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When Henry VIII died on 28 January 1547, the crown passed to a boy of nine. Edward VI was the son Henry had broken with Rome, discarded two queens, and reshaped the English Church to obtain, and he was, by the standards of his age, a remarkably learned and precociously pious child — a sincere and increasingly zealous Protestant. But he was a child, and he would never reach his majority: he died at fifteen, in July 1553, having reigned for six and a half years in which he never personally ruled. Real power lay, throughout, with those who governed in his name — first his maternal uncle Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, as Lord Protector, and then, after Somerset's fall, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, as Lord President of the Council. The reign is therefore, in constitutional terms, a study in minority government: the exercise of royal authority by regents on behalf of a monarch too young to wield it, with all the instability that arrangement carried.
Yet the deeper importance of Edward's reign lies in religion. For it was under Edward — or rather under Somerset and Northumberland, driving reform through the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer — that England became, on paper, a genuinely Protestant country for the first time. The Henrician Church had been a schismatic Catholicism, severed from Rome but conservative in doctrine; the Edwardian Church swept that away. The Latin Mass gave place to an English liturgy in the Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552; the altar became a communion table; the theology of the sacraments was recast along Reformed lines; clerical marriage was permitted; images, shrines, and the whole apparatus of intercession were stripped from the parish churches. In six short years the Reformation moved from a change of jurisdiction to a change of belief. That this was accomplished so fast, from above, on a population whose attachment to traditional religion the revisionist historians have shown to be deep and genuine, is the central tension of the reign — and it helps explain both the rebellions the changes provoked and the relative ease with which Mary would soon reverse them.
This lesson examines the politics and the religion of Edward's reign in tandem, because they were inseparable. It looks first at Somerset's protectorate and its collapse — his character and policies, the ruinous Scottish war, the cautious first steps toward reform, and above all the twin rebellions of 1549 that destroyed him. It then turns to Northumberland's more effective and more thoroughly Protestant rule, and to the doctrinal high-water mark of the Edwardian Reformation in the 1552 Prayer Book and the Forty-Two Articles. It closes on the crisis that ended the reign: the dying king's Devise for the Succession, the attempt to divert the crown from the Catholic Mary to the Protestant Lady Jane Grey, and its swift collapse — an episode that, as the next lesson shows, tells against the older picture of a mid-Tudor state in systemic breakdown.
The organising question is whether the reign of Edward VI is best understood as a period of crisis and instability — weak minority government, factional coups, ruinous war, serious rebellion, and religious upheaval imposed on a reluctant people — or as a period in which, beneath the undoubted difficulties, the institutions of government continued to function, genuine and lasting reform was achieved, and the foundations of the Elizabethan settlement were laid. How one answers feeds directly into the great "mid-Tudor crisis" debate that this course later treats as its set enquiry, and it should be held in view throughout.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to OCR H505 Unit Y106 (British period study and enquiry): England 1485–1558 — The Early Tudors. Within our own teaching sequence it opens the mid-Tudor portion of the unit, carrying the story from the death of Henry VIII into the reign of his son, and it supplies essential context for the Section A set enquiry on the Mid-Tudor Crises of 1547–1558. We have chosen to treat the reign of Edward VI as a single lesson organised around the twin themes of minority government and the drive to Protestantism — rather than following any spec sub-strand order — because those two threads, politics and religion, are the analytical heart of the reign and are best examined together. This is our arrangement, not a transcription of the specification's order. (Refer to the official OCR specification for exact wording.)
Because Y106 is a period study, examiners look for command of change over time and for judgements that reach across the reign rather than settling into narrow case-study description. Keep asking how each development altered the distribution and reach of royal authority and the religious identity of the realm, and how far the reign supports or undermines the "crisis" reading of the mid-Tudor years.
