremony was used, lest the ‘tedious length of the same … should weary and be hurtsome peradventure to the King’s majesty, being yet of tender age’.72 Edward arrived between ten and eleven o’clock to take his place in the coronation chair, where Archbishop Cranmer proclaimed him a second Josiah and urged him to continue the reformation of the Church of England, with ‘idolatry destroyed, the tyranny of the Bishops of Rome banished from you subjects and images removed’. After being anointed, he was transferred to a lighter chair, dressed with cloth of tissue and carried by four gentlemen ushers to the four corners of the platform, to display him to the congregation, who shouted their acceptance of him.73 He wore the crown of King Edward the Confessor, then the imperial crown, then the one which had been made specially for him. After the service, Edward sat crowned at the head of a feast in Westminster Hall and, over the next two days, in a gallery to watch the jousting.74 After that, he took up residence at Whitehall, Greenwich and St James’s, with Hampton Court reserved as his summer retreat. That Easter, Edward was at Greenwich, as the record of his religious offerings shows and, by Whitsun, he was back at Westminster.
One of the first matters of Edward’s reign was war with the Scots, in continuation of his father’s ‘rough wooing’. Lord Protector Somerset led an English army to a decisive victory on 10 September at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh and Edward wrote to his ‘dearest uncle’ a week later from Oatlands Palace:
Dearest uncle, by your letters and report of the messenger, we have at good length understanded, to our great comfort, the good success it hath pleased God to grant us against the Scots by your good courage and wise foresight, for the which and other the benefits of God heaped upon us … so do we give unto you, good uncle, our most harty thanks.75
Unexpectedly, though, Edward soon found himself in a difficult position with his other Seymour uncle, Thomas, and his stepmother. Catherine Parr had attended his coronation, then retired to the country, to Old Manor at Chelsea. There, she had married Thomas Seymour in secret that May, with whom she had been in love prior to her marriage to Henry VIII. The Council was not informed, as the pair rightly judged it would have withheld approval, but the truth of the matter soon came to light. Edward was angry to learn of the match, seeming so disrespectful to his father, but he allowed the charismatic Thomas to influence him, even going so far as to permit him to dictate a letter to Catherine, the day after he had written thanking the Lord Protector, giving the impression that he had actively encouraged the marriage to take place. The match could have caused potential problems for Edward, depending on the time scale as, if Catherine conceived quickly, or gave birth prematurely, there may have been doubts about whether the child had been fathered by the late king.76 On 25 June, he wrote to her from St James’s Palace:
Ye shal not need to fear any grief to come, or to suspect lack of any need, seeing that he, being my uncle, is of so good a nature that he will not be troublesome any mean unto you; and I of that mind that of divers just causes I must favour you … And I will so provide for you both, that hereafter, if any grief befall, I shall be a sufficient succour in your godly or praisable enterprises.77
It is an awkward letter to read, giving the reader pause to consider how far, at 9 years old, Edward was able to exercise his own will against the influence of powerful men he trusted. The following year, he would give evidence against Thomas Seymour, admitting that ‘the Lord Admiral came to me in the time of the last parliament at Westminster and desired me to write a thing for him … he said it was none ill thing, it is for the queen’s majesty.’78 The situation became more complicated as the young king was caught up in the rivalry between the two Seymour brothers, and Thomas attempted to ingratiate himself with the boy through expensive gifts and money, encouraging him to be independent. Eventually, he attempted to pressure Edward into signing a bill to make Thomas his personal governor and to persuade him that he did not require a Lord Protector. Tensions came to a head when Thomas was arrested on the night of 16 January 1549, attempting to break into the king’s apartments at Hampton Court, during which he shot one of the king’s dogs. Convicted of treason, he was executed that March but the uneasy balance between the young king’s independence and the will of his advisors was to continue for the rest of his short reign.
Edward had been educated to be sympathetic to the Protestant movement, but the religious reforms introduced in the early years of his reign, when he was aged 9–11, were more extreme than anything his father had achieved. Jane Dormer, an ardent Catholic, refused to believe that Edward had been in favour of these changes, or that he had fully understood their implications. She stated that:
mischievous and heretical governors, contrary to his father’s will, abused his tender age: who, ruling to effect their own ends notoriously injured the natural good inclinations of this gentle and noble prince. For, when he was King, in passing by the ruins of goodly monasteries, he demanded, what buildings were those? It was answered that they were religious houses, dissolved and demolished by order of the King his father, for abuses. He replied: ‘could not my father punish the offenders and suffer so goodly buildings to stand, being so great an ornament to this kingdom and put in by better men, that might have governed and inhabited them?’79
When Jane wrote of Edward’s affection for his sister Mary, this also encompassed sympathy for her Catholicism; of his questioning of her regarding her faith and his exhortation to be patient in the face of his ministers’ strictures, crying and ‘grieving matters could not be according to her will and desire’ and that when he was older he would ‘remedy all’.80
Did the 9-year-old Edward dream up the 1547 injunctions pushed through Parliament by Edward Seymour? Did the child who wished the monasteries had been put into more competent hands order that bells should be removed from church towers, rood screens and lofts dismantled, images of saints whitewashed over, icons and statues removed, shrines destroyed, chalices melted down, processions, ashes and palms forbidden, the dissolution of chantry chapels and the notion of purgatory condemned? Eighteen years had passed since Simon Fish had published A Supplication for the Beggars, rejecting the existence of purgatory and prayers for the dead, because he argued that neither was mentioned in the Bible. Fish had been arrested and condemned in London, although he died of the plague before he could be executed, yet his theories predated the changes in English approaches to memorials that now become law. Starting in 1547, at least 2,374 chantries were dissolved and the bequests in wills for prayers for the dead and their memorials ceased to be honoured. Far from being a permanent memorial for the eternal life of the soul, the honouring of the dead was as short-lived as the physical structures they had erected. What had once been believed to be carved in stone, was demolished nationwide in a few short years. To use the example of one major English city, in Bristol alone, there had been thirty-five permanent chantries and thirty-three chantry priests in 1547, along with another twenty-two temporary memorials for the lighting of candles and recitation of masses and obits.81 An entire system of belief regarding one of the major uncertainties of life, the experience of the soul after death, was being dismantled.
