Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (36 page)

Yet the Edwardian reformers had completed their work. Henry’s accomplishment in politics was now repeated in religion; the pope had been removed for ever. Justification by faith alone removed the intercessionary role of the Church, just as the demotion of the sacraments reduced the power of the priesthood. The denial of transubstantiation effectively destroyed the Mass. The rituals of Rome had been discarded.

In the autumn of the year Northumberland once more contemplated the menace of rebellion. In December he ‘instantly and earnestly required the Lords of the Council to be vigilant for the preventing of these treasons so far as in them was possible to be foreseen’. Three months later martial law was declared in some regions of the country. The murmurings came to nothing but the danger of rebellion posed an acute threat to Edward’s councillors who were never much liked by the general populace.

One of those councillors was of especial significance. William Cecil, who was to play a pre-eminent role in the reign of Elizabeth, became, at the age of thirty, a privy councillor and secretary to the king; his outstanding gifts as an administrator and ‘confidential clerk’ had already been recognized. He had served Somerset and, after a brief spell in the Tower in the wake of his patron’s fall, he had been plucked into government by Northumberland. He wrote a state paper in the winter of 1550 in which he outlined in stark terms the prospects for the country. ‘The emperor’, he wrote, ‘is aiming at the sovereignty of Europe, which he cannot obtain without the suppression of the reformed religion; and unless he crushes the English nation, he cannot crush the reformation. Besides religion, he has a further quarrel with England, and the Catholic party will leave no stone unturned to bring about our overthrow. We are not agreed among ourselves. The majority of our people will be with our adversaries . . .’

The last sentence is a significant admission that the acts of the reformers had not been appreciated by the larger part of the population. Cecil said that in the event of war between England
and Charles V, the majority would obey the pope rather than the king. The greater body of the peers, most of the bishops, almost all of the judges and lawyers, as well as the priests and the justices of the peace, would follow the same guide. For those who consider the Edwardian reformation to be in large part popular, this is a corrective. The people may have acquiesced in the changes, but, according to Cecil’s testimony, they by no means approved of them. The habit of deference, and obedience, was combined with impotence and fear.

In the first days of 1552 the young king drafted ‘certain points of weighty matters to be immediately concluded on by my council’. It was no longer the council, but
my
council. He was now in his fourteenth year, and he began to exercise the reality of power. At the age of fourteen Richard II had been obliged to deal with the effects of the Peasants’ Revolt.

At the beginning of April, Edward fell ill of a disease that has been variously described as smallpox and the measles; yet he recovered easily enough. He told a childhood friend that ‘we have a little been troubled with the smallpox, which hath letted [prevented] us to write thereto; but now we have shaken that quite away’. He had not been well enough to attend parliament but he noted in his journal for 15 April that ‘I signed a bill containing the names of the acts which I would have pass, which bill was read in the House’.

After his recovery he began to sign royal warrants in his own hand rather than relying upon the signatures of his councillors. He engaged himself in foreign affairs, and in such subtle matters as the debasement of the currency. There survives a document, written in his own hand, concerning the method of proceedings in the council. Whether this was suggested to him, or was of his own devising, is not apparent. Yet he seems to have had all the makings of a good
administrator. He wrote some of his notes in Greek, so that his attendants could not read them. And in the summer of the year he went on a progress, with 4,000 horse in attendance. It was the best way of displaying his power and authority to his subjects; the vast train visited Portsmouth and Southampton, among other places, before moving on through Wiltshire and Dorset.

Yet the disease and mortality of the age soon swirled around its principal figure. By the autumn of the year he seemed weaker than before, and he consulted an Italian physician who, like most doctors, also practised astrology. Hieronymus Cardano recorded that the king was ‘of a stature somewhat below the middle height, pale-faced with grey eyes’; he was rather ‘of a bad habit of body than a sufferer from fixed diseases. He had a somewhat projecting shoulder-blade.’ Cardano also reported that he ‘carried himself like an old man’.

In February 1553 Edward contracted a cold or chill that was accompanied by a fever; in the following month he was still looking ‘very weak and thin’. In the spring he moved to the palace at Greenwich, and in this period the imperial ambassador reported that the young king was ‘becoming weaker as time passes and wasting away’. His sputum was sometimes green and sometimes black. He was still capable of a Tudor outburst. When his will was obstructed in one matter he exclaimed to his councillors, ‘You pluck out my feathers as I were but a tame falcon – the day will come when I shall pluck out yours!’

On 12 May the imperial ambassador wrote that Edward ‘is suffering from a suppurating tumour on the lung’. He added that ‘he is beginning to break out in ulcers; he is vexed by a harsh, continuous cough, his body is dry and burning, his belly is swollen, he has a slow fever upon him that never leaves him’. Two weeks later it was reported that ‘he does not sleep except when he be stuffed with drugs, which doctors call opiates . . . The sputum which he brings up is black, fetid and full of carbon; it smells beyond measure.’ On 12 June he signed the Forty-Two Articles; but it was too late. They were never enforced. By the summer ‘the king himself has given up hope and says he feels so weak that he can resist no longer’. He was in his sixteenth year, a dangerous period for the Tudor male. Prince Arthur, his uncle, had expired at
the age of fifteen; his half-brother, the duke of Richmond, had died at seventeen.

The nature of his illness has been variously described, but it is likely to have been a pulmonary infection that led to pneumonia. Rumours at the time that he had been the victim of a poisoner are most unlikely to have been true.
Cui bono?
In the face of the growing weakness of the king, Northumberland was thrown into panic fear. The next person in line to the throne, according to Henry VIII’s will, was Lady Mary, who reviled and hated him as the destroyer of the old faith. If she succeeded to the throne all the work of the reformation would be undone. It was unthinkable.

