July 4, 2023 • 30 mins
The story of King Henry VIII is famous, as are the stories of his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth. King Henry's only son, the sickly Edward VI, had a short reign, often overlooked and too often ignored.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim
and Mild from Aaron Mankie. Listener discretion advised. There is
a boy in bed so sick he can barely lift
(00:21):
his head without coughing and sputtering. His skin is covered
in ulcers. His feet and head are both swollen. There
are whispers from his doctors murmuring that he has a
month to live, maybe two, no more. The boy is
not yet sixteen years old. From certain angles, he looks
(00:44):
like his sweet mother. The boy is so thin from
illness that you would have to squint for him to
look anything like his famously large, hearty father. Still, the
boy has enough energy to call his counsel to him,
telling them that there's something that he has to do.
(01:06):
After all, he's not dead yet. The counselors exchange glances.
What the sick boy is asking them to do might
be treasonous, But then again, maybe that's not possible, because
this is not just any mortally ill boy. The boy
(01:26):
is the King of England. The judges and council must
obey his commands and sign the order of succession. This
boy demands that cuts out the boy's two sisters, upending
the explicit desires of his father, Henry the Eighth, who
looms large in the room. Despite his death six years prior,
(01:51):
Henry the Eighth had been able to declare his plan
for the line of succession back when he was alive.
He wanted his son and then his daughter his first wife,
Catherine of Aragon, and then his daughter by Anne Boleyn.
But if Henry the Eighth had been allowed to make
the line of succession back when he was king, well,
(02:11):
now that Edward the sixth was king, he could decide
the line of succession for himself. He could amend his
late father's plans. The councilman nod grimacing slightly. If this
plan should go awry, well, this ill boy would soon
be dead, and they, the signers, would be the ones
(02:34):
considered treasonous and left to face the consequences. Still, at
this moment, he is their king. The boy holds his
handkerchief to his mouth and takes it away, revealing blood.
If this was a movie, the meaning in that imagery
would be very clear. It's June fifteen fifty three in Greenwich, England,
(03:00):
on the banks of the Thames River. In one month,
King Edward the sixth will be dead. He will be
remembered only as the short lived, barely reigning boy King
of England, the much desired male heir that Henry the
Eighth killed and divorced all those wives. For the story
of Edward's father, King Henry the Eighth is well known
(03:23):
in the popular imagination. This podcast did a series on
his six wives, according to the British nursery rhyme, now
set to music in the Broadway musical six Divorced, Beheaded, died, divorced, Beheaded,
survived the story of his sisters who came to the
throne after him. Mary and Elizabeth are also famous. Mary
(03:46):
would be known sometimes in history as Bloody Mary, champion
of Catholicism. Elizabeth would, of course ring in the long
Golden Elizabethan age as the Virgin Queen. They Mary and
Elizabeth were the first accepted women to rule England as
Queen's But comparatively forgotten as he might be, there was
(04:09):
actually one man in the middle of those famous figures,
while not even a man really a boy, a son
born to the beautiful Jane Seymour, wife of Henry the Eighth,
and the one that he loved best, the only wife
who died a natural death while still married to him.
(04:29):
That little boy, their son, never got to grow up.
He is England's lost king, dead before his sixteenth birthday,
barely a blip in English histories between the enormous stories
of his father and his two sisters. But he had
a story too. It was a story that ended fast
(04:52):
and short, but a story that echoed and inverted his
father's because Edward too was a man surrounded by women
in a time when every dynasty needed a man. He
loved his sisters, and yet he tried with everything he
had to leave a legacy that did not include them.
(05:14):
I'm Danish Schwartz and this is noble blood. The story
of Edward the sixth started on October twelfth, fifteen thirty seven,
with England's King Henry the Eighth, a nervous wreck. Henry
(05:34):
was a man of action who lived to jump onto
his horses and ride out into a hunt. But for
now all he could do was pace and wait. His
third wife, Jane Seymour, was in her thirtieth hour of
labor in Hampton Court Palace. King Henry had already divorced
one wife who had failed him, and beheaded another. Both
(05:57):
had Lain in labor two and both had given him
only daughters. He had whispered to this third wife's growing belly,
Edward Edward. He had ensured no women or midwives would
be present at the birth, only the best doctors, men,
and sweet Jane Seymour, formerly Lady in waiting to his
(06:20):
earlier queen, gave birth to a son, at last, the
only thing Henry had wanted. She Jane would be the
best of all of his wives. Immediately, church bells clanged
throughout London, two thousand rounds of ammunition shot from the
(06:41):
tower guards, free wine and beer poured into the streets.
A circular went out announcing the birth of a quote
prince conceived in most lawful matrimony. Supposedly, the announcement was
sent by Queen Jane, but the labor had been difficult
and it's unlikely she'd have delivered the address. Still, the
(07:05):
language in the announcement was notable. The king had deemed
his daughters Mary and Elizabeth illegitimate. They were both born
while he had been married to their mothers, Yes Mary
from Catherine of Aragon, Elizabeth from the Traitoress and Bolin.
