Dan Snow's History Hit - Edward VI: The Last Boy King

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

Edward VI, son of Henry VIII, became king at the age of nine. All around him loomed powerful men who hoped to use him to further their own ends. Edward was the only Tudor monarch who was groomed to reign, and it was assumed he would become as commanding a figure as his father had been. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Professor Stephen Alford, to discover the story of a boy learning to rule and emerge from the shadows of the great aristocrats around him - only to die unexpectedly at the age of 15.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm actually on a boat in the middle of the Weddell Sea in the Antarctic at the moment. It is not the easiest place I've ever been to create new podcasts, however that's not a problem because we've got our sibling podcasts. So this is an episode of Not Just the Tudors with Professor Susanna Lipscomb for you to get into. Enjoy. The year of our Lord, 1537, was the prince born to King Harry VIII by Jane Seymour, then Queen.

was the prince born to King Harry VIII by Jane Seymour, then Queen. On the 28th of January, 475 years ago this year, Edward, son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, became King of England, though he only found out a few days later. He was a boy of nine years old. His youth was something of a problem for the governance structure of a personal monarchy, which relied on having a strong adult male at its heart. It created something of a limbo state, as the country waited for the monarch to reach 18, the age of majority specified in Henry VIII's will. There were two ways of seeing rule by a minor,

either as an infliction, was a royal minority a curse on England, they wondered, or as an opportunity. Those around the king could use the occasion to feather their own nests and establish their own power, which certainly happened. Now English history had examples of both. The long minority of Henry VI had seemed like an occasion of divine punishment after the glorious rule of his father, Henry V, while Richard III had taken, arguably usurped, the throne during the minority of his nephew, Edward V. Henry VIII had been desperate in the circumstances

to pass his throne to a fully grown adult male heir, but it was not to be. So a month before his death, he had reaffirmed his plan that during Edward's minority, England should be governed by a regency council of 16 councillors working in concert. But that was not to be either. The new boy king, who would rule for only six years, is something of a mystery. To explore what we know about him and how much of that confounds traditional stereotypes, I'm joined by Professor Stephen Alford. Stephen Alford has been Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Leeds since 2012 and has written six books

about the 16th century, including the acclaimed Burley, William Sissel, The Court of Elizabeth I, and The Watchers, a secret history of the reign of Elizabeth I, which is all about the Elizabethan spy service. He's also examined the lives of Tudor merchant adventurers, but today I'm tapping him for his expertise on Edward VI, about whom he's written two books. The most recent is a very short book in the Penguin Monarchs series that I highly recommend. So, what can we make of King Edward VI?

Stephen, it is a great delight to welcome you onto Not Just the Tudors to talk about Edward VI in this great anniversary year. to talk about Edward VI in this great anniversary year. I suppose the defining fact of Edward's reign is that he became King of England when he was a child of nine and he died when he was a child of 15 and eight months. And you've called him the Peter Pan of English monarchy. Could you tell us a bit about what having a boy king meant for the Tudor polity? Well, I think, first of all,

an absolutely enormous shock. 38 years of Henry VIII, followed by, it wasn't a political vacuum, but it could have been a political vacuum. But the vulnerability, the danger, the possibilities of a minority ruler, of shaping that boy king into perhaps what those around him wanted him to be. All of those, I think, are really interesting balance in Edward's reign. But we never quite get through, I think, to the end of the story. We just have that kind of glimpse of possibility, which really, I think, comes into focus Edward at 14, 15, but he never makes it all the way through. I always think of him in many ways as an unfinished king, a sort of work in progress, really, and a bit of a mystery, actually, at heart. And that's one of the things that's always attracted me to the person of the king, but also to the reign in general, I think.

