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The last few years of Henry VIII's life witnessed a contest between reformers and conservatives for control of the Church of England. The reformers wanted to move the Church in a Protestant direction, while the conservatives basically believed in "Catholicism without the Pope"--that is, they accepted the Royal Supremacy (or at least said they did) but wanted it to be used to enforce traditional Catholic doctrine. They were disturbed by the growth of heresy, and by the way the laws against it were being openly flouted, especially in London. They were also alarmed by the Protestant sympathies of Henry VIII's sixth and last queen, Katherine Parr, who sponsored a women's Gospel discussion group at court which listened to discourses by such radical clergymen as Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer. Prominent conservatives included Bishops Stephen Gardiner of Winchester and Edmund Bonner of London, and they had allies in the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, and in the elderly Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard. As for Henry, he liked to portray himself as the wise Solomon protecting the Church from its squabbling clergymen who were calling each other "papists" and "heretics." As he told Parliament in December 1545, "Some be too stiff in their old mumpsimus, other be too busy and curious in their new sumpsimus." http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/tudorspeech.htm In 1546, with Henry's health declining, the conservatives decided that it was time to strike. "[T]hey were becoming increasingly disturbed by the spread of religious dissidence, especially in London and the south-east, and had no doubt who was to blame for the growth of radical views in high places. A vigorous anti-heresy drive was under way by the spring, but Gardiner and Wriothesley remained convinced that the key to the situation remained with the queen, and that the way to bring down the progressives was to attack them through their wives. In the summer of 1546 a promising opportunity presented itself in the person of Anne Kyme, better known by her maiden name of Anne Askew, a notorious heretic already convicted and condemned, who was known to have close connections with the court. Two of her brothers were in the royal service and it semed highly probable that she had attended some of the queen's bible study sessions--she was certainly acquainted with some of the queen's ladies. If it could be shown that any of these ladies--perhaps even Katherine herself--had been in touch with her since her arrest; if it could be proved that they had been supporting her, then the Lord Chancellor would have ample excuse for an attack on the queen." Alison Plowden, *Lady Jane Grey: Nine Days Queen*, p. 29.

Unfortunately for Wriothesly, he could get no information implicating the Queen (or the ladies of her discussion group) from Anne Askew, even when Askew was subjected to the rack. (The racking was counterproductive in that it made Askew a popular heroine--not that that saved her from the stake, of course.) But the campaign against the Queen continued. If she could not be connected with Anne Askew, she could be found guilty in other charges--such as the possession of banned books, which her enemies were sure could be found in her chamber (or perhaps could be planted there). Foxe in his Book of Martyrs tells the famous story of how Henry, annoyed by his wife's habit of arguing theology with him, agreed to have Wriothesly draw up a bill of charges against her; but evidently Henry decided that things had gone far enough, and allowed Katherine to be warned of what was being planned for her. She took this chance to explain to him that the only reason she had dared to argue theological matters with him was to distract him from his painful, ulcerated leg, and so that she could have a chance to listen to his instructive wisdom. With this, the couple was completely reconciled, and when Wriothesly arrived with a warrant for the Queen's arrest, he was greeted with a tirade by the king--"arrant knave! beast! and fool!" "And with that the king commanded him presently to avaunt out of his presence." http://www.exclassics.com/foxe/foxe212.htm

In any event, the fiasco of the Askew racking and the defeat of the plot against the Queen marked the collapse of the conservative resurgence. By autumn, the tide turned completely. "The Duke of Norfolk's son, Henry Howard (Earl of Surrey), was foolish enough to flaunt his Plantagenet ancestry by quartering the royal arms into his own heraldic bearings--an act easily portrayed as treason in the charged atmosphere of the dying king's Court. The Howards' rivals pounced, and the duke and the earl were both charged with treason, the earl for the act itself, and his father for not informing against him." Richard Rex, *The Tudors,* p. 101. Surrey was beheaded on January 19, 1547--Henry's final victim. The Duke of Norfolk was condemned by an act of attainder and destined for the scaffold on January 28--but saved by Henry's death in the early hours of the morning. Bishop Gardiner did not fare quite so badly as the Howards but he was excluded from the Privy Council that Henry in his will named to run things after his death--Henry supposedly said that *he* could manage Gardiner, but he didn't think anyone else could. The removal of Gardiner meant that the upbringing of the young King Edward would be in the hands of Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford (newly created Duke of Somerset), the Lord Protector. Somerset was to lead both Edward and England in an increasingly Protestant direction in the next couple of years; and when he was ousted, the dominant figure in the government (and in Edward's upbringing) became the equally Protestant John Dudley, soon to be duke of Northumberland.

