To what extent did the political problems between 1547 and 1558 ...

To what extent did the political problems between 1547 and 1558
arise from the facts that Edward VI was a minor and Mary a
woman?
In the years after Henry VIII’s death, the profound changes that were taking place in the
religious, economic and political life of the country all took place in the context of a relative lack
of firm sovereign control as had been previously the case. Due to the fact that the monarch
between 1547 and 1558 was not a king who had reached his majority automatically in some eyes
made the government less able to exert its proper authority. Certainly this period saw a larger
number of rebellions - whether localised or not - than either before or immediately after it.
However at no point was it ever the case that there was a vacuum on executive control in the
central government. The Protectorate under the Earl of Hertford (immediately created Duke of
Somerset) was established only 3 days after Henry VIII’s death, giving sovereign powers to the
Somerset until Edward’s 18th birthday. Indeed since the Protectorate was clearly legitimately
established according to both the will of Henry VIII and the consent of the executors of that
will, there was no role for faction to paralyse the workings of the Council. Indeed the prestige of
the Council if anything increased after the fall of Somerset, since the Duke of Northumberland
governed as Lord President of the Council. Its sphere of government remained unchallenged,
even when rivalry between Gardiner and Paget in Mary’s reign spilled over into Parliament itself
as regarded the Queen’s marriage. Yet despite this, the Council continued to manage
Parliamentary business in general very effectively, despite apparent opposition especially over
religious issues. An example could be the 1554 Parliament, in which only 80 out of 350 members
opposed the bill whereby all of Edward VI’s religious legislation was repealed - especially
surprising considering that approximately a third of the Commons had been present in the
session which originally passed them. Although Gardiner’s Bill for reviving the heresy laws was
rejected by the Lords after fears for the future of secularised Church land - yet an identical bill
passed easily the following year, with proper management by the leading Councillors.
Yet the fact that a Protectorship was ever felt necessary in the first place highlights the
continuing uncertainty that was inevitable for a period of time when the king was too young to
exercise real sovereign judgement. Even then it was possible to criticise Protectors in a way
which was unthinkable towards the anointed king. Southampton was removed from the Council
according to Dale Hoak ‘not because the earl had remained a Henrician Catholic, but because he
had from the very beginning opposed Hertford’s creation as Protector.’1 Yet apart from this
removal it was impossible to bring any further charges against him. Even where this were not the
case members of the Council did not possess the prestige which was necessary for the true
maintenance of royal authority. An example comes from Protector Somerset’s own brother
Thomas Seymour, who complained that in previous minorities where the king had two uncles it
was unknown that ‘one should have all the rule and the other none, but that if one were
protector, the other should be governor.’2 Somerset’s activities in ruling without the Council’s
consent - examples being the construction of the garrison at Haddington, the cession of
Boulogne to the French and the 1549 enclosure commissions - led to 29 articles of law against
him. Even Edward VI in his Chronicle recorded the charges as including ‘enriching himself of my
treasure, following his own opinion, and doing all by his own authority.’3 - and the fact that
charges were brought go to prove that authority still only lay with the king despite his extreme
youth. Northumberland’s position after the coup which brought down Somerset was so weak

