he Earl of
Surrey, adopted the immoral plan of ensnaring the King, who though
dying was yet supposed to be still susceptible to woman's charms, by
means of his sister, in order to draw him back to the side of his
family and the strict Catholics: a plot which failed at once when his
sister refused to play such a part. The ambitious announcements into
which he allowed himself to be hurried away could only bring about the
opposite result: he himself was executed, his father thrown into
prison, and the man who could have done most in the Catholic
direction, Bishop Gardiner, was struck out of the list of those who,
after the King's death, were to form the Privy Council.[139]
Immediately afterwards, January 1547, Henry died. He had composed the
Privy Council of men of both tendencies in the hope, as it appears,
that in this way his system would be most surely upheld. But men were
too much accustomed to see the highest power represented in one
leading personage, for it to continue long in the hands of a Board of
Councillors. From the first sittings of the Privy Council Edward VI's
uncle, the Earl of Hertford, came forth as Duke of Somerset and
Protector of the realm. In him the reforming tendency won the upper
hand.

It appeared at once with full force at the Coronation, which was not
celebrated at all after the form traced out by Henry VIII, since even
this would have tied them far too much to the existing system;
Cranmer, in the discourse which he there addressed to the young King,
departed in the most decided manner from all the ideas hitherto
attached to a coronation. Whither had the times of the first Lancaster
departed, in which a special hierarchic sacredness was given to the
Anointing through its connexion with Thomas Becket? Becket's shrine
had been destroyed. The present Archbishop of Canterbury went back to
the earliest times of human history: he brought forward the example of
Josias, who likewise came to the government in tender years and
extirpated the worship of idols: so might Edward VI also completely
destroy image-worship, plant God's true service, and free the land
from the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome; it was not the oil that made
him God's anointed, but the power given him from on high, in virtue of
which he was God's representative in his realm. His duty to the Church
was changed into his duty to religion: instead of upholding the
existing state of things, it at once pledges and empowers him to
reform t