Edward remained oddly pliant and passive in his dealings with the duke. A French observer noted that ‘whenever there was something of importance that he [Northumberland] wanted done or spoken by the king without anyone knowing that it came from him, he would come secretly at night into the prince’s chamber after everybody was in bed, unnoticed by anyone. The next morning the young prince would come to his council and, as if they came from himself, advocate certain matters – at which everyone marvelled, thinking they were his own ideas.’ It was noticed by another foreign observer that the king always kept his eyes upon the duke, and would leave a meeting or conversation ‘because of signs the duke of Northumberland had made to him’. Slowly he was being educated in the ways of the world, and in the ways of government, but in no sense did he possess independent authority. Northumberland controlled the grant of offices and lands. It was said that he encouraged the young king in all martial pursuits, including those of archery and hunting, thus keeping him out of the way.
In the matter of religion, however, Edward may have already formed his own opinions. At the time of the fall of Somerset he was twelve years old. That is age enough to be enamoured of faith and piety, and his condemnation of Mary’s religious practices suggest that he was already something of a martinet in this sphere. In the previous year he had completed a treatise on papal pretensions, in which he concluded that the pontiff was ‘the true son of the devil, a bad man, an Antichrist and abominable tyrant’. He may have been instructed by his tutors in this regard, but the tone is surely his own. When he went through the service of consecration for a new bishop he came upon an invocation of the saints; with a stroke of his pen he cancelled it as a blasphemous addition. It was he who decided that there should be weekly sermons in his country’s churches. ‘Believe me,’ one reformer wrote, ‘you have never seen in the world for these thousand years so much erudition united with piety and sweetness of disposition.’
He was known as the ‘godly imp’, as we have observed, and there may have been a strong element of youthful idealism in his character. Had he not been hailed as ‘the young Josiah’? It was a title that he may have wished to fulfil. Thus he was asked to provide judgement, early in his reign, on the curious case of the bishop’s vestments.
John Hooper, Northumberland’s chaplain, had been promoted to the see of Gloucester. But the putative bishop saw an obstacle in his path. For the ceremony he would be obliged to wear the ecclesiastical habits, the white rochet and black chimere, that he had in the past denounced as the dress of the harlot of Babylon. He said that he would not become a magpie in white and black. The surplice was the magic robe of the conjuror. He was also supposed to swear obedience to the archbishop of Canterbury, where before he had promised to defer to no authority other than the Scriptures. His opposition threatened to split the new church discipline, and as a result he was confined for a period to the Fleet prison. Cranmer asked for the king’s judgement on the matter and, at the behest of Edward, a compromise was agreed. Hooper would don the vestments at the service of consecration, but he would not be obliged to wear them for his diocesan affairs. The bishop has since that time become known as ‘the father of nonconformity’. We may say, in the words of St James, ‘how great a matter a little fire kindleth’.
A parliament had been summoned towards the end of 1549 that confirmed the movement of religious change. The eight orders of the medieval church were abolished to make way for the less complex order of bishops, priests and deacons. This was now largely to be a simplified preaching ministry. The priest was no longer expected ‘to offer sacrifice and celebrate Mass both for the living and the dead’, as desired in the past, but to preach the plain gospel and administer the sacraments. Yet many clandestine papists were still to be found among the clergy; they recited the communion office with the same cadences and whisperings as the old Latin Mass; they bent down over the communion table; they genuflected and lifted up their hands; they struck their breasts and made the sign of the cross in the air. These were the vile rags of popery, infinitely comforting to many in the congregation.
An Act was passed prohibiting any statues or figures in the parish church except ‘the monumental figures of kings or nobles who had never been taken for saints’; since the Book of Common Prayer provided all necessary instruction, other prayer books, manuals or missals were to be destroyed. If they were not burnt, they could be sold to book-binders as convenient material; they could of course also be used in the jakes. In the spring of the following year it was decreed that stone altars should be removed and replaced by wooden communion tables. ‘A goodly receiving, I promise you,’ one conservative bishop declared, ‘to set an oyster table instead of an altar . . .’
