Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [63]
Along the route were pageants celebrating Edward’s arrival, many echoing those that had greeted the last boy king, Henry VI, on his entry into London in 1432.13 Edward was heralded as “a young King Solomon,” charged with “rebuilding the Temple”—that is, continuing his father’s reformation.14 In one pageant, a phoenix, representing Edward’s mother, Jane Seymour, emerged from an artificial Heaven of suns, stars, and clouds to be met by a crowned golden lion (Henry). Two angels then crowned their offspring; the phoenix and the old lion vanished, leaving the cub to rule on his own. The highlight of the pageantry, in nine-year-old Edward’s eyes, was an acrobat who “came sliding down” a rope strung from the uppermost part of the steeple of St. Paul’s to an anchor in the garden of the dean’s house. The tumbler stood up, kissed Edward’s foot, then walked back up the rope, “tumbling and casting himself from one leg to another.”15 By the time the procession reached Westminster, it was nearly six in the evening, five hours after it had set off from the Tower.16
Early the following day, noblemen were summoned to accompany the king to Westminster Abbey and attend the coronation.17 Edward was taken by barge to Whitehall and dressed in a robe of crimson velvet, “furred with powdered ermines throughout.” At the abbey a scaffold seven stairs tall had been erected, on top of which was set the throne, a white chair covered with damask and gold. Two cushions had been placed on the seat, one of cloth of tissue, the other black velvet embroidered with gold, upon which the diminutive boy king would sit.
Edward was not the youngest king to be crowned; Henry VI had been just eight at his coronation in 1429. However, his would prove to be the most radical English coronation in its thousand-year history. He would be the first monarch to be anointed “Supreme Head of the English Church,” and though the coronation would broadly follow the Liber Regalis—the Book of Kingship—which had dictated the ceremony for kings since 1375, there would be some significant departures.18
The week before, the Council had announced its decision, “upon mature and deep deliberation,” that the “old observances and ceremonies [should] be corrected” on account of the king’s “tender age” and so that they might conform to the “new laws of the realm,” particularly concerning the supremacy and abolition of papal authority. A new king would traditionally swear to confirm laws and liberties that had been granted to people by kings before him and to observe “such laws as … shall be chosen by your people.”19 This was drastically altered. It was now left to the king to decide which laws and liberties he would obey. The clause ensuring the protection of the liberties of the clergy was entirely omitted, and the final part of the oath was rewritten: the people, not the king, now had to consent to the new laws.
As Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, explained in his sermon, the oaths Edward had sworn were not to “be taken in the bishop of Rome’s sense,” and the clergy had no right to hold kings to account (“to hit your Majesty in the teeth”).20 Although Edward was to be anointed, Cranmer made clear that this was “but ceremony.” He was king “not in respect of the oil which the bishop useth, but in consideration of their power which is preordained … the King is yet a perfect monarch notwithstanding, and God’s anointed, as well as if he was inoiled.” Edward had come to the throne “fully invested and established in the crown imperial of this realm.”21
Now the young king was called upon to do his princely duty:
Your Majesty is God’s vice-regent and Christ’s vicar within your own dominions, and to see, with your predecessor Josiah, God truly