The reign of Edward VI was a singularly merciful one for those harsh times. Now that we are taking leave of him let us try to keep this in our minds , to his credit.

Mark Twain

Jane died a leader and not merely a victim, a Protestant Joan of Arc calling up fresh troops to fight Mary Tudor while her own generals betrayed her.

Leanda de Lisle

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

Martin Luther King

A man does not look behind a door unless he has stood there himself.

WEB DuBois

In July of 1553 King Edward VI was dying and he saw a problem in the line of succession for the English crown. Under the will, passed by Parliament, of his father Henry VIII the line of succession had been laid out. Under it it was stated that if Edward died without an heir, the crown was to go to his sister Mary, then Elizabeth. If they died without heirs it was to go to his aunt Francis Grey, the daughter of Henry’s sister Mary and Charles Brandon. Henry ruled as an absolute king who believed his power came from God himself, and none should or would dare question his authority.

Edward saw himself in the same way, he saw himself as the as possessing all the powers and prerogatives of his father, as well as all of those possessed by all the English kings that came before him. He passionately believed he had all the royal prerogative, holding to the body of customary authority, privilege, and immunities that had been recognized in common and civil law that traditionally belong to any sovereign, especially those who had ruled England.

Edward saw himself backed by eleven Bible verses, especially Romans 13, that proclaimed that the king’s powers came from God and none were lay hands on those God had chosen to rule. It was the concept of the Great Chain of Being, it is where Disney would find the Circle of Life in present times, an idea that God knew what a society need to run smoothly and placed people in all the jobs need to make a society rule well. Edward believed God had chosen him, and him alone, to rule England. He was to rule like a father ruled the family, to take care of the souls and bodies of the people of England and lead them along the path of salvation to the True Church, the Protestant one he had been championing since his coronation. It is in this the character Stubbs in the movie Moby Dick would find his right to proclaim that a ship’s captain could not violate a law as he is the law.

Edward believed that God had placed him on top of this Commonwealth by God to further the reformation of his father. At his coronation Thomas Cranmer proclaimed, “You majesty is God’s vice-regent and Christ vicar within your own domains, and to see, with your predecessor Josiah, God truly worshipped, and idolatry destroyed, the tyranny of the bishops of Rome banished from your subjects, and images removed.” (Eamon Duffy. The Stripping of the Alters: Traditional Religion in England c.1400-c.1580. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 1992. 448) This radical thinking was infused into Edward for the entirety of his reign and life. Of his time on the throne, Diarmaid MacCulloch said, “These six years reshaped the culture which the English, Scots, and Irish crowns later exported to the world.” (Diarmaid MacCulloch. Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation. United Kingdom: Penguin Books. 2001. 11)

To Edward, he was the divinely chosen leader of a national Protestant church, he was the new Hezekiah, the new Josiah, returning the world to the true church. He was destroying the evil of Rome that had been placed between the people and the church, Henry VIII was the David, the one who conquered the old order and set up the new kingdom, and he was the new Solomon, the one who would build the new Temple. (MacCulloch. 14-15) Now he was dying, and the chosen successor was his sister Mary, the champion of the Church of Rome that he had fought since he came to power. Under the old view of this time, it was his that made Edward attempt to place his cousin, Lady Jane Gray on the throne in place of the Catholic Mary. The traditional story is he did this to protect his church, or his counselor, John Dudley, used his desire to protect his church to marry his son Guildford to Jane in an attempt to make him the most powerful man in the kingdom.

In 1553 the Tudors, who under Henry VII had disposed Richard III and brought down the Plantagenet monarchy (1154-1485) and set up the Tudor dynasty, had a problem. Henry VII had ended the long Wars of the Roses, (1455-1485) ending the long civil war that had destroyed the medieval Plantagenet rule. This unrest was still fresh in the minds of the English, as both Edward and his father were the first two monarchs to peacefully succeed to the crown since Edward III and Richard II. But now only sixty eight years later the Tudor dynasty had a problem. Under Henry’s act, after Edward the claimants were, Mary, Elizabeth, Lady Jane Grey, Lady Katherine Grey, Lady Mary Grey, and Margaret Clifford. Henry had excluded his sister’s Margaret’s line, because of his displeasure at her marrying James IV of Scotland. He also excluded his sister Mary’s daughters Francis and Eleanor Brandon. This was done in the Third Act of Succession passed by Parliament in 1544, replacing his second act passed in 1536 with his divorce from Anne Boleyn. His first act was in 1533 after his marriage to Anne .