The altar of St Paul’s Cathedral was taken down in the dead of night, in case of popular protest, and a table set up at the foot of the steps before a curtain. Yet a chronicle of the time reports that, three days later, ‘a man was slain in Paul’s church and two frays within the church that same time afterwards’; these ‘frays’, or disturbances, became so frequent that a royal proclamation was issued against them, lamenting that ‘many quarrels, riots, frays and bloodshed have been made in some of the said churches, besides shooting of handguns to doves’. Churches had now become the centre of bitter controversy.
The parish church was now a plain, bare room; no decoration was to be seen except, perhaps, for a memorial text or two and a painted wooden board bearing the royal arms. Where once the altar had stood was now a table and bench for communicants. William Harrison, at a slightly later date, wrote that ‘dead cold is our age . . . there is blue ice in our churches’. Yet in these bare churches the laity participated much more openly in the service; Bible reading was given primacy, and the fundamentals of the Christian faith – the creeds, the confession of faith and prayer – were properly and fully emphasized. In the royal court itself biblical and prophetic poetry took the place of sonnets and ballads. Edwardian drama, too, concerned itself with scriptural themes.
It was still possible to go too far. In the spring of 1550 Joan Bocher, known as Joan of Kent, was arrested for preaching the doctrine that Christ was not incarnate of the Virgin Mary; he had passed through her by miracle like a ray of light through a glass. At her interrogation she ably pointed out the changes of doctrine already accommodated by the religious authorities. ‘Not long since,’ she said, ‘you burned Anne Askew for a piece of bread [the denial of transubstantiation] and yet came yourselves to believe and propose the same doctrine for which you burned her . . .’ That was true enough. Yet she was sentenced to death by burning and when a preacher intoned against her as she stood at the stake in Smithfield she called out that ‘he lied like a knave’. And so she died. She was condemned as an ‘Anabaptist’, a catch-all title of opprobrium that was attached to anyone with beliefs that might lead to subversion or anarchy within the body politic.
These were nervous times. Fears of another popular rebellion could not be allayed, and the dearth of resources rendered the government weak. Since the treasury was empty, it was necessary to make peace with France; Northumberland promptly managed this by returning Boulogne to the French king, receiving only half of the promised compensation. Henry VIII’s one conquest had been a costly mistake. The decision was fiercely criticized at the time, as a sign that England was no longer pre-eminent in the affairs of Europe, but it did bring an end to an expensive policy of aggression. As Paget put it in a letter to Northumberland, ‘then was then and now is now’. Calais was the last vestige of what had once been great English possessions in France; that, too, would soon be lost. Northumberland also brought back the English forces from Scotland, thus reversing another of Somerset’s favourite policies. The mercenaries who had helped to put down the rebellions, in west and east, were paid off. The period may perhaps be viewed as one in which for the first time English insularity came to the fore.
The impact of the rebellions can also be recognized in a further parliamentary Act ‘for the punishment of un
lawful assemblies and raising of the king’s subjects’. Northumberland also started work on removing other causes of discontent. He began the complex and difficult task of reversing the debasement of the coinage that had occurred in the previous reign and in the protectorate. In this respect he and his fellow councillors achieved only a small measure of success. Under his leadership the privy council was re-established as the governing forum of the realm.
Lady Mary had once described Northumberland as ‘the most unstable man in England’. He returned the compliment in his belief that she was a serious threat both to him and to the new religious settlement. She was next in line to the throne and, if Edward were to die, Northumberland would be cast into the wilderness or worse. She was also the single most prominent supporter of the old faith. It would perhaps be convenient to kill her, yet the popular outcry would threaten the unity of the kingdom itself. She was also the cousin of the most powerful monarch in Europe, the emperor Charles V, and Northumberland knew that it would be unwise and dangerous to incur his wrath; the emperor had just subdued the rebellious provinces of Germany, and knew precisely how ill-prepared England was for war. In the spring of 1550, however, her privilege of observing the rites of the old religion was denied to her, and she was asked to submit to the Act of Uniformity. The imperial ambassador at once objected to this privation.
