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294 The Tudor Age
Yet Somerset's most spectacular failure was his continued
adherence to the defunct treaty of Greenwich. His desire to
realize Henry VIII's plan to subdue French influence in Scotland
and achieve the union of the Crowns became an obsession. His
victory at the battle of Pinkie (10 September 1547) was justified
as an attempt to free Scotland from the Roman clergy, but the
Scottish Reformation was hardly helped by a policy that
pushed Scotland ever closer into the embrace of France. In June
1548, 6,000 French troops landed at Leith, and Mary Stuart was
removed to France. When Somerset continued to threaten Scot-
land, Henry II of France declared war on England. Boulogne
was blockaded; French forces in Scotland were strengthened.
The Scots then agreed that Mary should eventually marry the
Dauphin, heir to the French throne. That provision hammered
the last nail into Somerset's coffin.
The earl of Warwick's coup, and realignment of the Privy
Council, was completed by February 1550. Warwick shunned
the title of Protector; instead he assumed that of Lord President
of the Council, an interesting choice, since it revived an office
effectively obsolete since the fall of Edmund Dudley, Warwick's
father. Posthumous tradition has vilified Warwick as an evil
schemer—a true 'Machiavel'. But it is hard to see why, for
expediency in the interests of stability was the most familiar
touchstone of Tudor policy. Three episodes allegedly prove
Warwick's criminal cunning: his original coup against Somer-
set, the subsequent trial which ended in Somerset's execution
in January 1552, and the notorious scheme to alter the succes-
sion to the throne in favour of Lady Jane Grey, Warwick's
daughter-in-law. However, only the last of these charges seems
justifiable by Tudor standards, and even this would be regarded
differently by historians had the plot to exclude the Catholic
Mary actually succeeded.
Warwick, who created himself duke of Northumberland in
October 1551, made, in fact, a laudable effort to reverse the
destabilization permitted, or left unchecked, by Somerset.
Domestic peace was restored by the use of forces which included
Edward VI 295
foreign mercenaries; England's finances were put back on
course by means of enlightened reforms and retrenchments.
Above all, Somerset's disastrous wars with France and Scotland
were quickly terminated. Northumberland sought peace with
dishonour—a humiliating but attractive alternative to fighting.
Boulogne was returned to France at once; English garrisons in
Scotland were withdrawn, and the treaty of Greenwich was
quietly forgotten. It thus became inevitable that Mary Stuart
would marry the Dauphin, but considerations of age ensured
that the union was postponed until April 1558.
The English Reformation had meanwhile reached its cross-
roads. After Thomas Cromwell's execution, Henry VIII had
governed the Church of England himself: his doctrinal conser-
vatism was inflexible to the last. But Somerset rose to the
Protectorate as leader of the Protestant faction in the Privy
Council, and the young Edward VI—he was nine years old in
1547—mysteriously became a precocious and bigoted Protest-
ant too. In July 1547, Somerset reissued Cromwell's Erasmian
injunctions to the clergy, followed by a Book of Homilies, or
specimen sermons, which embodied Protestant doctrines. He
summoned Parliament four months later, and the Henrician
doctrinal legislation was repealed. At the same time, the chant-
ries were dissolved. These minor foundations existed to sing
masses for the souls of their benefactors; as such, they encour-
aged beliefs in purgatory and the merits of requiems, doctrines
which Protestants denied. Somerset thus justified their abolition
on religious grounds, but it is plain that he coveted their prop-
erty even more to finance his Scottish ambitions. Next, the
Privy Council wrote to Archbishop Cranmer, ordering the
wholesale removal of images from places of worship, 'images
which be things not necessary, and without which the churches
of Christ continued most godly many years'. Shrines, and the
jewels and plate inside them, were promptly seized by the
Crown; the statues and wall-paintings that decorated English
parish churches were mutilated, or covered with whitewash. In
1538 Henry VIII had suppressed shrines which were centres of