Protector Somerset favors Protestantism, overseeing the publication…
December 1549 CE
Protector Somerset favors Protestantism, overseeing the publication of the first Book of Common Prayer.
Although he governs in an autocratic manner, he is essentially a liberal in social policy.
Following Somerset’s inability to suppress Kett's Rebellion, a protest against the enclosure of common land for sheep grazing, his fellow council member John Dudley overthrows him in 1549.
One of the charges raised against Somerset is the protector's severity toward his own brother, who he had had arrested and beheaded in March for his attempt to wed the teen-aged Princess Elizabeth and for his suspected attempt to gain improper influence over Edward VI.
Dudley becomes president of the council and thus the virtual ruler of England.
Somerset is pardoned after a brief imprisonment.
The English translation of the late Desiderius Erasmus’s Encomium moriae, first printed in 1511, is published in 1549 as The Praise of Folly.
One of the catalysts of the Protestant Reformation, the hugely popular work is considered one of the most influential works of literature in Western civilization.
The miracle plays of English bishop and playwright John Bale, written in support of the Reformation, are often virulent and crude anti-Catholic propaganda.
He writes in about 1548 a historical drama, “Kynge Johan,” itself a polemic against the Roman Catholic Church; King John is represented as the champion of English rites against the Roman.
Bale’s catalog of British writers is his most important work: Illustrium majoris Britanniae scriptorum, hoc est, Angliae, Cambriae, ac Scotiae Summarium...(Ipswich and Wesel, for John Overton, 1548, 1549).
Bale, an indefatigable collector and worker, had personally examined many of the valuable libraries of the Augustinian and Carmelite houses before the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
He records in his notebook as an instance of the wholesale destruction in progress.
His work is therefore invaluable, in spite of the inaccuracies and the abuse he heaps on Catholic writers, for it contains much information that would otherwise have been lost forever.
Venice-born cartographer, navigator, and explorer Sebastian Cabot, now sixty-four, goes again to England, where Edward VI’s regency council grants him a pension and appoints him grand pilot in 1549.
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