King Edward VI

1537 – 1553 · Generation XXIII · King of England and Ireland (r. 1547–1553) · House of Tudor

Edward VI was born at Hampton Court Palace on 12 October 1537, the long-awaited son of Henry VIII and his third wife, Jane Seymour. Guns fired from the Tower of London and bonfires burned across the country, but the celebrations were short. Jane died on 24 October, and Edward grew up without a mother, in a household his anxious father ordered kept scrupulously clean and guarded against infection. Westminster Abbey’s own account still calls him a sickly child, but recent historians have challenged that picture. Apart from a dangerous fever at the age of four and weak eyesight, they find a tall, lively boy who kept good health until his final months.

From the age of six he was taught by humanist scholars, among them Richard Cox and John Cheke, and he was a formidable pupil, working through Latin, Greek and French. Britannica notes that by thirteen he had read Aristotle’s Ethics in Greek. His half-sisters were attentive, and Mary in particular showered him with affection, although their bond later cracked over religion. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer became a father figure and shaped the fervent Protestantism that would mark his reign. Edward also kept a journal, the only Tudor monarch known to have left one, though it sets down the events of the reign rather than his own feelings.

Henry VIII died on 28 January 1547, and his nine-year-old son was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 20 February. Henry had meant a regency council to govern jointly, but Edward’s uncle Edward Seymour, soon Duke of Somerset, quickly took power as Lord Protector. Somerset crushed the Scots at Pinkie in September 1547, yet his war proved ruinously expensive, and in 1549 riots and rebellions broke out in Devon and Cornwall, in Norfolk and elsewhere. In October 1549 the council turned on him, and from early 1550 John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and later Duke of Northumberland, led the government. Warwick made peace with France, gave up Boulogne and withdrew the garrisons from Scotland. Somerset, released and briefly restored, was executed in January 1552 for plotting against Dudley, and his nephew noted the beheading in his journal in a single flat sentence.

Edward’s real mark was on the Church. Under him, and with his keen approval, England became Protestant in substance for the first time. The first Book of Common Prayer (1549) replaced Latin services with English, clergy were allowed to marry, and images and many old rites were swept away. Cranmer’s more radical revision of 1552 effectively abolished the Mass, and in June 1553 the king approved the Forty-two Articles, the forerunner of Elizabeth I’s Thirty-nine Articles. When the imperial ambassador asked that Mary be allowed to hear Mass, Edward refused.

He fell ill early in 1553, possibly weakened by a bout of measles and smallpox the year before, and by June he was beyond hope. Determined that his Catholic half-sister should not undo his work, he drafted in his own hand a “Devise for the Succession” that passed over both Mary and Elizabeth and settled the crown on his Protestant cousin Lady Jane Grey, Northumberland’s daughter-in-law. Historians long blamed Northumberland alone for the scheme, but many now see the king’s own will behind it. Edward died at Greenwich on 6 July 1553, aged fifteen. The cause is not certain. The surgeon who opened the body reported a disease of the lungs, and tuberculosis, the explanation given by the Royal Family’s and Westminster Abbey’s own histories, is the one many historians accept. He was buried in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey on 8 August with the English burial service, the first time it was used for a monarch. Jane reigned for nine days before Mary deposed her and restored Catholicism, but after Mary’s death most of Edward’s reforms returned in Elizabeth’s religious settlement of 1559.

Place in the family

• King Edward VI was a son of King Henry VIII.

Images

• Edward as an infant holding a golden rattle, painted by Hans Holbein the Younger, probably in 1538 (Hans Holbein the Younger, public domain)
• Edward’s “Devise for the Succession” of 1553, written in his own hand (Inner Temple Library) (Edward VI, public domain)
• Edward VI’s signature (Edward VI, traced by Connormah, public domain)

One of 11 people of House of Tudor (1485–1603) in this archive. Welsh in origin and only a handful of monarchs long — it broke with Rome and ended with Elizabeth I.

Line of descent: Owen Tudor → Edmund Tudor → King Henry VII → King Henry VIII → King Edward VI.

Read more on Wikipedia

Parents

• King Henry VIII (1491 – 1547)
• Jane Seymour (1508 – 1537)

Siblings

• Queen Mary I (1516 – 1558) (half)
• Queen Elizabeth I (1533 – 1603) (half)

Life

• 1537 — Born
• 1547 — Edward VI accedes to the throne at the age of nine after the death of his father, Henry VIII.
• 1547 — Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, uncle of Edward VI, is invested as Duke of Somerset and Protector of England.
• 1547 — The English army defeats the Scots at Pinkie Cleugh as part of an attempt to force a marriage between Edward VI and Mary Queen of Scots.
• 1553 — Died
• 1553 — The Duke of Northumberland persuades Edward to nominate his daughter-in-law Lady Jane Grey as his heir, in an attempt to secure the Protestant succession.
• 1553 — Edward VI dies of tuberculosis at Greenwich Palace.

Sources

1. Edward VI · Wikipedia
2. Edward VI (r.1547–1553) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
3. Edward VI · Westminster Abbey
4. Edward VI: The Lost Tudor King · Historic Royal Palaces
5. Edward VI · Encyclopaedia Britannica