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This study of Morison's diplomatic career not only challenges previous work on the Tudor diplomatic corps but gives diplomacy a much‐needed cultural perspective. Morison had over a decade of experience of diplomatic tasks before he departed on his first embassy. He served as Edward VI's ambassador to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1550–3 during a transitional period in which diplomats representing Protestant powers at Catholic courts had to learn the boundaries within which they could defend their religion. Morison's religious convictions both undermined his political effectiveness and determined the recommendations he made on English foreign policy. During his embassy, Morison's activities were informed by his humanism: he oversaw a scholarly household and established contact with and patronized a range of continental reformers and scholars.

The chapter studies the politics of Reformation in England, Scotland, and Ireland between 1530 and 1558. Its narrative of change pays particular attention to issues of jurisdiction across English territories and to the dissolution of the monasteries. The intersection between religious changes in the three kingdoms is treated fully.

This chapter analyses how Henry VIII and his ministers blundered into a confrontation with the Kildare dynasty, on which they depended for the management of the Irish lordship. The rebellion and destruction of the Kildares left a power vacuum, filled by the new strategy of seeking to integrate the Gaelic Irish lords, formerly considered aliens, into the English social hierarchy — the policy known as surrender and regrant. Meanwhile, Ireland followed England in rejecting the authority of the pope. Under Edward VI, surrender and regrant gave way to a more aggressive policy, while more far reaching changes in doctrine and liturgy — a true Protestant Reformation — encountered strong resistance.

Because of the Reformation during the sixteenth century, parishes of England experienced how symbols of Catholic devotion were torn down and burned. The Catholic mass — including the priests' decorated vestments and the altars — was under attack, as was the importance and focus given to the notion of consecrated bread and wine that supposedly represents the body and blood of Christ. Along with idolatry, sacrifice — which could be in the form of thanksgiving, benevolence and liberality to the poor, and the mortifying of one's own body — was also a major target. After Edward VI's reign, the English version of the bible and the pulpit became the new icons during that period. This era also offered the basis for the Elizabethan settlement in the 1560s.

This chapter analyses the impact on the commemoration of the dead of the mid-Tudor decades, and the contrasting religious policies of Edward VI and Mary Tudor. It describes the 1547 dissolution of the chantries as well as the officially-inspired iconoclasm against tombs and monuments, and assesses popular responses to these developments. It investigates the ways in which the dead were commemorated in the 1549 and 1552 Books of Common Prayer. It then assesses the restoration of traditional doctrine and practice after the accession of Mary. While conceding that Marian theologians were cautious about purgatory, and that some significant shifts in attitudes had taken place at the popular level, the chapter employs testamentary and other sources to dispute that the issues were completely marginalised, or that notions of purgatory and intercessory prayer were a permanent casualty of reform by this stage.

This chapter is constructed around William Cecil's appointment as principal secretary and to the privy council in 1550 during the reign of Edward VI. It offers an account of society and government in Ireland, by then a kingdom, at a time when the implications of the constitutional and political changes introduced late in the reign of Henry VIII were steadily revealing themselves against a backdrop of religious polarization and war in Europe which had altered the traditional relationship between Ireland and England.

The last chapter explores the Bibles printed in the short minority reign of Edward VI. It reveals a period of intense creativity, when – free from financial or religious constraints – printers experimented with size, layout, and addenda. Different printers produced pocket or lectern Bibles to suit different audiences and uses. With the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer, Bibles began to make, for the first time, liturgical sense. The last Bible of the period reveals the most experimental book of the reign, and serves as a testimony to its abrupt end.

This chapter presents seditious voices from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, including attacks on the queen's gender and sexuality, using judicial records and government correspondence. By combining letters, indictments, depositions, and judicial examinations, it retrieves parts of the lost conversations of Elizabethan England that show slanderous and traitorous words. From the very beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign, some subjects already challenged their monarch's religion. Another recurrent Elizabethan rumour claimed that Edward VI was still alive, so that neither of his half-sisters could be lawful monarchs. Such fantasies encouraged the emergence of pretenders, and fed the circulation of conspiracy theories. Their tenacity in popular discourse reflects a propensity to wishful thinking as well as anxiety about the royal succession. However, no subject drew such lively interest, or such creative speculation, as the queen's sexuality.

A profound transformation of medieval religion came along the changes in government and law by Henry VIII. Even without Henry’s matrimonial complication, the Reformation might well have come anyway. Wales was far removed from the epicentres of religious upheavals and controversy. Humanist ideas of improvement began to impinge upon the growing number university graduates from Wales. Henry VIII dissolved Welsh monasteries. Friaries had also disappeared. All of their possessions were dispatched to the royal treasury. Only a small amount of this property came back to the Church or to educational foundations. During the last ten years of his reign the king’s overriding objective was to maintain the unity of his realm. All of his policies had been received in Wales with virtually no overt opposition. The reign of Edward VI saw more reforms in the Church. Mary’s time was devoted to full restoration of Catholicism.

This chapter describes Edward VI's reign in Ireland, which began a period of alternation between conciliation and coercion that was to become a settled pattern of her relationship with England for a long time. The Tudor attempt to settle Ireland proceeded uneasily. The state still had hope of attaining its end by conciliation, but the military resources of the deputies were steadily increased, and, although the power of the administration was as yet quite inadequate for a military conquest, the use of force to secure short-term objectives was becoming more and more attractive. The parliament that Sidney summoned in January 1569 was used to promote the policy of conquest. Still representative only of that part of the island where English control or influence were manifest, much of the increase being made up, to match the current domination of the Irish administration by Englishmen, by English newcomers.

In 1549, the Spanish cosmographer and pilot Sebastian Cabot published London’s first printed world map and began to organize its first joint-stock, the “Cathay Company.” This chapter shows how this was a translation of Iberian cartography, Asian trading routes and older forms of the ‘persona’ distinct from either urban citizen or royal subject. It examines the ways that the increasing importance of the silver cycle created new exchange opportunities generated by Asian trade for London to engage in non-traditional forms of exchange.

This chapter focuses on the story of state and commonwealth during the Kett's Rebellion of 1549. For many writers, the rebellion marked a moment of crisis not only for traditional tenurial arrangements in the countryside, but also for the popular commonwealth policies of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, who was governing during Edward VI's minority. The chapter examines the attempt to respond to the desire for distinction and the impulse to reform manners within the context of the commonwealth, a classical ideal of society. It argues that the Kett's Rebellion was not a crisis for the overarching goal of commonwealth, which was shared broadly, but for a specific version of commonwealth as championed by John Hales, Martin Bucer, and Somerset himself, in which it was attempted to give the state a larger role through the active use of magistrates, who were imagined as custodians of the divine law.

This chapter examines the economic problems and social unrest that in 1549 erupted into riot and rebellion during Edward VI's reign. Copies of the new Prayer Book were distributed, and the new liturgy was performed in place of the Latin mass on Whitsunday even in remote rural parishes. One of these was Sampford Courtenay, a small village in mid-Devon. The chapter first describes the events that led to the Sampford Courtenay rebellion, along with similar uprisings in Cornwall and in Norfolk. It then considers the Oxfordshire rebellion, a short but bloody civil war portrayed by many as a conflict between forces of Christ and Antichrist. It also discusses the sequence of events that led to the removal from power of Edward's uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset. Finally, it analyses the assertion by evangelicals that radicals and Romanists both distorted the Word of God.