There are a lot of question marks at a very sort of important and critical moment in the 16th century. Yes, I really get that sense of him being prepared for rule. It never happens. But I suppose we ought to think about the context also of receiving a child onto the throne, because of course, there had been other child kings in English history that would have been playing in the minds of his courtiers, what lessons do you think they would have had at the front of their minds as he became king? The entire system was really built for functioning male monarchs. And the 15th century had been a particular time of deep instability. And that's really the big challenge, I think. Balancing rule, shaping a king to rule, one day, not yet, and in the meantime, preserving governance, preserving order, preserving stability, command, control. But at a really sort

of ticklish time in the 16th century, I think one of the things that seems to me about the Edwardian years is these were difficult, challenging, revolutionary years in many ways. You know, there was an evangelical revolution, a Protestant revolution, and that was quite intentional. So I think it's, I suppose, put really simply, keeping the show on the road, actually, was the really kind of critical challenge from 1547. So let's have a think about his upbringing before he became king. And you point out in your book that he was the only one of the Tudor monarchs to have been expected from birth to rule. How did that shape his upbringing? Fundamentally, I think there was never any doubt in his mind that one day he would rule.

in his mind that one day he would rule. And I felt, particularly in those early school room letters to his father and to his stepmother, Catherine Parr, I felt the weight of expectation. He knew what was expected of him. There's always that sense, I think, with Edward of a very small Henry VIII waiting to grow up in a way. Those other experiences and doubts and periods of uncertainty that other Tudor monarchs experienced were not there, I think, for Edward. The future looked, I think, perhaps more structured and more certain for him than certainly for his siblings. We know, of course, that that turned out not to be the case, but that wasn't clear to Edward and his contemporaries, I think. Edward, of course, never knew his mother, Jane Seymour. After he was born in October 1537, she died as a result of the childbirth. And yet we are so formed by those first few years of our lives. So what do we know about those who

cared for him in infancy and early childhood? A little bit, fairly sort of conventional royal upbringing for the early years, some distance from his father and from his stepmother. Early on, nurses, wet nurses, dry nurses, a female establishment. He talks at one point in his journal about being taken from the age of six out of the company of women and put into the company of men. So the early years and early experience, I think, for Edward was in many ways quite a feminine one, one very much older and one near contemporary siblings or half-siblings, Mary and Elizabeth. But the early experiences for Edward would have been of distance, mainly from his father in particular. Certainly, as he gets his own establishment from the age of five or six,

there's a sense in which those letters to his father in particular and those visits to court become really important and special. So in a way, there's something of a cocoon, I think, around Edward. And this would have been true of other royal children also. Very used to his own space and his own servants relatively early on, I think. And we have this wonderful portrait by Holbein of the toddler Edward. Do describe that and what you make of it. It's Edward holding the viewer's gaze, in a sense. It's a wonderful picture. He's alert.

He's switched on. There is something of his father about his whole attitude. It's Holbein's interpretation, I think, of Edward the toddler. It's a nod, I think, by Holbein to Henry, as much as it is any sort of accurate representation to Edward. But it shows, again, I think, that sort of expectation, but also that idea of potential, that here is a young king formed or forming. And it's a nod to the future as much, I think, that portrays as it is, you know, representation of a young child in the present.

And then, as you say, in 1544, at the age at which a Tudor boy was breached, put into the equivalent of trousers, and entered the world of men, his household was broken up and his education began in earnest. And there's a sense that the breadth and the quality of his education was notable, but that he was also, you suggest, schooled in obedience. So tell me what we know of Edward's experience of learning and what he did learn. Early on, the usual sort of humanist classical curriculum, the fundamental grounding in Latin. A schoolmaster, Richard Cox, who was very much of the old school, tough discipline, no exceptions for a prince, especially. But then later joining the team, as it were, John Cheek, the great classical Greek scholar, great Hellenist of Cambridge in the 1520s, 1530s,

I mean, really one of the most outstanding scholars of his generation in Europe. And I think that really speaks to something sort of interesting about education, what it was really all about. I mean, I think he was very, very consciously formed as a Erasmian philosopher prince. moving into the study of Greek, Hebrew, heavy amounts of grammar, rhetoric, those kind of forensic skills of the classical scholar of being able to sort of argue points of debate, philosophy, theology, mathematics. We know he had a big soft spot for cosmography, the great science, the interpretive science of its day, you know, which considered both the earth and the heavens and was used to kind of understand the planet. We think of it as kind of geography meets astronomy meets history meets travel. And there seems to be a real sense of sort of intellectual endeavour. In some ways,

not very much choice. I mean, he had the tutors he had. There were those kind of exercises he had to do and the essays he had to write, and many of those survived. But I think there's a sense also in which that was with the grain of personality rather than against the grain, which doesn't mean that he was a kind of super intellectual, but does mean that I think he was clever and alert and was, I suppose, sort of enjoyed learning in many ways, so far as we can tell. Yes, is that what you make of the sort of surviving letters that you mentioned earlier on? Do they tell us of his character that he seems to respond quickly to this learning? Or can we make anything else of them?

