IN THE CLOSING days of January, Prince Edward received two visitors from his father’s court. One was his uncle, Edward Seymour, and the other was Sir Anthony Browne. They had ridden to the prince’s residence at Hertford as soon as his father had breathed his last. Henry VIII’s death was concealed from his subjects for a further two days, just as his own father’s had been, in order to allow time for his councillors to arrange a smooth succession. Meals continued to be taken into his privy chamber so that the servants beyond would have no inkling that anything was amiss.
Meanwhile, Henry’s son and successor was moved to Enfield, where Princess Elizabeth was staying. The young prince was filled with excited anticipation because he knew that his formal creation as Prince of Wales was being actively considered, so he hoped that Seymour might be bringing news of its confirmation. But as soon as Edward was with his sister, the two men told them of their father’s death. Distraught, Edward rushed into his sister’s arms and they wept together for several hours while the councillors looked on, aghast. Yet in his diary, Edward recorded only that there was ‘great lamentation and weeping’ when his father’s death was announced to the people of London, and mentions nothing of his own feelings.1
Edward soon set out for London. He arrived in the capital on 31 January and was given a rousing reception, to his ‘great felicity’.2 Following tradition, he resided at the Tower until his coronation. On the same day as Edward’s arrival, a tearful Wriothesley announced his royal master’s death to parliament. The sincerity of this arch-politician is questionable. After all, his position in the new reign seemed assured. Henry had named him one of the sixteen executors to sit on his son’s regency council. He had also bequeathed the Lord Chancellor £500 in his will and the earldom of Southampton, which he duly inherited on 16 February.
Edward Seymour showed no such regret, feigned or otherwise, in the days following the old king’s death. Instead, one of his first acts after conveying the news to his nephew was to seize the jewels that Henry had bestowed upon his sixth wife. This rather aggressive action triggered a long-running and bitter dispute with Katherine, who was already aggrieved at being deprived of any powers of regency. It did not help matters that Seymour’s wife was seen wearing the jewels at the coronation the following month.
Seymour and his fellow executors met on 31 January and agreed ‘that being a great number appointed to be executors with equal and like charge, it should be more than necessary as well for the honour, surety and government of the most royal person of the king our sovereign lord that now is as for the more certain and assured order and direction of his affairs, that some special man of the number and company aforesaid should be preferred in name and place before others’.3 They decided to create two posts: Governor of the King’s Person and Protector of the Realm.
Of all the men in whom Henry had entrusted power during his son’s reign, Edward Seymour stood head and shoulders above the rest. He had spent years planning for this moment and made sure that the transfer of authority to him would be as smooth as it had been from Henry to his son. As the new king’s uncle, he was a natural choice as Lord Protector, and he was more politically shrewd than most of his rivals. But he was so greedy for power that he also persuaded the executors to make him Governor of the King’s Person too. This sparked the resentment of his brother Thomas, who had expected that this title would go to him.
Thomas Seymour was not the only man who had cause to feel aggrieved. The new Lord Protector’s ally, William Paget, had been instrumental in laying the path to Seymour’s promotion during the closing days of Henry’s reign, but he was denied the rewards that had been held out as an enticement. ‘Remember what you promised me in the gallery at Westminster, before the breath was out of the body of the King that dead is,’ Paget urged him. ‘Remember what you promised me immediately after, devising with me concerning the place which you now occupy.’4
On the same day as Seymour’s position was decided, the French ambassador, Odet de Selve, reported to his master that the Duke of Norfolk had been secretly beheaded on the previous day. In fact, the duke had been spared the same fate as his son by the king’s death. The new Lord Protector, Edward Seymour, resisted the temptation to deal the killer blow because he and his council judged that it would be more politic to begin the new reign peaceably. Instead, they contented themselves with keeping Norfolk in the Tower and plundering his estates. As he was the wealthiest peer in England, these were considerable.
Initially, there was little change in the court personnel after Henry’s death. The only senior officer to lose his place was Lord St John, who was obliged to cede his post as lord great chamberlain to John Dudley. Anthony Denny continued to wield influence in the new king’s privy chamber. An executor of his master’s will, he also received a substantial bequest, although there are hints that Denny abused his position as keeper of the privy purse to extract even more of his late master’s bounty. He was also made a privy councillor and would be vested with an increasing level of power by his ally, the Lord Protector, even deputising for him on occasion. He died in service, on 10 September 1549, but his heirs would enjoy similar prominence in the reigns of the later Tudors and their successors, the Stuarts.
Some of the other privy chamber posts were filled by men who had attended Edward as prince. They included John Fowler, John Philpot and Robert Maddox, to each of whom the new king had grown attached. But otherwise this department, like the others, remained largely untouched.
