Henry VIII had a son, Prince Edward, who became Kind Edward VI at the age of nine, and died of some sickness or other at the age of fifteen. But what might have happened if Edward had recovered from his illness, and lived long enough to have a meaningful reign in and of himself, rather than via a regency council? Let's suppose he lives to the age of at least 30. What would seem to be probable results?
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..."