kingedwardvi:“One incident in particular suggests that by his early teens Edward had absorbed
kingedwardvi:“One incident in particular suggests that by his early teens Edward had absorbed some of the core principles, and vocabularies, of kingly authority. In October 1551 Lord Chancellor Richard Rich received from the king a signet letter challenging Rich’s return of a letter addressed to the lord chancellor by the Privy Council because it bore only eight signatures.The message of the signet letter was simple. Edward thought his authority ’to be su[ch] that what so ever we shall do by the advise of the nombre of our Counsell attending upon our person’ had more ‘strength and efficacye than to be put into question or doubt of the validite therof’. The number of counsellors ’or any parte of them’ did not make the king’s authority. He was prepared to listen favourably - to ’inclyne’ himself to the advise of any number of counsellors; but he was not bound by them.Equally, as king, Edward could instruct the men around him. He recorded in his journal that he ’marveled’ at the lord chancellor’s refusal to deliver a letter ’willed by any on[e] about me to write’.Edward did not need to summon all his councillors, either to make a decision or to turn that decision into action. Once again, in private, he wrote that it was ‘a great impediment for me, to send to al my councell, and i shuld seme to be in bondage’. He appears to have felt himself limited in two ways. First, by the practical nuisance of gathering together privy councillors for the transaction of the routine business of governance. And second, by the assault on his authority.When Edward asked a servant-perhaps William Cecil, who endorsed the draft of the letter - to write to royal commissioners it was an instruction that would have been unremarkable in a normal, adult monarchical context. In 1551, however, it presented itself as an important measure of the transition from potential to active kingship, with Edward’s sense of his own authority beginning to outgrow the protective limits imposed on a king’s power during his minority.But was this sense of development com plemented by physical or structural change at court or in Council? In the letter to Lord Chancellor Rich of October 1551, the king referred to ’our Counsellours here… presently attending upon our persone’. A month earlier Richard Goodrich had received a commission from Edward to visit the Savoy and, with his colleagues, to report the findings to the king ‘or his privy council attendant upon his person’.[…] The political culture of the sixteenth century was different. Tudor governors were perhaps more able than their predecessors to imagine that sovereign power could be exercised on conciliar authority, but this did depend heavily on the monarchical context. A council could offer a solution (at least on paper) to the collapse of Elizabethan monarchy. And yet it was not an issue of preference. The leading subjects of the later Tudor crown were profoundly troubled by fears of dynastic insecurity, and a body exercising sovereign power was preferable to royal interreg num […].The circumstances of Edward’s reign were rather different. But there is some evidence to suggest that, by the early 1550s, the structures of the Council and the dynamics of offering counsel were beginning to change because Edward was growing into his kingship. A ’counsel for the estate’, projected in 1552 […], represented an important political and cultural comment on the notion of the royal estate embracing the public affairs of a kingdom governed by a king counselled. Edward himself wrote that the temporal governance of his realm consisted in ’well ordering, enriching, and defending the hole bodye politique of the commenwelth’, a statement that set him at the heart of the governance of his kingdom. And rightly so: after all, the Edwardian model of kingship was active, engaged, and dynamic […].How should we begin to read Edward’s gradual emergence an operational king? Should we measure his performance in terms of his involvement with the institutional Council? Did he succeed in freeing himself from the influence of the men around him? First of all it is possible to endorse Edward’s developing grasp of the business of king ship and accept the still powerful political presence of John Dudley and his colleagues. This rests on a distinction between the cultural expec tations of Edward’s kingship and the political dynamics of the second half of the reign. The structures of, and relationships in, the bureau cratic Council and the royal household began to adapt themselves to the implications of the king’s age; whether Edward actually became a fully executive and operational king is a different - but of course important matter. The significant point to grasp is that the dynamics of power at the centre were capable of reshaping themselves because the men around the king accepted that, in the circumstances, they should. It is possible to acknowledge flexible and adaptive change at the Edwardian court […].” Alford, Stephen. “Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI” Fan casting: Tom Holland as Edward VI, King of England. -- source link