Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > Edward VI: The Last Boy King > Status Update

‘Edward understood that he was in charge. True, he was not yet eighteen. But his voice mattered. He took advice but he was neither bound nor limited by that advice. It was he who gave commands. With all this in mind, we might perhaps imagine Edward reading his ‘Device’ out loud to himself, intelligent and resolute, knowing his own mind, looking to the future of his people without emotion, compelled by duty’

‘Probably Edward began the ‘Device’ in the early spring of 1553 when he was ill but not apparently dying. He had finished it by early June, by which time some thoughts and possibilities set out on paper had become a matter of life-or-death political urgency. At first Edward proposed to leave the crown to a male heir of the family of Lady Frances Grey and her daughters Jane, Katherine and Mary.’

‘In October the Duke of Somerset’s protectorate fell to pieces. His colleagues in the council simply refused any longer to accept his authority; his credibility was spent. Paget’s analysis had been correct: Edward Seymour had broken the trust given to him as Protector... a fantastic misjudgement, Edward Seymour seized the king and took him from Hampton Court to the security of Windsor Castle.’

‘Attainted by Parliament for offences within the compass of high treason, Thomas Seymour was beheaded on Tower Hill on 20 March 1549. In his ‘Chronicle’ Edward made a short and simple entry: ‘the Lord Sudeley, admiral of England, was condemned to death and died the March ensuing.’ Here there was no emotion and no obvious regret.’

‘In July 1544 the household that had cared for Prince Edward since 1538 was broken up on the orders of his father the king... Edward was now six years and eight months old, no longer an infant, and it was time for him to enter the world of men. Sir William Sidney, who had been Edward’s chamberlain for nearly six years, became the prince’s steward.’

‘nine or ten years old Edward began what he called ‘A Chronicle’ which was both a private record of his life and an account of public events. Early on he wrote it in the third person, a grammatical tense that, when we are used to the conversational directness of modern autobiography, today sounds remote and abstract. In a sense there were two Edwards in the ‘Chronicle’: the boy who wrote it and the prince and king’