1 Loach Edward VI p.56
2 Loach Edward VI p.55
3 Loach Edward VI p.91

---

initially that he was forced to not only allow the latter to live but even to welcome him back to
the Council. In Mary’s reign on the other hand, her sovereignty as Queen was never subject to
discussion, and her marriage was concluded by herself with a free hand for the maintenance of
the succession as much as a dynastic trick to shore up England’s foreign policy. In this case the
fact of a royal minority appeared much more serious than if the claimant were female.
Another destabilising factor in the political life of the country during the reigns of Edward and
Mary was the desperate state of the royal finances, despite the best efforts of Cromwell and
Henry VIII’s ministers to leave them on a solid footing. According to the Privy Council, the
dissolutions of 1548 were carried out to relieve the king’s ‘charges and expences, which do dayly
growe and encrease.’4, although their religious message cannot be denied. From this statute, the
bishopric of Lincoln lost 30 manors to the Crown, Bath & Wells 20, Norwich 12 and Exeter 9
manors. Yet this money, as with so much else of the proceeds of dissolution, was itself dissolved
in wars with England’s neighbours, specifically in this case the wars with Scotland and later
France. Royal finances were often so dire that the young Edward VI noted that ‘My Unkell off
Sumerset deylyth very hardly with me, and kepyth me so strayt that I cane not have mony at my
wylle, but my Lord Admiral both sendes me mony and gyves me mony.’5 In these circumstances,
it is easy to see how many of the political problems facing the Crown could come from the fact
that revenues were insufficient to carry out the Crown’s policies. Parliamentary taxation - in
theory only requested in exceptional circumstances, became more common - Parliaments were
required to grant subsidies to the government in 1545, 1548, 1553, 1555 & 1558. The scale of the
shortfall can be seen from Paget reminding Somerset in 1548 that taxation was ‘the only cause
why Parliament was called before Christmas’ while the Commons expected that the subsidy bill
was ‘the first thing that shall have come in Parliament.’6 The obvious cause of this apparent
shortfall was clearly from the cost of making war against the Scots and Welsh. In total, the
Scottish wars bridging the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI came to £580,000 - in other
words half the total wealth accumulated from the dissolution, while the garrisoning method
employed by the Protectorate came to approximately double that of Henry. When there
subsequently arose rebellions in England itself, the costs only rose further. The Western
Rebellion of 1549 was to a great extent precipitated by the Edwardian Reformation in any case,
yet the impoverished government required even further dissolutions in order to pay for the
troops suppressing the rebellion and thus exacerbating the already difficult situation.
Unfortunately the method used by the government to remain solvent - debasement of the
coinage - proved to be yet more damaging to an already fragile economy since the consequent
inflation meant that rises in army wages could quickly become prohibitively expensive.
The connection between the state of royal finances and those of the country as a whole should
not be overstated, but nevertheless it must be said that much of the poverty of the Crown
matched the difficulties being faced more generally. Firstly, the population of the country rose
dramatically in the middle of the sixteenth century, causing more stress on the agricultural
stability of the country. The population rise as a whole - 2.774m in 1541, but 3.01m in 1551 -
also masks several even more dramatic rises in certain regions. Predominant among these was
the population of London which over tripled from 60,000 in 1520 to 200,000 in 1603.7 Despite
this dramatic rise - which the monarch could do little about - the actual supplies of food did not
increase alongside it, leading to inflated prices for food reinforcing the inflation caused by the
debasement of coinage. When in 1555 and 1556 two successive harvests failed, epidemics of
typhus and influenza combined with it to create a demographic disaster wholly beyond the