I think so. In a way, much of this was sort of fairly standard, or at least fairly standard for an advanced grammar school, for a university curriculum. But he does seem to have been receptive. And although there's a formality about those exercises, with Cheek sort of encouraging him, and not just Edward. And the interesting thing about his education was that it wasn't, in a sense, simply sort of solo tutoring. By the time he's king, he's essentially sort of part of a schoolroom with usually older members of the nobility, just a little bit older, by a year or two,

boys like Barnaby Fitzpatrick or the brothers Charles and Henry Brandon, the Suffolk brothers. So it's not simply one-to-one tuition, I think, where there's something of a collegial sort of experience as well, and a kind of schoolroom experience. But he does seem to have been receptive to it. And in the year before he became king, we have his second surviving portrait, where he really is a chip off the old block, isn't he? Tell us about that. It's a portrait of Edward in 1546. And in the background, you can see one of his residences, Hunston. He's standing. His left hand is on a belt. He's holding a dagger in his right. And, you know, fixing again, this is one of the aspects of portraits of Edward. He fixes the viewer eye

to eye. He is quite consciously presented here as a little Henry VIII. There's something of a seriousness about his face. His clothes are grand and expensive, which doesn't always accord actually with some of those accounts coming out of his household of some of the scrimping and the saving and the recycling that had to be done to keep him looking princely. But you know, here he's got the best doublet on and a great sort of furred gown. So there's majesty here, or at least again, sort of potential majesty. And this is so close to the point at which he became king. So we almost have a kind of snapshot here in many ways. We can imagine this is the small boy who becomes king. And maybe he's in such fine clothing, not only because he's having his portrait done,

but because this is the year in which he has the first experience of what you've called performing on the public stage of royal theatre. What was this and what do you think its effect was on him? It's the arrival of French embassy. It's a big show. It's the usual pattern with Henry VIII of either fighting extravagant wars or making extravagant pieces. And this is Edward really sort of wheeled out into public. I think, again, you know, everything for Edward sort of seems to be about expectation and preparation and observation as well. He's there to play a part, which I think is more symbolic than anything else. But for him, I think it's all part of this sort of building repository of experiences of how to behave and how, in a sense,

deport himself, both privately, but also in this case, publicly as well. The chronicle or journal that he wrote, I think very much part of that was to practice Edward's skills of not just English composition. So although I talked a little while ago about Edward's Latin and Greek and Hebrew and so on, he was writing an English account of his life and daily experiences. And I think there's an observational element to that. You use that as a way of building those experiences, describing how things are, but also how things should be, both in your private life, but also on the public stage of kingship as well. The year of our Lord, 1537, was the Prince born to King Harry VIII by Jane Seymour, then Queen. Within a few days after the birth of her son, she died and was buried at the

castle of Windsor. This child was christened by the Duke of Norfolk, the Duke of Suffolk, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Afterwards, he was brought up till he came to six years old among the women. This seems to be a glorious resource. Here we have his own words, writing about his own experiences. In some ways, however, for a modern reader, it can be a bit distancing at first because it often is written in the third person, not always, but in the beginning. What do you think his chronicle can tell us? And what can't it tell us? It always shows to me as sort of growing up, it feels to modern reader, I think, absolutely, as you say, a little unfamiliar in places and distancing. It feels wooden a little

at first, but there again, these are the prose compositions of a 10-year-old, probably. It's in the third person, really sort of peculiar, where the king writes about himself in that sort of way. The most recent editor of it, W.K. Jordan, back in the mid-1960s, wrote of the frightening objectivity of Edward in describing some of these crunch moments in the sometimes violent politics of his reign. And I think that's right, but also I think it gives us, especially as it really sort of warms up from 1550, a sense of Edward in his own court, something of his personality, something of what made him tick.