Just how far did this dramatic change reflect the national mood? Historians continue to disagree about the beliefs of the English in the 1530s and ’40s, if it is even possible to discover a uniform belief across class, age and place. While A.G. Dickens believes that most people no longer believed in purgatory, rendering the need for masses obsolete. Eamon Duffy sees the demolition of chantries more as an imposition upon congregations forced to dance to the royal tune. It remains a moot point whether the changes of 1547 were catching up with a wider sea change in beliefs or an attempt to impose new rules upon a people who were forced to follow, sometimes reluctantly. The former scenario makes it more likely that Edward could accept the need for regulation at 9 years old; the latter implies that he was more of a religious radical, or that his uncle was. The fact that the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer in 1549 sparked a mass rebellion in Devon and Cornwall indicates the slow travel of change across the country. But Duffy’s detailed study of the Devonian parish of Morebath, through the accounts of parish priest Christopher Trychay, exposes a deep hostility to the changes that supports the notion that they were being imposed from the top down, rather than chasing and seeking to clarify an existing mood.82 The revolt was more than just a rejection of the new prayer book, it called for the undoing of much of the recent legislation, and a return to the high Catholicism of masses in Latin, prayers for purgatory, chantry chapels, icons, saints and statues, palms and ashes, and the literal translation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.83 Nor was the unrest confined to the south-west, spreading into the Midlands, through Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. The Lord Protector dispatched armies to deal with the rebels and prominent leaders, including the vicars of local churches, were hung from their steeples.84 At the same time, rebellion broke out under Robert Kett in Norfolk, against the enclosure of common land, which was also severely dealt with. Within three years of Henry VIII’s death, the mood in his son’s kingdom was rebellious.
And yet, there is evidence that Edward was closely involved in religious matters and keen to learn more about the reforms. A new preaching place was erected in the privy gardens at Whitehall and Edward frequently accompanied his tutor John Cheke and the Lord Protector to attend sermons given there by the Protestant royal chaplain Hugh Latimer. On 29 June 1548, the king listened to Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester preach about the recent changes in religion. Edward sat and made notes, especially regarding any aspects that touched upon kingship. Then, in August 1549, at the age of 11, Edward composed and wrote his own thoughts against papacy, entitled A Small Treatise against the Primacy of the Pope, which is explicit and extreme in its condemnation, particularly mentioning idolatry:
It is true the Pope is primate of the church, but it is not the divine or catholic church but the diabolical one … the bishop of Rome is like a wolf amongst sheep, eating and devouring the poor sheep of Christ; and when they are hid by fear, he takes the voice of a sheep to betray and devour them.
… the Bishop of Rome lies notoriously if, in nothing else, but in his pretending to be the head of the Christian church, and having the keys of heaven. [But] when the Pope is dead and none hath the keys, whence it must follow, that the pope being dead, heaven’s gates are closed.
… Behold how he is filled and puffed up with pride and vanity. Behold how large and fair a name and title he takes, though he be a venomous serpent, calling himself the most holy father whereas he is a detestable thief and contaminated with all uncleanness.
All others exercise their tyranny against bodies, but this wolf and tyrant exercises his tyranny over the souls of men, constraining the poor and simple lambs of God to forsake their faith, whereby they are saved, to follow his abominable traditions and diabolical precepts; which if they refuse to obey, to wit, adoring images and offering to his idols and devils, he burns, racks and torments them, or forces them to a costly recantation.85
A note on the manuscript in a contemporary hand, perhaps that of Edward’s French tutor Jean Belmain, a radical Calvinist, records that the work was entirely that of the king, and a rough draft of the treatise shows corrections in another hand. His sources were the books at his disposal and conversations with figures such as Belmain, Latimer, Gardiner and the Bishop of Rochester, Nicholas Ridley. Edward was astute and, in 1550, pointed out that the oath John Hooper was about to swear to become Bishop of Gloucester was still the same as had been used by Henry VIII, containing references to the worship of saints and their powers of intercession with God.84
Early in 1551, Edward was addressed in the Erasmian Martin Bucer’s De Regno Christi, presented to him as a new year’s treaty, full of advice and guidance. Bucer urged him to ‘restore for [his] peoples the blessed kingdom of the son of God’, to purge the church of ‘dead wood, thorns and brambles’, that might obscure the word of God and ‘the impiety and injustice of dissipated men who might corrupt others’. He must also be willing to ‘countenance dangers, exile and death itself’ on this dangerous mission to help create this kingdom of God upon Earth.87 In that same year, the French theologian Jean Calvin also addressed the young king, urging him to purge the English clergy of corruption. Three months later, he dedicated his commentaries upon Isaiah to Edward, adding that the young king should let nothing distract him from his important task.88Under these influences, as well as those among the circle of his educators, and in the context of the recent acts of reform, Edward’s identity as a religious reformer, as a leading Protestant monarch, was gaining ground. European leaders of the reformed faith had every reason to look to England as a friend in the wake of the Catholic Counter-Reformation that had been launched by Pope Paul III. The Council of Trent, which sat at intervals between 1545 and 1563, was attempting to restore the old Latin mass, the worship of saints and idols, the prayers for the dead and various other practices considered heresies in the eyes of the Protestants. No doubt this act did nothing but fuel a young king keen to be seen as a champion of religious idealism.