So in the early summer of the year a change in the order of succession was planned by Northumberland and the king. It has been suggested that the plot was devised by the duke alone, but there is no reason to suppose that the ‘godly imp’ would have calmly anticipated the reversal of religious reform. The salvation of the country depended on its survival. Northumberland himself seems to have grown tired and weary of governance. ‘I have’, he wrote, ‘entered into the bottom of my care.’

In the early stages of the king’s disease Mary was informed of his condition by Northumberland himself. In February, when her brother was kept in bed by the feverish chill, she was invited to court where she was ‘more honourably received and entertained with greater magnificence’ than ever before; Northumberland and a hundred horsemen welcomed her on the outskirts of the city and, when she arrived at Whitehall, the assembled council bowed their heads as if she were already on the throne of England. Yet as the death of Edward seemed to draw ever closer it became desperately important to remove Mary from the succession. There was no possibility of a Catholic queen. But who should be the beneficiary?

Jane Grey was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII by his younger daughter, Mary, and stood third in line to the throne after Mary and Elizabeth; for Northumberland, she also had the inestimable benefit of being his daughter-in-law. She was of impeccable religious credentials, as an ardent reformer. She had asked one of Mary’s ladies why she curtsied to the sacrament. ‘ “I curtsy to Him that made me.” “Nay, but did not the baker make him?” ’ She told her tutor that it ‘were a shame to follow my lady Mary against
God’s word’. So she was stridently of the new faith. She was also learned. When Elizabeth’s tutor, Roger Ascham, visited her he found her reading Plato’s
Phaedo
. He asked her why she was not with her family hunting stag in the park. ‘I think,’ she replied, ‘all their sport in the park is but a shade to the pleasure I find in Plato.’ She would be the ideal queen, especially under the paternal eye of the duke himself.

So Edward and Northumberland, presumably working in concert, now devised a new will. Mary and Elizabeth were once more declared illegitimate, thus barring them from the throne of England. At the end of May the young king prepared what he called ‘his device for the succession’. He had at first written that his crown should pass to the ‘Lady Jane’s heirs male’ in the hope that he would live long enough to see the fruits of her marriage; he could at this stage not envisage the rule of a queen. Then, approximately three weeks later, he erased those words and inserted ‘the Lady Jane and her heirs male’. He may have suffered a relapse. In any case it must have been made clear to him that he might not live.

Many of the councillors were opposed to this device, considering it illegal for an under-age king to set aside an Act of Parliament. The judges were summoned to the palace at Greenwich where, on listening to Edward’s proposal, they unanimously declared that it was contrary to the law. The king was defiant and dismissive. The judges asked for more time. They returned to meet the council two days later, when they declared that to permit the alteration of the succession would incur the charge of treason.

Northumberland was absent on their arrival but, on hearing their verdict, ‘he came into the council chamber, being in great rage and fury, trembling for anger . . . and said that he would fight in his shirt with any man in the quarrel’. The judges left the room. They came back on the following day, after an urgent summons, and were taken to the king’s bedside. He met them ‘with sharp words and angry countenance’. ‘Why is my will disobeyed? There must be no delay!’ The royal councillors remained silent. The judges were cowed. They asked only that their instructions should be put in writing, and that they should be pardoned if their consent was later deemed to be criminal. They argued to each other that
there could be no treason in obeying the commands of their sovereign. And so it passed. The great ones of the realm eventually subscribed to the document dethroning Lady Mary.

These were the last days of the young king. On 1 July he was shown at a window of the palace, presumably to counter a rumour that he was already dead; yet he looked ‘so thin and wasted’ that few of the spectators were reassured. A crowd gathered on the following day, in the belief that he would appear again, but a courtier came out to declare that ‘the air was too chill’.

A professor of medicine from Oxford was summoned to the palace, together with a ‘wise woman’ who recommended the healing powers of a mysterious liquid. Both of them were admitted to the sickroom on the strict understanding that they would reveal the king’s true condition to nobody. The guard at the Tower was doubled, and wild rumours flew around the city of imminent perils. The imperial ambassador had been told that a force of 500 men had been sent to surround Lady Mary’s manor house, Hunsdon, in Hertfordshire, in order to seize her person; he reported further that the princess was to be taken to the Tower, ostensibly to prepare herself for her coronation, but would then be detained indefinitely. Northumberland and his friends were purchasing all the available arms in London, and the ships upon the Thames were being prepared for the sea. It was proposed that the evangelical preachers, under the supervision of Northumberland, would declare the illegitimacy of Mary from their pulpits. It was whispered that the duke was willing to surrender England into French hands for the support of the French king. That was, perhaps, a rumour too far. He may have come to an understanding, however, about the use of French troops in case of an English revolt. Henry II, the French king, would not in any case wish the cousin of his rival, Charles V, to become the queen of England.

On 6 July the end of Edward came. Between eight and nine in the evening, according to one popular news-sheet or ‘broadside’, he whispered his last prayer. ‘Lord God, deliver me out of this miserable and wretched life, and take me among thy chosen . . .’ This is no doubt a pious fantasy of the writer purporting to witness Edward’s death as a Calvinist. Another account must also be treated
warily. In this version the dying king sensed, rather than saw, his attendant doctors and gentlemen of the privy chamber. ‘Are you so near?’ he asked them. ‘I thought you had been further off.’