But in the end Henry had to deem each marriage
(07:27):
illegitimate in order to continue on to the next marriage.
With this child his son, there would be no question
Edward was the most lawful. He was the heir. After
baby Edward's birth, two royal gatherings took place in quick succession.
(07:48):
First Edward's christening, a most happy occasion. On October fifteenth,
fifteen thirty seven, the King and Queen received guests in
their bedchamber. Jane, dressed in velvet and fur, sitting on
a pallette beside her husband. Edward's sister, Mary, aged twenty
one at this point, was godmother. Edward's sister Elizabeth, only
(08:12):
four years old, came in carrying the baptismal chrism the
anointments for her brother. She was carried by Jane's brother,
Edward Seymour, remember that name. It was a joyous family
scene for both little Edward and all of England. But
nine days later, Jane Seymour died, and so began the
(08:36):
second gathering in Edward's short life, the funeral ceremonies for
his mother. His sister Mary was chief mourner. Edward and
his mother had only shared the earth for twelve short days,
but despite this early tragedy. Edward's childhood was mostly happy.
(08:58):
He seemed to love his sister's man and Elizabeth, who
seemed to love him too, particularly the much older Mary.
Both sisters were more welcomed into the fold by their
father now that the male line of succession was assured.
In Edward's diary, he wrote that he was brought up
quote among the women until the age of six. He
(09:21):
knew his wet nurse, dry nurse under nurse cradle Rockers,
and his father was extremely protective. As a baby, Edward's
room was scrubbed daily, dirty utensils and food were not
allowed near him, and his clothes tested for poison. You
can understand why Henry was so careful, given all that
(09:44):
he had to go through to get his precious son.
Still little, Edward's childhood was far from sterile. Acrobats and
tumblers performed for his entertainment. He watched bear's fight in
his menagerie. His Mary would watch the minstrels with him,
and she gave them rewards for delighting her younger brother.
(10:06):
Edward didn't see his father often, but Henry doated on
him when they did see each other. In fifteen forty three,
Henry married his sixth and final wife. I mean he
wasn't so happy with a single male heir that he
didn't divorce and behead two other wives during young Edward's childhood,
and Edward had a good relationship with his final stepmother,
(10:30):
Catherine Parr, whom he called his most dear mother. Edward
also had an excellent and robust education in what was
then deemed the humanist tradition. He was very intelligent. He
knew Latin and French, memorized and recited Aesop's fables, and
Cato strengthened his skill at rhetorical argumentation by arguing both
(10:55):
for and against war. He learned cartography, geography, and astronomy,
and directed and acted in masks. Some claim that he
had a photographic or at least idetic memory. This humanist
education also meant he grew up Protestant, unlike his very
Catholic older sister Mary. Nevertheless, he wrote affectionate letters to
(11:21):
both of his sisters. He and his sister Elizabeth, only
four years older than him, had a playful rivalry that
would be familiar to those of us who have siblings today. Academically,
Edward promised quote to my utmost power, if not to
surpass at least to equal you in zeal And. As
(11:41):
with much older siblings today whose texts we might not
respond to quickly enough, Edward was warmer in his letters
to his sister Mary, writing quote, although I do not
frequently write to you, my dearest sister, I love you
quite as well as if I had sent letters to
you more frequently. I write to you rarely, yet I
(12:02):
love you most. Most of this good relationship with his
sisters came about as a result of their father, Henry's
Third Succession Act, passed in fifteen forty three, when Edward
was five years old. The first Succession Act had removed
Mary from the line of succession. The second had removed Elizabeth,
(12:25):
but that had been before the male heir had existed.
This third Act restored the girls to the line of succession,
behind Edward and any other children Henry might have. The
order was Edward and his line of dissent any other
children Henry might have, then Mary, then Elizabeth, and all
(12:48):
that came to really matter. On January twenty eighth, in
fifteen forty seven, nine year old Edward and thirteen year
old Elizabeth were together in Hertfordshire when a messenger arrived
with grim news their father was dead. Brother and sister
(13:09):
might have wept together, but the time for grief was short.
They both knew what this meant. Edward, not yet ten
years old, was going to be crowned king, and he
needed to be ready to rule. Of course, Edward was
still too young to rule on his own. His stepmother,
(13:32):
Henry's final wife, Catherine Parr, had already started signing her
letters as Queen Regent when she found out that she
would not actually be regent at all, despite her wishes,
and despite Henry's dying wishes, it would be Edward's uncle,
Jane Seymour's brother also named Edward, who would be in
(13:55):
charge until the young Edward's eighteenth birthday. He had wanted
a sixteen man regency council to rule equally until his
son turned eighteen. Instead, Edward Seymour was named Lord Protector
of the realm Duke of Somerset. For a while, this
(14:16):
suited the young King. Edward just find his humanist schooling
and his Protestant beliefs deepened apace. His sister Mary loved
to give her little brother presents, and at new year's
he could count on receiving a shirt that his sister
Elizabeth had made for him herself. He was content enjoying
(14:38):
his family's doting and being king in name only, But
as Edward grew older and closer to ruling fully on
his own, tensions and threats were growing from three sources
around him, from the natural world, from his own family,
and from the Lord protector for the natural world, plague abounded.