Much of that, I think, had to do with tournaments, with chivalry, with the glamour, military dimensions of court, you know, these great sort of shows that were mock battles that were put on in court entertainment. It gives us flavour, I think, of his life as he saw it and experienced it. But as I say, it does have those kind of question marks there because, you know, you read these accounts, it gets you so far, but then you realise there are some quite big stories lurking behind these often very, very short entries. Is that all that Edward's just kind of choosing to give us? Is he being censored? Does he only see so much of what's going on, but is much kept hidden away from him? So the critical reader has questions, but I think still it is a wonderful resource.

I want to ask one more question before we make him king, which is what you alluded to earlier about the nature of his relationship with his father and with his stepmother, Catherine Parr. Because from our all-em emotional 21st century perspective when Henry VIII dies there's a huge rupture his father is dead and effectively his stepmother is taken from him too do you think that Edward would have experienced it like that what was the nature of his relationship with those two it's such a hard one isn't it i find myself here experiencing myself that sort of historical distance between now and then i mean there's a reality in a sense to edward's world being turned

utterly upside down on the 30th of january 1547 where he's whisked off from the dead of night by his maternal uncle edward seymour, Earl of Hertford. He meets his half-sister Elizabeth. They're told that their father is dead. And there is almost no response, no recorded response. And within hours, he's at the Tower of London and his hand is being kissed by his new council. So how on earth did this boy make sense of that? I don't know, really, but it is an extraordinary moment. But again, a moment which in some sense, and on one level, maybe not at that point, but he must have expected at some point, because that was always going to be the reality. Edward's future was one from which he was never going to escape, eventually. But it's very, very tricky, I think, to make sense of.

And let's talk a bit about the politics. The Regency Council that was appointed by Henry VIII, while paying lip service to the late king's will, decided in fact to overrule it by appointing one of their number to be preeminent among them, precisely what Henry had wanted to avoid. And that, of course, is Edward Seymour, the king's uncle. Let's talk a little bit about him and his role in the next couple of years after Henry VIII's death. He's the central political figure. It doesn't surprise me that at the end of January 1547, the first days of February 1547, there was a feeling that a single powerful individual was needed to kind of run the show. We know at the same time that this was planned. There are all kinds of question marks about those final hours of the life of Henry VIII, question marks about the will and about the provisions of the will and the Regency Council

and all the rest of it. So there are some murky behind-the-scenes politics going on. We know that King's Secretary William Padgett was, in effect, the Earl of Hertford's campaign manager and getting things sorted out at court. So there's hard politics at work here. And yet, probably no great surprise that you don't very easily move from the government of Henry VIII to a happy collective group of councillors who are going to be able to govern in a very clear way. So I think finding one decisive individual, in a sense, who could have stepped up to the challenge of running the country, but also with that tutorial responsibility for Edward as well. He's both Lord Protector and Governor of the King's Person. And I think those two things

are slightly different in Hartford's career. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans.

Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, to a slightly lighter subject, here we have this young boy who's become king and it seems that he had a court full of entertainment. Let's talk about what he did for leisure and his friendships and the fun that he had. Yes, it wasn't all work and probably in the early years it was very little work for Edward. I think that comes a wee bit later. There were masks, there were entertainments, there was music, and all of those, you know, sort of pastime in good company. It is easy, I think, to kind of imagine middle Tudor politics as a shark tank of scary, powerful individuals. But actually, I think there's colour, there's fun. And for Edward, I think actually a real sort of developing passion for taking part in sporting events. It seems to have liked competition.

