WHEN EDWARD VI BECAME KING, MARTIN LUTHER HAD been dead for thirteen months and the Lutheran part of the Reformation had largely run its course. After changing the world, the former Friar Martin had withdrawn into a relatively quiet life as the father of a growing family and a writer of biblical commentaries. In the last decade of his life he was tortured by constipation, hemorrhoids, and kidney stones, plagued by the scandal that had erupted when he endorsed bigamy, and increasingly consumed by a virulent anti-Semitism.