An unattributed painting entitled Edward VI and the Pope: An Allegory of the Reformation seeks to personify the young king as the spirit of religious change. While the exact dating of its composition is unclear, placed by experts in a range spanning the years 1547 to the 1570s, it was produced by someone who had lived through Edward’s reign, perhaps an eyewitness at court. It may even date precisely to the boy’s lifetime, a piece of contemporary propaganda. The young king is central, seated on a throne upon a dais beneath a gold canopy of estate. His feet rest upon a gold cushion, beside which an open book bears the text ‘the word of the Lord endureth forever.’ Below it, the pope is being crushed, a message upon his chest reads ‘all flesh is grass’ and ribbons around him bear other messages: ‘feigned holiness’, ‘idolatory’ and ‘superstition’. To Edward’s right, his father sits up in his death bed, pointing to his son as his legal and spiritual successor; to his left, around a table stand an array of councillors, including the Lord Protector; Edward Seymour, who stands at his side; Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury; John Russell, the Lord Privy Seal; and William Paget, Comptroller of the King’s Household. An additional figure may be John Dudley, Earl of Warwick or Thomas Seymour, as it bears some facial resemblance to the Protector. Other courtiers and clerics face them on the other side of the table. The top right-hand corner of the painting contains an inserted scene, either a picture within a picture, or a scene out of the window, showing acts of iconoclasm. Amidst it all, Edward smiles sweetly, almost knowingly, looking like a very young child in his habitual feathered hat and red robes furred with ermine. This work may have been commissioned to represent the changes taking place at the time, but for all its iconography and structure, it does not represent a powerful king. Edward is a tiny cherub set amid chaos, a ceremonial figure that represents the continuity of the dynasty, failing to convince as the progenitor of the action around him. It seems more likely, as Margaret Aston has asserted, that this painting was produced later, drawing multiple elements together as a record of the Protestant Reformation. It acknowledges Edward’s reign and his councillors for taking a dramatic step down a path that was to become the mainstream in the reign of his sister Elizabeth.
In October 1549, Edward, Duke of Somerset was deposed as Lord Protector. The Council blamed his inflexibility and narrow-mindedness for the uprisings earlier in the year and prepared to challenge him under the leadership of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. Somerset took King Edward and escaped to Windsor Castle, possibly against the boy’s will, as he was kept under ‘watch and ward’, and believed himself in prison. He also developed a bad cold as the result of being moved at night. When London threatened to rise against him, Seymour prompted Edward to write a letter asking for an end to hostilities and promising that the Protector would submit to a process of arbitration, but the Council replied that it had appointed Somerset and that he had no power independently of it. Finally, the Earl of Warwick arrived and arrested Somerset, returning King Edward to the safety of Richmond Palace. A list of twenty-nine articles was drawn up against the former Protector and he was accused of offences which, as Edward himself wrote, included ‘ambition, vainglory, entering into rash wars’, negligence, enriching himself from the royal coffers, following his own opinion and doing ‘all by his own opinion’.89 Somerset was replaced by John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and held in the Tower until 6 February 1550, when he was released with a fine of £10,000. Although he was later permitted a brief return to the Council, he was executed early in 1552 for conspiring to overthrow Warwick. His death was recorded, by the London diarist Henry Machyn, as taking place soon after eight in the morning, before a ‘great company’ that included the king’s guard and sheriffs, who removed his body to the quire of St Peter ad Vincula.90
Edward’s new protector, John Dudley, came from a family with a chequered past. His father, Edmund, had been the chief financial minister of Henry VII, responsible for raising his unpopular taxes and executed as a scapegoat as soon as Henry VIII came to the throne. His son had served as Vice Admiral and Lord Admiral during Prince Edward’s childhood, fought in Scotland and France, and become close to the old king before his death. He was part of the religious reform party, an excellent soldier and administrator, and had fathered a family of thirteen.
On 4 June 1550, Edward attended the wedding of Dudley’s fourth surviving son, the 18-year-old Robert, who was married to Amy Robsart at Sheen Palace. Thoughts also turned to potential brides for the young king, who would soon be approaching the significant milestone of his thirteenth birthday. When the French ambassador arrived to discuss a marriage treaty with Princess Elizabeth of Valois, Edward impressed the visitors by playing the lute. He took them hunting with hounds, they watched him at target practice and coursing in Hyde Park, and entertained them at several dinners. Elizabeth was the daughter of the new King of France, Henri II, and had been born in April 1545, so any potential marriage would not be taking place for another seven or eight years. Coincidentally, the 5-year-old princess shared a chamber with her sister-in-law, the young Mary, Queen of Scots, aged 8 in 1550, who had once been intended as Edward’s bride. He also proved a gracious host when Mary’s mother, Marie of Guise, visited him at Hampton Court and Westminster in November 1550.
