A. K. Chidgzey

We last left this story with Henry VIII’s death. He had successfully separated the English church from Roman Catholicism, but theologically and practically, very little had actually changed. Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had been trying to push through a greater reformed bend and had succeeded in reducing the number of sacraments from 7 to 3, and introduced Luther’s idea of justification by faith alone, but everything else was basically the same.

Are we Catholics? Are we Protestants? Who cares?! Our king got to end his marriage and instead of sending the pope our taxes, we send it to him. …To spend on pointless wars. Cool.

But now the king is dead – long live the king – and his successor, Edward, is only 9 years old. Cranmer pounced on the opportunity to make some real change. This next part of the tale of this very British schism is actually quite sad, I find. The Tudor children lived traumatic lives. We can be very quick to judge and give nicknames, like Bloody Mary or the Virgin Queen, but Henry’s egomaniacal narcissism was replaced by power hungry manipulation and in some cases, literal abuse. As I’ve mentioned in previous episodes, it’s quite surprising just how often politics, economics, and personal power and position becomes more important than the theology that it is supposedly championing. This sort of stuff happens even today. Thomas Cranmer seems to have been a bit of an exception here, who genuinely desired reformed, but he did need to play the game a bit, especially when surrounded by the types of people who made up the Tudor court.

And just to clarify, the name Tudor is basically the surname of Henry VIII’s family, whose ancestors originated in Wales, and the Welsh root for the name Tudor comes from the word meaning king.

Edward Tudor was born, if we remember from previous episodes, in 1538. His mother was Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third wife. Edward was the desperately wanted son and was described as the country’s most valuable jewel. However, sadly, his mother died before he was a month old. He was cared for by a household of closely trusted royal advisors, and he grew quite close to Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife, who had Protestant leanings and who played a significant role in reconciling Henry’s children. He received a strong formal education, particularly in Protestant theology by people like Thomas Cranmer, and Edward would become the first English monarch to be raised as a Protestant. He had good relationships with his sisters Mary and Elizabeth, who by all reports doted on him and then in 1547, when he was just 9 years old, Henry died and Edward became king, Edward VI.

Edward Seymour, Edward Tudor’s uncle, (again…they’ve all got the same name) and John Dudley were his advisors who had quite a significant influence in determining the direction Edward should take, both politically and theologically. The country was ruled by regency council, a council of about sixteen people who would rule collectively until Edward was 18, but they quite quickly proclaimed Seymour as Edwards’ Lord Protector, even though Henry had not appointed a Protector. It’s likely Seymour bribed some of the others to secure the spot. It was Edward’s brother, Thomas, who would go on to marry Catherine Parr, but we’ll return to him in a moment.

I should point out that a lot of these aristocrats are known, not by their actual names, but by where they were from. Edward Seymour was the Duke of Somerset, and so often goes by Somerset, rather than Seymour. However, just to make this story easier to follow, I’m just going to use their actual names, because otherwise it can get difficult to follow, especially if you’re listening to this podcast on your way to work and you haven’t had your morning coffee yet.

The year 1549 was a big year for Cranmer, who published the book of common prayer, which was hailed as a masterpiece, and the Act of Uniformity was passed, requiring clergy to use Cranmer’s book of common prayer. This book stressed simple, congregational worship, and was written in English. It avoided explicit language regarding the eucharist – many wanted to retain some Catholic emphases and there were some protests. The question of the nature of the eucharist would become a sticking point later on – I published an episode on the sacraments about a month ago, by the way. In that same year, pushing the Protestant angle, Edward published a tract calling the pope the antichrist. So there’s that historicist approach to Revelation again.

The prayer book received a significant revision in 1552, when the eucharist lost its Catholic transubstantiation emphasis and became more of a memorialism. But England was still a long way from becoming Protestant. That same year, Edward Seymour, the Lord Protector, was executed after the regency council felt Seymour was taking too much power for himself, and so they just killed him on a trumped up charge of trying to overthrow one of his political rivals, John Dudley. Saying all that, under Seymour’s governance, they were losing expensive wars, losing money, and riots had broken out. So maybe he wasn’t a particularly good leader. His successor might have been a little bit better, but it wasn’t until well into Elizabeth’s reign that the economy truly recovered.

In the year 1553, the 42 articles were published, written by Cranmer, and outlined the doctrinal shape of the emerging Anglican church. It demonstrated an increasingly reformed, or even Calvinist, theology, but ultimately it wasn’t implement because Edward died that year. Traditionally, he was thought to be a sickly child, but this simply wasn’t true. However, at the age of 15 he became quite unwell and his breathing grew increasingly worse and it got to the point where he couldn’t walk. He died on the 6^th of July 1553, only 6 years into his reign. The cause of Edward’s death is unknown, but there were rumours of poisoning – but there are always rumours of poison. It’s possible he died of tuberculosis or pneumonia.

What was Mary and Elizabeth doing through all this?

