Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Edward VI
EDWARD VI (1537–1553), king of England, was son of Henry VIII cry his third wife, Jane Seymour, daughter of Sir John Seymour of Wolf Hall, Savernake, Wiltshire. His father married 19 May 1536, and the son was born at Hampton Court 12 Oct. 1537. A letter under the queen's signet announced the event to 'the lord privy seal' on the same day. The christening took place in the chapel at Hampton Court on 16 Oct. Princess Mary was godmother, and Archbishop Cranmer and the Duke of Norfolk godfathers. The Marchioness of Exeter carried the infant in her arms during the ceremony. On 19 Oct. Hugh Latimer sent the minister Cromwell a characteristic letter, entreating that the child should be brought up in the protestant faith. Queen Jane Seymour died on 24 Oct., and the despatch sent to foreign courts to announce her death dwelt on the flourishing health of the prince. In his first year Holbein painted his portrait and that of his wet nurse, 'Mother Iak.' As early as March 1539 a separate household was established for the boy. Sir William Sidney became chamberlain, and Sir John Cornwallis steward. There were also appointed a comptroller, vice-chamberlain, almoner, dean, lady-mistress, nurse, and rockers. Lady Bryan, who had brought up both the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, received the office of lady-mistress, and Sybil Penne, sister of Sir William Sidney's wife, was nominated chief nurse in October 1538. George Owen was the prince's physician from the first. The royal nursery was stationary for the most part at Hampton Court, where the Princess Mary paid many visits to her little stepbrother in 1537 and 1538. The lords of the council were granted a first audience in September 1538, while Edward was at Havering-atte-Bower, Essex. In February 1538-9 the French ambassador, and in October 1542 Con O'Neil, earl of Tyrone, visited the child. In 1543 his household was temporarily removed to Ashridge, Hertfordshire. In July of the same year the war with Scotland was brought to a close. The chief stipulation of the peace-treaty was that the boy should marry Mary Queen of Scots, who, although a queen, was not at the time quite seven months old.
Until he was six Edward was brought up 'among the women' (Journal, 209). At that age Dr. Richard Cox [q. v.] became his first schoolmaster. In July 1544 Sir John Cheke [q. v.] was summoned from Cambridge 'as a supplement to Mr. Coxe,' and to Sir Anthony Cooke [q. v.] Edward also owed some part of his education. On several occasions Roger Ascham gave him lessons in penmanship; but Edward, although he wrote clearly and regularly, never attained any remarkable skill in the art. Latin, Greek, and French chiefly occupied him. He wrote in Latin to his godfather Cranmer when he was eight. In 1546 Dr. Cox stated that he knew 'four books of Cato' by heart, and 'things of the Bible,' Vives, Æsop, and 'Latin-making.' His three extant exercise-books, dated 1548 to 1560 (one is at the British Museum and two in the Bodleian Library), are chiefly filled with extracts from Cicero's philosophical works and Aristotle's 'Ethics.' Ascham, writing to Sturm 14 Dec. 1550, when Edward was thirteen, reported that he had read all Aristotle's 'Ethics' and 'Dialectics,' and was translating Cicero's 'De Philosophia' into Greek. The books in his library, still preserved in the Royal Library at the British Museum, include an edition of Thucydides (Basle, 1540), besides most of the Fathers' writings. John Bellemain was Edward's French tutor, and Fuller states that he had a German tutor named Randolph, but no such person is mentioned elsewhere. Martin Bucer doubtfully asserts that Edward spoke Italian. Philip van Wilder taught him to play on the lute, and he exhibited his skill to the French ambassador in 1550. Probably Dr. Christopher Tye, who set the Acts of the Apostles to music, and Thomas Sternhold, the versifier of the Psalms, also gave him musical instruction. The prince took an interest in astronomy, which he defended in a written paper in 1551, and he had an elaborate quadrant constructed, which is now in the British Museum. Always of a studious disposition, Edward would 'sequester himself into some chamber or gallery' to learn his lessons by heart, and was always cheerful at his books (Foxe). Little time was devoted to games, but he occasionally took part in tilting, shooting, hunting, hawking, and prisoners' base. As early as August 1546 Annebaut, the French ambassador, was enthusiastic about the boy's accomplishments, and in 1547 William Thomas, clerk of the council, described his knowledge and courtesy as unexampled in a child of ten.
