Edward VI
Henry’s six marriages produced two daughters – Mary, daughter of Catherine of Aragon, and Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn – and two sons: Henry, son of Catherine, who passed away at only a month old, and Edward, son of Jane Seymour. When Henry died, grossly overweight and in physical agony, he could at least reflect that he had managed to produce a male heir. This effectively secured Henry’s dynasty, as daughters would only rule in name alongside their husbands and produce offspring without the Tudor name. Edward, however, was only 9, and so Henry appointed 16 advisors to help him reign.
Edward VI (1537-53), as well as sharing Lady Jane Grey’s approximate year of birth, was also splendidly educated in the reformed faith and Renaissance Humanism. He was a precocious youth, showing a talent for theology and philosophy and noted for taking copious notes in his classes. By the time he was crowned King of England, Edward could translate the Latin works of Cicero into Greek. Unfortunately, though, as a nine-year-old boy his impressive academic work could do nothing to prevent the council of regents Henry chose disintegrating as the Duke of Somerset ousted the lot and made himself Lord Protector.
Somerset took the country to war with France and Scotland, at great expense, with young Edward again helpless to do anything. Simultaneously, he responded positively to increasing calls for a more thorough Reformation, as Catholic features of England’s ecclesiastical buildings were torn down. Beautiful medieval wall paintings were whitewashed (giving old churches their current look), and one has only to gaze at the exterior of a church or cathedral of sufficient age to see the still-empty niches which once displayed carvings of saints. This didn’t go down well at all with the small pockets of Catholicism around the country.
Rebellion broke out against Somerset in 1549 amongst those furious at the debasement of the coinage he had caused and Catholics and their sympathisers enraged by the iconoclasm he instituted. The latter hatched a plan to dethrone Edward and replace him with his elder Catholic sister, Mary. The City of London was surrounded, and Somerset replaced by the ardently-Protestant Duke of Northumberland. Somerset was arrested and later executed in 1552. With Somerset out of the picture, Edward invited Mary back to court, but she arrived with a provocatively-Catholic procession, as if to remind him of the threat she posed.
There were hopes that Edward would choose his cousin-once-removed, Lady Jane, as his queen. They were almost the same age, scholarly, pious, and both hard-line Protestants, after all. Before anything could happen, however, Edward contracted consumption in 1553, of which he slowly died aged just fifteen. Never married, he left no heir, and England was confronted by the same problem it would have faced if the king had never been born. With debate over the Reformation still simmering, as the attempt to install Mary demonstrated, the country had bigger fish to fry than merely maintaining the royal family’s name.