Edward VI.

Jennifer Loach, Edward VI 

(Yale English Monarchs Series.) New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999. xviii + 24 pls. + 210 pp. n.p.. ISBN: 0-300-07992-3.

This book is a melancholy memorial to one of England's respected Tudor historians. A member of the faculty at Oxford University and Fellow of Somerville College, Jennifer Loach died in April 1995 a few days short of her fiftieth birthday. Her earlier work had dealt primarily with Parliament during the reign of Mary Tudor. Then, continuing to study the mid-sixteenth century, which she along with a number of other scholars regarded as having been inadequately treated, she transferred her attention to Mary's younger brother, Edward VI, who reigned from the death of Henry VIII in 1547 until his own premature death in 1553. Although Loach had accomplished considerable research and writing, her manuscript was incomplete when she died; it has been edited and prepared for publication by her friends George Bernard and Penry Williams, both well-known Tudor historians.

As Bernard and Williams say in their preface, a life of Edward VI could be approached in two ways. As a simple biography, it might focus on the young king's private life, excluding the examination of government policy and national conditions. A broader study would include such topics as well as a discussion of Edward's chief ministers, Protector Somerset and the Duke of Northumberland. Loach wisely chose the second course. Since Edward died as a teen-ager his personal life was too short to deserve an entire volume, and one of the most interesting issues was the extent to which the boy grew to understand and influence official policy. Loach and her editors have succeeded surprisingly well in offering a full new interpretation of his reign. In some areas, particularly the description of Edward's court, fresh archival evidence is introduced. In others Loach has relied on the work of other writers who have studied aspects of Edward's reign, especially the American scholars Dale Hoak and Robert Braddock.

Convincing revisionist conclusions abound. Loach argues, for instance, that the death of Edward's mother Jane Seymour was caused, not by a puerperal infection, but by a catastrophic vaginal hemorrhage, possibly caused by retention of part of the placenta in the womb. As Loach says, the Queen would have been better served by ordinary midwives than by the royal doctors who attended her. Edward's own health is also reassessed. Although older accounts often stated that he was a sickly child, always fated to have a short life and perhaps inheriting some disorder from his father, Loach agrees with most modern scholars in depicting him as being healthy and handsome at the time of his accession and not seriously ill until the last few months of his life. Having consulted with diagnostic specialists at Oxford, she attributes his death to a suppurating pulmonary infection which led to generalized septicaemia and renal failure.

The character and policy of Protector Somerset, Edward's uncle and first chief minister, is also subject to fresh evaluation. In fact this had begun before Loach wrote; while traditional studies, including the account offered by W K. Jordan in 1968 (Edward VI: The Young King: The Protectorship of the Duke of Somerset), viewed Somerset as a liberal idealist, G. R. Elton and others had come to question his supposed desire to reform religion and society. Like Elton, Loach emphasizes Somerset's military career and concludes that he had litde interest in education or things spiritual. She sees the religious changes of his ministry as consolidating Henry VIII's royal supremacy rather than moving in a Protestant direction, and she is surely right in viewing the dissolution of the chantries as being motivated by the desire to confiscate their endowments rather than a theological denial of the efficacy of prayers for the dead. The iconoclastic attack on images was led by Archbishop Cranmer rather than Somerset; the " Commonwealth party" sometimes seen as fostering social reform offered little more than rhetoric, and documentation for Somerset's support is at best tenuous. The Duke of Northumberland, thought by older writers to be an unscrupulous manipulator of politics, appears here in a more favorable light. He was probably not responsible for Somerset's fall -- Somerset's own failings brought that about -- and his support of Protestant reform was probably genuine, not politically motivated. Here Loach accepts reinterpretations by Hoak and (although she fails to give him due credit) Barrett L. Beer.

A chapter on Edward's court is one of the freshest and most attractive parts of Loach's volume. She sees Edward as being very much his father's child, delighting in elegance and ceremonial. He also shared many of Henry VIII's intellectual interests, including the study of Latin, Greek, French, and music. But (pace John Foxe) he had no deep or informed concern for Protestant theology. Loach believes that Edward himself, when he realized that he was dying, helped draft the notorious "device for the succession" which attempted to deny the crown to both Mary and Elizabeth and place Lady Jane Grey, a more distant relative, on the throne instead. Northumberland also pressed for this plan; Archbishop Cranmer was not involved in originating it but later offered reluctant support. In the end, of course, "Bloody" Mary followed Edward; she was not wrong, Loach concludes, in believing that many of her subjects had not been convinced of the validity of Protestant reforms and longed for the restoration of the old ways in religion.

Loach's final conclusion is worth quoting. "My picture of Edward himself," she wrote, "is a picture not of the young Josias purifying the Church and destroying idolatry, but of a conventional upper-class youth, delighting in warfare, castle building and in the substitute for war that tournaments provided" (184). Such a short reign cannot be understood on its own: one must look back at the reign of Henry VIII, forward to the rule of Mary and Elizabeth, and recognize the continuity in the structures and methods of government. This is a common-sense approach, free from theoretical entanglements, and it is surely right.