The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation

This book is a good story for researchers as well as the general audience.

Diarmaid MacCulloch should have a well merited following by now. His extremely readable books finally made Church History a fascinating subject. His mastery of theology, ecclesiology, iconography, architecture, ceremony, and other dimensions of Tudor England are unrivalled, and he weaves them into a comprehensive whole. The depth and quality of his research are exemplary, and his prose is very good literature. In this book he shows how most events which make the pace of Edward VI's reign seem frantic, were prepared but had to be postponed during Henry VIII's last years. Even during his first year, Edward's establishment under the Duke of Somerset's protectorate was reluctantly forced to appease the Emperor Charles V, the majority of lay politicians, and conservative bishops as powerful as Stephen Gardiner of Winchester. After Somerset's disgrace, John Dudley, first Earl of Warwick and later Duke of Northumberland maintained a more consensual relationship with the Lords. He made peace with France and Scotland, and inaugurated a phase of political reconstruction at home, thus permitting the evangelical revolution to recover its pace. Dr. MacCulloch lets us see that in England as in the Continent, the cost of being too specific on the Lord's Supper was soon perceived, since the matter was admittedly of more importance to traditionalists and evangelicals alike than justification by faith, and also produced more martyrs. This determines a very gradual, even stealthy accumulation of arguments and liturgical reforms up to 1550, although at least Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cranmer had much earlier become convinced that the Lutheran doctrine of Christ's real presence in the Eucharist was as blasphemous as the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation. Nevertheless, MacCulloch argues convincingly that Cranmer's convictions on the Lord's Supper are more in agreement with Heinrich Bullinger's than with either Zwingli's or Calvin's theology. Whether, as John Knox believed, had he reigned longer Edward would have evolved into a doctrinaire Calvinist, is now a moot point.One of this book's main attractions is that it conveys a sense of indebtedness to a very young and serious boy, a great promise that flickered and died. Edward is portrayed as a real believer, not just an immature tool of vested interests. Since he appears to have been gifted with a more thoughtful and less egotistical character than his father, it's very possible that he would have grown up to be a great leader of the Reformation, and Cranmer could have finally convened the General Council of Reformed Churches of which he dreamt.Regardless of how much anglo-catholicism and theological liberalism alike have done to demolish the Edwardian heritage, it's possible that in a critical juncture such as the one Anglicans worldwide find themselves in today, MacCulloch's closing lines might awaken their concern: "Perhaps the Anglican Communion, most enigmatic member of the Christian family of

In the years since publication of his award-winning biography of Thomas Cranmer, one cannot stop marveling at the scholarship of Prof MacCulloch, at his indubitable talent of an author, and at how deftly and effortlessly he adapts it to the restrictions of an academic narrative. `The Boy-King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation', published in 2001 in hardback and in 2002 in paperback, has been a definitive treat for many Tudor students, providing them with an engaging story of the English Reformation in the years between 1547 and 1553, as well as containing references to a mesmerising range of archives, from the good old British Library to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Thanks to Prof MacCulloch's being one of the leading British church historians, this book has rather successfully done what other monographs did not quite manage to achieve. Its main achievement is in the fact that one can no longer think of Edward VI as a juvenile parrot in terms of his political involvement. Although this does not immediately imply that his raison d'etat was promising to be terrific, his participation in the matters of state must not be underestimated, let alone overlooked. MacCulloch illustrates this, for example, with his brilliant analysis of Edward's proposal for the reform of the Order of the Garter in the light of its deriving from Edward's tutorship and contemporary political discourse. The reason why this change in the view of Edward seems so important is because scholars until this day continue to debate the political potential and intellectual faculties of a young king, being mostly critical about both. The most blatant example is Stephen Alford's biography of Edward VI and the review of it by George Bernard. Those, however, who read MacCulloch's book attentively will - hopefully - realise by the end of the last chapter that it is futile to either extol Edward or to dismiss him. Indeed, the boy did not reach his 16th birthday, and no matter what promises had been there, these were buried with him in June 1553. He nevertheless contributed to the affairs of state, by writing proposals, notes, discourses, etc. Certainly, one must still see the forest for the trees, but these documents, written by the young king himself, cannot ever be ignored. One must remember that in all times children were engaged in political discourse, however superficial, especially if they had been destined to the throne. Consequently, these documents, even if they had little or no impact, must be read with all due seriousness to catch the glimpses of an emerging character. For this reason, there cannot be too much praise for MacCulloch, who with a simple phrase `the boy-king' captured the whole ambiguity of Edward's reign and his contribution to the mid-Tudor politics. The book's attention to the representation of power in Edward's reign only further stresses this ambiguity. The careful analysis of many `personas' attributed to Edward VI at different stages of his l