A boy king was once more head of the English nation. When Henry the Eighth died in January, 1547, Prince Edward was not quite ten years old, his sister Elizabeth nearly fourteen, while Mary, the elder sister, was thirty-one. In less than a month after his father's death, Edward was crowned at Westminster, and very curious the accounts are of the ceremony. As was usual, the prince spent the few days before his coronation at the Tower; and the procession from thence to Westminster was of extreme magnificence. The little boy was delighted by an Arragonese sailor who "capered on a tight-rope down from the battlements of St. Paul's to a window at the Dean's Gate."[44]
An old man in a chair, with crown and sceptre, represented the state of King Edward the Confessor. St. George would have spoken, but that His Grace made such speed for lack of time he could not.[45]
The service at which Archbishop Cranmer, the king's godfather, officiated, was still that of the Church of Rome: but it was greatly shortened,
partly "for the tedious length of the same," and "the tender age" of the King--partly for "that many points of the same were such as, by the laws of the nation, were not allowable."[46]
And there were various other differences in matters of detail, into which we have no space to enter, which showed that a radical change had taken place in England since Henry the Eighth's coronation. Even shortened as it was, the service was so long and exhausting that the poor little king was carried out fainting before it was over.
[Illustration: EDWARD THE SIXTH.--_From a Painting by Holbein._]
A "marvellous boy," "_monstrificus peullus_" as an Italian physician described him, must King Edward have been. When other boys have their heads full of bats and balls, of bird'snesting and fishing, this little lad was writing a diary of political events, the history year by year of his own reign--a strange document when one thinks of the author's youth. In it he gravely set down all manner of questions which usually trouble only old heads. And King Edward's journal is still one of the most valuable records of the time. Although it does not exhibit any very original views, this diary shows a strangely impartial spirit. It shows too a good deal of the coldness of the Tudor nature; for one is unpleasantly impressed at finding the young king recording the executions of his two uncles--Somerset and Seymour--with the most stoical indifference; and setting aside the right of his sisters Mary and Elizabeth to the crown, with a hard cold remark that they are "unto us but of the half-blood."