A portrait of Edward at this point by William Scrots shows him as a serious, thin-faced young man with a long jaw line and pouting mouth, pointed chin and ear and a largish nose. With his hair close-cropped again under the black hat and white plume, it is clear to see how the subject has evolved from the unidentified round miniature of a few years before. His red-gold clothing with the high collar creates a further echo. Scrots makes the king look very much an adolescent in this head and shoulders work, but a second, full-length image he created around the same time leaves little doubt of the boy’s kingship. Standing before a gold curtain embroidered with black and a blue-grey pillar set with coloured marble, Edward appears every inch the king. The visual references to the smaller portrait can be found again in details of his clothing, in the same black jewelled hat and feather and in the close-cropped hair, now with a reddish sheen which echoes the colours of the background. But Edward has undergone a dramatic change of clothing, appearing in black with gold trimming, the broad shoulders and codpiece of his father, referencing the old king’s silhouette as he stands facing the viewer. His legs are parted, encased in black hose and shoes, giving an impression of strength and virility, and while his right hand clasps a pair of gloves, his left rests upon the hilt of a dagger, separate from the sword that also hangs nearby. The pointed chin and ear remain the same but the dark eyes are now fixed and the small mouth is resolute. This portrait gives the impression that Edward has come of age, and indeed he almost had, as he entered his fourteenth year. A couple of alternative versions also survive, perhaps created by artists in Scrots’s workshop; one shows Edward in the same location and position, although this time his black and gold outfit has been exchanged for a reddish-brown ensemble with black and gold edging, while another has a garter around the left knee and the order’s blue ribbon around his neck. The fact that they derived from the same master is clear from a payment of fifty marks given to Scrots in 1552 for the creation of ‘three great tables’, or full-length portraits.91
Yet for all the grandeur of his portraits, in 1551 there came a timely reminder of the mortality of young men. The sweating sickness had broken out again that summer and, on 9 July, Edward wrote that:
at this time came the sweat into London, which was more vehement than the old sweat. For if one took cold he died within 3 hours, and if he escaped it held him but 9 hours, or 10 at the most. Also if he slept … as he should be very desirous to do, then he raved, and should die raving.
Edward’s two friends Henry and Charles Brandon were among those so quickly lost. The sons of his uncle the Duke of Suffolk by his fourth wife, they had been raised in his household and educated alongside him. Their childish doodles appear on the side of some pieces of Edward’s work.92 Henry was born in September 1535 and had inherited the title on the death of his father a decade later, while Charles was born two or three years later. Both boys were painted by Holbein on bright blue miniature roundels, at the ages of 5 and 3. Henry wears a cap with a feather like that of the king, leaning on his left arm upon the edge of a tilting table, as if unwilling to sit still. He looks plaintively at the viewer, with clear eyes and resolute mouth, while his younger brother appears angelic, almost surprised under his bell of gold hair. On the occasion of his coronation in 1547, Edward had created both boys Knights of the Bath and their futures at his side seemed assured. During the summer of 1551, though, the pair had been at St John’s College, Cambridge, and as the sweat raced through the city they tried to escape by heading for the Bishop of Lincoln’s Palace at Buckden, around 20 miles away. It was too late though, as the infection had set in and both boys died, on the same day, 14 July, within an hour of each other. They were aged 15 and around 13. The deaths of Charles and Henry represented a major blow to the Brandon dynasty, as two previous sons born to their father had also died in childhood. A month’s mind was held for them on 22 September.
The 1551 outbreak of the sweat was especially bad. Henry Machyn’s diary reports that between 7 and 20 July, the illness claimed 938 lives in London. The following year, Dr John Caius, president of the Royal College of Physicians and attendant upon the king, wrote a treatise entitled A Book or Council against the Disease Commonly Called the Sweat or Sweating Sickness. The illness’s lack of discrimination between social classes and its rapid acceleration was particularly commented upon, as its victims might be dancing at court at nine o’clock and dead by eleven. However, the dancing at court that Christmas resulted only in mirth and pleasure, rather than mortality.
At the end of 1551, Edward was involved in the seasonal pageantry at court, both performing in and directing the revels.93 He had always enjoyed tumblers, jesters and players, and in 1552 he had even managed to offend the imperial ambassador – who had come to him on behalf of Princess Mary to discuss her right to hear mass – by moving to one side in order to see the players. Henry Machyn’s diary records a ‘great triumph’ at Greenwich in May 1551, which the king and his company, dressed all in black, won against the Earl of Hertford, Edward Seymour, whose company all wore yellow, running at the ring and fighting with swords in a tournament.94 Details like this are a reminder that, underneath all the religious reforms and political rivalry of his reign, Edward was still a child. An educated, devout, intelligent child, perhaps, but still young enough to be distracted by pleasure, and still healthy enough to indulge his sense of fun. Although he was frequently ill, wearing glasses for his poor vision and suffering a debilitating episode of illness in October 1550, he was still a keen sportsman. His regular enjoyment of tennis, bowling, riding and especially archery, his avid watching of tilting and jousting, during which he ‘skirmished’ in 1550 and participated fully in 1551,95 belie the impression of a sickly child. Rather than being signals of an unhealthy constitution, making his premature death inevitable, his illnesses were isolated incidents that may have had a cumulative effect towards the end of his life. Through the spring of 1551, he led a challenge mounted by sixteen gentlemen to any who wished to try their hand at running at base, shooting and running at the ring, and won on 1 April. He exercised himself in the use of arms which, the imperial ambassador recorded, he enjoyed ‘heartily’. He also enjoyed playing cards, chess, dice and games of chance, revelled in the gifts of falcons and greyhounds, danced and took part in masques. As he reached his fourteenth birthday in October 1551, it must have seemed that this youth combined a new religious zeal with the playfulness of his father. Edward was shaping into a significant Tudor king.
Then tragedy struck. On 2 April 1552, Edward fell ill with a combination of measles and smallpox. Ten days later, he wrote to his friend Barnaby Fitzpatrick, who was then in France, with typically English understatement, that ‘we have a little been troubled with the smallpox … but now we have shaken it quite away.’96 Sixteen days later, the imperial ambassador described him as ‘cheerful’ and by mid-May he was able to ride from Greenwich Park to Blackheath, where he shot and rode at the ring. Edward seems to have made a full and speedy recovery and that summer he planned a lengthy royal progress, although the route took into account known outbreaks of infectious disease. He outlined his route for Barnaby, which included visits to Guildford in Surrey, Petworth in Sussex, and Chichester and Portsmouth on the south coast, among other places. He also reported that ‘at this time, the most part of England (thanks be to God) is clear of any dangerous or infectious sickness.’ The sweat or plague had raged ‘only in Bristol and in the country near about’.97 Yet this was to be the last time the king would enjoy a period of consistent good health.