Many highborn youths of about his own age were his daily companions, and shared, according to the practice of the time, in his education. Among them were Henry Brandon, duke of Norfolk, and his brother Charles, his cousin, Edward Seymour (heir of Protector Somerset), Lord Maltravers (heir of the Earl of Arundel), John, lord Lumley, Henry, lord Strange (heir of the Earl of Derby), John Dudley (son of the Earl of Warwick), Francis, lord Russell, Henry, lord Stafford (heir of the last Duke of Buckingham), Lord Thomas Howard (son of the attainted Earl of Surrey), Lord Giles Paulet, and James Blount, lord Mountjoy. But his favourite schoolfellow was Barnaby Fitzpatrick [q. v.], heir of Barnaby, lord of Upper Ossory, with whom he maintained in the last years of his short life an affectionate correspondence (printed by Horace Walpole, 1772). Fuller and Burnet assert that Fitzpatrick was the prince's 'whipping-boy,' suffering in his own person the punishments due to the prince's offences.
Edward was at Hatfield when Henry VIII died (21 Jan. 1546-7). He was little more than nine, and had never been formally created Prince of Wales, although the ceremony had been in contemplation. Henry's will, dated 30 Dec. 1546, constituted Edward his lawful heir and successor, and named eighteen executors to act as a council of regency during the prince's minority, with twelve others as assistant-executors to be summoned to council at the pleasure of the first-named body. Among the chief executors were Edward's uncle, the Earl of Hertford, and Viscount Lisle (afterwards Duke of Northumberland). On the day after Henry's death Hertford brought Edward and his sister Elizabeth to Enfield, and on Monday, 31 Jan., Edward was taken to the Tower of London. On Tuesday the lords of the council did homage, and Lord-chancellor Wriothesley announced that the council of regency had chosen Hertford to be governor and protector of the realm. The lord chancellor and other officers of justice resigned their posts to be reinstalled in them by the new king. On 4 Feb. the lord protector assumed the additional offices of lord treasurer and earl marshal. Dudley became chamberlain, and the protector's brother, Thomas Seymour, admiral. All other offices were left in the hands of the previous holders. On Sunday, 6 Feb., the young king, still at the Tower, was created a knight by his uncle, the protector, and on 18 Feb. he distributed a number of peerages among his councillors, promoting the protector to the dukedom of Somerset, Dudley to the earldom of Warwick, and Sir Thomas Seymour to the barony of Seymour of Sudeley. A chapter of the Garter was held on the same day, and the decoration conferred on the new Lord Seymour and others.
The coronation took place in Westminster Abbey on Sunday, 20 Feb. On the previous day a sumptuous procession conducted the little king from the Tower to Whitehall. Archbishop Cranmer placed three crowns in succession on the boy s head, the Confessor's crown, the imperial crown, and one that had been made specially for the occasion. A brief charge was delivered by the archbishop, in which the child was acknowledged to be the supreme head of the church. The two following days were devoted to jousts which the king witnessed. During his short reign Edward divided most of his time between Whitehall and Greenwich; but he occasionally lodged at St. James's Palace, and in summer at Hampton Court, Oatlands, and Windsor.
The religious sympathies of the young prince soon declared themselves. During the first year of his reign he made the money- offerings prescribed by the ancient catholic ritual for Sundays and saints' days, but after June 1548 the payments were discontinued, although a sum was still set apart for daily alms, and for royal maundies on Maundy Thursday and Easter-day. Dr. Nicholas Ridley, who became bishop of Rochester in 1547, regularly preached before the king from the opening of the reign. But Hugh Latimer was the favourite occupant of the pulpit in the royal chapel, and a special pulpit was erected in the private gardens at Whitehall to enable a greater number of persons to hear him preach. Edward 'used to note every notable sentence' in the sermons, 'especially if it touched a king,' and talked them over with his youthful companions afterwards. On 29 June 1548 Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, preached, and was expected to compromise himself by attacking the reformed doctrine, but he disappointed his enemies by acknowledging the king's title as supreme head of the church. When parliament (23 Nov.) was debating the Book of Common Prayer, and 'a notable disputation of the sacrament' arose 'in the parliament house,' Edward is reported to have taken keen interest in the discussion, and shrewdly criticised some of the speakers. In Lent 1549 Latimer preached his celebrated series of sermons audressed to the young king's court. A year later. Hooper, Ponet, Lever, Day, and other pronounced reformers, occupied the pulpit, and at the end of the reign John Knox delivered several sermons at Windsor, Hampton Court, and Westminster.
