Henry’s son Edward VI was crowned king at the age of nine, with Henry’s will stipulating that royal authority was to be exercised by a council of his executors until Edward turned 18. This instruction was ignored and Edward Seymour, the boy-king’s uncle, was appointed lord protector of the realm and elevated to the dukedom of Somerset in the process. The key to Edward’s kingdom was not his signature as such, but the woodcut stamp which had been made from it.
Lot 193 in the sale captures Lord Protector Somerset at a pivotal moment in his rule, mobilising cavalry for a renewal of Henry’s campaign against Scotland in the name of Edward VI. Although no one would have seriously believed the letter to have come from Edward himself, Somerset’s application of his stamped signature at the head of the document is both an illustration of the unquestioned authority of the dynastic principle in Tudor England and a portent of the overreach which eventually led to Somerset’s downfall.
The militant Protestantism of Edward’s reign and the Catholic reaction of Mary’s created a situation which their sister and successor Elizabeth was determined to resolve via a middle way. The religious policy she adopted at home would necessarily have consequences for her relations with her fellow rulers on the continent, and from the 1570s she found herself increasingly drawn into the Dutch revolt against Spanish Habsburg rule in the Low Countries.
In 1577 she intervened in a flashpoint in the conflict by writing to the Calvinist mayor of Ghent, pleading with him to grant a fair trial to the Catholic notables of the city whom he had imprisoned after taking power in a coup d’état the previous year. Her beautifully flourished signature on the letter is an imposing mark of her authority and might have also been read as embodying her special status as a female ruler in a world governed by men.
The Elizabethan settlement did not mark the end of religious conflict in Britain, however. In the next century the presbyterian magnates of Scotland assembled to put their signatures on a document declaring their rejection of the liturgy imposed on them by Charles I.
Drawn up in Greyfriar’s Kirkyard in Edinburgh in 1638, the National Covenant was then quickly disseminated across the kingdom for signing by all the leading figures in each local jurisdiction, bringing Scotland into open rebellion against England and leading to the Bishops’ Wars, the Scots’ success in which precipitated Charles’s terminal conflict with parliament and the outbreak of the English Civil War by the end of 1642. A rediscovered copy of the National Covenant distributed to the burgh of Peebles provides an opportunity to acquire an original historical document of national importance.
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