That October, after his return to London, Edward met the Italian physician and astrologer Hieronymus Cardano, a Renaissance polymath who developed influential theories in mathematics, mechanics, biology and astronomy. Cardano concluded that the king was partially deaf and short-sighted. He was ‘of a stature somewhat below the middle height, pale faced with grey eyes’, and ‘carried himself like an old man’, with projecting shoulder blades and a ‘bad habit of body than a sufferer of fixed diseases’.98 If those were his only problems at the time, this atypical period of good health was not to last long. Within weeks, the king’s diary falls silent, the final entry being made at Westminster Palace. By the following month, Edward was seriously ill again, perhaps with the first stages of the disease that would kill him seven months later. Measles is notorious for suppressing the immune system so although he had apparently recovered from the infection in April, it may have left him vulnerable. His health provided a dramatic contrast at court with the celebrations that had taken place just a year before, when he had dressed up to take part in a play. Henry Machyn recorded that on 12 December, Edward ‘removed from Westminster unto Greenwich to keep Christmas’ and if he did appoint a Lord of Misrule for his ‘goodly pastime’ as the merchant surmised, it was in an attempt to raise his spirits.99
When the new year arrived, Edward was still suffering from a fever and a cough that did not respond to treatment. The imperial ambassador commented that his pain seemed to come from a ‘compression of the organs on the right side’ which left him unable to draw breath. Soon, he was confined to his bed with a feverish cold. The account of the Italian Giulio Raviglio Rosso, writing in 1558, gives details of Edward’s health that spring:
On the first of February … the catarrh increased in Edward, and the misery began to harm him further [so] the visiting Duke [of Warwick] … wished to comprehend the true opinion, that the two physicians had regarding his life, and therefore he called two, who had attended continuously upon the person of his Majesty, and to those he added four others of the greatest experts in the realm and made them swear an oath of loyalty … he wished to understand from them all if the illness was consumption, if [it was] mortal and how much time they judged that he might be able to survive; the which consulting themselves together concluded that the King was consumptive, the infirmity mortal but that nevertheless they were sure he would live until the next September.100
But the physicians were to be proven wrong. In March, Edward had recovered enough to take the air in the park and on 11 April, he made the journey by boat to Greenwich. Machyn was on hand again to record his movements. When the king passed by the Tower, there was ‘a great shot of guns and chambers and all the ships shot of guns … a great number’.101 Yet despite the solitude at Greenwich, which the physicians had hoped would do the king some good, Edward was still coughing up sputum mixed with blood.
The king’s isolation was giving rise to rumours and conflicting reports: on 7 May, Warwick asserted that the doctors anticipated that Edward would make a full recovery but, five days later, the imperial ambassador wrote that the same physicians believed him to be suffering from a suppurating tumour of the lung. He had a fever and a cough, and his belly, head and feet were swollen and covered in ulcers. Two weeks later Schefyre reported that the king ‘does not sleep except when he be stuffed with drugs, which doctors call opiates, the sputum which he brings up is black, fetid and full of carbon, it smells beyond measure’. Warwick’s apparent optimism may have been diplomatic, as the contrast between the two accounts can hardly have been the result of misunderstanding. It also contradicts his behaviour around the French ambassadors in mid-April, who perceived ‘even from the Duke’s own words, how little prospect there remained of the King’s recovery’.102 Princess Mary had clearly received a positive report, as she wrote on 16 May to congratulate her brother on recovering from a ‘rheum cold’, but the ambassador was being regularly updated by John Banister, a medical student whose father held a position in the king’s household. Edward’s final public engagement came on 17 May, when he met the French ambassadors, despite the fact that he was still coughing and feeling weak.
At this point he could no longer ignore his state but had to accept he was dying. He reputedly said to John Cheke that he was glad to die, perhaps as a release from the pain, but such a sentiment would also have been consistent with his faith: to embrace, even to welcome death and make a good end. But this was not just a personal journey; the boy took seriously his duties as a Protestant king with the spiritual welfare of his subjects in his hands, recalling the words of Bucer and Calvin, and the comparison Cranmer had made between himself and Josiah. In such a context, his final actions make perfect sense. On 21 May he wrote a ‘devise’ to add to his existing will, ruling his Catholic sister Mary out of the succession in favour of his Protestant cousin Lady Jane Grey. This went against the terms of Henry VIII’s will, but it only had power to determine that king’s immediate successor; Edward VI had the equal right to decide to pass the throne to whomever he chose. However, Mary’s claim was stronger than Jane’s, and the decision was clearly made to ensure religious continuity. There is also a clear preference for the country to be ruled by a man:
My devise for the Succession.
1. For lack of issue of my body … coming of the issue female, as I have after declared to the Lady Frances’ heirs males, such issue to the Lady Jane’s heirs males, To the Lady Katerins heirs males, To the Lady Mary’s heirs males, To the heirs males of the daughters which she shall have hereafter. Then to the Lady Margarets heirs males. For lack of such issue, to the heirs males of the Lady Jane’s daughters. To the heirs males of the Lady Katerins daughters, and so forth til yow come to the Lady Margarets’ daughters’ heirs males.
2. If after my death theire male be entred into 18 yere old, then he to have the hole rule and gouernauce therof.
3. But if he be under 18, then his mother to be governres til he entre 18 yere old, But to doe nothing without the advice and agreement of 6 parcel of a counsel to be pointed by my last will to the nombre of 20.
