It was piously stated that the funds and lands released from enthralment to vain piety were now to be directed towards schools and other foundations; in fact most of the revenue went straight into the pockets of the treasury for use in the Scottish wars. The number of schools created by Edward VI has been miscalculated. The majority of schools that claim him as their founder did in fact exist long before his reign; he simply continued their foundation by making a fixed payment to the schoolmaster in place of the fees the master had received from the now dissolved chantries. In the course of Edward’s rule, however, free schools were established at St Albans, Berkhamsted and Stamford. The same process of secular change affected the universities; the old monastic foundations were dissolved and new colleges took their place. Trinity College in Cambridge, for example, was established in 1546; Emmanuel College, Cambridge, was founded in 1584 on the site of a dissolved Dominican friary that had been purchased for the purpose.
Some of the revenue from the chantries was evidently put to more familiar uses, and the imperial ambassador reported that ‘all the gentry, large and small, are . . . on the look out to receive rewards and benefits from the king’. A small group of peers at the centre of power shared the major part of the remaining spoils; the corruption of rulers made up what Thomas More called in his Utopia ‘a conspiracy of rich men seeking their own commodity under the name of the commonwealth’. It was said that it was better to be in hell than in the court of augmentation, where the monastic revenues were administered. The proverb ‘The law is ended as a man is befriended’ was on everyone’s lips. ‘Who passeth on [refrains from] offending and breaking the laws when he hath plenty of money to stop the execution of them?’ It is the story of the government of England.
It has been calculated that more than 2,500 chantry foundations were thus removed from the land. The English were no longer permitted to pray for their dead. At the beginning of 1548 it was also proclaimed that no candles should be carried on Candlemas Day, nor ashes be applied on Ash Wednesday, nor palms be borne on Palm Sunday.
In accordance with its reformist inclinations parliament also passed legislation that allowed communion to be taken in both kinds, the bread and the wine; with this change a vernacular Order of Communion was introduced, inserted into the Latin Mass. Muscatel or malmsey wine was given to the ‘better sort’ while the rest had to make do with claret. It was further resolved that there should be no restrictions on printing, teaching or reading the Scriptures. It was therefore hoped that England would become the land of the Bible. From this time forward bishops were to be made by king’s letters patent, making sure that the newly evangelized nation had a staff of permanent officials. Piece by piece, step by step, the religion of the people was changed.
Parliament also issued a new Treason Act that repealed the draconian legislation imposed by the old king on his sometimes fractious realm. It was now no longer considered treason merely to speak against the king; any more heinous acts now needed two witnesses rather than one before matters were taken further. This particular clause on the need for two witnesses has been described by a great administrative historian, Henry Hallam, as ‘one of the most important constitutional provisions which the annals of the Tudor family afford’.
In a similar spirit of toleration the Act for the Burning of Heretics, dated 1414, was also removed from the statute book. More importantly, perhaps, the Act of Six Articles was abolished; this had been described, at its inception in 1539, as ‘an Act abolishing diversity in Opinions’. It was imposed essentially to uphold orthodox Catholicism and silence active reformers; it was no longer necessary or expedient in the new atmosphere of Edward’s reign, and its repeal could of course also be construed as a measure of religious toleration. So parliament had thrown out all the old precautions over treason and heresy, and thus had tacitly dismantled much of the oppressive legislation of the old reign.
One much less liberal measure was introduced. A new Vagrancy Act was passed that ordered into slavery those who were unwilling to work. Two justices of the peace, on hearing about the ‘idle living’ of any person from two witnesses, could ordain that the guilty party should be branded on the chest with a ‘V’ and sentenced to two years of slavery; the culprit could be chained or driven with whips. Anyone who tried to flee from this exacted labour would be punished with perpetual slavery for the first offence and with death for the second. The severity of the measure is a token of the anxiety that the vagrants caused in sixteenth-century England. They roved the country in bands, begging or stealing at pleasure; the ‘sturdy beggars’ were an old order with their own traditions and their own language in ‘the canting tongue’. ‘The cull has rum rigging, let’s ding him, and mill him, and pike’ was as much to say that ‘the man has very good clothes, let us knock him down, rob him and run’.
