Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset

Edward Seymour, the eldest surviving brother of Queen Jane Seymour, became the effective ruler of England not by right of blood alone, but through a calculated manipulation of his brother-in-law King Henry VIII's final days. Born around the year 1500 to Sir John Seymour and Margery Wentworth, he entered the royal court as a teenager, serving in the household of Mary Tudor, Queen of France, before rising to prominence through his sister's marriage to Henry VIII in 1536. When Henry died on the 28th of January 1547, leaving a nine-year-old son, Edward VI, Seymour seized the moment to transform himself from Earl of Hertford into Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector of the Realm. He did not wait for the Regency Council to function as intended; instead, he secured letters patent in March 1547 that granted him the power to appoint members to the Privy Council and to consult them only when he chose. This move effectively turned the collective governance envisioned by Henry VIII into an autocracy, with Seymour ruling largely by proclamation while the council rubber-stamped his decisions. His brother Thomas, who had protested his exclusion from power, was eventually beheaded in March 1549 after attempting to seize the governorship of the king's person, a role no previous Lord Protector had ever held. The speed and efficiency of Seymour's takeover were remarkable, yet they sowed the seeds of his eventual downfall.

The Cost of Conquest

Edward Seymour's only undoubted skill was as a soldier, which he had proven on expeditions to Scotland and in the defense of Boulogne in 1546, but his military ambitions would ultimately bankrupt the crown. After a crushing victory at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh on the 10th of September 1547, he established a network of garrisons stretching as far north as Dundee, aiming to unite the realms through conquest. However, the Scots allied with France, sending reinforcements to defend Edinburgh in 1548, while Mary, Queen of Scots, was removed to France and betrothed to the dauphin, the future Francis II of France. The cost of maintaining these massive armies and permanent garrisons placed an unsustainable burden on royal finances, and a French attack on Boulogne in August 1549 forced Seymour to begin a withdrawal from Scotland. His initial successes were followed by a loss of direction, and his aim of uniting the realms through conquest became increasingly unrealistic. The financial ruin of the crown was compounded by the unpopularity of his religious measures and agrarian grievances, which resulted in unrest across England and provoked a series of uprisings, including the Prayer Book Rebellion and Kett's Rebellion. These costly wars and economic mismanagement undermined his government, leading to his fall from power in October 1549.

The Reformer's Paradox

The Cost of Conquest

The Reformer's Paradox

The sequence of events that led to Seymour's removal from power has often been called a coup d'état, and by the 1st of October 1549, Seymour had been alerted that his rule faced a serious threat. He issued a proclamation calling for assistance, took possession of the king's person, and withdrew for safety to the fortified Windsor Castle, where Edward said, Methinks I am in prison. By the 7th of October he was writing desperately to Sir Rowland Hill, Lord Mayor of London, and a fellow member of the Privy Council requesting 1000 troops to defend him and the King, but a meeting had already been had between Hill and London representatives with John Dudley, then Earl of Warwick at Ely Palace. That meeting moved decisively against Somerset, and a united Council published details of Seymour's mismanagement of government, making clear that the Protector's power came from them, not from Henry VIII's will. On the 11th of October, the council had Seymour arrested and brought the king to Richmond, and Edward summarized the charges against Somerset in his Chronicle: ambition, vainglory, entering into rash wars in mine youth, negligent looking on Newhaven, enriching himself of my treasure, following his own opinion, and doing all by his own authority. In February 1550, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, emerged as the leader of the Council and, in effect, as Seymour's successor, and although Seymour was released from the Tower and restored to the council in early 1550, in October 1551 he was sent to the Tower on an exaggerated charge of treason.

The Brothers' Rivalry

Instead, he was executed for felony, that of seeking a change of government, on the 22nd of January 1552 after scheming to overthrow Dudley's regime, and Edward noted his uncle's death in his Chronicle: the duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine o'clock in the morning. Historians have contrasted the efficiency of Edward Seymour's takeover of power in 1547 with the subsequent ineptitude of his rule, and until recent decades, Seymour's reputation with historians was high, in view of his many proclamations that appeared to back the common people against a rapacious landowning class. In the early 20th century this line was taken by the influential A. F. Pollard, and was echoed by Edward VI's 1960s biographer W. K. Jordan, but a more critical approach was initiated by M. L. Bush and Dale Hoak in the mid-1970s. Since that time the first Duke of Somerset has often been portrayed as an arrogant ruler, devoid of the political and administrative skills necessary for governing the Tudor state. The existence of a council of executors alongside the Privy Council was rationalized in March when the two became one, incorporating the executors and most of their appointed assistants and adding Thomas Seymour, who had protested at his exclusion from power, but a few days after Henry's death, on the 4th of February, the executors chose to invest almost regal power in Edward Seymour.

The Coup That Ended A Life

Thirteen out of the sixteen agreed to his appointment as Protector, which they justified as their joint decision by virtue of the authority of Henry's will, and Seymour may have done a deal with some of the executors, who almost all received hand-outs, and he is known to have done so with William Paget, private secretary to Henry VIII. In 1549, Paget was to remind Seymour: Remember what you promised me in the gallery at Westminster before the breath was out of the body of the king that dead is. Remember what you promised immediately after, devising with me concerning the place which you now occupy ... and that was to follow mine advice in all your proceedings more than any other man's. The final state of Henry VIII's will has occasioned controversy, and some historians suggest that those close to the king manipulated either him or the will itself to ensure a shareout of power to their benefit, both material and religious.

Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset

The Cost of Conquest

The Reformer's Paradox

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The Brothers' Rivalry

The Coup That Ended A Life

The Cost of Conquest

The Reformer's Paradox

The Brothers' Rivalry

The Coup That Ended A Life