4. If the mother die before they entre into 18 the realme to be governed by the counsel Provided that after he be 14 yere al great matters of importaunce be opened to him.
5. If I died without issue, and there were none heire male, then the Lady Fraunces to be governres. For lack of her, the eldest daughters, and for lack of them the Lady Margaret to be governres after as is aforesaid, til sume heire male be borne, and then the mother of that child to be governres.
6. And if during the rule of the goveernres ther die 4 of the counsel, then shal she by her letters call an assemble of the counsel within on month following and chose 4 more, wherin she shall have three voices. But after her death the 16 shall chose among themselves til the heir come to 14 yeare olde, and then he by their advice shal chose them.103
Soon after this, Edward was confined to his bed, suffering terrible agonies which announced that his end was near. In these final weeks, his symptoms escalated considerably, so that on 10 June, his doctors gave him only three days to live. He was unable to eat, racked by fever, flat on his back as his legs swelled. When his ulcers burst or he coughed up sputum, it gave off a terrible stench. Nine days later, he was still hanging on, although his demise was expected at any moment. The ambassador reported that his hair and nails were falling out and that he could hardly breathe and never moved. Among his loyal attendants at the end was Sir Henry Sidney, the son of his former chamberlain, whom he must have known almost his entire life. Sidney related that while he was still able to speak, the king prayed for God to deliver England from popery and hoped that the succession of Lady Jane Grey would prevent the country from lapsing into Catholicism. Somehow, he lasted until the start of June and, even more improbably, appeared at a window to dispel rumours that he was already dead.
As imperial ambassador Jehan Scheyfve recorded for the emperor on 4 July:
As for the King, his condition is still as I reported to your Majesty on the 27th of last month, though since then he has shown himself at a window at Greenwich, where many saw him, but so thin and wasted that all men said he was doomed, and that he was only shown because the people were murmuring and saying he was already dead, and in order that his death, when it should occur, might the more easily be concealed. The people believed that the King was to show himself again last Sunday, the 2nd of the month, and a great crowd went to see, but they were told it should be done the following day. A large gathering then assembled, but a gentleman of the Bed-chamber came out and told them that the air was too chill. As far as I am able to ascertain, Sire, the King is very ill to-day and cannot last long. He will die suddenly, and no one can foretell whether he will live an hour longer, notwithstanding his having been shown to the people, for that was done against the physicians’ advice. It seems there is at present about the King a certain woman who professes to understand medicine, and is administering certain restoratives, though not independently of the physicians.104
As Scheyfve notes, the king the witnesses saw on that day was thin and frail, only confirming that he would soon be gone. Edward died in Sidney’s arms on 6 July, at around eight in the evening, surrendering his soul with ‘great sweetness’ and asking God to have mercy on him and take his spirit. Edward endured a longer, more drawn-out death than his uncle Arthur or his half-brother Henry Fitzroy, the former having little warning, the latter declining over the course of two or three weeks. It is often assumed that all three died of the same disease, but if this is the case, the nature of Edward’s death suggests that he experienced other complications, or that his illness affected him differently, resulting in months of ill health.
It was probably tuberculosis that killed Edward. Other suggestions have included lung disease and septicaemia. Jennifer Loach105 diagnoses a suppurating pulmonary infection after his cold developed into acute bilateral bronchopneumonia, causing abscesses to form in the lungs. This would have resulted in Edward coughing up coloured sputum, mixed with blood, as well as suffering fever and weight loss, leading to a poisoning of his other organs. The swelling in his lower body could be indicative of kidney failure. Concurring with the imperial ambassador, Christopher Skidmore106 favours tuberculosis, which Edward contracted after the measles and smallpox he experienced in 1552, lowering his immunity. Machyn recorded in his diary that Edward had been ‘poisoned, as everybody says’, and had gone ‘where now, thanks be to God there be many of the false traitors brought to their end’ and prayed that ‘more shall follow as they may be spied out.’107 But the notion of poison was not given credence at court by those who had witnessed the king’s health over the course of his life.
Edward’s body was opened, embalmed and placed upon a catafalque in Westminster Abbey, without candles, surrounded by a guard of twelve men. He was interred in the Lady Chapel at Westminster on 8 August. His sister Mary did not impose her Catholicism upon the ceremony, but allowed proceedings to follow the changes he had introduced, under the guidance of Sir Gilbert Dethick, the Garter Knight at Arms.108 However, she could not prevent herself from ordering masses to be said for the boy’s soul. The procession was led by singing children, the king’s officers and household bearing banners and the chariot carrying the hearse, draped in cloth of gold. An effigy of Edward lay on top of the latter, dressed in robes of estate, a coat embroidered in gold and a crown, carrying the orb and sceptre. The heralds bore standards depicting a dragon and a white greyhound, followed by the king’s heraldic devices and achievements, including his helmet and crest, his target, garter and sword, ‘gorgeous and rich’. The chief mourners followed, mostly gentlemen of the king’s chamber, dressed alike in mantles of cloth of gold lined with white satin. Edward was buried in the east side of the Lady Chapel, under a brass altar and a canopy supported by pillars and capitals, although this has since been destroyed.109 Henry Machyn witnessed the occasion. He wrote that the ‘greatest moan’ was made for him, that was ‘ever heard of or seen, both of all sorts of people, weeping and lamenting’.110
Obviously, Edward’s death had a devastating impact upon England as a newly reformed nation and, specifically, upon a number of individuals. Had the young king lived, his religious policy continuing under Northumberland and other like-minded servants, there would have been no hiatus of the mid-1550s and no burning of Protestant martyrs. Had he even survived another decade, assuming that Mary would still have died in 1558, he would have outlived his eldest sister and made a smoother transition to power for Queen Elizabeth. Had he fathered a son, perhaps by a princess of France, or by one of his own cousins, the sixteenth century would have looked remarkably different. Of course, all this is just idle speculation, a rewriting of events that cannot be rewritten. Only in alternative fiction can real people be ‘saved’ from the realities of their own fates and returned to the stage to enjoy a parallel reality. And yet, it is possible for the historian to examine what happened as a result of an individual’s death, what filled the space they vacated in political, dynastic and religious terms. Edward’s loss opened up a void that allowed the Catholic Counter-Reformation in England a brief window of opportunity and established an unprecedented period of religious conflict. The young king was powerless to prevent his own death, but he did attempt to take steps to control his country, through the succession, after he had gone. In the event, he failed, but his failure was short-lived. The sympathetic heir Edward had been seeking in 1553 was to be his second sister, Elizabeth, who established a more tolerant approach upon her accession in 1558.