The third act placed both Mary and Elizabeth in the line of succession, but did not restore their legitimacy. It is thought the language of the acts may have been an attempt by Henry to to place his illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy on the throne if he had no male heirs. Henry did not pass these laws to claim the power to leave the crown to whomever he pleases, he believed he already processed this, but to confirm this power. Edward also believed he had this power, and he was looking at six candidates, all female. The last time a female candidate was put forward for the crown was at the death of Henry I in 1135. His only son, William Adeline was killed in the White Ship Disaster in 1120. His daughter, Matilda, was the widow of the Holy Roman Emperor and he had all the barons plead to her before he died. After Henry’s death, the barons revolted and crowned Stephen of Blois as king and a civil war resulted. (The Anarchy 1135-1153) At the end of the conflict, Matilda’s son, Henry II was crowned as the first Plantagenet king.

In the sixteenth century in England the idea of a ruling queen was anathema, it was the root cause of the Anarchy after the death of Henry I. Women were seen as the weaker sex, and morally frail. As the descendants of Eve they were creatures of the body, emotional, irrational, and indecisive. To get an idea of the view of women Kyra Kramer describes the the medical view of women in her book, Blood Will Tell.

Men and women were also believed to have inherently different humors. Women were the ‘colder’ gender, which made them less rational, but more compassionate than men. The medical problem represented by gender was a matter of great interest to Tudor physicians. Reproduction was largely mysterious and misunderstood, apart from the very obvious relationship between intercourse and procreation. Much of the prevailing wisdom about gynecology and obstetrics relied not on anatomical dissection or observation, but instead, like all other matters of health, depended on the writings of the ancient Greeks, particularly Galen. Galen surmised that the reason women were not men was because their colder natures had prevented them from extruding their genitalia before birth. Galen conceptualized the vagiana as an inverted, inside out penis still trapped in the body, while the ovaries were the feminine testicles and the uterus was the equivalent of the scrotum. Women were also known to produce ‘seed,’ or seman, and if they went without sex, especially if they were accustomed to coitus and then had to go without (as in the case of widows), it was imagined that the build up and spoiling of their seed could cause them to become hysterical.

Kyra Cornelius Kramer. Blood Will Tell: A Medical Explanation of the Tyranny of Henry VIII. Bloomington, Indiana. 2012. 191-192

Galen also taught that the woman’s seed was necessary for reproduction and if the woman was not orgasmic during intercourse, then no pregnancy would result. Thus a man would have to make sure the woman was enjoying the sexual encounter to insure the birth of an heir. This sadly is the root of the idea that a woman cannot become pregnant as a result of rape. (Ibid. 193) Along with Galen both the writings of Aristotle and the teachings of the church backed this idea of the inferiority of the female sex. Aristotle wrote that women were deformed or mutilates and thus were monsters. The Church taught that since Eve had tempted Adam to sin all women were prone to embracing evil, especially lust, and would lead a man astray. (Ibid. 194)

Since all women were descendants of Eve (modern science does in a way back this up by saying all humanity can be traced to one African woman) they were emotional, indecisive, and irrational and thus placed under the rule of men in the Great Chain of Being. In this view a woman would be placed under the rule of her father, brother or husband for the good of society. (Leanda de Lisle. The Sisters Who Would be Queen:The Tragedy of Mary, Katherine, and Lady Jane Grey. London: Harper Collins Press. 2009. xxvii) Rule by women was a deviation from the proper order and was seen as God punishing a kingdom for sin, John Calvin equated it to slavery. (Ibid. 183)

Eric Ives would sum up Edward’s mindset in the following:

Far from being a move towards putting Lady Jane on the English Throne, neither she nor another woman was ever to be queen in her own right. In effect, Edward was attempting an English equivalent of the Saltic law of France which insured that the monarch was always a male. In wanting to confine the succession to men Edward was not exhibiting a personal quirk. His father had rocked Europe in his effort to avoid being suceced by Princess Mary. Ruling England and the English was the job for a man,. Unfortunately in 1553 there was no suitable man.

