EDWARD VI. A.D. 1547--1553.
The little son of Henry VIII. and Jane Seymour of course reigned
after him as Edward VI. He was a quiet, gentle boy exceedingly fond
of learning and study, and there were great expectations of him; but, as
he was only nine years old, the affairs of state were managed by his
council.
The chief of the council were his two uncles--his mother's brothers,
Edward and Thomas Seymour, the elder of whom had been made Duke of
Somerset--together with Archbishop Cranmer; but it was not long before
the duke quarreled with his brother Thomas, put him into the Tower,
and cut off his head, so that it seemed as if the days of Henry VIII.
were not yet over.
The Duke of Somerset and Archbishop Cranmer wanted to make many more
changes in the Church of England than Henry VIII. had ever allowed.
They had all the Prayer-book Services translated into English, leaving
out such parts as they did not approve; The Lessons were read from the
English Bible, and people were greatly delighted at being able to
worship and to listen to God's Word in their own tongue. The first
day on which the English Prayer-book was used was the Whitsunday of
1548. The Bibles were chained to the desks as being so precious and
valuable; and crowds would stand, or sit, and listen for hours
together to any one who would read to them, without caring if he were
a clergyman or not; and men who tried to explain, without being
properly taught, often made great mistakes.
Indeed, in Germany and France a great deal of the same kind had been
going on for some time past, though not with any sort of leave from
the kings or bishops, as there was in England, and thus the reformers
there broke quite off from the Church, and fancied they could do
without bishops. This great break was called the Reformation, because
it professed to set matters of religion to rights; and in Germany the
reformers called themselves Protestants, because they protested some
of the teachings of the Church of Rome.
Cranmer had at one time been in Germany, and had made friends with
some of these German and Swiss Protestants, and he invited them to
England to consult and help him and his friends. Several of them
came, and they found fault with our old English Prayer-book--though
it had never been the same as the Roman one--and it was altered again
to please them and their friends, and brought out as King Edward's
second book. Indeed, they tried to persuade the English to be like
themselves--with very few services, no ornaments in the churches, and
no bishops; and things seemed to be tending more and more to what they
desired, for the king was too young not to do what his tutors and
governors wished, and his uncle and Cranmer were all on their side.
However, there was another great nobleman, the Duke of Northumberland,
who wanted to be as powerful as the Duke of Somerset. He was the son
of Dudley, the wicked judge under Henry VII., who had made himself so
rich, and he managed to take advantage of the people being discontented
with Somerset to get the king into his own hands, accuse Somerset of
treason, send him to the Tower, and cut off his head.
The king at this time was sixteen. He had never been strong, and he
had learnt and worked much more than was good for him. He wrote a
journal, and though he never says he grieved for his uncles, most
likely he did, for he had few near him who really loved or cared for
him, and he was fast falling into decline, so that it became quite
plain that he was not likely ever to be a grown-up king. There was
a great difficulty as to who was to reign after him. The natural
person would have been his eldest sister, Mary, but King Henry had
forbidden her and Elizabeth to be spoken of as princesses or
heiresses of the crown; and, besides, Mary held so firmly to the
Church, as she had learnt to believe in it in her youth, that the
reformers knew she would undo all their work.
There was a little Scottish girl, also named Mary--the grand-daughter
of Margaret, eldest daughter of Henry VII. Poor child, she had been
a queen from babyhood, for her father had died of grief when she was
but a week old; and there had been some notion of marrying her to King
Edward, and so ending the wars, but the Scots did not like this, and
sent her away to be married to the Dauphin, Francois, eldest son of
the king of France. If Edward's sisters were not to reign, she came
next; but the English would not have borne to be joined on to the
French; and there were the grand-daughters of Mary, that other sister
of Henry VIII., who were thorough Englishwomen. Lady Jane Grey, the
eldest of them, was a good, sweet, pious, and diligent girl of fifteen,
wonderfully learned. But it was not for that reason, only for the
sake of the royal blood, that the Duke of Northumberland asked her
in marriage for his son, Guildford Dudley. When they were married,
the duke and Cranmer began to persuade the poor, sick, young king
that it was his duty to leave his crown away from his sister Mary
to Lady Jane, who would go on with the Reformation, while Mary would
try to overthrow it. In truth, young Edward had not right to will
away the crown; but he was only sixteen, and could only trust to
what the archbishop and his council told him. So he signed the
parchment they brought him, and after that he quickly grew worse.
The people grew afraid that Northumberland was shutting him up and
misusing him, and once he came to the window of his palace and looked
out at them, to show he was alive; but he died only a fortnight later,
and we cannot guess what he would have been when he was grown up.