In 1554, Peter Martyr dedicated his Commentaries on the Epistles to the Romans to Edward’s former tutor Sir Anthony Cooke, lamenting the king’s loss; ‘it is a griefe unto me to thinke that that most noble wit, most sacred brest and incredible piety of that famous King Edward the VI of that name, your most dear pupil is so suddenly taken from us.’ Yet he also thanked Cooke for his pains, for ‘your worthy office which you faithfully and with great renown executed in the Christian public wealth, in instructing Edward, that most holy King … whose wit, goodness and religion and other virtues heroical … can never be praised according to their desert’.111
Religious changes by the end of Edward’s reign had made England a far more Protestant country, having followed the example of Luther’s teachings in banning images in churches and the veneration of saints. These moves also completed the process that had been evolving since the 1520s, with the rejection of chantry chapels and beliefs in purgatory and the afterlife, bringing about a revolution in the way people thought about death. Pre-Reformation Catholics had believed that life was merely an interlude before the everlasting bliss of death. Good deeds and a good death would influence this process, but the moment of death itself, or the process of dying, was a test, a dark valley of shadows through which the soul had to pass; a battlefield where the Devil would be waiting to make one last, determined assault upon the individual. After that, a different struggle ensued as purgatory led either to hell or heaven, whose outcome the soul no longer had any power to influence, but might be aided by the prayers and masses of the living. Some might already have been destined to achieve heaven, but the damnation of sinners was by no means guaranteed, and the power of salvation was in God’s gift. The Protestant belief removed this stage of limbo, with the immediate passage of the soul to heaven or hell, depending upon whether the individual was one of Luther’s predestined, one of those who had sought God.
The detailed churchwardens’ records from one London parish across this period helps illustrate a change in the methods for honouring the dead. The church of St Mary at Hill was originally built on Lovat Lane, in Billingsgate, in the fourteenth century. It had a late medieval north aisle and steeple, completed between 1490 and 1497, and contained four chapels, to St Stephen, St Katherine, St Anne and St Christopher. The abbot’s former kitchen was demolished to make way for the new south aisle, which was ready for use by 1501. The church was destroyed in the great fire of 1666 but its records survived; these relate payments made for rents, expenses and the maintenance of the church and its many chantry chapels.
The records from the late fifteenth century are consistent with the practice of Catholicism and the usual memorials to the dead. Throughout this period, there are a handful of wealthy benefactors whose bequests ensured they were remembered. Between Michaelmas 1483 and Michaelmas 1485, 3s 4d was paid daily to the priests and clerks for keeping the obit of John Bradmer on 25 November; 6s 10d was paid for the obit of John Weston on 19 April; and the obit of Richard Goselin was observed on 1 December, for a payment of 4s 1d and an offering and bread and ale for the priest and clerks. Five chantry chapels were recorded in this cycle of accounts. John Bedaham’s chantry saw his obit kept twice on 14 May for 8s 10d, as well as £13 6s 8d to the priest, 6s 8d as a bequest to the churchwarden, £5 11s to three poor men every Sunday and 18s for oil to keep Bedaham’s lamp burning. There were also chantries with regular obits kept for a John Causton, Rose Wrytell and a Mr Nasing. The costs of William Cambridge’s chantry chapel amounted to 44s 8d, including 8s 8d for the keeping of his obit twice annually, 13s and 4d as a bequest from the Cambridge family to the Mayor of London and 3s 4d to the sword-bearer who accompanied the mayor.112
The church accounts also include an exhaustive list of pre-Reformation furniture, with altar leaves, hanging and stones, square banners, banner staves and banners for the rood loft. There were branches of iron and brass; candlesticks; canopies and chalices; figures of the virgin, St Thomas and St Nicholas; painted glass; holy water sprinklers; a monstrance for the sacrament; silver pax and pyx; the great rood screen with images of St Mary and St John; streamers; tablets; tapers; and veils for Lent. Such features, along with the names of Bedaham, Cambridge, Causton, Wrytll, Nasing, Bradmer, Weston and Goselin, recur through each session of the accounts until the end of the 1540s. In 1547–48, when the first Edwardian reforms were pushed through, all mention of chantry chapels disappears and there are indications that the fabric of the church was changing: 13s 4d was paid for the dismantling of the rood loft, taking down the iron work and the tabernacle over the vestry door. In 1548–49, the church purchased two copies of the new Book of Common Prayer at a cost of 7s 6d and sold the gilt of three images for 12s;1549–50 also saw the sale of old prayer books, chalice, pyx, silver bell and twelve ounces of silver, altar stones and tables, raising a total of £1 5s 7d. This would have helped cover the 22s 6d paid for the taking down of the high altar and paving of the quire.113
The details of burial services also changed as a result of England’s shifting religious climate. Those dying in the Catholic faith were sprinkled with holy water and censed, before being wished God speed upon their journey to Abraham’s bosom. A priest would have been present in the chamber, holding a cross before the bed and placing a piece of communion bread in the mouth of the dying. In 1549, the cross and bread, the sprinkling and censing were removed, but the soul continued to be wished a speedy journey until 1552. At Willesborough, Kent, mourners at the funeral of Mother Cosen in 1560 were criticised for carrying crosses in the funeral procession to the church.114 It had been customary for the priest to come out of the church and meet the dead upon their entry into the churchyard, or ‘at the church stile’, to conduct them into the building. This also changed: the coffin was now brought inside, up to the altar, where the priest was waiting.
