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Death of Edward VI. and accession of Mary 1553

      • Mary's marriage with Philip 1554

      • Submission to Rome and re-enactment of the heresy laws 1554

      • Beginning of the persecution 1555

      • War with France 1557

      • Loss of Calais and death of Mary 1558

      1. Somerset becomes Protector. 1547.– The new king, Edward VI., was but a boy, and Henry had directed that England should be governed during his son's minority by a body composed of the executors of his will and other councillors, in which neither the partisans of change nor the partisans of the existing order should be strong enough to have their own way. The leading innovators, pretending to be anxious to carry out his wishes, asserted that he had been heard to express a desire that they should be made peers or advanced in the peerage, and should receive large estates out of the abbey lands. After gaining their object, they set aside Henry's real plan for the government of the realm, and declared Hertford (who now became Duke of Somerset) to be Protector. A council was formed, from which Gardiner and the Lord Chancellor Wriothesley were excluded as likely to take part against them.

      2. The Scotch War. 1547-1548.– Somerset was as greedy of Church property as the greediest, but he was covetous also of popularity, and had none of that moderating influence which Henry, with all his faults, possessed. He had always too many irons in the fire, and had no sense of the line which divides the possible from the impossible. His first thought was to intervene in Scotland. For some time past Protestant missionaries had been attempting to convert the Scottish people, but most of them had been caught and burnt. Cardinal Beaton, the Archbishop of St. Andrews, had lately burnt George Wishart, a noted Protestant. In 1546 the Cardinal was murdered in revenge by a party of Protestants, who seized on the castle of St. Andrews. A French fleet, however, recaptured the castle, and Somerset, who had sent no help to the Protestants in St. Andrews, marched into Scotland in the hope of putting an end to all future troubles between the kingdoms by marrying the young Queen of Scots to Edward. He carried with him a body of foreign mercenaries armed with the improved weapons of Continental warfare, and with their help he defeated and slaughtered the Scotch army at Pinkie Cleugh, burnt Holyrood and Leith, and carried destruction far and wide. Such rough wooing exasperated the Scots, and in 1548 they formed a close alliance with Henry II., who had succeeded Francis I. as king of France, and sent their young queen across the sea, where she was married to Henry's eldest son, the Dauphin Francis. Somerset had gained nothing by his violence.

      3. Cranmer's Position in the Church of England. 1547.– Somerset's ecclesiastical reforms were as rash as his political enterprises. Cranmer had none of that moral strength which would have made some men spurn an alliance with the unscrupulous politicians of the time. He was a learned student, and through long study had adopted the principle that where Scripture was hard to understand it was to be interpreted by the consent of the writers of the first ages of Christianity. As he had also convinced himself that the writers of the first six centuries had known nothing of the doctrine of transubstantiation, he was now prepared to reject it – though he had formerly not only believed it, but had taken part in burning men who denied it. It is quite possible that if Henry had been still alive Cranmer would have been too much overawed to announce that he had changed his opinion. His exact shade of belief at this time is of less importance than the method by which he reached it. In accepting the doctrines and practices of the existing Church till they were tested and found wanting by a combination of human reason and historical study of the scriptures, interpreted in doubtful points by the teaching of the writers of the early Church, Cranmer more than any one else preserved the continuity of the Church of England, and laid down the lines on which it was afterwards to develop itself. There was, therefore, a great gulf between Cranmer and the advanced Protestants, who, however much they might differ from one another, agreed in drawing inferences from the Scripture itself, without troubling themselves whether these inferences conformed in any way to the earlier teaching. This gulf was constantly widening as time went on, and eventually split English Protestantism into fractions.

4. Ecclesiastical Reforms. 1547-1548.– In 1547 a fresh blow was struck at the devotions of the people. In the churches – by the order of the Government – there was much smashing of images and of painted glass bright with the figures of saints and angels. Gardiner, who protested that the Government had no authority to alter religion till the king was of age, was sent to prison as the easiest mode of confuting him. As Parliaments were usually packed in those days, it does not follow that the nation was eager for changes because Parliament ordered them. There was, however, no difficulty in filling the benches of the House of Commons with men who profited by the plunder of the Church, and when Parliament met, it showed itself innovating enough. It repealed all the statutes giving special powers to Henry VIII. and all laws against heresy. It also passed an Act vesting in the reigning king the whole of the chantries and other like foundations which Henry had been permitted to take, but which he had left untouched. Cranmer, indeed, would have been glad if the money had been devoted to the relief of the poorer clergy, but the grasping spirit of the laymen was too strong for him. So violent was the race for wealth that the Act decreed the confiscation even of the endowments of lay corporations, such as trading companies and guilds, on the excuse that part of their funds was applied to religious purposes. It was soon, however, found that an attempt to enforce this part of the Act would cause resistance, and it was therefore abandoned. In 1548 the Government issued orders abolishing a great variety of Church practices, and, in consequence of the opposition offered by the clergy to these sudden measures ordered that no sermons should be preached except by a few licensed preachers.

      5. The First Prayer Book of Edward VI. 1549.– In 1549 Parliament authorised the issue of a Prayer Book in English, now known as the First Prayer Book of Edward VI. The same Parliament also passed an Act permitting the marriage of the clergy.

      6. The Insurrection in the West. 1549.– Somerset's own brother, Lord Seymour of Sudley, was sent to the block by this Parliament. He had spoken rashly against the Protector's government, but it has been thought by some that his main fault was his strong language against the rapacity with which Church property was being divided amongst the rich. That rapacity was now reaching its height. The Protector had set an evil example in order to raise the palace which, though it has since been rebuilt, still bears the name of Somerset House. He had not only seized on a vast amount of ecclesiastical property, but had pulled down a parish church and had carted off the bones of the dead from their graves. The Reformers themselves, men of the study as most of them were, had gone much farther than the mass of the people were prepared to follow. In 1549 an insurrection burst out in Devon and Cornwall for the restoration of the old religion, which was only suppressed with difficulty.

      7. Ket's Rebellion. 1549.– Another rising took place in Norfolk, headed by Ket, a tanner. Ket's rebellion was directed not so much against ecclesiastical reforms, as against civil oppression. The gentry, who had been enriching themselves at the expense of the clergy, had also been enriching themselves at the expense of the poor. The inclosures against which More had testified were multiplied, and the poor man's claims were treated with contempt. Ket gathered his followers under a tree, which he called the Oak of Reformation, on Mousehold Hill, outside Norwich, and sent them to pull down the palings of the inclosures. The Earl of Warwick – the son of that Dudley who, together with Empson, had been the object of popular hatred in the reign of Henry VII. (see p. 357) – dispersed the insurgents with great slaughter; but it was noted that both here and in the West the Government was driven to use the bands of German and Italian mercenaries which Somerset had gathered for the war in Scotland. It was the first time since the days of John (see p. 182) that foreign troops had been used to crush an English rising.

      8. The Fall of Somerset. 1549.– Somerset no longer pleased any single party. His invasion of Scotland had led to a war with France, and to carry on that war he had found it necessary to debase the coinage still further than it had been debased by Henry VIII. All the disturbance of trade, as well as the disturbance of religion, was laid to his door. At the same time he was too soft-hearted to satisfy his colleagues in the Council, and had shown himself favourable to the outcry against inclosures.

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