Somerset and his fellow-councillors were of the king's way of thinking. The early legislation of the reign respecting the prayer-book, uniformity, of service, and the formularies of the church seemed to set the Reformation on a permanent and unassailable footing. Reformers hastened to England from foreign countries, and they vied with native protestants in eulogising Edward's piety and dovotion to their doctrine, to which they pretended to attribute the religious advance. Bartholomew Traheron, writing to Bullinger of Zurich (28 Sept. 1548), says of the king: 'A more holy disposition has nowhere existed in our time. Martin Bucer reported (15 May 1550) that 'no study delights him more than that of the holy scriptures, of which he reads daily ten chapters with the greatest attention.' Bucer also wrote to Calvin ten days later that 'the king is exerting all his power or the restoration of God's kingdom.' Peter Martyr and John ab Ulmis spoke in a like strain. When in July 1550 Hooper was offered the bishopric of Gloucester, and raised objections to part of the requisite oath, Edward is said to have erased the objectionable clause with his own pen (Zurich Letters, iii. 607). On 4 Dec. 1550 a French protestant in London, Francis Burgoyne, sent to Calvin a description of an interview he had with Edward, when the young king made many inquiries about the great reformer. Calvin, taking the hint, sent the king a long letter of advice and exhortation in April 1551. When Knox wrote later of his experience as a preacher at the court, he described as unsurpassable and altogether beyond his years the king's 'godly disposition towards virtue, and chiefly towards God's truth.' Nicholas Udal, in his dedication of his translation of Erasmus's paraphrase of the New Testament, is extravagantly eulogistic, and Bale, in his 'Scriptores,' adds to his own praises of the English 'Josiah,' as Edward was generally called by his panegyrists, the testimonies of Sleidan und Bibliander, besides complimentary epigrams by Parkhurst.
Edward lived a solitary life. He only acknowledged any friendship with Cheke and Fitzpatrick. His sisters had separate household's and seldom saw him. His intellectual precocity and religious ardour were unaccompanied by any show of natural affection. Although so young, he showed traces of his father's harshness as well as much natural dignity of bearing. Protector Somerset was nearly always with him, but the king treated him with indifference. The protector left for Scotland in 1647 to enforce by war the fulfilment of the marriage treaty between Edward and Queen Mary which the Scottish rulers were anxious to repudiate. The French aided the Scotch, and Boulogne was taken. In Somerset's absence his treacherous brother. Lord Seymour, the admiral, attempted to oust him from all place in the king's regard. Lord Seymour constantly sought interviews with Edward, and remarked on one occasion that the protector was growing old. Thereupon the king coolly replied, 'It were better that he should die.' This is the king's own account of the conversation. After Lord Seymour was thrown into the Tower by the protector on a charge of treason, the privy council went in a body to the king (24 Feb. 1548-9) to demand authorisation for further proceedings; the king gave the required consent with much dignity and the utmost readiness, and on 10 March showed eoual coolness in agreeing to his execution in October 1549 the councillors, under Dudley, revolted against the protector. On 6 Oct. Somerset heard tidings of their action, and hastily removed the king from Hampton Court to Windsor. He was subsequently charged with having alarmed Edward by telling him that his life was in peril, with having injured his health by the hastiness of his removal, and with having left the royal room at Windsor unguarded while his own was fully garrisoned. Somerset was sent to the Tower on 14 Oct. On 12 Oct. the hostile councillors explained to the king at Windsor the reasons of their policy. The boy, who had been suffering from 'a rheum,' at once fell in with their suggestions, and catalogued in his journal his uncle's faults: 'Ambition, vainglory, entering into rash wars in my youth... enriching himself of my treasure, following his own opinion, and doing all by his own authority.' On 15 Oct. the council met at Hampton Court and nominated the Marquis of Northampton, the Earls of Arundel and Warwick, and Lords Wentworth, St. John, and Russell, to be lords governors of the king for political and educational purposes. New honours and offices were bestowed on the prominent leaders in the revolt; the hopes of the Roman catholics rose, but it was soon apparent that much of Somerset's power had been transferred to the Earl of Warwick, who had no intention of reversing the ecclesiastical policy. On 17 Oct. the king made a state progress through London, and in the following summer took an exceptionally long journey from Westminster to Windsor (23 July), Guildford, Oking, Oatlands, Nonsuch, Richmond, and back to Westminster (16 Oct.) All the halts at night were made at the royal palaces or manor-houses. At Oking the Princess Mary was summoned to meet her brother.
