The middle Tudor monarchs, sandwiched between the ‘greatness’ of Henry VIII and the ‘glories’ of Elizabeth I, often look like the poor relations of the dynasty, occupying (and indeed shaping) a decade beset by crisis and instability. The reign of Mary I presented (and, for historians, still presents) peculiar problems of its own. So did (and, again for historians, still does) the reign of Mary's half-brother Edward, the son of Henry VIII by his third wife Jane Seymour, and, at nine years of age, the only male Tudor heir to the throne after the death of his father in 1547. The five-and-a-half years of Edward's reign were marked by controversial and destructive Protestant Reformation. But they were also profoundly important to the construction and presentation of Tudor monarchy after Edward's death – critical, indeed, for our reading of the queenship and politics of the reign of Elizabeth I, and for our understanding of the men who inhabited the Elizabethan political scene, many of whom had served their apprenticeships between 1547 and 1553. That at least is the argument of this book.

Kingship and politics in the reign of Edward VI is, I think, the book I wanted to write. I have just reread the proposal I submitted to Cambridge University Press in 1998, and the projected structure of Kingship and politics matches the end result fairly well.