Noble Blood - Edward VI Among the Women

Episode Date: July 4, 2023

The story of King Henry VIII is famous, as are the stories of his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth. King Henry's only son, the sickly Edward VI, had a short reign, often overlooked and too often ignored. Sign up for Dana's history writing course! Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Merch! — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. There is a boy in bed so sick he can barely lift his head without coughing and sputtering. His skin is covered in ulcers. His feet and head are both swollen. There are whispers from his doctors, murmuring that he has a month to live. Maybe two, no more. The boy is not yet 16 years old. From certain angles, he looks like his sweet mother. The boy is so thin from illness that you would have to squint for him to look anything like his famously large, hearty father.

Still, the boy has enough energy to call his counsel to him, telling them that there's something that he has to do. After all, he's not dead yet. The counselor's exchanged glances. What the sick boy is asking them to do might be treasonous. But then again, maybe that's not possible. But then again, maybe that's not possible, because this is not just any mortally ill boy. The boy is the king of England. The judges and counsel must obey his commands and sign the order of succession this boy demands that cuts out the boy's two sisters, upending the explicit desires of his father, Henry the eighth, who looms large in the room, despite his death, six years prior. Henry the 8th had been able to declare his plan for the line of succession back

when he was alive. He wanted his son, and then his daughter by his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and then his daughter by Anne Boleyn. But if Henry VIII had been allowed to make the line of succession back when he was king, well, now that Edward V. 6th was king, he could decide the line of succession for himself. He could amend his late father's plans. The councilman nod, grimacing slightly. If this plan should go awry, well, this ill boy would soon be dead, and they, the signers, would be the ones considered treasonous and left to face the consequences. Still, at this moment, he is their king. The boy holds his handkerchief to his mouth and takes it away, revealing blood. If this was a movie, the meaning in that imagery

would be very clear. It's June 1553 in Greenwich, England, on the banks of the Thames River. In one month, King Edward V. 6th will be dead. He'll be remembered only as the short-lived, barely reigning boy king of England, the much-desired male heir that Henry VIII killed and divorced all those wives for. The story of Edward's father, King Henry VIII, is well known in the popular imagination. This podcast did a series on his six wives, according to the British nursery rhyme, now set to music in the Broadway musical Six. Divorced beheaded died, divorced beheaded survived.

The story of his sisters who came to the throne after him, Mary and Elizabeth, are also famous. Mary would be known sometimes in history as Bloody Mary, champion of Catholicism. Elizabeth would, of course, ring in the long, golden Elizabethan age as the virgin queen. They, Mary and Elizabeth, were the first accepted women to rule England as queens. But comparatively forgotten as he might be, there was actually one man in the middle of those famous figures. Well, not even a man, really. A boy, a son born to the beautiful Jane Seymour, wife of Henry VIII, and the one that he loved best, the only wife who died a natural death while still married to him. That little boy, their son, never got to grow up. He is England's

lost king, dead before his 16th birthday, barely a blip in English histories between the enormous stories of his father and his two sisters. But he had a story too. It was a story that ended fast and short, but a story that echoed and inverted his fathers, because Edward, too, was a man surrounded by women in a time when every dynasty needed a man. He loved his sisters, and yet he tried with everything he had to leave a legacy that did not engage. include them. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. The story of Edward the 6th started on October 12th, 1537, with England's King Henry the 8th, a nervous wreck. Henry was a man of action, who lived to jump onto his horses and ride out into a hunt, but for now, all he could do was

pace and wait. His third wife, Jane Seymour, was in her 30th hour of labor in Hampton Court Palace. King Henry had already divorced one wife who had failed him and beheaded another. Both had lain in labor too, and both had given him only daughters. He had whispered to this third wife's growing belly, Edward, Edward. He had ensured no women or midwives would be present at the birth, Only the best doctors, men, and sweet Jane Seymour, formerly lady-in-waiting to his earlier queen, gave birth to a son at last, the only thing Henry had wanted. She, Jane, would be the best of all of his wives. Immediately, church bells clanged throughout London.

Two thousand rounds of ammunition shot from the tower guards. free wine and beer poured into the streets, a circular went out announcing the birth of a, quote, prince conceived in most lawful matrimony. Supposedly, the announcement was sent by Queen Jane, but the labor had been difficult and it's unlikely she'd have delivered the address. Still, the language in the announcement was notable. The king had deemed his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, illegitimate. They were both born while he had been married to their mothers.

