ABSTRACT
On 8 June 1544, parliament passed the Third Act of Succession, whereby Prince Edward, the son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, was made first in line as heir to the English throne. Next in the line was Mary, daughter of Catherine of Aragon, and Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn. Few in 1544 would have anticipated that these secondary and tertiary plans of succession would have taken effect, but the deaths of both Edward VI (d. 1553) and Mary I (d. 1558) within a period of just over five years saw Elizabeth crowned as Queen of England.1 Alongside the sudden shifts in political power that resulted from such a close series of successions, there were also significant changes in religious policy. Edward VI promoted Protestantism, and Mary I very forcibly returned the country to Roman Catholicism. Through her 1559 Act of Supremacy and Act of Uniformity, Queen Elizabeth re-established Protestantism in England. This Elizabethan Protestantism was in many ways deeply indebted to that practised in England under the queen’s half-brother, Edward VI, a Protestant faith for which many in England had given their lives during Mary’s reign.
