This book offers a reappraisal of the kingship and politics of the reign of Edward VI, the third Tudor king of England who reigned from the age of nine in 1547 until his death in 1553. The reign has often been interpreted as a period of political instability, mainly because of Edward's age, but this account challenges the view that the king's minority was a time of political faction. It shows how Edward was shaped and educated from the start for adult kingship, and how Edwardian politics evolved to accommodate a maturing and able young king. The book also explores the political values of the men around the king, and tries to reconstruct the relationships of family and association that bound together the governing elite in the king's Council, his court, and in the universities. It also assesses the impact of Edward's reign on Elizabethan politics.

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. Recent writing on the Tudor century emphasizes the importance to the history of politics of the study of political processes. Tudor historians are, for the most part, less willing than hitherto to describe bureaucracies or institutions of government, and more concerned to present politics as something dynamic rather than static. Although their work remains rooted in the archives, Tudor specialists are increasingly receptive to the significance of ( for example) political language, iconography, and literature. This article examines a number of recent contributions, in the context of post-war Tudor historiography. It accepts that the insights of other disciplines can enhance the study of sixteenth-century politics, and welcomes the intellectual and cultural turn in recent writing, but maintains that Tudor culture is not always being reconstructed with the sensitivity it needs.In recent years, historians of early modern Britain have spent some time examining the state and nature of writing on the Tudor century. In his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge in , Patrick Collinson discussed a ' history with the politics put back ', but the sort of politics he discussed went well beyond the interests of other generations of sixteenth-century historians. Professor Collinson's history was a history of political process rather than of sovereign states, a discipline capable of dealing with ideas and ideologies as well as social and ecclesiastical preoccupations." More recently, John Guy has presented an agenda for a ' new political history ' of the sixteenth century, built in part on Professor Collinson's call for politics to be put back, but broader in focus, sensitive to the work of historians of political thought and the insights of writing which moves beyond a consideration of lowland England. Professor Guy emphasizes the importance of studying the interaction between people, institutions, and ideas ; of combining archival research with a sensitivity to literary and iconographical sources ; of recognizing political language, and in particular the vocabulary of counsel ; of understanding the impact of classical writing on sixteenthcentury notions of duty and service, and the effect this eventually had on concepts of the state ; and of the wider reach of the polity, in Ireland, Wales, and the borderlands of England.# This is, potentially, a huge undertaking based on an already substantial body of work -even a basic reading list would have to include studies by

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