He seems to have been fairly sort of physically robust, running at the ring and tournament. And if he wasn't a participant, he was a spectator and an observer. And those really sort of seem to be the aspects of his life that sort of seem to be the aspects of his life that sort of made him tick. After supper, there a fort made upon a great lighter on the Thames, which had three walls and a watchtower in the midst of it, with 40 or 50 other soldiers in yellow and black. There came four pinnaces with their men in white, handsomely dressed, which intending to give assault to the castle, first drove away the yellow pinnace,

and after with clods, squibs, canes of fire, darts and bombards assaulted the castle, and at length came with their pieces and burst the outer walls of the castle, beating them off the castle into the second wall, who after issued out and drove away the pinnaces, sinking one of them, out of which all the men in it, being more than twenty, leaped out and swam in the Thames. Then came the Admiral of the Navy with three other pinnaces, and won the castle by assault and burst the top of it down. What do you think this detailed description tells us about Edward? This is really what he's interested in. I think, I mean, there's this moment in Deptford,

and you can almost see him absolutely there. It's really what sort of motivates and interests him. What I think comes across too is the clarity of his description as well. His effectiveness, his precision in describing those events. He's been raised, I think, and taught to not only enjoy this sort of event, but also really to kind of describe it and remember it and file it away. Now there is another Seymour on the scene, Sir Thomas Seymour, also Edward's uncle. But in 1549, we have what we could call, I suppose, the Seymour affair, in which in the end Edward has to give a deposition. Tell me about what happened with Sir Thomas Seymour and what you make of Edward's take on it.

take on it? It's pretty clear that behind the scenes, this younger brother of Protector Somerset was trying over the course of 1547 to get as much influence as possible, feeling that his elder brother had all the power. And so we see this younger uncle, I think, taking advantage of a young king, of playing on a boy's family affection for his uncle. Seymour was to get certain assurances and promises from Edward for further promotion. Thomas Seymour used his access to the king's privy chamber to visit the king. He used the servants around the king to provide Edward with pocket money, insinuating that Protector Somerset and others around the king

were keeping him short on money. So he's kind of feeding him little gifts. He even uses John Cheek, the king's tutor, to do that, and Cheek refuses. So we see this uncle trying to inveigle himself into the king's affections and goodwill. The Lord Admiral came to me in the time of the last Parliament at Westminster and desired me to write a thing for him.

I asked him what. He said it was none ill thing. It is for the Queen's Majesty. I said if it were good, the Lords would allow it. If it were ill, I would not write in it. Then he said they would take it in better part if I would write. I desired him to let me alone in the matter. Cheek said afterwards to me, you are not best to write. At another time, within this two year at least, he said,

you must take upon you yourself to rule, for you shall be able enough as well as other kings, for your uncle is old and I trust will not live long. All this blows up and it blows up spectacularly fairly quickly over a number of months and all kinds of important figures at court have to give depositions or questioned about Seymour affair. And we have these words by Edward himself, which I think, again, show his sort of clarity, his skill with language, but also, probably more fundamentally, actually, his vulnerability in many ways. He's really kind of exposed at this moment. You really feel he's still very, very small and has a lot to learn about the realities of court and politics.

1549 was a year in which the country was shaken by uprisings and rebellions. We could talk for a long time about that, but I suppose we ought to say briefly what was exercising the commons and whether we can see any response from Edward about this great tumult. It's a number of things. It's financial pressures, it's crop failures, it's war. Protector Somerset was opening a war on a number of fronts. We see the effects of inflation, some enclosure, high levels of disgruntlement, very little give by the government in meeting some of the grievances of the commons.

And Edward initially, I think, sort of fairly insulated from all of this. Although there's a wonderful passage in the Chronicle where he lists these minor, which turn into major uprisings across the various English counties. And the list grows, you, there were risings in, and then he lists county, another county, another county, another county. Protector Somerset advised to crack down hard, which he doesn't quite do. If anything, he seems too concessive to the Commons demands. And before long, over the summer of 1549, you have not a coordinated rebellion, but a serious set of uprisings across pretty much the whole south of England, Midlands into the north, that call for military action and armies assent against

the rebels. So it's a really kind of crunch moment. In terms of religious policy, this was from the beginning an explicitly, fervently evangelical Protestant regime. Took Henry VIII's great Church of Rome in the 1530s and sort of radicalised and weaponised it. And so the restructuring of faith, new common prayer book, white liming of churches, the smashing of stained glass, the end of purgatory, you know, huge assault on the traditional religion. All of this, in a sense, comes into focus in 49. So it's social, it's economic, it's religious, and it's a big deal. And eventually, I think Edward sees, or at least senses some of it. But it's still pretty insulated, I think, broadly from it. But I remember reading Dermot McCulloch on this some years ago,