The masterless man was also believed to be the sign of a dissolving or deteriorating social order, thus provoking fresh fears of the future. In 1577 William Harrison wrote that ‘it is not yet full three score years since this trade began, but how it hath prospered since that time it is easy to judge, for they are now supposed of one sex and another to amount unto about 10,000 persons, as I have heard reported’. Yet the legislation is also evidence of the social discipline that was maintained over the nation by means of church ‘visitations’ and injunctions and proclamations. Anyone walking free had to be detained or restrained. The fear of disorder was very strong.
A tumult of legislation had indeed been passed in the first months of Somerset’s rule. In the spring of 1548 William Paget, once the colluder or conspirator with Somerset, wrote a letter to the protector in which he declared that the country had become restless. ‘The use of the old religion is forbidden, the use of the new is not yet printed in the stomachs of eleven of twelve parts of the realm.’ He warned the protector to be cautious and to move carefully. ‘Commissions out for this matter, new laws for this, proclamations for another, one in another’s neck, so thick that they be not set among the people . . . You must take pity upon the poor men’s children, and of the conservation and stay of the realm, and put no more so many irons in the fire at once.’ But Somerset objected to him as a Cassandra, prophesying woe.
Yet there had never been so much dissension over matters of religion. Some said that Somerset had gone too far, and others complained that he had not gone far enough. An indication of religious controversy can be found among the members of the royal family. Edward professed his ‘comfort and quiet of mind’ at the changes in religion, and even began writing a treatise in French on the subject of papal supremacy; at the same time his older sister, Mary, was hearing four Masses a week. Fights broke out in churches between the various factions, conservative and reformed. One church favoured the rite of Rome while another practised that of Geneva; neighbouring churches might worship according to the rules of Zurich or Wittenberg. Verse satires, ridiculing conservatives and reformers, were widely circulated; one of them was entitled Have at all Papists! By me, Hans Hatprick and another was printed as A Ballet, declaring the Fall of the Whore of Babylon, intituled ‘Tie this Mare, Tom-boy’.
In the churchwardens’ accounts at Stanford in the Vale, then in Berkshire, the date was given as ‘the time of Schism, when this realm was divided from the Catholic church’ when ‘all godly ceremonies & good uses were taken out of the Church’. The parish priest of Adwick le Street, in Doncaster, wrote that at Rogationtide ‘no procession was made about the fields, but cruel tyrants did cast down all crosses standing in open ways despitefully’. At a school in Bodmin the boys set up rival factions of ‘the old religion’ and ‘the new religion’ in a series of elaborate battles. When they managed to blow up a calf with gunpowder, the master intervened with a whip. The social and religious order had to be maintained at all costs. A boy of thirteen was whipped naked at the church of St Mary Woolnoth; his offence was to throw his cap at the Blessed Sacrament raised during a Mass.
In the spring of 1548, therefore, all preaching was prohi
bited except by those especially licensed to do so; this was meant to silence ‘rash, contentious, hot and undiscreet’ men who were forever stirring the pot of religious dissension. Yet even this was not enough and, later in the year, all preaching came to an end. An exception was made for the conservative bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner. He had been released from the Fleet prison on his promise that he would conform to the new religious polity, and had scarcely returned to his palace in Southwark when he was informed by the council that he was to preach before the king. He was asked to read out, and subscribe to, certain articles concerning the recent changes in religion. He was being ordered, in other words, publicly to assent to such matters as the destruction of images and the administration of communion in both kinds.