Somerset was pardoned 16 Feb. 1549-50, and returned to court (31 March) and to the council (10 April) with diminished prestige. Lady Seymour, the king's grandmother and Somerset's mother, died in the following autumn, and the council on 18 Oct. deprecated the wearing of mourning for her. Schemes of marriage for the young king were now under discussion. The treaty of marriage with Mary Queen of Scots made in 1543 had been finally repudiated by Scotland, and the mother, Mary of Guise, on her passing through England in July 1551, he reminded her of the old engagement, and asked for its fulfilment (De Origine Scotorum, Rome, 1578, p. 512), but the story is not supported. On 24 March 1549-50 peace was signed with both France and Scotland and it was decided that Edward should propose for the hand of Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Henri II of France, the lady who ultimately married Philip II of Spain. In May 1551 the Marquis of Northampton went on a special embassy to Paris to invest the princess's father with the order of the Garter, and to determine settlements. The marriage was agreed to, but it was decided to deter its celebration till both parties had reached the age of twelve. In July a French ambassador, Maréchal de St. André, brought Edward the order of St. Michael, and Warwick procured a portrait of the princess, which he directed the king to display so as to arrest the ambassador's attention. The marriage could hardly have commended itself to Edward's religious prejudices, which grew stronger with his years. The question of permitting Princess Mary to celebrate mass had more than once been under the council's discussion, and permission had been refused. When she positively declined to adopt the new service-book in May 1551, the emperor instructed Sir Richard Morysin, the English ambassador at his court, to demand in his name complete religious liberty for the princess. Some of the councillors suggested that the wishes of the emperor should tie respected, but the king is stated to have resolutely opposed the grant of special privileges to his sister (cf. Harl. MS. 353, f. 130). Jane Dormer, duchess of Feria, asserts that Mary was left practically at liberty to do as she pleased, that she had much affection for her brother, and had hopes of converting him to her faith. Parsons repeated the story in his 'Three Conversions of England' (1604), pt. iv. p. 360. But there is no reason to doubt the king's resolution whenever Romish practices were in debate. The king with Cranmer has been charged with personal responsibility for the execution of Joan Bocher [q. v.] the anabaptist, in May 1550; but although he just mentions her death in his diary, there is no reason to suppose that he was consulted in the matter.
On 16 Oct. 1551 Somerset was attacked anew. Warwick resolved to secure the reins of government, and as soon as he had been created Duke of Northumberland contrived to have Somerset sent to the Tower. Edward was an easy prey to the ambitious nobleman. He accepted all the false charges preferred against Somerset as true, related the proceedings against his uncle with great fulness in his diary, and after signing the warrant for his execution laconically noted that 'the Duke of Somerset had his head cut off on Tower Hill on 22 Jan. 1551-2.' The same heartlessness is evinced in the king's reference to the matter in his correspondence with Fitzpatrick.
Edward, whose health had hitherto been food, was constitutionally weak, and in April 1552 was attacked by both measles and smallpox. On 15 April the parliament, which had sat from the beginning of the reign, was dissolved, and the royal assent givenby commission to many bills. On 12 May Eaward was sufficiently recovered to ride in Greenwich Park with a party of archers. Soon afterwards Cheke, the king's tutor, fell ill, and Edward showed unusual concern. He attributed Cheke's recovery to his prayers. In the autumn William Thomas, clerk of the council, offered instruction in statecraft to the king, and submitted eighty-five political questions for his consideration. Edward agreed to receive from Thomas essays on stipulated subjects, and Thomas submitted to him papers on a proposal to reform the debased currency, on foreign alliances, and forms of government. Girolamo Cardano, the great Milanese physician, visited him in September or October, and wrote an interesting account of his interviews, in which he eulogised the young king's learning. He cast Edward's horoscope and foretold that he would reach middle age.