(15:03):
Two of his closest friends his own age died of
the sweating sickness. But it was the second problem his
family where the rifts were really starting to show, specifically
with Edward's older sister Mary, who'd showered him with gifts
and whom he declared he loved most. The problem was
(15:24):
she was incorrigibly Catholic. Edward, educated as a Protestant, was
becoming more and more anti Catholic. At eleven years old,
he spent eight months writing a treatise about Papal's supremacy,
which makes him sound like he was a really fun kid.
Ever practicing his rhetoric, he argued both for and against
(15:49):
the Pope until reaching his conclusion the Pope was quote
the true son of the devil a bad man, an antichrist,
not exactly the king inclusion a deeply Catholic sister would
want her little brother to have. He told Mary several
times over the years to knock it off with the
(16:09):
Catholic Mass, sometimes criticizing her in front of his council,
an occasion that would sometimes end with both of them crying.
But Mary wouldn't stop. In a diary entry marked March eighteenth,
fifteen fifty one, Edward described a confrontation at Westminster when
(16:30):
he that thirteen year old king called his thirty five
year old sister to a meeting in front of his council. There,
he declared that he'd suffered her mass for long enough
and simply could not bear it anymore. This entry, by
the way, makes a plus use of the passive voice.
(16:50):
Edward writes, quote, it was said that I asked her
to obey she was called into a meeting. The little
king wrote actively about himself plenty, but he didn't need
a twenty first century English teacher to tell him that
the passive voice is perfect when you don't quite want
(17:10):
to take responsibility for the way you're humiliating your adult sister.
Edward's growing frustrations with Mary did get superseded for a
time by that pesky little third problem, his uncle, the
Duke of Somerset. His uncle was planning a coup. A
lot went on here, but long story short, his uncle failed,
(17:34):
and Edward's entire diary entry for January twenty second, fifteen
fifty two is a kind of darkly hilarious one liner.
The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon
the Tower Hill between eight and nine o'clock in the morning.
(17:55):
That's it with the problem of his former lord protector
take care of. Edward may have thought his main concern
would be Catholic Mary, but nature tends to rear its
cruel head, and it was problem number one that ultimately
showed up in another one line diary entry, which isn't
(18:18):
funny at all. On April second, fifteen fifty two, Edward wrote,
I fell sick with the measles and the smallpox. It
was a relatively minor about of sickness at the start,
but history hindsight is twenty twenty and so we looking
(18:38):
back know that's where Edward's real problems would begin. Where
his father had been surrounded by wives and daughters, Edward
had no wife and would never have one, nor would
he have children. Edward was instead surrounded by his sisters
Mary and Elizabeth, and his cousins. Yes, even his cousins
(19:02):
were all women, and they were all through the female line.
His cousin, Jane Gray, was his father's sister's granddaughter. Edward
had grown up among the women in his infancy and
early years, and he was among them again at the
end of his life, at least as far as succession
was concerned. Edward was well educated and knew his history.
(19:27):
He knew that the crown of England had never successfully
passed to a woman, and the closest it came was
the incredibly disputed claim by the Empress Matilda four hundred
years before. Edward looked at his options. His sister Mary first,
as his father had commanded in his third succession act.
As a little brother. He had loved his big sister,
(19:50):
but as king of England he had to contend with
her Catholicism. Despite all of his warnings to her, she
had stayed Catholic. And Edward was the boy who had
called the Pope the Antichrist. He could not in good
conscience leave England in her Catholic hands. Elizabeth was second
(20:13):
in his father's line of succession. There was nothing wrong
with his second sister, per se. But Edward was also
the boy who'd grown up learning rhetoric, arguing both sides
of every issue. He was logical. How could he exclude
Mary on the ground that she was illegitimate without claiming
(20:33):
that Elizabeth was illegitimate too. After all, their father had
only divorced Mary's mother, he had outright killed Elizabeth's mother
and boln for treason. Edward couldn't logically allow Elizabeth to
reign either. So, ailing and aching, the little brother set
about writing the final literary task of his short life.
(20:59):
He called the docor he meant his device for the succession.
Edward wrote about the lack of issue of his body.
He wrote the term heirs male twelve times, as obsessed
with the idea as his father had been before him.
But no matter how many times he wrote what he desired,
he had no heirs at all, male or not. So
(21:21):
he named his cousin, Lady Jane Gray, his heir to
the throne. The judges of the King's Bench warned him
it could be treason. He was directly contradicting his father's will,
potentially directly contradicting a future queen. Edward, sick as he was,
(21:43):
drew himself up to as imposing a height as he
could manage, and reminded them who was currently King Mary,
he said, could not be queen, she would destroy the
Protestant religion in England. He had to quote disown and
disinherit her together with her sister Elizabeth, as though she
(22:04):
were a bastard and had sprung from an illegitimate bed end.
