Again I'll recycle one of my old soc.history.what-if posts:
***
There is a discussion of what would have happened if Edward VI had lived
longer in Richard Rex, *The Tudors,* pp. 129-130. (Rex, Director of
Studies in History at Queens' College, Oxford, offers several interesting
counterfactuals in this book.)
"Had Edward VI survived, the history of England and of Europe would have
been vastly different. Although Mary Tudor, like many others as Catholic
as she, persuaded herself that the Protestant Reformation was little more
than a self-seeking conspiracy by a Court cabal, and that Edward would
repudiate it upon attaining his majority, she was quite wrong. That is
not to deny that the Protestant Reformation in England was a self-seeking
conspiracy by a Court cabal--even dedicated Protestants like Hugh Latimer
and Thomas Lever said as much, in sermons preached to the Court!--but it
was much, much more. For a start, it was an evangelical religious
movement offering a new heaven and a new earth, capable of inspiring its
followers to virtuous lives and heroic deaths. As Mary was to find, the
removal of the cabal and the withdrawal of royal support did not mean that
Protestantism would simply melt away like a morning frost. Even more
important, Protestantism was in a real sense Edward's religion. There was
no way that he would have repudiated it had he grown up. And once the
young zealot had taken personal control of his government, there is every
reason to believe that the Protestant politics of Somerset and
Northumberland would have been the keynote of his reign. He had been
groomed by Cranmer, Somerset, and Northumberland to be the champion of
European Protestantism, a sort of evangelical crusader. Even allowing him
the modest life expectancy of his father and grandfather, around fifty
years, he might have ruled England until the 1580s.
"A solidly Protestant England, united under a vigorous Tudor king, would
have been well placed to take advantage of the religious and political
chaos which spread through France and the Netherlands in the later
sixteenth century. Of course, not even under a vigorous and mature king
could England have threatened the hegemony of Spain under Philip II. But
it would certainly have shifted the balance of power, it would probably
have driven Spanish power back to the Pyrenees, and it might possibly have
established the total dominance of Protestantism in Northern Europe. With
England's political leadership and full royal support for the
international vision of Thomas Cranmer, who under these circumstances
would have become the veritable patriarch of European Protestantism, the
history of Protestantism itself might have been very different, a solid
ecclesiastical block in the north ranged against the Catholicism of the
south and the Orthodoxy of the east. As for England itself, thirty years
under a king as zealous as Edward would have resulted in a Protestantism
as dour and grey as anything ever seen in Scotland or Switzerland. 'Merry
England' would have come to an even more complete and sudden end. There
would have been no more cakes and ale, no Shakespeare, no Anglican choral
tradition... The future of England, to use some words at this time still
to be coined, would have been not 'Anglican' but 'Puritan". Yet it was
not to be. For Mary Tudor would in fact inherit the throne, and would thus
save not only English Catholicism, but even much that would later be part
of Anglicanism, much that we find it difficult to conceive the history of
England without..."
For a slightly skeptical view of some of Rex's counterfactuals, see the
review in *Times Higher Education*
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=173512
"Rex poses some plausible counter-factuals: had Henry VIII died six months
earlier, England would have remained a Catholic country; had Edward VI
lived, England would not only have become thoroughly Protestant ('as dour
and grey as anything ever seen in Scotland or Switzerland'), but it might
have led a Protestant northern Europe against the Catholic south.
"This sense of contingency, depending on the particular views and
experiences of monarchs and on the kaleidoscopic shifts of faction, is
certainly the emergent orthodoxy of England's long 'Reformations'. But the
argument may undermine itself. Would a Catholic Privy Council really have
managed to sideline Edward VI's Protestantism, inculcated by evangelical
education? Equally, if Catholicism was so popular at ground level (an
essential building block in the now-orthodox revisionist argument), then
surely implementing a thorough Protestantisation would not have been so
easy even for a long-lived Edward VI?
"Indeed, Rex does not push his luck where Mary is concerned, given that
she was unlikely to bear children and so would have eventually been
succeeded by Elizabeth anyway. He resists the temptation to offer a vision
of a Catholic England to match his peroration on Edward, contenting
himself instead with the conclusion that, while 'she did not save England
for Roman Catholicism', she 'saved Roman Catholicism in England' because
she 'stopped the rot'.
"Perhaps, indeed, some sort of compromise such as the Anglicanism that
emerged under Elizabeth was the only possible solution. Elizabeth
recognised what neither her father nor her siblings could accept - that
securing uniform inner conversion to a single religious outlook was
impossible and was a recipe for endless division. Insisting only on
outward conformity offered the sole hope of some stability after three
decades of traumas. Perhaps Rex implicitly acknowledges this necessity, in
that his account of the Elizabethan settlement takes on a greater air of
inevitability than some historians would accept..."