and Dermot talks about the fact that the teenage Edward seems to have had a sort of classically teenage piebald response everything's black and white and perhaps is really quite dogged in his faith and also remember that there's a sort of question here about archival survival that we have the chronicle and so we have these wonderful descriptions about jousting and all the fun that Edward's having. But that several sources report that Edward listened attentively to sermons and wrote them down in a book that's now lost. So arguably, the Chronicle is giving us only one side of the picture. And what it's obscuring is the thing that speaks most to what's going on in the country as a whole, which is about religion and piety. Do we know much about Edward's faith with the sources that survive? I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. We do have that sense of Edward's interests. We have some of his exercises in which he's writing about

the so-called powers of the Bishop of Rome and the Antichrist. He's at least been sort of taken through the exercises. There are wonderful images of Edward. Archbishop Cranmer's Catechism, 1548, has a wonderful title page, woodcut, of Edward, Archbishop Cranmer's Catechism, 1548, has a wonderful title page, woodcut of Edward, sort of sitting there enthroned, handing the word of God to his nobility and to the bishops, with these great sort of verses from the Old Testament about fearing the king and obeying the king, that the king is an instrument of reformation. So I think he was perfectly capable

of playing the part. One relationship in his life which I think is really interesting, and again is a little bit of a question mark because we get hints here and there, is the relationship with his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who was his godfather. So I think there's a closeness of a relationship there, but from the few bits and pieces of evidence we have about that, I find it quite difficult to triangulate that relationship and see it in any great depth. But I think it was there. The other source, I suppose, that we might look to is that letter to his friend, Barnaby Fitzpatrick, in December 1551, where, this might be unfair, but Edward comes across as a little bit priggish for women as far

forth as you may avoid their company yet if the French king command you you may sometimes dance so measure be your mean else apply yourself to riding shooting or tennis with such honest games not forgetting sometime when you have leisure you're learning chiefly reading of the scripture this i write not doubting but you would have done so though i had not written but to spur you on i mean he's talking about avoiding women's company and you know make sure you read the bible it sounds a bit moralistic doesn't he he does i think there's that wonderful sense here of we know who's in charge. He makes it very clear to Barnaby Fitzpatrick, who is as close

to a friend as Edward ever had. And it's very clear who's in charge. One thing I've skipped over is quite an important moment, which is when the Duke of Somerset removes Edward from Hampton Court to Windsor. It's an almost kidnap. Me thinks I'm in prison. Here be no galleries nor no gardens to walk in. And in the end, it leads to Somerset's downfall. How did this play out? And again, do we know anything of Edward's thoughts on the matter?

Well, there's a lot of reading between the lines here, I think. The crunch moment came for Somerset in the October of 1549, that sort of playing out, that slow kind of implosion really of Somerset's power and authority within the council after the uprisings of the summer of 1549. Basically, Somerset whisks him off to Windsor Castle, which is, other than the Tower of London, one of the more secure of the royal palaces. And Edward's effectively kept as hostage with a couple of other councillors there too. And we see this kind of exchange of letters and, frankly, also accusations of treason between Somerset and a unit of councillors who've kind of set

themselves up as an alternative government in London. Somerset's negotiated down, in part because level heads are also Windsor as well. And there is an account by Edward in the Chronicle of what he saw, in a genuine sense, I think, of this young boy being really kind of torn. There's some sort of affection for his uncle. There's some sense also, I think, of just a little bit of confusion. You feel that Edward's still very much in his own little cocoon here, that the tough political realities of the situation haven't quite clicked with him. But this is 1549, he's a boy, could we expect anything else? But it really is one of those sort of moments, I think, perhaps filed away, even kind of unconsciously, in little Edward's political repository for later years.