The judges relented, Edward was appeased. In portraits of Edward
from babyhood to young adulthood, he is painted in the
same red orange tunic as his father. His father was
known to be a huge man, married six times in
(22:28):
his fifty five years. Edward would die small and weakened,
never married forever a boy. Yet in the end, maybe
there was a bit of his father in him. After all,
Edward exerted his iron will over the women that he'd loved,
women who'd loved him. He'd used his power to get
(22:51):
rid of them at will. He'd spent his dying days
ensuring that his sisters, at least in his mind, would
never see the throne of England. Well spoiler alert, he failed.
Edward's cousin, Lady Jane Gray, manipulated by the men around her,
(23:11):
claimed the crown for a disputed nine days in July
of fifteen fifty three, and then lost her head. It
was Edward's oldest sister, Mary who became the first accepted
female queen of England, who reigned for five years, re
establishing Catholicism with a violence that earned her the historical
(23:33):
nickname but not altogether entirely accurate, Bloody Mary. After she
died childless in fifteen fifty eight, Edward's other sister, Elizabeth,
reigned for nearly fifty years, bringing England into the seventeenth
century as a Protestant nation. But in the early morning
(23:54):
of July sixth, fifteen fifty three, all of that was
so far ahead. Edward was born into the hands of
male doctors, and he died in their hands too. Just
as they couldn't help his mother, they couldn't help him.
Edward's final days were painful. His fingers and toenails came loose,
(24:17):
his skin turned purplish. He looked so bad that in
his final appearance to the public in a window. Some
onlookers thought that he was already dead by the time
he drew his last breath. Those around him could barely
stand the stench of what came out of his lungs.
An autopsy revealed that his lungs had two enormous ulcers.
(24:42):
Many historians suspect he may have died of what we
now know as tuberculosis, and that his measles of April
fifteen fifty two, that had been jotted as just a
note in his diary, was probably the cause. Measles can't
suppress immunity to tuberculosis. Mary had already fled by the
(25:04):
time her little brother died, knowing full well that as
soon as he died, she would be vulnerable to being captured.
For the tumultuous month that followed Edward's death, when the
line of succession was confused because of Edward's own machinations,
his body laid unburied, waiting for the question of the
(25:24):
crown to be settled among the women who outlived him. Finally,
on August eighth, fifteen fifty three, he was laid to
rest in Westminster Abbey in a vault that was two
and a half feet wide by seven and a half
feet long in unusually small vault by Kingley standards to
(25:44):
this day in Westminster Abbey. He has only a small
plaque on the ground marking his resting place. His sisters
both loom much larger. They are buried in a tomb
together with each other. Edward's father, Henry the eighth, has
company in death, sharing a vault with Edward's mother, Jane Seymour,
(26:07):
the King's favorite. Also in the vault is King Charles
the First and an infant child of Queen Anne. But
the lost often forgotten boy, King Edward the sixth, the
boy who never grew up, is not buried among the women.
He is buried alone. That's the story of the lost
(26:38):
boy King of England who gave way to Bloody Mary.
But stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear
a little bit more about the diary that we quoted
in this episode. I mentioned Edward's diary a few times
(27:04):
in this story. That's because it's actually a really special
historical document, the first private diary of a king in
all of English and European history. But if you're expecting
some really good, juicy details, you'll be disappointed. When I
was nine years old, My diary chronicled my interactions with
(27:26):
my fourth grade crush Todd. But Edward's diary has almost
no hint of an inner life at all. He started
keeping it in fifteen forty seven, the year he became
a king at age nine or ten years old, and
it's clear he was aware he was chronicling history. He
even called it his chronicle, meticulously writing sixty eight pages
(27:50):
of text on eighty four leaves of paper in his
neat italic handwriting. The diary is generally consider uttered boring,
like the driest daily calendar you've ever read. Lots of
one line entries describing Flemish ships, the trade of tallow candles,
(28:11):
detail less dinners with ambassadors, an entire entry that kind
of hilariously reads the aforementioned proclamation was proclaimed. He even
records his own mother's death in a tone that is
flat and refers to himself in the third person. The
first sentence of his diary reads, in the year of
(28:35):
our Lord fifteen thirty seven, a prince was born to
King Henry the Eighth by Jane Seymour, then Queen, who
within a few days after the birth of her son,
died and was buried at Windsor Castle. The words have
no emotion, and so there's something kind of sad about
(28:56):
this little boy, nine or ten and newly orphaned at
the point his father recently dead, aware that he is
the King of England, beginning a diary and starting with
those words, he's recording the death of the mother. He
never knew with an awareness that history would be reading
(29:16):
his words, that you or I would be reading or
listening to those words someday, and that he, as King
of England, should strip all emotion from his careful, doomed
little boy hand. Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio
(29:49):
and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankie. Noble Blood is
created and hosted by me Dana Schwartz, with additional writing
and researching by Hannah Johnston, hannah's Wick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender,
and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by
Noemi Griffin and rima Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh
(30:13):
Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple
Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim
and Mild from Aaron Mankie. Listener discretion advised. There is
a boy in bed so sick he can barely lift
(00:21):
his head without coughing and sputtering. His skin is covered
in ulcers. His feet and head are both swollen. There
are whispers from his doctors murmuring that he has a
month to live, maybe two, no more. The boy is
not yet sixteen years old. From certain angles, he looks
(00:44):
like his sweet mother. The boy is so thin from
illness that you would have to squint for him to
look anything like his famously large, hearty father. Still, the
boy has enough energy to call his counsel to him,
telling them that there's something that he has to do.