Yes, Mary from Catherine of Aragon, Elizabeth from the traitorous and Bolin. But in the end, Henry had to deem each marriage illegitimate in order to continue on to the next marriage. With this child, his son, there would be no question. Edward was the most lawful. He was the heir. After baby Edward's birth, two royal gatherings took place in quick succession. First, Edward's christening, a most happy occasion on October 15, 1537. The king and queen received guests in their bedchamber.

Jane dressed in velvet and fur sitting on a pallet beside her husband. Edward's sister, Mary, aged 21 at this point, was godmother. Edward's sister Elizabeth, only four years old, came in carrying the baptismal chrism, the anointments for her brother. She was carried by Jane's brother, Edward Seymour. Remember that name. It was a joyous family scene for both little Edward and all of England. But nine days later, Jane Seymour died, and so began the second gathering in Edward's short life.

the funeral ceremonies for his mother. His sister Mary was chief mourner. Edward and his mother had only shared the earth for 12 short days. But despite this early tragedy, Edward's childhood was mostly happy. He seemed to love his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, who seemed to love him too, particularly the much older Mary. Both sisters were more welcomed into the first. fold by their father now that the male line of succession was assured. In Edward's diary, he wrote that he was

brought up, quote, among the women, until the age of six. He knew his wet nurse, dry nurse, undernource, cradle rockers, and his father was extremely protective. As a baby, Edward's room was scrubbed daily. Dirty utensils and food were not allowed near him, and his clothes tested for poisoned. You can understand why Henry was so careful, given all that he had to go through to get his precious son. Still, little Edward's childhood was far from sterile. Acrobatts and tumblers performed for his entertainment. He watched bears fight in his menagerie. His sister Mary would watch the minstrels with him, and she gave them rewards for delighting her younger brother. Edward didn't see his father often, but Henry doted on him when they did see each other. In 1543, Henry married his

sixth and final wife. I mean, he wasn't so happy with a single male heir that he didn't divorce and behead two other wives during young Edward's childhood, and Edward had a good relationship with his final stepmother, Catherine Parr, whom he called his most dear mother. Edward also had an excellent and robust education in what was then deemed the humanist tradition. He was very intelligent. He knew Latin and French, memorized and recited Asap's fables and Cato, strengthened his skill at rhetorical argumentation by arguing both for and against war. He learned cartography, geography, and astronomy, and directed and acted in masks. Some claim that he had a photographic or at least idetic memory. This humanist education also meant he grew up Protestant,

unlike his very Catholic older sister Mary. Nevertheless, he wrote affectionate letters to both of his sisters. He and his sister Elizabeth, only four years older than him, had a playful rivalry that would be familiar to those of us who have siblings today. Academically, Edward promised, quote, to my utmost power, if not to surpass, at least to equal you in zeal. And as with much older siblings today, whose texts we might not respond to quickly enough, Edward was warmer in his letters to his sister Mary, writing, quote, Although I do not frequently write to you, my dearest sister, I love you quite as well as if I had sent letters to you more frequently.

I write to you rarely, yet I love you most. Most of this good relationship with his sisters came about as a result of their father Henry's third Succession Act passed in 1543 when Edward was five years old. The first Succession Act had removed Mary from the line of succession. The second had removed Elizabeth. But that had been before the male heir had existed. This third act restored the girls to the line of succession. behind Edward and any other children Henry might have. The order was Edward and his line of descent, any other children Henry might have, then Mary, then Elizabeth.

And all that came to really matter on January 28th in 1547. Nine-year-old Edward and 13-year-old Elizabeth were together in Hertfordshire when a messenger arrived with grim news. Their father was dead. Brother and sister might have wept together, but the time for grief was short. They both knew what this meant. Edward, not yet ten years old,

was going to be crowned king, and he needed to be ready to rule. Of course, Edward was still too young to rule on his own. His stepmother, Henry's final wife, Catherine Parr, had already started signing her letters as Queen Regent when she found out that she would not actually be regent at all. Despite her wishes and despite Henry's dying wishes, it would be Edward's uncle,

Jane Seymour's brother, also named Edward, who would be in charge until the young Edward's 18th birthday. Henry had wanted a 16-man regency council to rule equally until his son turned 18. Instead, Edward Seymour was named Lord Protector of the Realm, Duke of Somerset. For a while, this suited the young King Edward just fine. His humanist schooling and his Protestant beliefs deepened apace. His sister, Mary, loved to give her little brother, and at New Year's he could count on receiving a shirt that his sister Elizabeth had made for him

herself. He was content enjoying his family's doting and being king in name only. But as Edward grew older and closer to ruling fully on his own, tensions and threats were growing from three sources around him, from the natural world, from his own family, and from the Lord protector. For the natural world, plague abounded. Two of his closest friend, his own age, died of the sweating sickness. But it was the second problem, his family, where the rifts were really starting to show. Specifically with Edward's older sister, Mary, who'd showered him with gifts and whom he declared he loved most. The problem was she was incorrigibly Catholic. Edward educated as a Protestant, was becoming more and more anti-Catholic.