Ralph Sadler was one of the privy councillors deputed to arrange the king’s funeral in his capacity as master of the great wardrobe. The late king’s apothecary, Thomas Alsop, supplied perfumed substances to place in the coffin. Henry had left Alsop a generous bequest in his will, so the apothecary was no doubt glad to perform this final service for his former master. His royal patronage had won him a host of wealthy clients, and he had also maintained his business interests as a member of the Grocers’ Company. By the time of his own death in 1558, Alsop was a man of considerable means, with assets that included sixteen properties in London.
Henry’s enormous body began its last journey from Westminster to Windsor on 14 February, and he was laid to rest two days later in St George’s Chapel. His son Edward did not attend, as was customary. Nor did most of his council: they were too busy fighting over the terms of the late king’s will. Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset, was assigned the role of chief mourner – not because he was the most highly favoured of Henry’s men by the time of his death, but because he was the closest in blood to him, after Prince Edward.
The two most senior members of the late king’s privy chamber took pride of place in the funeral procession, as a contemporary account described: ‘Then set at the head and feet of the said corpse Sir Anthony Denny and Sir William Herbert, two of the chief of his privy chamber.’5 The king’s former groom of the stool, Sir Thomas Heneage, also attended the funeral as a gentleman of the privy chamber extraordinary. Meanwhile, Bishop Gardiner directed the funeral mass. Given Henry’s often-expressed antipathy towards ‘wily Winchester’, it is doubtful whether his late master would have approved.
Henry’s choice of Windsor for his final resting place has long been taken as proof of his esteem for Jane Seymour, who was buried there. But it was also a sign of his enduring affection towards one of his men. The mortal remains of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, had lain there since his death almost eighteen months before. Now his royal master was interred close by. And so these two brothers in arms, who had so closely resembled each other in life and whose friendship had endured for more than four decades, were reunited in death.
Although Edward Seymour’s position seemed assured until his nephew reached maturity, it would soon become obvious that vesting so much power in one man was a recipe for disaster. The fatal flaw in the arrangement was the fact that, although the council had decreed that the Lord Protector ‘shall not do any act but with the advice and consent of the rest of the coexecutors’, Seymour had no intention of adhering to what they envisaged as an honorary presidency. He meant to be regent, and soon began to exercise the executive powers of the crown. In short, as one contemporary observed: ‘He was all but king.’6
This was not what Henry had intended, but even he could not rule beyond the grave. Before his death, he had, though, had plans to restore what he regarded as a ‘greatly decayed’ nobility, thanks to so many of their lands having reverted to the crown during his reign. William Paget claimed that the late king had ‘willed me to make unto him a book of such as he did choose to advance’.7 This document still exists in The National Archives, and the many amendments reflect the king’s constant changes of mind about which of his men should benefit from his largesse. It was therefore open to interpretation, and the fact that most of the men who were put forward for ennoblement were favourable to Seymour and his regime suggests that the latter had helped to decide what the old king intended. Seymour was to receive the highest honour as Duke of Hertford, Exeter or Somerset; John Dudley was to be Earl of Coventry; Sir John Russell was to be Earl of Northampton; Thomas Wriothesley and Sir William Paulet were both earmarked for the earldom of Winchester; and William Parr was to become a marquess.
The council declared themselves satisfied that these were Henry’s intended beneficiaries, but they postponed the final decision until a more appropriate time. They did not have long to debate the issue, however, because it was important that the new titles be conferred in time for Edward’s coronation. On 16 February, the young king duly distributed the new honours. His uncles, Edward and Thomas Seymour, became Duke of Somerset and Baron Seymour of Sudeley respectively, while John Dudley was made Earl of Warwick and Katherine Parr’s brother William became the Marquess of Northampton. Neither Sir John Russell nor Sir William Paulet were granted their intended titles at this time, although they were promoted to the earldoms of Bedford and Wiltshire respectively in January 1550.
Four days later, Henry’s nine-year-old son was crowned Edward VI amid magnificent pomp and pageantry that called to mind the heyday of his father’s reign. According to John Foxe, although the new king was ‘but tender in years’, he had matured into a young man of whom his father would have been proud: ‘For his sage and mature ripeness in wit and all princely ornaments … I see but few to whom he may not be equal.’8
Henry’s long-serving attendant, Sir Anthony Browne, rode next to the young king in his coronation procession. Although he had tried to persuade the dying king to admit Gardiner into his regency council, Browne had swiftly changed sides upon Edward’s accession and was one of the first to accept Seymour as Lord Protector. But he did not live long enough to make an impact in the new reign, for he died on 6 May 1548 at his estate in Surrey.
