Rehabilitating the Duke of Northumberland: Politics and Political Control, 1549–53

Abstract

To students of the mid-Tudor crisis, the brief reign of Edward VI (1547–1553) presents the extraordinary spectacle of both a government and a society on the point of collapse. In October 1549 the machinery of monarchical government actually broke down, one consequence of an internecine war among Privy Councillors collectively unable to exercise the powers of kingship delegated to them by Henry VIII during his son’s minority. In this narrow sense, the political crisis was a predictable one, the result of a fierce competition at court to bestow the pensions, grants and offices in the gift of the Crown. But the coups and state trials of the period reflect more than an exaggerated rivalry for control of the royal powers of patronage. The coup d’état of October 1549, for example, signalled the failure of the duke of Somerset to surmount the simultaneous shock-waves of inflation, rebellion and war on two fronts. The crises which filled Somerset’s protectorate were not resolved by that event; Somerset’s successor, the duke of Northumberland, inherited many of the same problems and more. Indeed, he and his colleagues confronted a permanent crisis of domestic security: in the name of their sovereign lord, the King, they ruled a people whose loyalty they knew they did not command.

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