(01:06):
After all, he's not dead yet. The counselors exchange glances.
What the sick boy is asking them to do might
be treasonous, But then again, maybe that's not possible, because
this is not just any mortally ill boy. The boy
(01:26):
is the King of England. The judges and council must
obey his commands and sign the order of succession. This
boy demands that cuts out the boy's two sisters, upending
the explicit desires of his father, Henry the Eighth, who
looms large in the room. Despite his death six years prior,
(01:51):
Henry the Eighth had been able to declare his plan
for the line of succession back when he was alive.
He wanted his son and then his daughter his first wife,
Catherine of Aragon, and then his daughter by Anne Boleyn.
But if Henry the Eighth had been allowed to make
the line of succession back when he was king, well,
(02:11):
now that Edward the sixth was king, he could decide
the line of succession for himself. He could amend his
late father's plans. The councilman nod grimacing slightly. If this
plan should go awry, well, this ill boy would soon
be dead, and they, the signers, would be the ones
(02:34):
considered treasonous and left to face the consequences. Still, at
this moment, he is their king. The boy holds his
handkerchief to his mouth and takes it away, revealing blood.
If this was a movie, the meaning in that imagery
would be very clear. It's June fifteen fifty three in Greenwich, England,
(03:00):
on the banks of the Thames River. In one month,
King Edward the sixth will be dead. He will be
remembered only as the short lived, barely reigning boy King
of England, the much desired male heir that Henry the
Eighth killed and divorced all those wives. For the story
of Edward's father, King Henry the Eighth is well known
(03:23):
in the popular imagination. This podcast did a series on
his six wives, according to the British nursery rhyme, now
set to music in the Broadway musical six Divorced, Beheaded, died, divorced, Beheaded,
survived the story of his sisters who came to the
throne after him. Mary and Elizabeth are also famous. Mary
(03:46):
would be known sometimes in history as Bloody Mary, champion
of Catholicism. Elizabeth would, of course ring in the long
Golden Elizabethan age as the Virgin Queen. They Mary and
Elizabeth were the first accepted women to rule England as
Queen's But comparatively forgotten as he might be, there was
(04:09):
actually one man in the middle of those famous figures,
while not even a man really a boy, a son
born to the beautiful Jane Seymour, wife of Henry the Eighth,
and the one that he loved best, the only wife
who died a natural death while still married to him.
(04:29):
That little boy, their son, never got to grow up.
He is England's lost king, dead before his sixteenth birthday,
barely a blip in English histories between the enormous stories
of his father and his two sisters. But he had
a story too. It was a story that ended fast
(04:52):
and short, but a story that echoed and inverted his
father's because Edward too was a man surrounded by women
in a time when every dynasty needed a man. He
loved his sisters, and yet he tried with everything he
had to leave a legacy that did not include them.
(05:14):
I'm Danish Schwartz and this is noble blood. The story
of Edward the sixth started on October twelfth, fifteen thirty seven,
with England's King Henry the Eighth, a nervous wreck. Henry
(05:34):
was a man of action who lived to jump onto
his horses and ride out into a hunt. But for
now all he could do was pace and wait. His
third wife, Jane Seymour, was in her thirtieth hour of
labor in Hampton Court Palace. King Henry had already divorced
one wife who had failed him, and beheaded another. Both
(05:57):
had Lain in labor two and both had given him
only daughters. He had whispered to this third wife's growing belly,
Edward Edward. He had ensured no women or midwives would
be present at the birth, only the best doctors, men,
and sweet Jane Seymour, formerly Lady in waiting to his
(06:20):
earlier queen, gave birth to a son, at last, the
only thing Henry had wanted. She Jane would be the
best of all of his wives. Immediately, church bells clanged
throughout London, two thousand rounds of ammunition shot from the
(06:41):
tower guards, free wine and beer poured into the streets.
A circular went out announcing the birth of a quote
prince conceived in most lawful matrimony. Supposedly, the announcement was
sent by Queen Jane, but the labor had been difficult
and it's unlikely she'd have delivered the address. Still, the
(07:05):
language in the announcement was notable. The king had deemed
his daughters Mary and Elizabeth illegitimate. They were both born
while he had been married to their mothers, Yes Mary
from Catherine of Aragon, Elizabeth from the Traitoress and Bolin.