The London diarist Henry Machyn, who recorded many of the events of Edward’s reign, is particularly interesting on the question of death and funeral rites. Although little else is known about him, he was a merchant who supplied funeral trappings and his diary takes a particular interest in the ceremonies accompanying the final journeys of prominent citizens, but also of less well-known figures. He comments upon the burial of Sir William Locke, late alderman and sheriff, laid to rest at St Thomas’s on 27 August 1550, with sixty poor men in mourning gowns and white staffs, after which the mourners ate a ‘great dinner’. On 18 October, Machyn records that they buried Judge Hynde in St Dunstan’s, in the presence of other judges and serjeants, with clerks singing and the dead man’s heraldic devices. There was ‘much ado there for him’ and a ‘great deal of money and of meat and drink and gowns to the poor’.115
At the end of November 1550, he recorded three more deaths. First to be buried, on the 19th of the month, was Lady Jude, wife of Andrew Jude, former Mayor of London. She was laid to rest in the parish of St Helen in Bishopsgate Street, and church and street were hung with black and the poor issued with gowns. Five days later, it was the ‘noble captain Sir James Wilford’, who was carried from the place of his death at the Crutched Friars near Tower Hill, to St Bartholomew’s beside St Anthony’s, with many mourners, to be buried in the same tomb as his great-uncle of the same name. The funeral was attended by the worshipful company of clerks, indicating the profession of the deceased, and the sermon was preached by the reformed friar Myles Coverdale. Finally, on the last day of the month, the diarist records the burial of ‘Christopher Machyn, merchant-tailor, in the parish of St James and the brother of Henry Machyn’. The company of merchant tailors were present, the clerks sang and a preacher called Maidwell gave the sermon.116
Wills from these years indicate the religious and practical concerns of the dying in the immediate aftermath of Edward’s reforms. Christopher Barker was an officer in the College of Arms who had served Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk and accompanied King Henry VIII to France in 1513. By the time he came to make his will on 31 December 1549, he must have been at least 60, and had helped arranged the christening of Prince Edward and the funerals of Jane Seymour, Henry VIII and Edward himself. Perhaps it was his long experience in this field that dictated his choices regarding his own resting place. He followed the Catholic tradition of expressing ‘a pious hope that his soul may be received into Abraham’s bosom’, which recalls the hope that a small number of individuals would bypass purgatory and be received at once in heaven. Then he directed that his ‘wretched corpse and carcas’ be buried in a vault he had prepared in the chapel beside St Faith’s church. He had been a member of the vintner’s company since 1521, and master between 1540 and 1543, and now left it the reversion of his tenements in Lime Street, while his third wife Edith received his freehold lands and tenements in Essex and Middlesex, and in Wanstead, West Ham and Barking.117 Christopher Barker died just four days after making his will, on 4 January 1550, in Paternoster Road. He was buried in St Faith’s Under St Paul’s but any tomb he may have had was destroyed in the great fire of 1666.
Some will makers were minimal in their funerary requirements while others still left bequests for the beautification of local churches, to influence the living for their prayers. Geographical distance from London might have been a factor in the slow dissemination of change. The city draper Jasper Allen, writing his will on 4 November 1548, requested that he be buried ‘without any pomp or pride of vain glory’ and that thirteen sermons were to be preached on as many Sundays next after his burial, to be paid at the rate of 6s 8d each. He also left bequests of money, clothes, and coals to the new hospital lately founded by King Henry VIII, to various prisons and for redemption of prisoners, to poor householders in the parish of St Nicholas and others.118 Five months later and 100 miles to the west, Edmund Winter was dying in the diocese of Bath and Wells. He also invoked Abraham, leaving his soul ‘to the mercy of Almighty God trusting to have the everlasting fruition of his Kingdom with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’. When the widowed Elizabeth Fitzjames of Temple Combe made her will in 1550, she left eight pence to every householder in the villages of Combe and Horsington ‘so that they take pains to go with my corpse to see it buried’ and ordered that pennies be given out at the funeral itself. Also in Somerset, when Nicholas Jobbyn was preparing to die in 1552, he stated his wish to be buried by the pulpit in the church of St Mary of Stalles and paid 40s for ‘the making or setting up of the name of Jesus in goodly colours upon the high front or wainscott in Stalles Church and these texts written after the best manner in the same font: in nomine Jesu, omne genu flectatat celestrium, terrestrium et infernorum [at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven, on earth and under the earth] both in English and Latin that all men may see to read it’.119
No doubt responses to these changes were not consistent. They would have depended upon individual faith, but also factors like age, wealth, health and geographical location. While some embraced change, happily rejecting the old tenets of purgatory and prayers for the dead, others clung to them in horror at the heresy that threatened to jeopardise their souls. It must have been the case, however, that some were left confused by the rapid changes of the 1540s and 1550s, which would see an utter rejection of Catholicism before its complete, albeit brief, restoration. A percentage of those who died during this period must have been uncertain about their ultimate fate, trusting to God and clinging even more fervently to what they had believed to be the truth. Powerful faith and inconsistent policy would engender an era of religious martyrdoms.