Peace and order were violated by religious dissensions and universal neglect of the law. Offices of trust were bought and sold; benefices impropriated, tillage-ground turned to pasture, "not considering the sustaining of men." The poor were robbed by the enclosures; and extravagance in dress and idle luxury of living were eating like ulcers into the State. These were the vices of the age; nor were they likely, as Edward thought, to yield in any way to the most correct formula of justification. The "medicines to cure these sores" were to be looked for in good education, good laws, and "just execution of the laws without respect of persons, in the example of rulers, the punishment of misdoers, and the encouragement of the good." Corrupt magistrates should be deposed, seeing that those who were themselves guilty would not enforce the laws against their own faults; and all gentlemen and noblemen should be compelled to reside on their estates, and fulfil the duties of their place.[47]
Boys and girls in all countries are apt to say "as happy as a king." I wonder if they ever think of the meaning of that phrase. Certainly a less enviable position than that of this young king cannot well be imagined. Holbein's portraits show him to us a delicate, precocious looking boy, with fine features, small mouth, and odd narrow eyes which glance with a keen penetration from under the sleepy lids. If he had been the son of some country squire he would have been living out of doors, making his frail little body strong and healthy, doing ordinary lessons, riding and leaping and playing tennis like any other lad of his age. But instead of this, we find him a mere tool in the hands of unscrupulous advisers, who are filling their own pockets and ruining the kingdom at his expense. He is pondering on matters of state when he ought to have been playing at marbles. Sitting for long hours in the council chamber, when he should have been riding about the forest with his hawks and hounds. Galloping all the night through, from Hampton Court to Windsor, when his uncle Somerset carried him off to serve his own ends, and thereby did the king's delicate chest an injury which it never recovered. And at length, after six years of a miserable, troublous reign, dying at Greenwich before he was sixteen, with the lords in council and the judges quarreling about his death bed. Poor boy! surely no one would be tempted to envy his fate.
He was buried at Westminster in the splendid chapel that his grandfather built and that his father finished under "the matchless altar" which stood at the head of Henry the Seventh's tomb. This sumptuous "touchstone altar, all of one piece," with its "excellent workmanship of brass," was the work of Torregiano, the rival who broke Michael Angelo's nose in the gardens of St. Mark at Florence. He came to England to complete the adornment of Henry the Seventh's chapel, and lived for twenty years in the precincts of the Abbey, where he kept up his Florentine reputation by sundry fighting feats against the "bears of Englishmen."
The Altar was "by the hot-brained zealots in 41 (1641) demolished; so that not the least footsteps now remain;" and only a gray stone slab marks the resting place of the last male heir of the Tudors. But when in 1868 Dean Stanley made the memorable search in the vaults of the Abbey to discover where James the First was buried—a mystery unsolved till then—a beautiful piece of a carved white marble frieze was found at the entrance of Edward the Sixth's grave. This fragment, three feet eight inches long, seven inches high, and six inches thick, is the only relic which exists of Torregiano's altar. It is now restored as far as possible to its original position, under the present altar in Henry the Seventh's Chapel.
King Edward's funeral, like his coronation, was remarkable in many ways. It was the first service of the Reformed Church of England ever used over an English sovereign; and this concession was made by the King's Roman Catholic sister, Queen Mary. She was not present; being at the requiem sung in the Tower under the direction of Gardiner, her chief adviser. Archbishop Cranmer conducted the service at Westminster. Thus "the last and saddest function of his public ministry which he was destined to perform," was the burial of his godson, this young king, whom he had both baptized and crowned.
"The one admirable thing which the unhappy reign produced," must however never be forgotten. While King Edward's uncle Somerset was ruining the kingdom, and paying with his head for his ambition—while the Duke of Northumberland was plotting to set aside Henry the Eighth's will, and to place his own daughter-in-law, the hapless Lady Jane Grey, on the throne of England—Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, was working on quietly in the midst of all the uproar of war and treason, plot and counter-plot, at the English prayer book.
As the translation of the Bible bears upon it the imprint of the mind of Tyndal, so, while the Church of England remains, the image of Cranmer will be seen reflected on the calm surface of the Liturgy. The most beautiful portions of it are translations from the Breviary; yet the same prayers translated by others would not be those which chime like church-bells in the ears of the English child. The translations, and the addresses which are original, have the same silvery melody of language, and breathe the same simplicity of spirit.
One other admirable memory has the reign of Edward left in England. If you stand on Westminster Bridge near the houses of Parliament, and look across the Thames, you see several huge piles of red brick and white stone rising on the Lambeth shore. This is the modern St. Thomas's Hospital, one of the finest in England, built on the foundation which Edward made. Ridley in a sermon preached before the young king, urged the rich to be merciful to the poor and to comfort and relieve them by charitable works. The sermon so impressed the boy that he founded St. Thomas's—St. Bartholomew's Hospital, in Smithfield, where a few years later the martyrs were to suffer at the stake under his ruthless sister Mary—and Christ's Hospital, which we all know as the "Bluecoat" school, where Charles Lamb, and Coleridge, and Thackeray and many another learned man spent their schooldays. But the boy-king did yet more. In eighteen towns of England he founded the famous Grammar Schools which "throw a lustre over the name of Edward," although he did not live to see the fruit of his noble thought.