The accession of a nine-year-old king created a structural problem that the Tudor polity was ill-designed to solve. Royal authority was intensely personal — power flowed from the will and favour of the monarch — and a monarch incapable, by reason of age, of exercising that will left a vacuum that had to be filled by some form of regency. Henry VIII's will, as the previous lesson showed, had prescribed a balanced council of sixteen executors to govern collectively during the minority, with no one man pre-eminent. That scheme was set aside within days of the king's death. The executors agreed to appoint the young king's maternal uncle, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, as Lord Protector of the Realm and Governor of the King's Person; he was created Duke of Somerset and concentrated in his own hands precisely the personal, quasi-regal authority the will had been designed to prevent.
Minority government — rule by a regent or council on behalf of an under-age monarch — was inherently unstable, for reasons that the reign would amply demonstrate. The regent's authority was borrowed and provisional, lacking the sacral legitimacy of an anointed adult king; it invited the jealousy of rivals who saw no reason why one of their number should tower above them; and it raised the perpetual danger that the regent would govern in his own interest rather than the king's, or would be unable to command the obedience that a true monarch could. Somerset's protectorate ran onto every one of these rocks.
| Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
| Title and position | Lord Protector of the Realm and Governor of the King's Person; he increasingly bypassed the Privy Council and governed through his own household and a circle of personal servants, alienating fellow councillors who resented their exclusion |
| Character | Idealistic but high-handed, arrogant, and politically maladroit; he cultivated the image of the "Good Duke," a champion of the common people against the greed of landlords, which raised popular expectations he could not satisfy |
| The Seymour feud | His own brother, Thomas Seymour, Lord Admiral, intrigued against him — courting the young king with pocket-money and scheming for power — and was attainted and executed in 1549, a fratricidal episode that damaged Somerset's standing |
| Religious policy | A cautious but real move toward Protestantism, restrained at first for fear of provoking resistance and foreign hostility |
| Social policy | Genuine sympathy for the rural poor; he backed enclosure commissions under John Hales (1548–1549) to investigate the illegal enclosure of common land — a stance that alarmed the propertied classes and, by appearing to license complaint, arguably encouraged the unrest of 1549 |
Somerset's most damaging single commitment was to the Scottish war, the continuation of Henry VIII's Rough Wooing. Determined to force the marriage of Edward to the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, and so bind Scotland to England, Somerset invaded and won a crushing victory at the Battle of Pinkie in September 1547. But, as under Henry, victory in the field did not deliver the marriage. Somerset's novel strategy was to garrison Scotland — planting permanent English fortresses to hold the country down — and this proved ruinously expensive without being effective. Far from detaching Scotland from France, the policy drove the Scots into a still closer French embrace: they sent the young Mary to France to be raised as the bride of the Dauphin, sealing the very Franco-Scottish alliance the war was meant to break. The Scottish campaign drained the treasury Henry's wars had already exhausted, and it consumed money and attention that might have addressed the mounting discontent at home. The war is a textbook instance of the connection between foreign and domestic difficulty in the mid-Tudor years: the fiscal strain it imposed, on top of the debasement of the coinage, deepened the economic distress that helped to fuel the rebellions of 1549.
The first steps of the Edwardian Reformation were taken cautiously, but they were unmistakably in a Protestant direction, and they gathered pace as the protectorate went on.
