Draft:1553 succession crisis in England

The 1553 succession crisis in England arose from an intractable personal and religious conflict between the Protestant King Edward VI and his older

sister and heiress, Mary, a Catholic.

The plan to remove Mary from the succession and replace her with a Protestant heir from the younger Tudor branch had been in Edward's mind since December 1552. In June 1553, the terminally ill Edward, influenced by the regent John Dudley, named sixteen-year-old Jane Grey, great-granddaughter of Henry VII and daughter-in-law of John Dudley, as his successor. On July 6, 1553, Edward died, and three days later the Privy Council proclaimed Jane Grey Queen of England. Mary, anticipating the actions of the London authorities, fled to eastern England, proclaimed herself queen, and led an armed rebellion. By July 13, when John Dudley personally led a military operation against Mary, she had mobilized up to six thousand armed supporters. Not daring to attack the superior rebel forces concentrated at Framlingham Castle, Dudley retreated to Cambridge and ceased his resistance. The actions of the smaller forces of Jane Grey's supporters on land and sea, and the actions of Princess Elizabeth's detachment, did not affect the outcome of the conflict. On July 19, the Privy Counci l deposed Jane Grey and proclaimed Mary Queen. John Dudley surrendered without a fight, and his allies joined the victors. On August 3, Mary triumphantly entered London and took control of the country. A five-year period of Catholic Counter-Reformation began in England. The immediate victims of the July Crisis were John Dudley, Thomas Palmer, and John Gates, who were executed for treason. Jane Grey, her husband, and her father were executed six months later, after the defeat of Wyatt's Rebellion.

Background
Henry VIII, who ruled England from 1509 to 1547, had three children: Mary, who was raised Catholic, and Elizabeth and Edward, who were raised Protestant. Henry VIII rewrote the Act of Succession three times — in 1533, 1534, and 1543. The final Act of Succession stipulated that Henry's heir was Edward, followed by Mary, then Elizabeth, and finally the descendants of the Tudor side branches of the Grey and Clifford families. Upon Henry's death, the nine-year-old Edward became king, with Mary as his heir according to the 1543 succession law. Henry's will specified that a Regency Council of sixteen men would govern the country until Edward reached adulthood, expected to be in 1555. However, the king's will was violated from the beginning. Instead of the council, real power was seized by individual regents: Edward Seymour from 1547 to 1549 and John Dudley from 1549 to 1553.

With the approval of the teenage king, the two regents and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, actively reformed the Anglican church, abolishing the Roman Rite. Mary, on the other hand, clung to Catholicism and openly protested the reform. Mary got along well with the regime of her long-time comrade Seymour, but she feared his successor, John Dudley, as she had once feared her father, and openly despised him. Dudley was willing to compromise, but to Mary any concession on matters of faith was unacceptable. In the spring of 1550, the rebellious princess decided to flee the country. Her cousin and spiritual advisor Charles V sent an armed squadron to help her, but at the last moment Mary changed her mind and remained in England. Edward did not dare to persecute his sister, limiting himself to reprisals against her advisors.

At the end of 1552 or the beginning of 1553, the fifteen-year-old King Edward VI, who had already become a politician in his own right, planned to exclude Mary from the succession. He could not allow a Catholic to come to power, as this could reverse the reforms he was implementing, return the country to the spiritual authority to the Pope, and potentially lead to repression against those close to Edward. Edward's second possible motive was his intolerance of the perceived "illegitimacy" of his father's marriages to Catherine of Aragon (Mary's mother) and Anne Boleyn (Elizabeth's mother). The third one was, that like Henry VIII, Edward did not favor the transfer of power to a woman for a practical reason: women, sooner or later, marry and fall under the influence of their husbands. The influence that the future husbands of the unmarried Mary and Elizabeth could have on their policies was uncertain and potentially problematic.

My Deuise for the Succession (beginning of 1553)


The first documentary evidence of Edward's plans is his My Deuise for the Succession. The surviving document is written from beginning to end in Edward's hand, in the firm handwriting of a physically fit man. The imperfect, confused language of the order, according to David Lodes, betrays the political immaturity of its author. It is not known whether it was Edward's sole initiative or whether the king's tutor William Thomas had a hand in its creation. There is also no consensus on the date of composition of the first text of the Deuise. Wilbur Jordan, David Lodes, Linda Porter, Geri McIntosh, and other modern historians believe that it was composed by Edward in full health — that is, no later than February or even January 1553. According to Stanley Bindoff, it was written in mid-May, shortly before the wedding of Jane Grey and Guilford Dudley. In all interpretations, the Deuise is seen as the will not of a dying king, but of one who was either healthy or expected to recover. It remained a secret not only from Mary and Elizabeth but also from the regent John Dudley until early June 1553. Edward probably realized that his proposal was against his father's will and custom (in the Plantagenet and Tudor dynasties, power always passed through the male line) and did not risk discussing it even with his closest supporters.

The essence of the document was to give priority to the throne to the unborn sons of Lady Frances Grey, followed by the unborn sons of her unmarried daughter Jane Grey. The choice of the descendants of Henry VII's youngest daughter was easy: Edward had no choice. He could not follow Salic law because of the paucity of men in the Tudor line: the only such man, the eight-year-old Henry Stuart, was Catholic — and therefore unacceptable. The Plantagenet men were also unacceptable: Edward Courtney spent his entire conscious life imprisoned in the Tower, cardinal Pole and his brothers were Catholics and political emigrants. Having excluded from consideration the descendants of the Plantagenets, Henry VII's eldest daughter Margaret (the Scottish Stuarts) and his son (sisters Mary and Elizabeth), Edward was forced to choose from the descendants of Henry VII's youngest daughter Mary. There were no male descendants in this branch of the Tudors, and the oldest woman of childbearing age was Mary's thirty-five-year-old daughter Frances Grey. If Frances could not bear a child, Frances's eldest daughter, Jane, could. She was young, healthy, and brought up in the Protestant faith, and her other qualities were of no importance. Jane Grey was only a temporary means of reproduction. Once Edward had children of his own, there would be no need for Jane and her offspring.

The King's Illness (February-June 1553)