The empire and France were at war in the summer of 1552, and Edward watched the struggle with the utmost interest. The growth of his intelligence in political questions is well attested by Queen Mary of Guise, who asserted, after visiting him in 1551, that he was wiser than any other of the three kings whom she had met. The emperor applied for the fulfilment of Henry VIII's treaty of alliance, while the French king pointed out that he was allied with the protestant princes of Europe, and therefore deserved English aid. But Edward's advisers maintained a strict neutrality. On 19 June 1552 he signed letters of congratulations on recent success addressed to both combatants. In July, at the request of Northumberland, Edward urged a marriage between the duke's son, Guildford, and Lady Margaret Clifford, a kinswoman of the royal family. Edward's complete subjection to Northumberland caused much dissatisfaction outside the court. In August 1552 a woman, Elizabeth Huggons, was charged with libelling Northumberland for his treatment of Somerset, and with saying that 'the king showed himself an unnatural nephew, and withall she did wish that she had the jerking of him.' On 22 Aug. Edward made a progress to Christchurch, Hampshire, and wrote of it with satisfaction to his friend Fitzpatrick. Knox asserted that in the last sermon he preached before the court he was not sparing in his denunciations of Northumberland and Winchester, who wholly controlled the king's action (Faythful Admonition, 1554). With November 1552 Edward's journal ceases. The following Christmas was celebrated with prolonged festivities at Greenwich, but in January the king's fatal sickness began. William Baldwin, in his 'Funeralles of Edward the Sixt,' attributes it to a cold caught at tennis. A racking cough proved the first sign of rapid consumption. On 6 Feb. Princess Mary visited him in state. On 16 Feb. the performance of a play was countermanded 'by occasion that his grace was sick.' On 1 March Edward opened a new parliament; the members assembled at Whitehall in consequence of his illness, and he took the communion after Bishop Ridley's sermon. On 31 March the members again assembled at Whitehall, and Edward dissolved them.
According to Grafton, Ridley's frequent references in his sermons to the distress among the London poor powerfully excited the king's sympathy, and he expressed great anxiety in his last year to afford them some relief. He discussed the matter with Ridley, and wrote for suggestions to the lord mayor. Stringent legislation against vagabonds and beggars had been passed in the first year of the reign, but the evil had not decreased. After due consultation it was resolved that the royal palace of Bridewell should be handed over to the corporation of London as 'a workhouse for the poor and idle people.' On 10 April the grant was made, and on the next day Edward received the lord mayor at Whitehall and knighted him. The palace was not applied to its new uses till 1555 (cf. A. J. Copeland's Bridewell Royal Hospital, 22-38). At the same time Edward arranged that Christ's Hospital, the old Grey Friars' monastery, should be dedicated to the service of poor scholars, and that St. Thomas's Hospital should be applied for the reception and medical treatment of the sick. The citizens of London subscribed money for these purposes, and they, and not the king, were mainly responsible for the success of the charitable schemes. A similar application of Savoy Hospital received Edward's assent.
In the middle of April Edward went by water to Greenwich. Alarming reports of his health were current in May, and many persons were set in the pillory for hinting that he was suffering from the effects of a slow-working poison. Dr. George Owen and Dr. Thomas Wendy were in constant attendance with four other medical men, but they foolishly allowed experiments to be tried with a quack remedy which had disastrous effects. In the middle of May Antoine de Noailles, the French ambassador, was received by the king, who was then very weak, and on 16 May Princess Mary wrote to congratulate him on a reported improvement. On 21 May Lord Guildford Dudley was married to Lady Jane Grey. In the second week of June the king's case seemed hopeless, and Northumberland induced him to draw up a 'devise of the succession' in Lady Janes favour and to the exclusion of his sisters. In the autograph draft the king first wrote that the crown was to pass 'to the L' Janes heires masles,' but for these words he subsequently substituted 'to the L' Jane & her heires masles' (see Petyt MS. in Inner Temple Library). On 14 June Lord-chief-justice Montagu and the law officers of the crown were summoned to the king's chamber to attest the devise. Montagu indignantly declined, but he was recalled the next day, and on receiving a general pardon from the king to free him from all the possible consequences of his act, he consented to prepare the needful letters patent. An undertaking to carry out the king's wishes was signed by the councillors, law officers, and many others. The original instrument is in Harl. MS. 35, f. 384. According to notes made for his last will at the same time Edward left 10,000l. to each of his sisters provided they chose husbands with consent of the council; gave 150l. a year to St. John's College, Cambridge; directed that the Savoy Hospital scheme should be carried out; that a tomb should be erected to his father's memory, and monuments placed over the graves of Edward IV and Henry VII. He warned England against entering on foreign wars or altering her religion. Almost the last suitor to have an audience was (Sir) Thomas Gresham, the English agent in Flanders, to whom the king promised some reward for his services, saying that he should know that he served a king. On 1 July the council declared that the alarming accounts of Edward's condition were false, but he died peacefully in the arms of his attendant, Sir Henry Sidney, on 6 July, after repeating a prayer of his own composition. The body was embalmed, and on 7 Aug., after the Duke of Northumberland's vain effort to give practical effect to Edward's devise of the succession [see Dudley, Lady Jane, and Dudley, John], the remains were removed to Whitehall. The funeral took place the next day, in Henry VII's Chapel, but no monument marked the grave. The chief mourner was Lord-treasurer Winchester, and the cost of the ceremony amounted to 5,946l. 9s. 9d. Queen Mary attended high mass for the dead in the Tower chapel on the day of the funeral.