At 11 years old, he spent eight months writing a treatise about papal supremacy, which makes him sound like he was a really fun kid. Ever practicing his rhetoric, he argued both for and against the Pope, until reaching his conclusion. The Pope was, quote, the true son of the devil, a bad man, an Antichrist. Not exactly the conclusion a deeply Catholic sister would want her little brother to have. He told Mary several times over the years to knock it off with the Catholic Mass, sometimes criticizing her in front of his counsel,

an occasion that would sometimes end with both of them crying. But Mary wouldn't stop. In a diary entry marked March 18, 1551, Edward described a confrontation at Westminster when he, the 13-year-old king, called his 35-year-old sister to a meeting in front of his counsel. There, he declared that he'd suffered her mass

for long enough and simply could not bear it anymore. This entry, by the way, makes A-plus use of the passive voice. Edward writes, quote, It was said that I asked her to obey. she was called into a meeting. The little king wrote actively about himself plenty, but he didn't need a 21st century English teacher

to tell him that the passive voice is perfect when you don't quite want to take responsibility for the way you're humiliating your adult sister. Edwards' growing frustrations with Mary did get superseded for a time by that pesky little third problem. His uncle, the Duke of Somerset. His uncle was planning a coup.

A lot went on here, but long story short, his uncle failed, and Edward's entire diary entry for January 22, 1552, is a kind of darkly hilarious one-liner. The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon the Tower Hill between 8 and 9 o'clock in the morning. That's it. With the problem of his former Lord Protector taken care of,

Edward may have thought his main concern would be Catholic Mary, but nature tends to rear its cruel head, and it was problem number one that ultimately showed up in another one-line diary entry, which isn't funny at all. On April 2, 1552, Edward wrote, I fell sick with the measles and the smallpox. It was a relatively minor bout of sickness at the start,

but history hindsight is 2020, and so we, looking back, know that's where Edward's real problems would begin. Where his father had been surrounded by wives and daughters, Edward had no wife and would never have one, nor would he have children. Edward was instead surrounded by his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, and his cousins. Yes, even his cousins were all women, and they were all through the female wine. His cousin Jane Gray was his father's sister's granddaughter.

Edward had grown up among the women in his infancy and early years, and he was among them again at the end of his life, at least as far as succession was concerned. Edward was well-educated and knew his history. He knew that the Crown of England had never successfully passed to a woman, and the closest it came was the incredibly disputed claim by the Empress Matilda 400 years before. Edward looked at his options.

His sister Mary first, as his father had commanded in his third succession, Act. As a little brother, he had loved his big sister, but as King of England, he had to contend with her Catholicism. Despite all of his warnings to her, she had stayed Catholic. And Edward was the boy who had called the Pope the Antichrist. He could not, in good conscience, leave England in her Catholic hands. Elizabeth was second in his father's line of succession. There was no wrong with his second sister per se, but Edward was also the boy who'd grown up learning rhetoric, arguing both sides of every issue. He was logical. How could he exclude Mary on the ground that she was illegitimate without claiming that Elizabeth was illegitimate too? After all, their father had

only divorced Mary's mother. He had outright killed Elizabeth's mother and Bolin for treason. Edward couldn't logically allow Elizabeth to reign either. So, ailing and aching, the little brother set about writing the final literary task of his short life. He called the document his device for the succession. Edward wrote about the lack of issue of his body. He wrote the term airs male 12 times, as obsessed with the idea as his father had been before him. But no matter how many times, he wrote, he wrote what he desired, he had no heirs at all, male or not. So he named his cousin, Lady Jane Gray, his heir to the throne. The judges of the king's bench warned him it could be treason. He was directly contradicting his father's will, potentially directly contradicting a future

queen. Edward, sick as he was, drew himself up to as imposing up to as imposing up, height as he could manage, and reminded them who was currently king. Mary, he said, could not be queen. She would destroy the Protestant religion in England. He had to, quote, disown and disinherit her, together with her sister Elizabeth, as though she were a bastard and had sprung from an illegitimate bed. End quote. The judges relented. Edward was appeased. In portraits of Edward, from babyhood to young adulthood, he is painted in the same red-orange tunic as his father. His father was known to be a huge man, married six times in his 55 years. Edward would die small and weakened, never married forever a boy.