He refused, saying that this was ‘like a lesson made for a child to learn’. Whereupon he was summoned to court and the protector warned him that he could be deprived of his bishopric for disobedience to the king’s highness. Gardiner then relented a little and agreed to compose a sermon touching upon such matters. He consented to preach on St Peter’s Day, or 29 June, but the afternoon before he received a message from the protector forbidding him to make any mention of the doctrine of transubstantiation. He was about to send his chaplain with a verbal response, when he broke off. ‘You shall not go,’ he told him. ‘I will do well enough, I warrant.’
On the following afternoon he stepped up to the new ‘preaching place’, the open pulpit set in the privy garden at Whitehall; the young king sat at a window in the gallery, overlooking the preacher, where assembled in the garden was ‘such an audience as the like whereof hath not lightly been seen’. Everyone wished to hear the bishop make his peace with the religious changes. He proceeded to say that ‘I will plainly declare what I think of the state of the Church of England at this day, how I like it and what I think of it’. It was in some respects an ambiguous message. He grudgingly agreed to the dissolution of the chantries, but still believed it right to pray for the dead; he accepted that rituals and ceremonies were essentially ‘things indifferent’ and so did not object to the reforms, but he did believe that priests should retain their vow of chastity; despite the protector’s warning to avoid the subject of transubstantiation, the bishop did affirm the power of the sacrament with the phrase ‘This is my body’.
After the sermon was over Gardiner was ‘merry and quiet’ on his way back to Southwark in his barge. When his chaplain heard a rumour that he would be committed to the Tower the bishop replied that ‘it was but tales for he thought that he never pleased the Council better in all his life’. On the following day he was arrested and, on the charge of ‘wilful disobedience’, was sent to the Tower of London where he was kept in close confinement for the next five years.
Somerset, even in the midst of these controversies, was preoccupied with Scotland. Early in 1548 he issued ‘an epistle or exhortation’ to the Scottish people in which he pleaded for a bond of common interests ‘united together in one language, in one island’ which should be given ‘the indifferent old name of Britaines again’; the names of England and Scotland would therefore be abolished. Once more he insisted on the marriage of Edward and Mary as the ground for this unity but, once more, the Scots were not listening. It came as a deep shock, therefore, when it was confirmed that Mary, queen of Scots, was in fact to be betrothed to the dauphin, the French king’s eldest son. So began the public career of the young princess whose troubled life cast its shadow over English affairs for the next thirty-nine years; even at the age of ten it was said that ‘her spirit is already so high and noble that she would make great demonstration of displeasure at seeing herself degradingly treated’. Mary of Guise from Lorraine, the widow of James V, became effectively the dowager queen of Scotland in her daughter’s absence in France, where the young girl was to be raised with her future husband. France now brooded on the northern borders of England.
The French king was still eager to regain Boulogne, but the overwhelming victory of the protector’s forces at Pinkie Cleugh gave him pause. It was also in the interest of England to avoid war with France; any military campaign would prove ruinously expensive. In February 1548 the French ambassador was gracefully received by the young king at Greenwich, where they witnessed a mock siege; they spoke together in Latin, for mutual ease of intercourse. Four months later a French force landed at Leith in order to aid their Scottish allies; sallies and counter-sallies were launched about the town of Haddington in East Lothian, but large-scale fighting was avoided. Nevertheless the presence of French troops on Scottish soil was an irritant, and emphasized the flaws in Somerset’s policy of subjugation by means of garrisons.
The younger brother of the protector, Thomas Seymour, had not abandoned his schemes of advancement. Further evidence of his incapacity emerged at the time when the young Lady Elizabeth entered the household of Katherine Parr; she was at the time fourteen but her young age did not deter the man who delighted to be called her ‘stepfather’. He would appear in her bedchamber dressed only in his nightgown and slippers; he would engage in playful romps with her, smacking her on the back or buttocks. It was evident, too, that the princess had become infatuated with the handsome lord high admiral. It is said that eventually Katherine Parr found them in each other’s arms. Elizabeth left the household. When it was rumoured that the princess was indeed pregnant with Seymour’s child, the privy council was obliged to question members of her entourage; there was no truth to the reports, but the foreign ambassadors were happy to pass on any titillating news of Anne Boleyn’s daughter. The episode also served to materially increase Elizabeth’s natural wariness and secretiveness.