On 22 February, as part of the celebrations that followed the coronation, Edward took part in a court masque, along with his companion Henry Brandon, the twelve-year-old Duke of Suffolk. Those members of the audience who could remember the heyday of his father’s reign must have been struck by how little had changed. Like his father, Edward showed an enthusiasm for martial displays of all kinds, but because of his youth and his status as the sole male Tudor heir, his own participation was limited to archery and ‘running at the ring’.
Edward also shared enough of his father’s sense of humour to keep Henry’s favourite jester in employment. Although Will Somer disappears from the records for a while after his old master’s death, he is listed in the court entertainments at Christmas 1550, and appears regularly thereafter. For one festivity, he was kitted out with several elaborate new costumes and ordered to take part in a mock combat that the young king had devised.
In early April 1547, news arrived at court that the late king’s fiercest rival, Francis I, had died. He had bested Henry even in death, for he had left his throne not to a minor, but to an accomplished, twenty-eight-year-old son. But it seems that this charismatic and pleasure-loving king had lost heart towards the end, for he was said to have ‘died complaining about the weight of a crown that he had first perceived as a gift from God’.9 Wriothesley thought he knew the reason for the French king’s melancholy: ‘It was said that he never rejoiced since he had heard of the King’s Majesty’s [Henry VIII’s] death.’10
As Edward’s reign began to settle, a number of his father’s long-standing servants found favour with the new king. Among them was Sir John Russell. In recognition of his unstinting loyalty, the late king had bequeathed him the princely sum of £500 (c. £120,000) and named him an executor on Edward’s council. Although there seemed to be little love lost between Russell and Seymour, the former was prepared to support his protectorship without allying too closely with him. It would prove a wise strategy, enabling Russell to survive the turbulence of the young king’s reign. So successful was he, in fact, that he also found favour in the next. He would serve Mary Tudor until his death, aged about seventy, on 14 March 1555. Admired for his honesty as well as for his pragmatism to the end of his days, Russell had been one of only a handful of Henry’s men whose steadfast and loyal service had contributed significantly to the stability of the Tudor dynasty.
Russell’s old friend Sir Francis Bryan also fared well in his service to Edward VI. His change of loyalty to the Seymours in the dying months of Henry’s reign was rewarded. In September 1547, he was given the command of the horse in an expedition against Scotland led by the new Lord Protector and was made knight-banneret. The last service of this most peripatetic of courtiers lay in Ireland, where, at the age of fifty-eight, he at last took a wife: the powerful widow Joan Butler, Dowager Countess of Ormond. Bryan was subsequently appointed lord marshal, commanding Edward VI’s forces against the Irish rebels. He died there in February 1550, and his last words were reported at the English court: ‘I pray you, let me be buried amongst the good fellows of Waterford (which were good drinkers).’11
Everything had seemed set fair for the new Earl of Southampton as he held the sword of state at Edward’s coronation. But a little over two weeks later, on 6 March, Wriothesley was deprived of the Great Seal and confined to his home at Ely Place. His alleged crime was the abuse of his authority, and he was accused of having ‘menaced divers of the said learned men [of Edward’s regency council] and others’.12 But his real offence was in abandoning his long-practised strategy of changing alliance to suit the political climate. Instead, he had miscalculated by making an enemy of Edward Seymour. He made little attempt to counter the charges. His compliance was rewarded at the end of June, when he was released and subsequently regained his place on the Privy Council.
By this time, Thomas Seymour had already married Henry VIII’s widow, Katherine Parr. The speed with which the Dowager Queen took another husband sent shockwaves throughout the court. Henry’s eldest daughter Mary was so appalled that she refused to have anything more to do with her former stepmother. Princess Elizabeth was more pragmatic. She adored Katherine and accepted her invitation to live with her and Seymour at Chelsea. But it would have disastrous consequences. Seymour soon began a dangerous game of flirtation with the late king’s youngest daughter, which resulted in Elizabeth being thrown out of Chelsea. Undeterred, when Katherine died after giving birth to a short-lived daughter in September 1548, Seymour renewed his advances towards the princess.
Meanwhile, thanks to his close alliance with Edward Seymour, as well as his ideological alignment with the new king, Thomas Cranmer retained his position as Archbishop of Canterbury. For all that he regretted the late king’s passing, he experienced a sense of relief, too, for he could live openly with his wife and children now that Edward’s first parliament had repealed the Act of Six Articles. Early in the new reign, he wrote to the young king, urging him ‘to finish and bring to pass that your father did most godly begin’.13 Edward needed little persuasion. His passion for reform belied his tender years, thanks in no small part to Cranmer’s assiduity in cultivating his favour during the preceding years.
