Robert Stewart

All too minor to matter

Monarchy, monarchy, monarchy. Are we so addicted to it that we want to read the life of a boy who came to the throne at the age of nine and died six years later? Chris Skidmore seems to think so. His purpose, he says, is to rescue the ‘lost’ Edward VI from the obscurity to which negligent historians have consigned him and resurrect him as ‘a central figure in the Tudor age’.

Can it be done? Amid the contest between the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset, and his rivals (first his younger brother, Edward Seymour, and then John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick) for control of the Council which governed England during his minority, was there a role of any significance for Edward to play? Skidmore makes a half-hearted stab at suggesting that there was. When Seymour was angling for the hand of Henry VIII’s widow, Katherine Parr, he would have us believe that Seymour looked to Edward for support, before acknowledging that Edward’s letter to Katherine, favouring the union, was dictated to him by Seymour. Something is also made of Seymour’s attempt to enlist Edward in his campaign to become the young king’s governor, but the decision was not Edward’s to make. It was his tutor, Sir John Cheke, who scotched the plan. When Somerset was tried, and deposed, by the Council, Edward spoke against him. As Skidmore allows, however, the words were written for him and the attempt to present him as a figure of political standing was a ‘charade’.

Can more be made of Edward’s influence on the course of religious reform, stalled in Henry VIII’s last years and threatened by Romanist resistance? Edward did express reformist sentiments. What else was he to do, surrounded as he was by reformist councillors such as Somerset and Dudley and taught by reformist tutors? Skidmore implies that Edward’s own mental efforts led him to independent conclusions about faith and religious practices: Dudley, in casting his lot with the reformers, is said to have been ‘following the course that Edward himself had chosen to take’.

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