In these early years of the 1550s, we have him continuing to enjoy entertainments and tournaments and jousting, and all of the pleasures of being king, whilst also from the age of 14 taking an interest in the serious business of being king as well. So just as his life was truncated, it feels like we have to truncate to move to February 1553, when Edward got a bad cold. And this amazingly turns out to be the beginning of the end. From the contemporary medical evidence, what do we know about what happened to Edward that year? It seems that his immune system was in some way weakened by an attack of smallpox. It's a small

encounter Edward had with smallpox that he wrote to Barnaby Fitzpatrick about. He recovered quickly, not always the case with smallpox, and he recovered, I think, without scarring. But it does seem to have weakened his system in some way. So there's a big deterioration in health for Edward at the beginning of 1553, and a big scramble on the part of those around him. But at this point, Protector Somerset is sort of out of the picture in a definitive sort of way. And the second great powerful individual, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, is sort of really kind of in charge. So there's a big scrambling by Northumberland and those around him in the council to think about the future. But also for Edward himself to think about the future and about his succession. And by this point, I think Edward's

voice, Edward's sense of control and command, all of these have developed. And you mentioned the age of 14. I think that's really significant. You know, when Edward himself comes in his very famous device about succession to lay out the future experience and kind of training and process of a monarch. 14 is the age at which governance is quite sort of entirely his, but it's not far off. So I think that's where we are, 1553 and a general dawning sense of anxiety that the king is declining. And the device for the succession is an astonishing document, this single page in his own hand. My device for the succession, for the lack of issue of my body, to the Lady Frances's heirs' mail, if she has any such issue before my death,

to the Lady Jane and her heirs' mail, to Lady Catherine's heirs' mail, to Lady Mary's heir's mail, to Lady Mary's heir's mail. Tell us about what Edward wanted in doing this. Before I wrote the very little book on Edward, I spent some time in the library of the Inner Temple, and I sat there with this document for about an hour and a half. I just sat with it, and I just looked at it, and tried to make sense of it. And it is extraordinary because as you say, you know, it's only Edward's hand, nothing else, no one else at all. We see some of those kind of key points about what he wanted, or at least how it changed. He

gives the succession to the heirs of Jane Grey, his cousin, granddaughter of Henry VIII's sister Mary. So he diverts the succession away from the Tudors, away from his half-sister Mary and eventually Elizabeth. He makes that all important and again, sort of famous change from the heirs male of Jane Grey to Jane Grey and her heirs male, which is the key point. Other than that, absolutely no clues about it. What were the circumstances in which he wrote this? When did he write it? Did he write it in two phases? Is this an early draft kept in his drawer to which he returned? Why Jane Grey? Why not Mary? Why not Elizabeth? It's one of those kind of classic documents, I think, that we seem to get

so often with Edward, where we get a lot of detail and a lot of suggestion, but a huge number of question marks all at the same time. I suppose the classic reading has been this idea that ideally he would have wanted a male heir, and he talks about a male heir, you know, something like 12 times in the document. And it's only when he can see that he is close to death and Lady Jane, who has now married, is now Lady Jane Dudley, is not pregnant. There is no male heir that he makes that change, you know, that crucial revision of adding the words and her. And so she is in the line of fire. But you're right in terms of the question about his criteria for choosing his heir. Was he thinking about legitimacy or was he

thinking about religion? You know, what were the factors at play here in terms of trying to decide who should rule? I think it's both legitimacy and religion. In a way, I think we can take this back to Edward's religion and, you know, that sort of sense in which perhaps his faith, though hidden away in many of the sources, I think there's some indication here. I think religion is quite a big deal for Edward, to put it mildly. Jane Grey, in that sense, sort of seems a safe evangelical pair of hands. to put it mildly. Jane Grey, in that sense, sort of seems a safe evangelical pair of hands. Sister Mary, again, to put it mildly, is not. Edward's counsel and Edward himself had had consistent struggles with Mary to get her to conform to the Book of Common Prayer. So I think religion's one factor. I think actually legitimacy is quite a big one.

And of course, that's an uncomfortable issue for his half-siblings, Mary less so, but it's uncomfortable for Elizabeth, I think. This is something that when a number of years later, Elizabeth becomes Queen is an issue for Elizabeth herself as the daughter of Anne Boleyn. So I think it's a meeting of both legitimacy and religion in a sense. And my feeling is, this is very, very hard to pin down evidentially. I think that's much more important, actually, for Edward in the drafting of this document than any sense in which shadowy, sinister political figures are kind of standing over his shoulder and telling him what to write. I think that's probably less the case. So you're suggesting that there's more of a degree of agency on Edward's part than the classic line, which is, you know, he's being forced into it by the Duke of Northumberland, who has married his son to Lady Jane Grey and is trying to get power here.