Yet, in the end, maybe there was a bit of his father in him after all. Edward exerted his iron will over the women that he'd loved, women who'd loved him. He'd used his power to get rid of them at will. He'd spent his dying days ensuring that his sisters, at least in his mind, would never see the throne of England. Well, spoiler alert, he failed. Edward's cousin, Lady Jane Gray, manipulated by the men around her, claimed the crown for a disputed nine days in July of 1553, and then lost her head.

It was Edward's oldest sister, Mary, who became the first accepted female queen of England, who reigned for five years, reestablishing Catholicism, with a violent that earned her the historical nickname, but not altogether entirely accurate, Bloody Mary. After she died childless in 1558, Edward's other sister, Elizabeth, reigned for nearly 50 years, bringing England into the 17th century as a Protestant nation. But in the early morning of July 6, 1553, all of that was so far ahead. Edward was born into the hands of male doctors, and he died in their hands too. Just as they couldn't help his mother, they couldn't help him.

Edward's final days were painful. His fingers and toenails came loose. His skin turned purplish. He looked so bad that in his final appearance to the public, in a window, some onlookers thought that he was already dead. By the time he drew his last breath, those around him could barely stand the stench of what came out of his lungs. An autopsy revealed that his lungs had two enormous ulcers.

Many historians suspect he may have died of what we now know as tuberculosis, and that his measles of April 1552 that had been jotted as just a note in his diary was probably the cause. Measles can suppress immunity to tuberculosis. Mary had already fled by the time her little brother died, knowing full well that as soon as he died, she would be vulnerable to being captured. For the tumultuous month that followed Edward's death, when the line of succession was confused because of Edward's own machinations,

his body laid unburied, waiting for the question of the crown to be settled among the women who outlived him. Finally, on August 8, 1553, he was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, in a vault that was two and a half feet wide by seven and a half feet long, an unusually small vault by kingly standards. To this day in Westminster Abbey, he has only a small plaque on the ground marking his resting place. His sisters both loom much larger.

They are buried in a tomb, together with each other. Edward's father, Henry VIII, has company in death, sharing a vault with Edward's mother, Jane Seymour, the king's favorite. Also in the vault is King Charles I and an infant child of Queen Anne. But the lost, often forgotten boy king Edward VI, the boy who never grew up, is not buried among the women. He is buried alone. That's the story of the lost boy king of England who gave way to bloody,

Mary, but stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about the diary that we quoted in this episode. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Vodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever.

I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a camera. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right. It wouldn't be

that. There's a lot of luck. Yeah. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Wodom. My next guest, you know from Stepbrothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Farrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up-and-coming talent.

He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.

Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I mentioned to Edwards. a few times in this story. That's because it's actually a really special historical document, the first private diary of a king in all of English and European history. But if you're expecting

some really good juicy details, you'll be disappointed. When I was nine years old, my diary chronicled my interactions with my fourth grade crush, Todd. But Edwards' diary has almost no hint of an inner life at all. He started keeping it in 1547, the year he became a king, at age nine or ten years old, and it's clear he was aware he was chronicling history. He even called it his chronicle, meticulously writing 68 pages of text on 84 leaves of paper in his neat, italic handwriting. The diary is generally considered boring. Like the driest daily calendar you've ever read. Lots of one-line entries describing Flemish ships,

the trade of tallow candles, detailless dinners with ambassadors, an entire entry that kind of hilariously reads, The aforementioned proclamation was proclaimed. He even records his own mother's death in a tone that is flat and refers to himself in the third person. The first sentence of his diary reads, In the year of Our Lord, 1537, a prince was born to King Henry the 8th by Jane Seymour, then queen,

who, within a few days after the birth of her son, died and was buried at Windsor Castle. The words have no emotion. And so there's something kind of sad about this little boy, nine or ten and newly orphaned at this point. His father recently dead, aware that he is the King of England, beginning a diary and starting with those words. He's recording the death of the mother he never knew with an awareness that history would be reading his words, that you or I would be reading or listening to those words someday, and that he, as King of England, should strip all emotion from his careful, doomed little boy

Hand. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noami Griffin and Rima Il Kali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodom.

My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right. It wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Yeah. Listen to Thanks Dad on the Iheart

radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.