When Katherine Parr died in the early autumn of 1548, six days after giving birth to an infant girl, Seymour found himself with another opportunity of bolstering his state. It soon became clear that he still had designs upon Lady Elizabeth. He asked one of her household servants, Thomas Parry, ‘whether her great buttocks were grown any less or no’? More pertinently, perhaps, he began to make enquiries about ‘the state of her grace’s houses, and how many people she kept’. What houses she had and what lands? Were they good lands or not, and did she hold them for life?
A courtier was out riding with him one day, en route to parliament. ‘My lord admiral,’ he said, ‘there are certain rumours of you that I am very sorry to hear.’
‘What are they?’
‘I am informed you make means to marry either with my Lady Mary or my Lady Elizabeth. And touching that, my lord, if you go about any such thing, you seek the means to undo yourself, and all those that shall come of you.’ When Seymour denied any such intention, the courtier replied that ‘I am glad to hear you say so – do not attempt the matter’. He warned Seymour that the two previous kings had been highly suspicious of over-mighty subjects; might not the new king have the same infirmity? Seymour’s own brother, Protector Somerset, might also be moved to act against him.
Yet Seymour shook off any such warnings, and decided that it was time to act upon Edward himself. ‘Since I saw you last,’ he told him, ‘you are grown to be a goodly gentleman. I trust that within three or four years, you shall be ruler of your own things.’ When the king reached sixteen, he might be able and willing to rule of his own accord and thereby dismiss the protector; Seymour might then rise high in royal favour. Yet at this juncture the king simply said ‘no’.
Seymour still plotted. He fortified his dwelling, Holt Castle in Worcestershire, and brought in a great store of beer, beef and wheat; by some means or other he obtained the ‘double key’ that would grant him access to the privy garden and the king’s lodging. He made the journey from Holt Castle to Whitehall many times with a company of his followers. He said that ‘a man might steal away the king now for there came more with me than is in all the house besides’. Then, on the night of 16 January 1549, he was surprised by Edward’s dog just outside the royal bedchamber; he shot the dog and, as cries of ‘Help! Murder!’ rang out, he was apprehended by the king’s guard
. It seems likely that he intended to kidnap the king and raise a civil war in his name. It was alleged later that he had made provision to recruit a private army and that he had planned to take over the royal mint at Bristol; these were also clear tokens of treasonable attempts.
He was arrested on the day after his discovery in the king’s quarters and taken to the Tower; soon enough he came to trial for his life on the charge of treason. The protector was now in the unenviable position of prosecuting his younger brother to the death. ‘They cannot kill me,’ Seymour said, ‘except they do me wrong.’ But then, a little later, he complained of his ‘friends’ on the royal council that ‘I think they have forgotten me’. The young king himself also turned against him. His recorded words were that ‘it were better for him to die before’. It was better for him to be dead.
In the inquiry against him, his designs on Elizabeth were also formally investigated. The young princess herself was questioned together with the more prominent members of her household. ‘They all sing one song,’ their interrogator wrote to the protector, ‘and so I think they would not do, unless they had set the note before.’ It seems likely, therefore, that Seymour’s advances had gone further than was considered permissible and may have verged on treason. ‘There goeth rumours abroad’, Elizabeth complained, ‘that I am in the Tower, and with child by my lord admiral.’ The rumours were false, but three of her entourage were dismissed. There had been smoke, and perhaps there had also been fire.
Even while he remained in the Tower Seymour engaged in more schemes. He made a pen from the point of an aiglet plucked from his hose and, according to Hugh Latimer, fabricated an ink ‘with such workmanship as the like has not been seen’; with pen and ink he then wrote two letters, to the princesses Mary and Elizabeth, ‘tending to this end, that they should conspire against my lord protector’s grace’. He concealed these letters within his shoe but, on his prison lodging being searched, they were discovered.
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