| Reform | Date | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| Repeal of the Six Articles | 1547 | Swept away Henry's conservative heresy legislation, and with it the doctrinal frame of the later Henrician Church, opening the door to reform |
| Chantries Act | 1547 | Dissolved the chantries — endowments funding priests to say masses for the souls of the dead — confiscating their wealth; simultaneously a revenue measure and a doctrinal blow against the belief in purgatory |
| First Book of Common Prayer | 1549 | Imposed by the Act of Uniformity (1549); replaced the Latin Mass with an English liturgy, largely Cranmer's work, but deliberately ambiguous on the Eucharist so as to soften the change and give the least possible offence |
| Clerical marriage permitted | 1549 | Reversed the rule of clerical celibacy — a clear Protestant reform |
| Removal of images | 1547–1548 | Royal injunctions ordered the destruction of "superstitious" images, the removal of candles and ceremonies, and the stripping of much traditional devotion from the parish church |
A chantry was an endowment funding a priest to say masses for the souls of its founder and their kin, speeding them through purgatory; many chantries also funded schools, almshouses, and other communal amenities, which were lost along with them when they were dissolved. Their dissolution under the Chantries Act of 1547 was thus both a fiscal measure — raising substantial sums for a Crown desperate for money — and a doctrinal one, a public repudiation of purgatory, which was the theological engine of late-medieval Catholic piety. The First Book of Common Prayer of 1549 was the centrepiece of the early settlement, and its deliberate ambiguity is the key to understanding it: Cranmer framed the communion service in language that a conservative might just about read as consistent with the real presence and a reformer might read as a memorial, so as to carry as much of the country with him as possible. This caution reflected the regime's fear — amply justified, as events proved — that too abrupt a change would provoke resistance. The very ambiguity that was meant to soften the change, however, satisfied neither the committed reformers, who found it too conservative, nor the traditionalists, who found the abolition of the Latin Mass intolerable — and in the conservative South-West it helped to ignite open rebellion.
The year 1549 saw two great popular rebellions erupt almost simultaneously in different parts of the country, for sharply contrasting reasons. Together they constitute the central case study in the whole unit for the causation of rebellion, and the analytical challenge — one that period-study essays reward directly — is to grasp how different in character the two risings were, and what each reveals about the pressures of Edwardian government. It is a serious error, and a common one, to treat them as a single wave of disorder; they were, in their motivation, almost opposites.
The imposition of the new English liturgy provoked open rebellion in the deeply conservative far South-West — Devon and Cornwall — where attachment to the traditional religion was strong and where, in Cornwall, many parishioners spoke Cornish and understood neither the old Latin nor the new English.
| Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
| Cause | The First Book of Common Prayer was imposed on Whitsunday (9 June) 1549; the assault on the Latin Mass and the familiar ceremonies of traditional religion was bitterly resented, and the imposition of an English service was felt as an alien intrusion |
| Demands | Restoration of the Latin Mass, the Act of Six Articles, communion in one kind, and the traditional ceremonies; the rebels famously derided the new English service as "but like a Christmas game" |
| Scale | Perhaps 6,000 rebels laid siege to Exeter for several weeks |
| Suppression | Lord Russell, reinforced by foreign mercenaries, broke the rebellion in a series of hard-fought engagements; thousands were killed in the fighting and the subsequent reprisals |
| Significance | The clearest demonstration that religious change imposed "from above" could provoke violent popular resistance; the Western Rising was overwhelmingly religious in motivation, the mirror-image of Kett's economic rising in the east |
At the same moment, a very different and even larger rebellion broke out in Norfolk — one driven not by religion but by economic and agrarian grievance, and remarkable for its discipline and its appeal to lawful order.
| Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
| Leader | Robert Kett, a prosperous tanner and minor landowner — himself a man of property who turned against the abuses of his own class |
| Cause | Overwhelmingly economic and agrarian: the enclosure of common land, the overstocking of the commons by landlords, rack-renting, and the abuse of manorial "foldcourse" rights |
| Character | Strikingly orderly: the rebels held their own courts of justice under the "Oak of Reformation," maintained discipline, and sought legal redress and good governance rather than the overthrow of the social order |
| Scale | Perhaps 16,000 rebels encamped on Mousehold Heath above Norwich and took control of the city — the second-largest in England |
| Demands | The Mousehold Articles (29 articles): curbs on enclosure and gentry exploitation, the reform of corrupt local officials, and the protection of tenant rights against their landlords |
| Suppression | The Earl of Warwick (John Dudley) crushed the rebel camp at the Battle of Dussindale in August 1549, using professional troops including foreign mercenaries; Kett was captured and hanged at Norwich Castle |
The twin risings of 1549 exposed the fundamental weakness of Somerset's government. His public sympathy for anti-enclosure grievances — the Hales commissions, the rhetoric of the "Good Duke" — had raised hopes among the commons that he could not meet, and made him appear, in the eyes of the propertied classes, complicit in the very disorder that threatened their interests. His slowness to repress the risings alarmed the nobility and gentry, who looked to the Crown to defend the social hierarchy and found the Protector wanting. On an influential reading of the crisis, Somerset's well-meaning populism actively encouraged rebellion by signalling that the regime shared the commons' complaints against their landlords. It was this catastrophic loss of elite confidence — the conviction among his fellow councillors that Somerset could neither keep order nor be trusted to defend property — even more than the rebellions themselves, that brought him down in October 1549. The analytical lesson for the period study is that the two rebellions of 1549, though distinct in cause, converged in their political effect: together they destroyed the Protector, and they did so by frightening the governing class into deposing him.