The eldest of Henry’s legitimate children, Mary, had been sent to Wales at the age of 9 for a few years, but returned to London where she stayed and became a pawn in potential marriage arrangements. She had been promised to the future king of France, and then to the Holy Roman Emperor, and then back to the French, and then to the Scots, but this all fell through. And then Henry began all the kerfuffle with getting an annulment from Mary’s mother, Catherine, and marrying Anne. Mary wasn’t allowed to see her mother and started to become quite unwell. At 14, she started having bad headaches and stomach cramps, and often struggled to keep food down. She suffered from depression and also started having irregular menstruation, which was diagnosed as ‘strangulation of the womb’. It’s difficult to diagnose what was going on, but I am sure much of this is connected to how Henry was treating her and her mother. Her own doctor at the time said as much. In 1533, she was sent to Hatfield Palace to live in her sister Elizabeth’s household, and never saw her mother again, even when she heard that Catherine was sick and dying. Though she never supported Henry’s claims, she did seek reconciliation and so received a household and was then made godmother to her new brother Edward. She remained Catholic, even after Henry died and Edward became king and started reforming the church. She lived on her estates and practiced Catholicism, rarely coming to court, and Edward pestered her about dropping her Catholicism. So that’s Mary, but what’s Elizabeth been up to?

Elizabeth was two years old when her mother Anne Boleyn was executed and then about five when Edward was born. By the age of 12 she knew Italian, Latin, and French and as a teenager translated works by the likes of Cicero and Plutarch. She would continue to learn languages throughout her life, which undoubtedly helped her as monarch. But her life wasn’t necessarily easy, or comfortable, or normal. When Henry died, Catherine Parr became the guardian of Elizabeth. Catherine married Thomas Seymour and this is when it all got a little bit weird. Seymour started sneaking into the 14 year old Elizabeth’s bedroom in the early mornings when she was still in bed and he wasn’t fully dressed. This made her very uncomfortable. Elizabeth’s own servants thought it was wrong. Seymour would occasionally get into bed with Elizabeth, slapped her on the bum, and on a couple of occasions, Catherine joined Seymour and they tickled her. About a year later, Catherine saw Elizabeth and Seymour hugging and was angry. Elizabeth was sent away. Apparently she did like Seymour, but it’s clear that this was all unwanted, and after she was sent away she suffered from migraines and a whole raft of other physical and mental issues, which seems to have been caused by stress and trauma. Today, the power imbalance between Elizabeth and Seymour would be significant, but in the strongly patriarchal world of the 16^th century that imbalance was even greater, adult to child, male to female, father to daughter. Regardless of whether or not Elizabeth displayed some moments of affection toward Seymour, this was all clearly nonconsensual and traumatizing. It’s very possible that this abuse had a part to play in Elizabeth never getting married and never having children.

Seymour was beheaded in 1549 for conspiring to marry Lady Jane Grey. There wasn’t really much evidence for this conspiracy but it seems people just didn’t really like Thomas and it doesn’t seem all that surprising really.

But Edward pulled a bit of a swifty over his sister Mary and declared someone else to be his successor. There was a very real concern that should Mary take the throne she would reinstate Catholicism, so even though Henry had restored Mary and Elizabeth to the line of succession, she posed a threat to the English Protestants. So when Edward was dying, his advisor John Dudley conspired to have his own daughter-in-law be made the successor. Her name was Lady Jane Grey and she is also known as the 9 day queen, because she didn’t last long. John Dudley obviously had ulterior motives here, but it was ultimately Edward who made the decision to proclaim his cousin Jane as his successor, and probably did so because of his Protestant commitments.

Jane was proclaimed queen on the 10^th of July. Technically, she would have been queen from Edward’s death on the 6^th July, which would make her the 13 day queen, but news only arrived on the 9^th and moved into the Tower on the 10^th where she was holed up with her husband and from where she never left. The public wasn’t especially pleased with her becoming queen. If the monarchs could change the line of succession whenever they wanted, a precedent set by Henry VIII, there was no stability in the land. She might have been queen technically, but even today she’s not really remembered as a proper queen. You don’t tend to find her face on commemorative tea towels. Mary was gathering support. And an army. It didn’t take long for the Privy Council to switch allegiances and declared Mary to be the rightful queen on the 19^th July. Jane and her husband were imprisoned and then executed as traitors, as were many of Jane’s supporters. Jane’s execution was a wholly undignified end to her life, being blindfolded but unable to find the block, crying out for help, begging to be led to the spot of her own execution.

Her tale is terribly tragic and just another example of powerful men pushing these poor women around. She had no autonomy in any of this, it was entirely the political ambitions of men like her father in law that saw her stripped of her dignity and then her life at only 17. She herself said she did not want the crown and was a very intelligent woman who had elected academia over parties and hunting. Her story is not entirely unique in this regard, as we’ve seen in the treatment of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, and their respective daughters.

So Mary Tudor became queen, Mary I. She grew up seeing her father horribly mistreat her mother and push the English Reformation through in order, partly, to separate from her mother so that he could marry Anne. It’s unsurprisingly that she did not like Protestantism, and she resolved to return the country to the papacy, back to the Catholic fold. But she wanted to do it slowly at first. She went about repealing…everything. She just pressed ctrl-z and kept tapping until it was like nothing had ever happened. The country, at least on paper, was Catholic again. But changing the hearts and minds of the people would prove much more difficult.  

But we’ll continue the story next week, when we look at the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, when the bodies start to pile up and the theological debates get fiery. Literally.