From this time forward Mary felt that she was in danger; she told the ambassador that the councillors were ‘wicked and wily in their actions and particularly malevolent towards me’. She believed that they were indeed now planning to murder her. By the summer, therefore, she had drawn up plans to flee by boat to the European mainland, where she might retreat to her cousin’s court in Flanders. At the end of June four imperial warships and four smaller ships approached the English coast near Maldon on the coast of Essex but, at this point, it seems that Mary’s nerve failed her. She repeated, over and over again, ‘What shall I do? What shall become of me?’ The ships retreated, and the princess became ever more closely watched by the council. Her chaplains were ordered to refrain from saying Mass, to which she replied that they were covered by her own immunity.
Edward himself then sent her a letter, partly written in his own hand, in which he condemned her misplaced piety and warned her that ‘in our state it shall miscontent us to permit you, so great a subject, not to keep our laws. Your nearness to us in blood, your greatness in estate and the condition of this time, maketh your fault the greater.’ An implied threat of discipline, or punishment, may be discerned here. In her reply Mary told her brother that his letter had caused her ‘more suffering than any illness, even unto death’. The bad blood between them was a source of much grief and suspicion.
When she was summoned to London to account for herself, she was accompanied by fifty knights wearing velvet coats and chains of gold; an entourage of eighty retainers followed her, each of them displaying a set of rosary beads. The message could not be clearer. But apart from proclaiming her attachment to the old faith, the display was also designed to manifest Mary’s power. If it should come to a fight, there was every chance that she would be the victor. She had the strength of the old faith with her. Two days later she went in procession to Westminster, where thousands of people came out to greet her. Omens and portents were in the air. It was reported that the earth shook as ‘men in harness came down to the ground and faded away’. It was also recorded that ‘three suns appeared, so that men could not discern which was the true sun’.
Edward had just begun keeping a journal, and in his entry for March 1551 he notes that ‘the lady Mary, my sister, came to me at Westminster’. She was called into a meeting with him and his council where it was made plain that he ‘could not bear’ her attendance at Mass.
‘My soul is God’s,’ she replied. ‘I will not change my faith nor dissemble my opinions with contrary doings.’
‘I do not constrain your faith,’ the young king replied. ‘You cannot rule as a king. You must obey as a subject. Your example may breed too much inconvenience.’
A further exchange is reported:
‘Riper age and experience,’ she said, ‘will teach Your Majesty much more yet.’
‘You also may have somewhat to learn. None are too old for that.’
Soon after this a message came from the emperor, Charles V, threatening war if Edward did not allow his sister to hear Mass. He noted that ‘to this no answer was given at this time’. Eventually the reply came that Mary was the king’s subject and was obliged to obey his laws.
Yet much of Northumberland’s time and attention was given to internal dissension and resistance to his own rule. The paramount threat once more was Somerset himself, who, on his return to the council after a brief spell of imprisonment, was devoted to undermining his successor. Somerset had survived the Tower but he had lost most of his authority and significance. For a proud man, this was too much to bear. He began a whispering campaign, or ‘popular murmuring’, against the lord president’s policy.
He established a faction against Northumberland, primarily among his supporters in London, and it is certainly possible that in the last resort he planned some kind of coup against him in parliament; it was said that he had hired an assassin to cut off Northumberland’s head, and that he had incited the citizens of London with drums and trumpets and cries of ‘Liberty!’ The lord president did not wait for him to strike, however, but ordered his arrest in the autumn of 1551. At his subsequent trial he was accused of spreading sedition, by stating, for example, that ‘the covetousness of the gentlemen had given the people reason to rise’. The charge of attempted assassination, however, seems to have been fabricated by Northumberland himself. He in fact admitted the manufacture of evidence on the eve of his own execution, and asked pardon from Somerset’s son.