John Dudley, Earl of Warwick — the victor of Dussindale, created Duke of Northumberland in 1551 — engineered Somerset's fall in October 1549 and emerged as the effective head of government. He was a far abler, if far less amiable, ruler than his predecessor, and his rule illustrates that minority government need not mean incompetent government.
| Aspect | Somerset | Northumberland |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Lord Protector | Lord President of the Council — pointedly avoiding the provocative title "Protector" and ruling through the Council, restoring at least the form of conciliar government |
| Style | Idealistic, populist, autocratic in practice | Pragmatic, efficient, ruthless, and politically astute |
| Finance | Reckless war spending and further debasement of the coinage | Withdrew from the costly Scottish and French wars; began to restore the currency and to reform the revenue courts — work that benefited Mary and Elizabeth after him |
| Religion | Cautious, incremental Protestantism | More thoroughly and doctrinally Protestant |
| Reputation | Sympathetically remembered as the "Good Duke" | Long vilified as a self-serving villain (chiefly for the Jane Grey coup), but substantially rehabilitated by revisionist historians who credit his real administrative competence |
Northumberland's government represents, in several respects, a recovery from the disorder of Somerset's last years. He wound up the ruinous wars, abandoning the garrisoning of Scotland and making peace with France (surrendering Boulogne back for a payment). He began the difficult work of restoring the debased coinage and reforming the tangle of revenue courts, laying groundwork that his successors would inherit. He restored the reality of conciliar government, ruling through the Privy Council rather than, like Somerset, through a personal household clique. Yet his reputation was permanently blackened by the manner of his fall — the attempt to divert the succession to Lady Jane Grey — and by the ruthlessness and evident self-interest with which he had risen. The revisionist rehabilitation, associated above all with the work of historians who have re-examined the administrative record, insists that behind the "villain of the Jane Grey coup" there was a competent and even constructive ruler; the difficulty of squaring that competence with the reckless gamble of 1553 is one of the genuine puzzles of the reign.
Under Northumberland the Edwardian Reformation reached its doctrinal high-water mark, casting off the ambiguity of 1549 for an unmistakably Protestant settlement.
| Reform | Date | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| Second Book of Common Prayer | 1552 | Decisively Protestant: the communion was framed as a memorial rather than a sacrifice, and the so-called Black Rubric denied any "real and essential presence" of Christ's natural body in the sacrament, resolving the ambiguity of 1549 in a Reformed direction |
| Forty-Two Articles | 1553 | A fully Protestant confession of faith, drafted chiefly by Cranmer — the doctrinal summit of the English Reformation to that date, and later the basis of Elizabeth's Thirty-Nine Articles |
| Ordinal | 1550 | A reformed rite for ordaining clergy, stripped of the Catholic language of sacrifice |
| Stripping of the churches | 1550–1553 | Stone altars were replaced by wooden communion tables; images, plate, and vestments were removed — the visible Protestantising of the parish church, carried much further than under Somerset |
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