But in the end Henry had to deem each marriage
(07:27):
illegitimate in order to continue on to the next marriage.
With this child his son, there would be no question
Edward was the most lawful. He was the heir. After
baby Edward's birth, two royal gatherings took place in quick succession.
(07:48):
First Edward's christening, a most happy occasion. On October fifteenth,
fifteen thirty seven, the King and Queen received guests in
their bedchamber. Jane, dressed in velvet and fur, sitting on
a pallette beside her husband. Edward's sister, Mary, aged twenty
one at this point, was godmother. Edward's sister Elizabeth, only
(08:12):
four years old, came in carrying the baptismal chrism the
anointments for her brother. She was carried by Jane's brother,
Edward Seymour, remember that name. It was a joyous family
scene for both little Edward and all of England. But
nine days later, Jane Seymour died, and so began the
(08:36):
second gathering in Edward's short life, the funeral ceremonies for
his mother. His sister Mary was chief mourner. Edward and
his mother had only shared the earth for twelve short days,
but despite this early tragedy. Edward's childhood was mostly happy.
(08:58):
He seemed to love his sister's man and Elizabeth, who
seemed to love him too, particularly the much older Mary.
Both sisters were more welcomed into the fold by their
father now that the male line of succession was assured.
In Edward's diary, he wrote that he was brought up
quote among the women until the age of six. He
(09:21):
knew his wet nurse, dry nurse under nurse cradle Rockers,
and his father was extremely protective. As a baby, Edward's
room was scrubbed daily, dirty utensils and food were not
allowed near him, and his clothes tested for poison. You
can understand why Henry was so careful, given all that
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he had to go through to get his precious son.
Still little, Edward's childhood was far from sterile. Acrobats and
tumblers performed for his entertainment. He watched bear's fight in
his menagerie. His Mary would watch the minstrels with him,
and she gave them rewards for delighting her younger brother.
(10:06):
Edward didn't see his father often, but Henry doated on
him when they did see each other. In fifteen forty three,
Henry married his sixth and final wife. I mean he
wasn't so happy with a single male heir that he
didn't divorce and behead two other wives during young Edward's childhood,
and Edward had a good relationship with his final stepmother,
(10:30):
Catherine Parr, whom he called his most dear mother. Edward
also had an excellent and robust education in what was
then deemed the humanist tradition. He was very intelligent. He
knew Latin and French, memorized and recited Aesop's fables, and
Cato strengthened his skill at rhetorical argumentation by arguing both
(10:55):
for and against war. He learned cartography, geography, and astronomy,
and directed and acted in masks. Some claim that he
had a photographic or at least idetic memory. This humanist
education also meant he grew up Protestant, unlike his very
Catholic older sister Mary. Nevertheless, he wrote affectionate letters to
(11:21):
both of his sisters. He and his sister Elizabeth, only
four years older than him, had a playful rivalry that
would be familiar to those of us who have siblings today. Academically,
Edward promised quote to my utmost power, if not to
surpass at least to equal you in zeal And. As
(11:41):
with much older siblings today whose texts we might not
respond to quickly enough, Edward was warmer in his letters
to his sister Mary, writing quote, although I do not
frequently write to you, my dearest sister, I love you
quite as well as if I had sent letters to
you more frequently. I write to you rarely, yet I
(12:02):
love you most. Most of this good relationship with his
sisters came about as a result of their father, Henry's
Third Succession Act, passed in fifteen forty three, when Edward
was five years old. The first Succession Act had removed
Mary from the line of succession. The second had removed Elizabeth,
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but that had been before the male heir had existed.
This third Act restored the girls to the line of succession,
behind Edward and any other children Henry might have. The
order was Edward and his line of dissent any other
children Henry might have, then Mary, then Elizabeth, and all
(12:48):
that came to really matter. On January twenty eighth, in
fifteen forty seven, nine year old Edward and thirteen year
old Elizabeth were together in Hertfordshire when a messenger arrived
with grim news their father was dead. Brother and sister
(13:09):
might have wept together, but the time for grief was short.
They both knew what this meant. Edward, not yet ten
years old, was going to be crowned king, and he
needed to be ready to rule. Of course, Edward was
still too young to rule on his own. His stepmother,
(13:32):
Henry's final wife, Catherine Parr, had already started signing her
letters as Queen Regent when she found out that she
would not actually be regent at all, despite her wishes,
and despite Henry's dying wishes, it would be Edward's uncle,
Jane Seymour's brother also named Edward, who would be in
(13:55):
charge until the young Edward's eighteenth birthday. He had wanted
a sixteen man regency council to rule equally until his
son turned eighteen. Instead, Edward Seymour was named Lord Protector
of the realm Duke of Somerset. For a while, this
(14:16):
suited the young King. Edward just find his humanist schooling
and his Protestant beliefs deepened apace. His sister Mary loved
to give her little brother presents, and at new year's
he could count on receiving a shirt that his sister
Elizabeth had made for him herself. He was content enjoying
(14:38):
his family's doting and being king in name only, But
as Edward grew older and closer to ruling fully on
his own, tensions and threats were growing from three sources
around him, from the natural world, from his own family,
and from the Lord protector for the natural world, plague abounded.