Edward's own wishes, his recognition that under various acts of succession his half-sisters have been declared illegitimate, and it's up to him as monarch, just as his father had done, to decide who should succeed. We shouldn't discount the political element here. Northumberland had an interest in maintaining his own power. But at the same time, all those accounts we have of Edward's final months and weeks do suggest that the king himself was putting a fair amount of pressure on his advisors to sign up to the device to ensure that it had legal status. And that was one of the big tricky things. You know, it's Henry VIII's third Act that's still law at this point, even Edward's device, you know, you can stick it under the Great Seal and, you know, all the rest of it, but it doesn't have the weight of statute. And that becomes really clear with the accession of

Mary in the summer of 1553. But Edward, I think, was applying a lot of personal pressure, or as much as he could, to advisors in those kind of critical months before his death. And I always think it's just about Edward really running out of time. And it's even about the time of year that he falls so fatally ill, because if it hadn't been in a summer season when Parliament wasn't sitting, it's entirely possible that that document, letters patent prepared on the basis of it, could have gone through Parliament. But, you know, they've all broken for the harvest. So there's going to not be anybody going to do that until the autumn.

And by then it's too late. And a sense, initially at least, that to resist Mary, sort of politically and actually sort of militarily, was entirely plausible in 1553. Now, we know that Edward's counsel in the final days of the king's life, in the days following his death, crumbled sort of internally fairly quickly. But I don't know whether that would have been absolutely obvious. I think there was a sense in which they could have made a go of it and sort of resisted Mary's claim. It's really interesting for me, one of the fascinating things about Edward's reign is that it begins with this kind of crunch moment in the Tudor royal succession, but it begins in 1547 with this kind of critical

moment and it ends with this, you know, sort of spectacular moment where the wheels could have come off well and truly and yet Mary becomes queen 1553, without civil war. So it really is kind of an exciting moment. So let us just talk then of Edward's last illness, which was really quite horrid. Tell us how he died, and if anything, what his legacy was. A disease of the lungs, differently sort of interpreted from the symptoms and from post-mortem, from tuberculosis to other diseases. The truth is that Edward had a long, lingering, painful final illness. Legacy, in a strange sort of way, muted. I think that his success has presented a bit of an uncomfortable king for Mary, certainly.

Mary, of course, sort of very quickly tries to turn the clock back to forget quickly about the 1530s and 1540s. And for Elizabeth also, I think, strangely. Edward is one of those monarchs who does not get a big tomb in Westminster Abbey. He was interred very, very quietly, very close to the great sort of gentry tomb of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. The legacy of the reign, I think, is sort of damaging in some ways, positive in others. It's a bit of a mixed bag, but I think it's really formative. It was really the kind of training ground for many of the big political figures of the later Tudor years, both in the reign of Mary, William Cecil, Robert Dudley, later Earl of Leicester,

and others. So we see in many ways the kind of early Elizabethan establishment formed in these challenging years, but also productive years, for Protestants at least, of Edward's minority. And I think that's really interesting too. So in that way, there's a long-term legacy, really. I suppose it's encouraging to think that there was a long-term legacy from such a short reign and such a short life. You have started to unpick for us a little bit the mystery of Edward VI, whilst recognising all the ways in which we can never really know him completely. really know him completely. But he's evidently a fascinating character. And I just imagine what would have happened if this philosopher king had lived to adulthood, how different history could have been. Well, thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us on Edward. And anyone who wants to read a bit more can pick up this wonderful and wonderfully short little book, 83 pages,

a fiver, entirely worth your money to sit down and read this beautifully written book by Stephen Edward VI, it's called, so you can find it quite easily. And Stephen, thank you so much for talking to me today. Thanks for listening, everyone. That was an episode of not just the tudors on my feed professor susanna lipscomb is a complete legend she's one of my greatest friends and colleagues in the world of history if you enjoyed it please head over to not just the tudors wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe and then rate and review and all that kind of thing share it with friends it just makes a really big difference to us and we're're really, really grateful for you guys doing that. Thank you very much. you