What was Henry's motive in this sudden, last-minute attack on the conservatives? A plausible explanation is that "Henry may well have doubted whether either Norfolk or Gardiner, both old-fashioned Catholics at heart, could be trusted to be entirely sound on Royal Supremacy. This was a point on which the king was always ultra-sensitive and may account for the fact that in the closing months of his life he personally ensured that in his son's reign the balance of power would be tilted in favour of those who advocated a more far-reaching programme of church reform than anything he had previously been prepared to countenance; but with men like the earl of Hertford and John Dudley in the driving seat there would at least be no danger of England returning to papal domination." Alison Plowden, *Lady Jane Grey: Nine Days Queen*, p. 31. In retrospect Henry's worry that the conservatives might return England to papal domination seems justified; but it may seem odd that he neglected the menace from the person who would actually do this, his daughter Mary--with Gardiner, Norfolk, etc. simply being her loyal servants. However, it has to be remembered that in 1546-7 nobody expected Mary to become Queen; Edward was a perfectly healthy boy at the time.

So let's say that Henry VIII had died not in January 1547 but in July 1546--when the conservatives were at the height of their power. Unless young Edward was already irretrievably committed to Protestantism at the age of nine (which I doubt, though it is true that he had already been tutored by the great humanist scholar John Cheke, whose evangelical inclinations were well-known) he might have been brought up to be as zealous a Catholic as he was in OTL a Protestant. (Moreover, it is entirely possible that his fatal illness would be butterflied away, and that he would live for a long time. There was nothing inevitable about his dying when he did; Edward had not been a sickly child. But of course he might have died as in OTL or even earlier.) In OTL the years of Edward's reign were as Richard Rex notes "the cradle of English Protestantism" (*The Tudors,* p. 103) with Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury--whom Gardiner had accused of heresy--leading the way. In 1549, the *Book of Common Prayer* was introduced, leading to Catholic rebellions in the South. (They might have been more formidable if the North had joined them, but on the whole it was quiet. Northerners had learned their lesson from Henry's brutal suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace...) The draconian heresy and treason laws of Henry's days had already been repealed in 1547, in order to let Somerset introduce religious changes which would otherwise have been unlawful. Momentary hopes by conservatives that Somerset's overthrow would bring back the good old days--Wriothesley, who had been ousted from the Privy Council in 1547, even made a brief comeback--proved unwarranted; Dudley continued the same policies. In 1552, a second, more radical version of the *Book of Common Prayer* was published.

If people like Norfolk and Gardiner and Bonner (all of whom were imprisoned under Edward's reign) had retained the power they had in the summer of 1546, none of this Protestantization would have been possible. It is true of course that Mary temporarily reversed the measures of Edward's reign, but they became the foundation for the "Elizabethan settlement"--even if Elizabeth herself thought some of them a bit too radical. So Richard Rex's conclusion seems plausible: "Had he [Henry] died six months earlier, England would have remained a Catholic country." *The Tudors*, p. 102. [1] I am not sure whether by "Catholic" Rex means "Papist" but as the example of Mary shows, once Henry was dead, conservatism could very well lead to reconciliation with Rome.

Thoughts?

[1] A more cautious formulation is that of Christopher Haigh in *The English Reformation Revised*, p. 10: "If Henry had died in the summer of 1546, he would have left conservatives to dominate his young successor; but he died in January 1547, and by then a reformist alliance was directing affairs." http://books.google.com/books?id=55CBPm7CYlEC&pg=PA10
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