In stature Edward was short for his age; he was of fair complexion, with grey eyes and sedate bearing. His eyes were weak (cf. Peter Levens's Pathway to Health, 1632, f. 12), and he sometimes suffered from deafness. An 'epitaph' ballad was issued on his death, and in 1560 William Baldwin issued a long poem, 'Funeralles of Edward the Sixt.'
Numberless portraits of Edward are extant, nearly all of which are attributed to Holbein. Sketches of the prince as an infant, at the age of seven and at the date of his accession (in profile), are now at Windsor. The two first have been engraved by Dalton, Bartolozzi, and Cooper. The finished picture painted from the first was Holbein's gift to Henry VIII in 1539, and was engraved by Hollar in 1650; the finished picture from the second sketch belongs to the Marquis of Exeter; that from the third belongs to the Earl of Pembroke. At Christ's Hospital are a portrait at the age of nine (on panel), and copies from originals at Petworth and Hampton Court painted after his accession. The two latter have been repeatedly engraved. Guilliam Stretes, Marc Willems, and Hans Huet are known to have been employed by Edward VI in portrait-painting, and they are doubtless responsible for some of the pictures ascribed to Holbein. Edward VI also figures in the great family picture at Hampton Court with his father, stepmother (Catherine Parr), and two sisters; in the picture of his coronation, engraved from the original at Cowdray (now burnt) by Basire in 1787; in the drawing of his council in Grafton's 'Statutes,' 1548. In Bale's 'Scriptores,' 1549, there is an engraving representing Bale giving the king a book, and in Cranmer's 'Catechism,' 1548, is a similar illustration. 'Latimer preaching before Edward' appears in Foxe's 'Acts and Monuments,' and Vertue engraved a picture by Holbein of Edward VI and the lord mayor founding the city hospital, the original of which is in Bridewell. Seventeenth-century statues are at St. Thomas's and Christ's Hospitals. An older bust is at Wilton.
Edward's 'Journal' — a daily chronicle of his life from his accession to 28 Nov. 1552 — in his autograph, is in the Cottonian Library at the British Museum (Nero MS. C. x.) Its authenticity is thoroughly established. It formed the foundation of Hayward's 'Life,' and was first printed by Burnet in his 'History of the Reformation.' Declamations in Greek and Latin, French essays, private and public letters, notes for a reform of the order of the Garter, and notes of sermons are extant in the king's own handwriting, chiefly in the British Museum Library. All these have been printed in J. G. Nichols's 'Literary Remains of Edward VI.' His own copy of the 'Latin Grammar' (1540) is at Lambeth; another copy richly bound for his use (dated 1542) is at the British Museum. The French treatise by the king against the papal supremacy was published separately in an English translation in 1682 and 1810, and with the original in 1874. The rough draft in the king's handwriting is in Brit. Mus. MS. Addit. 5464, and the perfected copy in the Cambridge Univ. Library, Dd. xii. 59.
[A complete memoir, with extracts from the Privy Council Registers and from other original documents, is prefixed to J. G. Nichols's Literary Remains (Roxburghe Club, 1857). This memoir supersedes Sir John Hayward's Life (1630) and Tytler's England under Edward VI and Mary (1839). Other authorities are Machyn's Diary (Camd. Soc.); Chronicle of the Grey Friars (Camd. Soc.); Chronicle of Queen Mary and Queen Jane (Camd. Soc.); Grafton's Chronicle; Foxe's Acts, which devotes much space to Edward's reign and character; Zurich Letters, vol. i.; Epistolæ Aschami; Cal. State Papers (Domestic); Strype's Annals, and Historia delle cose occorse nel regno d'Inghilterra in materia del Duca di Nortomberlan (Venice, 1558). Mr. Froude's History of England, Canon Dixon's Church History, and Lingard's History give elaborate accounts of the events of the time.]
Dictionary of National Biography, Errata (1904), p.113
N.B.— f.e. stands for from end and l.l. for last line
| Page | Col. | Line | |
| 85 | ii | 15 f.e. | Edward VI: for duke of Norfolk read duke of Suffolk |
| 87 | i | 14 | for April 1551 read Jan. 1550-1 |
| 90 | i | 26 | for some read most |