During the course of Edward’s short reign, Cranmer would oversee the establishment of a strongly reformed doctrine in England, encapsulated in the Book of Common Prayer, issued in March 1549, which was followed by an even more radical version three years later. This would be Cranmer’s greatest and most lasting achievement. He had, at last, been given free rein to express the views that he had so often been obliged to temper and suppress during Henry’s reign. Though it was not at all what his late master would have wanted, it was a dazzling achievement.
But it was all too brief. The accession of Edward’s sister Mary, who was determined to return England to the Roman Catholic fold, spelt disaster for those who had promoted the cause of reform. Cranmer would be the most high-profile victim of the Marian burnings. Although Cranmer had signed a recantation of his Protestant beliefs towards the end, when he went to his death in March 1556, he stretched out his right hand into the flames, declaring that it had ‘offended’.14 There is a profound tragedy in the fact that, having survived the many and dangerous vicissitudes of Henry’s reign, Cranmer met his end at the orders of his daughter.
By contrast, having weathered the storm of Edward’s reign, Cranmer’s long-standing rival the Duke of Norfolk enjoyed great favour during the ascendancy of Mary Tudor. Recognising his unstinting dedication to the old religion, the queen showered him with honours. By the time of his death in August 1554, the eighty-one-year-old duke was Lord High Steward, Earl Marshal and a privy councillor.
Meanwhile, Edward Seymour had soon paid the price for his ‘excessive arrogance’ and overweening authority. As one contemporary observed, he had sought to make himself ‘the king of the king’, and ‘had no one here superior to him in any degree of honour’.15 He was ruthless in his quest for absolute authority, not flinching even to have his own brother Thomas put to death in March 1549 on charges of plotting to kidnap the king, marry his sister Elizabeth and make himself Lord Protector. His arrogance soon made an enemy of his erstwhile ally John Dudley. When Seymour realised that Dudley was conspiring to deprive him of power, he pursued him ‘with the most unrelenting hatred’.16 But it was Dudley who would triumph. In October 1549, with the assistance of Wriothesley and a number of other prominent religious conservatives, he led a coup to oust the Protector from office. The young king himself was persuaded to order his uncle’s arrest.
Although Seymour was subsequently released and readmitted to the Privy Council, he was deprived of any real power from that day forward. Dudley was now the dominant force, and those who had helped him to power were quick to benefit. Prominent among them was Thomas Wriothesley, who was appointed to attend upon the young king. ‘Wriothesley … is lodged … next to the king. Every man repaireth to Wriothesley, honoureth Wriothesley, sueth unto Wriothesley … and all things be done by his advise,’ observed one contemporary.17 But within a few short weeks, he had been thrown out of office and placed under house arrest on suspicion of abusing his authority. By now, Wriothesley was seriously ill, and he died on 30 July 1550 at the age of forty-five.
John Dudley soon became as blinded by ambition as his predecessor, and held sway with increasing tyranny. Having secured himself the dukedom of Northumberland in October 1551, he had Seymour arrested a few days later on trumped-up charges of treason. The former Lord Protector was executed in January 1552. This merely served to increase the ranks of Dudley’s enemies, but, undeterred, he ruled with ever greater tyranny.
If he had known of the chaos and disorder into which his son’s reign would descend, Henry VIII would have been appalled. He had not been alone in predicting great things for his successor, who was described by Vergil as ‘a youth who most assuredly was destined for rule, for virtue and for wisdom. He is endowed with the highest talents and has aroused the greatest expectations among all men.’18 At least the young king’s subjects could look forward to the day when, aged eighteen, he would claim the full inheritance that his father had bequeathed him.
But Edward’s reign – and his life – would end far sooner than anyone could have predicted. In April 1552, he contracted measles. Although he recovered, his immune system was fatally weakened, and he soon fell prey to tuberculosis. On 6 July 1553, Henry’s precious son and heir died, aged just fifteen.
After a short-lived coup by John Dudley that placed his daughter-in-law (and Henry VIII’s great-niece), Lady Jane Grey, on the throne, the late king’s daughter Mary claimed her inheritance. But her reign, too, would be as brief as it was turbulent, and it was left to her half-sister Elizabeth to rescue the fortunes of the Tudor dynasty.
It is one of history’s greatest ironies that, having focused all of his efforts on producing a male heir, it was Henry’s forgotten younger daughter who would realise the hopes that had been articulated in the inscription on Prince Edward’s portrait of 1539: ‘Little one, imitate your father and be the heir of his virtue, the world contains nothing greater … Surpass him … and none will ever surpass you.’ In the male-dominated world of sixteenth-century monarchy, Elizabeth, not Edward, would imitate her father – and surpass him.