4 Loach Edward VI p.48
5 Loach Edward VI p.55
6 Loach The Mid-Tudor Polity p.10
7 Loach Edward VI p.37

---

control of the government.8 What made the population pressure worse came from the fact that
beforehand, the increase in England’s cloth trade had come at a time of a fairly steady population
level - thus making sheep-farming a more profitable occupation than arable crops. The
Townsend family in East Anglia as an example owned 3,000 sheep in 1544 and just four years
later this had increased to 4,200 - and to achieve this they infringed on common land. Sheep-
farming therefore clearly bore the brunt of subsequent protests in the 1550s and the government
used it as an excuse for their own actions in depreciating the currency. As Edward’s
proclamation read ‘christian people by the greedy covetousness of some men are eaten up and
devoured of brute beasts, and driven from their houses by sheep and bullocks.’ Commissioners
were sent out ‘since of late by the enclosing of lands and arable grounds in divers and sundry
places of this realm many have been driven to extreme poverty and compelled to leave the places
where they were born.’9 Enclosure may have seemed an easy target, yet only 2% of the country
was enclosed between 1455 and 1603, and of that the greatest amount was enclosed almost a
century before Edward’s reign. However the commissioners had to give out warnings not ‘to
take upon you to be executors of the statutes; to cut up men’s hedges and to put down their
enclosures.’ Even more strikingly, a gathering at Salisbury in 1549 said: ‘they wylle obaye the
kynges maieste and my lord protector with alle the counselle, but…thaye wyll not have ther
commonse and ther growndes to be inclosyd and soo taken from them.’10
One of the problems facing the government from popular actions such as this is that
government policy was often difficult to discern, due to the lack of a central royal policy. During
Kett’s rebellion it was said that a rebel could be found ‘in every towne and typplyng house, my
lordes graces name in hys mouthe sayng that hys grace hathe allowed alle hys doyngs for
goode.’11 The serious opposition to Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain also allowed Sir Thomas
Wyatt for instance to think that he was acting on behalf of the country. Certainly the defection
of Norfolk’s captains encouraged him in this thought, and Mary’s final conciliary effort was to
offer to hear any petition which stated that the marriage ‘implied a divorce between her and her
first spouse’ the Crown of England.12
However in the differing religious policies of the Crown, there is very little doubt that the agenda
during Edward’s reign was set by others, while Mary herself had a great role in reasserting
Catholic doctrines. The imposition of the English Prayer Book in 1548 for instance had nothing
to do with the ten-year old Edward, yet was an instantly recognisable change, not least because
of the fact that the Cornishmen who rebelled against it could not understand the English version
any more than the Latin it replaced. The wide ranging demands of the rebels even in 1549 - the
restoration of holy images, holy bread ‘and all other auncient olde ceremonyes’ as well as ‘that
the General Councils and holy decrees of our forefathers be observed, kept and performed’13
shows how far and how effective the commissioners sent out by Edward VI’s government had
been. Visitations by radical bishops such as Latimer, Ridley and Hooper set out to go well
beyond the commissions they were entrusted with, and yet these same bishops also did not
hesitate to criticise directly the government’s religious policies. In his 1548 visitation of Oxford
& Cambridge, merger plans for a separate college for civil law condemned by Ridley, who said:
‘it is a very sore thing, a great scandal…to take a college founded for the study of God’s word,
and to apply it to the use of students in men’s law.’14 Hooper refused the bishopric of Gloucester

8 Tittler The Reign of Mary I p.6
9 Loach Edward VI p.60
10 Loach Edward VI p.60
11 Loach Edward VI p.86
12 Loach The Mid-Tudor Polity p.62
13 Loach Edward VI p.76
14 Loach Edward VI p.42

---

since ‘are these offices ordained in the name of the saints or of God?’ and said of the first Prayer
Book that ‘I am much offended with that book, and that not without abundant reason, that if it
be not corrected, I neither can nor will communicate with the church in the administration of the
Lord’s Supper.’ It was noticeable that even this Prayer Book which Hooper thought so little of,
was sanctioned only by Parliament and not by the clerical convocation, which would most likely
have rejected it. On the other hand, Mary’s restoration of Catholic practice to England was
carried out to a great extent by her personally. It was Mary for instance, who re-awarded the First
Fruits and Tenths to the Church, thus shoring up its crippling financial situation in the aftermath
of the Dissolution; she too was instrumental in bringing Spanish clerics to England - one of
whom, Juan de Villagarcia, succeeded in obtaining a recantation from Cranmer; finally it was by
her influence that Pole was prevented from pursuing his uncompromising yet impossible
demands towards the need to return church lands.
In conclusion, both Mary and Edward faced by their sex and age respectively several difficulties
in imposing their personal impact upon the political life of the nation. More especially, the
political men of England also had to change their positions and roles to compensate for the
weaknesses of their sovereign. However in many ways Edward as a young boy was not in a
position to utilise his own person to best advantage. He had been betrothed in his infancy to the
young queen of Scots, but had not had a direct impact on this or the conduct of the war fought
on his behalf. Mary however was able to make use of her peculiar strengths as queen regnant
especially in persuading Londoners to support her claim in 1553, and again in gaining a Spanish
alliance by her marriage. Whether this latter decision was a wise one is debatable, but what is not
is that it was Mary’s own decision by reason of state to enter into it. Both monarchs, however,
attempted to rule over a kingdom whose serious economic disruption and religious divisions
meant that whoever was on the throne would have had to grapple with the same problems - and
with advisors common to their predecessors. Government in Tudor England was based on
maintaining stability and security, and therefore the solutions in all but religious policy were
cautious, conventional and above all common.

---