(15:03):
Two of his closest friends his own age died of
the sweating sickness. But it was the second problem his
family where the rifts were really starting to show, specifically
with Edward's older sister Mary, who'd showered him with gifts
and whom he declared he loved most. The problem was
(15:24):
she was incorrigibly Catholic. Edward, educated as a Protestant, was
becoming more and more anti Catholic. At eleven years old,
he spent eight months writing a treatise about Papal's supremacy,
which makes him sound like he was a really fun kid.
Ever practicing his rhetoric, he argued both for and against
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the Pope until reaching his conclusion the Pope was quote
the true son of the devil a bad man, an antichrist,
not exactly the king inclusion a deeply Catholic sister would
want her little brother to have. He told Mary several
times over the years to knock it off with the
(16:09):
Catholic Mass, sometimes criticizing her in front of his council,
an occasion that would sometimes end with both of them crying.
But Mary wouldn't stop. In a diary entry marked March eighteenth,
fifteen fifty one, Edward described a confrontation at Westminster when
(16:30):
he that thirteen year old king called his thirty five
year old sister to a meeting in front of his council. There,
he declared that he'd suffered her mass for long enough
and simply could not bear it anymore. This entry, by
the way, makes a plus use of the passive voice.
(16:50):
Edward writes, quote, it was said that I asked her
to obey she was called into a meeting. The little
king wrote actively about himself plenty, but he didn't need
a twenty first century English teacher to tell him that
the passive voice is perfect when you don't quite want
(17:10):
to take responsibility for the way you're humiliating your adult sister.
Edward's growing frustrations with Mary did get superseded for a
time by that pesky little third problem, his uncle, the
Duke of Somerset. His uncle was planning a coup. A
lot went on here, but long story short, his uncle failed,
(17:34):
and Edward's entire diary entry for January twenty second, fifteen
fifty two is a kind of darkly hilarious one liner.
The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon
the Tower Hill between eight and nine o'clock in the morning.
(17:55):
That's it with the problem of his former lord protector
take care of. Edward may have thought his main concern
would be Catholic Mary, but nature tends to rear its
cruel head, and it was problem number one that ultimately
showed up in another one line diary entry, which isn't
(18:18):
funny at all. On April second, fifteen fifty two, Edward wrote,
I fell sick with the measles and the smallpox. It
was a relatively minor about of sickness at the start,
but history hindsight is twenty twenty and so we looking
(18:38):
back know that's where Edward's real problems would begin. Where
his father had been surrounded by wives and daughters, Edward
had no wife and would never have one, nor would
he have children. Edward was instead surrounded by his sisters
Mary and Elizabeth, and his cousins. Yes, even his cousins
(19:02):
were all women, and they were all through the female line.
His cousin, Jane Gray, was his father's sister's granddaughter. Edward
had grown up among the women in his infancy and
early years, and he was among them again at the
end of his life, at least as far as succession
was concerned. Edward was well educated and knew his history.
(19:27):
He knew that the crown of England had never successfully
passed to a woman, and the closest it came was
the incredibly disputed claim by the Empress Matilda four hundred
years before. Edward looked at his options. His sister Mary first,
as his father had commanded in his third succession act.
As a little brother. He had loved his big sister,
(19:50):
but as king of England he had to contend with
her Catholicism. Despite all of his warnings to her, she
had stayed Catholic. And Edward was the boy who had
called the Pope the Antichrist. He could not in good
conscience leave England in her Catholic hands. Elizabeth was second
(20:13):
in his father's line of succession. There was nothing wrong
with his second sister, per se. But Edward was also
the boy who'd grown up learning rhetoric, arguing both sides
of every issue. He was logical. How could he exclude
Mary on the ground that she was illegitimate without claiming
(20:33):
that Elizabeth was illegitimate too. After all, their father had
only divorced Mary's mother, he had outright killed Elizabeth's mother
and boln for treason. Edward couldn't logically allow Elizabeth to
reign either. So, ailing and aching, the little brother set
about writing the final literary task of his short life.
(20:59):
He called the docor he meant his device for the succession.
Edward wrote about the lack of issue of his body.
He wrote the term heirs male twelve times, as obsessed
with the idea as his father had been before him.
But no matter how many times he wrote what he desired,
he had no heirs at all, male or not. So
(21:21):
he named his cousin, Lady Jane Gray, his heir to
the throne. The judges of the King's Bench warned him
it could be treason. He was directly contradicting his father's will,
potentially directly contradicting a future queen. Edward, sick as he was,
(21:43):
drew himself up to as imposing a height as he
could manage, and reminded them who was currently King Mary,
he said, could not be queen, she would destroy the
Protestant religion in England. He had to quote disown and
disinherit her together with her sister Elizabeth, as though she
(22:04):
were a bastard and had sprung from an illegitimate bed end.