Eric Ives. Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery. John Wiley & Sons. 2011. Loc 3452)

Edward would also believe that, “After all, if he (Henry) as king possessed the power to determine the succession, then in due course his successor would possess that power and be entitled to make his own choice of the next monarch.” (Ibid. Loc 3504) In his mind, “Edward was blessed with the same implacable commitment to his sovereign rights as any monarch, Tudor or otherwise, that had come before him.” (Kyra Kramer. Edward VI in a Nutshell. MadeGlobal Publishing. 2016. 48) Edward’s commitment to the Reformation and the mindset of his time against the idea of female rule would be combined with his adolescence fanaticism and certainly to produce his attempt to change the line of succession laid out in his father’s acts. Stephen Alford would say of Edward, “But although Dudley enforced the king’s will, it was Edward himself who set out to preserve his godly legacy and, implicitly, his political establishment.” (Stephen Alford. Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2002.172) Alford goes on to state that, “Counterfactual history is a difficult and perhaps dangerous business, but it is possible to imagine that, had the king lived, the Dudley years would have allowed Edward VI to operate at the heart of the most radical, dynamic, and personal adult male monarchies of the Tudor century.” (Ibid. 174) In Edward’s eyes his sister Mary represented both of the main evils he saw in England’s future, female rule and Catholic dominance of his nation.

The question of female rule also had the danger that the female queen would marry a foreign prince and thus England would become nothing more than a province of either the Hapsburg empire or France. John Knox, who was Edward’s favorite preacher, said of female rule, “But the authority of a woman is corrupted fountain and therefore from her can never spring no wholesome water ; secondarily, that no person hath power to give the thing which does not justly appertain to themselves.” (Roger Mason. John Knox on Rebellion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004. 42) This, along with the fear of a foreign marriage arose in Mary I’s reign when she married Philip II of Spain. Also was the fact that both of his sisters had been declared illegitimate by act of Parliament. Henry did not reversed the illegitimacy of either Mary or Elizabeth in his Third Act, maybe leaving him a way to place his illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy on the throne if Jane Seymour did not produce a male heir. Edward may have feared, “if a bastard could inherit, and inherit the very crown, no property was safe.” (Ives. Loc 3648) It is interesting to see that Mary did have the marriage of Katherine of Aragon declared valid and herself a legitimate child of Henry, but Elizabeth never reversed the proclamations on her or her mother Anne Boleyn.

Edward called on the Ancient Statue of Merton (1235) which were the first English statue and first one mentioned in the Statutes of the Realm, to exclude both of his sisters. Ives would argue, “accepting Mary ment setting aside the inheritance rights of legitimate heirs in favor of a bastard. Accepting Jane meant a return to common law. True, Edward was asserting royal privilege, but in doing so he was restoring the legitimate line of inheritance and that was what mattered.” (Ibid. 4036) Edward’s plan for succession would then favor any male born to any of the women he picked to be his successor. The words heirs male appear more times than any other term in his device, and under this device Jane would be in power only till a male heir was produced by any of the other claimants. That child would be installed as king under a counsel of twenty men until he came of age, much as Henry had planned for Edward. It was an ingenious plan that just screamed civil war, as Henry himself could not rule from the grave and neither could his son. One could envision Jane and her consort Guilford Dudley responding to the son of Katherine or Mary Grey with the words uttered by Selina Kyle at the end of the Gotham series, “Like Hell.” (John Stephens. Gotham, The Beginning. Fox. Season 5 Episode 100. April 25, 2019)

Edward was looking to restore male rule and protect his religious revolution as he laid dying in July of 1553. Diarmaid MacCulloch states of Edward’s time, “The Reformation of 1547 to 1553 carried out in his name (Edward VI) was a revolutionary act, a dynamic assault on the past, a struggle to the death between Christ and Antichrist. ” (MacCulloch. 9) To do this he tried to overturn an act of Parliament set down by his father, he renounced both of his sisters and set in motion a series of events that would doom his three cousins (Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey).

The forces of Queen Jane could not stand up against Princess Mary who quickly defeated them by 19 July 1553 and was crowned Mary I on 1 October 1553. Jane only ruled from 9 July 1553 to 19 July 1554. Historians say Mary’s victory was due to many in the nation feeling that Edward could not overturn an act of Parliament and that the commitment to the new Protestant church was not that deep. The commitment to Rome was stronger than many earlier historians of the time believed, the English Reformation was a top down affair that did not take deep roots until well into Elizabeth I’s reign. The nation resigned itself to female rule as it was thought Mary was the legitimate successor and Elizabeth was the next in line. It was the will of Henry VIII and so it was obviously the will of God as well. As for Jane, she was executed by 12 February 1554 and both Katherine and Mary would die in exile under Elizabeth.

