Tudor Church Militant: Edward Vi And the Protestant Reformation (Allen Lane History S.) - Hardcover

Already acclaimed for his masterly biography Thomas Cranmer: A Life, winner of the 1996 Whitbread Biography Award, in Tudor Church Militant Diarmaid MacCulloch has turned his attention to one of Cranmer's sovereigns, the last of the male Tudors, Henry VIII's only son, King Edward VI. Ascending to the throne at the age of nine in 1547, by 1553 the delicate young king was dead, plunging the kingdom into political and religious turmoil.

From the outset of this absorbing biography MacCulloch asks "Is Edward's reign a drama worth observing? Often it has been treated as a rather confused entr'acte for the two set-piece spectaculars of Henrician and Elizabethan England". His answer is an emphatic and persuasive "yes". MacCulloch proceeds to offer a readable yet painstakingly researched account of the ways in which Edward's reign was characterised by a remarkable religious evangelism, as the young king consolidated his father's split from Rome and the creation of a specifically English Protestantism. MacCulloch argues that "the Reformation of 1547 to 1553 carried out in Edward's name was a revolutionary act, a dynamic assault upon the past, a struggle to the death between Christ and Antichrist".

The story he proceeds to tell tends to lose sight of Edward the man, focusing instead on the doctrinal passions of this most precocious of young kings, the introduction of the controversial Book of Common Prayer of 1549, the jostling for power among the likes of Cranmer, Cecil, Somerset and Dudley, and the political crisis of 1549 which threatened to unseat Edward. However, this focus on the religious issues at the heart of Edward's reign is MacCulloch's explicit interest from the outset, and is elegantly concluded in his final chapter on "The Afterlife of the Edwardian Revolution". A challenging, elegant and persuasive biography of an unjustly neglected king. --Jerry Brotton

The boy-king Edward VI, last of the male Tudors, died while still a teenager, his plans for his country's future soon to be overturned by his Roman Catholic half-sister Mary. Yet his reign has a significance in English history out of all proportion to its brief six-year span. During its course, England's rulers spearheaded a religious revolution which propelled them into the heart of the European Protestant Reformation. They deliberately sponsored the destruction of a thousand-year-old devotional world, and they let loose an explosive new form of Christianity within the realm. This moulded the future identity of the English nation, created a shape for the Church of England which remains today, and inspired one of the foundation documents of English prose, the Book of Common Prayer, a key text in the development of one of the world's most widely spoken languages. In this book, based on the Birkbeck Lectures at Cambridge University for 1997-98, Diarmaid MacCullogh underlines the significance of Edward's turbulent and neglected reign. He take a fresh look at the life and beliefs of the young king and of the ruthless politicians who jostled for power around him.