Great crowds attended Somerset’s execution on Tower Hill. He addressed them from the scaffold, beginning with the words ‘Masters and good fellows . . .’ As he spoke there was a noise ‘as of gunpowder set on fire in a close house bursting out’ and at the same time a sound of galloping horses as of ‘a great number of great horses running on the people to overrun them’. Panic seized the spectators who fled in bewilderment, crying out ‘Jesus save us, Jesus save us’ or ‘This way they come, that way they come, away, away’. There were no horses, and no gunpowder. One lone horse and rider did approach the scaffold, at which point the people cried out ‘Pardon, pardon, pardon. God save the king. God save the king.’ Somerset, with his cap in his hand, waited for the cries to subside. ‘There is no such thing, good people,’ he said, ‘there is no such thing. It is the ordinance of God thus for to die.’ After a few more words he composed himself and, murmuring ‘Lord Jesus save me’ three times, he gave his rings to the executioner and laid his head on the block for the axe. After the event many rushed to the scaffold to dip their handkerchiefs in the dead man’s blood.
It is reported that the court provided many sports and entertainments for the young king during this period, to ward off any ‘dampy thoughts’. Yet Edward himself seems to have been largely indifferent to his uncle’s fate. He records, in his entry for 22 January 1552, ‘the duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Towerhill, between eight and nine o’clock in the morning’. Nineteen months later Northumberland would stand on the same spot.
The affairs of the realm, too, were in a state of disarray. The debasement of the currency in the protector’s regime had had the natural consequence of inflating the prices of the basic and most necessary foodstuffs. The harvest of 1551 was poor, the third such harvest in a row; and the European market for English woollens had diminished, with a glut of cloth reported at Antwerp. Money had lost half of its value since the last days of Henry. The cost of flour had doubled, for example, so that the standard halfpenny loaf was half the size; the governors of St Bartholomew’s were obliged to increase the rations to those in their care. There was very little Northumberland and his colleagues could do about these matters; they were effectively helpless in
the face of overwhelming misery.
In the summer of that year, compounding all the distress and woe, an epidemic illness known as ‘the great sweat’ or ‘the sweating sickness’ spread through the country. It was also known as ‘Stop, gallant’ on account of the fact that some people who were dancing at court at nine o’clock were dead by eleven. It came at night accompanied by chills and tremors; these were followed by a fever and vomiting. The sweat was manifest soon after the onset of the attack; stupor, and death, followed. In the course of the first few days 1,000 Londoners died, and it claimed 2–3,000 in subsequent weeks. It was said in one London chronicle that ‘if they were suffered to sleep but half a quarter of an hour, they never spake after, nor had any knowledge, but when they wakened fell into pangs of death’. It was a year of horrors.
Parliament assembled for its fourth session on 23 January 1552, the day after the execution of the quondam protector, with the urgent task of once more considering religion. Its most notable achievement was the second, and revised, Book of Common Prayer in which further measures of reform were introduced. The Virgin Mary and the saints were not to be invoked. The Mass was not mentioned, since it had been replaced by a service known as the ‘Lord’s supper’. Vestments were reduced and simplified. Any prayer or act that did not have the warrant of the Scriptures was to be abandoned. Thus was the reformed faith firmly revealed to the English, in a liturgy that has remained essentially unchanged to the present day.
The question of kneeling, while receiving communion, was a matter of strenuous and fierce debate. Did it imply adoration of the bread and the wine? Or was it a simple gesture of piety? The bishops could not agree on the matter, and eventually an addition was made to the text which explained that the act of kneeling had no traces of superstition. Prayers for the dead were not to be said during the funeral service, and the corpse was no longer to be addressed by the priest; the dead were sealed off from the living. In a more general sense it might be said that the past no longer had any claim upon the present, a condition of liberation or forgetfulness that had enormous consequences for the direction of English life.
Tudors (History of England Vol 2) Page 26