The Tudors had very few male heirs and many of them died around their sixteenth birthdays. The Tudors produced very few princes, unlike the Plantagenets who at times were swimming in them. Had the first two boys of Charles Brandon with Henry’s sister Mary, both named Henry (the first born in 1516 and died in 1522, the second born in 1523 and he died in 1534), Henry might have named the surviving Brandon, and Henry was very close to both Charles and his sister Mary, son over his daughters. Both of Brandon’s daughters (Francis and Margaret) would survive with the Grey sisters descended from Francis. Henry excluded his sister Margaret who married James IV of Scotland and would later provide the line of succession that Elizabeth II comes from. But Charles Brandon did marry after Mary Tudor died in 1533, to Katherine Willoughby.

From this union two boys were born, Henry in 1535 and Charles in 1537. Sadly they would both die of the sweating sickness on 14 July 1551, both within an hour of each other. But, what if they had lived? Their mother, Katherine Willoughby was descended from Maria de Salinas who may have been related to the royal family of Spain. She had been Catherine of Aragon’s most loyal ladies in waiting. Had they been alive, Edward may have found them a good rival to Mary. Their father was a very popular noble in Tudor times and may have been seen as almost a brother to Henry. His father had been Henry VII’s standard bearer and killed at Bosworth by Richard III. Edward could have found enough royal blood in their backgrounds to assign the crown to Henry. Henry would have been 18 in 1553 and his brother Charles, 16.

The Tudors were obsessive and paranoid over their claim to the throne. Both Henry VII and Henry VIII went after any person with Plantagenet blood in them, trying to stamp out any rival climate. The surviving Grey sisters, Katherine and Mary, were persecuted and imprisoned by Elizabeth until their deaths. The Tudor genealogy was not solid, the founder, Owen Tudor lived with Henry VI’s widow, Catherine of Valois and Margaret Beaufort was descended from the mistress of John of Gaunt, Katherine Swynford. John of Gaunt had his children with her legitimized in 1396, but they were excluded from the crown. The same had been done for the father of Henry VII, Edmund Tudor by Henry VI, but he too was excluded from the crown. This was ignored as the Lancasterians had run out of legitimate claimants with the death of Edward of Westminster in 1471. So, Edward, with a few stretches could have been able to justify giving the crown to Henry Brandon, Duke of Suffolk.

The choice between Mary and a male candidate who also had a brother, plus he was near adulthood and could rule on his own, may have been too formidable for Mary to overcome. Henry was connected to his father, Charles, and not to the unpopular Dudley, as Jane was. Many of the people in England might have been likely to favor a male over a female ruler. They had done this with Matilda in 1135, despite Henry I having been a very popular and respected king. The English nobility chose instead Stephen of Blois, the grandson of Adela the daughter of William the Conqueror. Mary was much the same, despite Henry’s reputation, he was seen as a great king by the English of the time. Plus his will had become an Act of Parliament, had Edward lived a few more months and got his will through Parliament, Jane may have prevailed.

Henry Brandon had been raised with Edward and may have been as close as Edward’s friend Barnaby Fitzpatrick. Edward may have married him to a princess of noble girl to strengthen his claim, as he had done with Jane. Her marriage to Guilford Dudley was doe to insure the Duke of Northumberland would support her. With the right allies and the fact that he was a male candidate may have given his the power to overcome Mary. His victory may have come mainly from the belief by many in the nation had about rule by a woman and that the nation needed to be ruled by a man.

Sadly, both were victims of a mysterious illness known as the sweating sickness. It been suggested it may be an unknown species of hantavirus which first appeared in England in 1485 and seems to disappear after 1551. It’s an unknown illness that is called the English sweating sickness or sudor anglicus, that once was attributed to the mercenaries that Henry VII brought over from France. This was later debunked as outbreaks in York predate the landing of Henry’s troops. Typically the onset is sudden and death can occur within hours, as it did with both of the Brandon brothers. Without this disease Edward VI may have been succeeded by Henry IX, or Charles I and the House of Brandon in 1553. Incidentally, Katherine Willoughby did remarry after Charles died, to Richard Bertie, and the present William, Duke of Cambridge is a direct descendant of her through his mother Princess Diana of Wales.