The judges relented, Edward was appeased. In portraits of Edward
from babyhood to young adulthood, he is painted in the
same red orange tunic as his father. His father was
known to be a huge man, married six times in
(22:28):
his fifty five years. Edward would die small and weakened,
never married forever a boy. Yet in the end, maybe
there was a bit of his father in him. After all,
Edward exerted his iron will over the women that he'd loved,
women who'd loved him. He'd used his power to get
(22:51):
rid of them at will. He'd spent his dying days
ensuring that his sisters, at least in his mind, would
never see the throne of England. Well spoiler alert, he failed.
Edward's cousin, Lady Jane Gray, manipulated by the men around her,
(23:11):
claimed the crown for a disputed nine days in July
of fifteen fifty three, and then lost her head. It
was Edward's oldest sister, Mary who became the first accepted
female queen of England, who reigned for five years, re
establishing Catholicism with a violence that earned her the historical
(23:33):
nickname but not altogether entirely accurate, Bloody Mary. After she
died childless in fifteen fifty eight, Edward's other sister, Elizabeth,
reigned for nearly fifty years, bringing England into the seventeenth
century as a Protestant nation. But in the early morning
(23:54):
of July sixth, fifteen fifty three, all of that was
so far ahead. Edward was born into the hands of
male doctors, and he died in their hands too. Just
as they couldn't help his mother, they couldn't help him.
Edward's final days were painful. His fingers and toenails came loose,
(24:17):
his skin turned purplish. He looked so bad that in
his final appearance to the public in a window. Some
onlookers thought that he was already dead by the time
he drew his last breath. Those around him could barely
stand the stench of what came out of his lungs.
An autopsy revealed that his lungs had two enormous ulcers.
(24:42):
Many historians suspect he may have died of what we
now know as tuberculosis, and that his measles of April
fifteen fifty two, that had been jotted as just a
note in his diary, was probably the cause. Measles can't
suppress immunity to tuberculosis. Mary had already fled by the
(25:04):
time her little brother died, knowing full well that as
soon as he died, she would be vulnerable to being captured.
For the tumultuous month that followed Edward's death, when the
line of succession was confused because of Edward's own machinations,
his body laid unburied, waiting for the question of the
(25:24):
crown to be settled among the women who outlived him. Finally,
on August eighth, fifteen fifty three, he was laid to
rest in Westminster Abbey in a vault that was two
and a half feet wide by seven and a half
feet long in unusually small vault by Kingley standards to
(25:44):
this day in Westminster Abbey. He has only a small
plaque on the ground marking his resting place. His sisters
both loom much larger. They are buried in a tomb
together with each other. Edward's father, Henry the eighth, has
company in death, sharing a vault with Edward's mother, Jane Seymour,
(26:07):
the King's favorite. Also in the vault is King Charles
the First and an infant child of Queen Anne. But
the lost often forgotten boy, King Edward the sixth, the
boy who never grew up, is not buried among the women.
He is buried alone. That's the story of the lost
(26:38):
boy King of England who gave way to Bloody Mary.
But stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear
a little bit more about the diary that we quoted
in this episode. I mentioned Edward's diary a few times
(27:04):
in this story. That's because it's actually a really special
historical document, the first private diary of a king in
all of English and European history. But if you're expecting
some really good, juicy details, you'll be disappointed. When I
was nine years old, My diary chronicled my interactions with
(27:26):
my fourth grade crush Todd. But Edward's diary has almost
no hint of an inner life at all. He started
keeping it in fifteen forty seven, the year he became
a king at age nine or ten years old, and
it's clear he was aware he was chronicling history. He
even called it his chronicle, meticulously writing sixty eight pages
(27:50):
of text on eighty four leaves of paper in his
neat italic handwriting. The diary is generally consider uttered boring,
like the driest daily calendar you've ever read. Lots of
one line entries describing Flemish ships, the trade of tallow candles,
(28:11):
detail less dinners with ambassadors, an entire entry that kind
of hilariously reads the aforementioned proclamation was proclaimed. He even
records his own mother's death in a tone that is
flat and refers to himself in the third person. The
first sentence of his diary reads, in the year of
(28:35):
our Lord fifteen thirty seven, a prince was born to
King Henry the Eighth by Jane Seymour, then Queen, who
within a few days after the birth of her son,
died and was buried at Windsor Castle. The words have
no emotion, and so there's something kind of sad about
(28:56):
this little boy, nine or ten and newly orphaned at
the point his father recently dead, aware that he is
the King of England, beginning a diary and starting with
those words, he's recording the death of the mother. He
never knew with an awareness that history would be reading
(29:16):
his words, that you or I would be reading or
listening to those words someday, and that he, as King
of England, should strip all emotion from his careful, doomed
little boy hand. Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio
(29:49):
and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankie. Noble Blood is
created and hosted by me Dana Schwartz, with additional writing
and researching by Hannah Johnston, hannah's Wick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender,
and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by
Noemi Griffin and rima Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh
(30:13):
Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple
Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Host
Dana Schwartz
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