The Boy Died
The boy-king, Edward VI, died July 6, 1553. Even though he was king for only six years, during his reign the first two Prayer Books were written for the Church of England (1549, 1552), homilies written for the purpose of shaping the church into Protestantism were being read from every pulpit every Sunday, the Articles of Religion was accepted as Anglican's confessional statement, and the evangelical faith was irrevocably planted.
The Church of England upholds the Bible as its primary authority, guided by the Bible’s central message of justification by grace through faith alone. It shifted focus from the Medieval sacerdotal priesthood to universal priesthood (of all believers). And it holds to an understanding of "real presence" located, not in the bread and wine on an altar, but in the hearts of the people who receive the grace of the sacrament by faith. Edward’s half-sister and successor, Bloody Mary Tudor, tried to derail the Protestant train, but it wouldn’t be stopped.
With Edward, everything about the church in England was changed. As Diarmaid MacCulloch said, this was visually recognizable by everyone who walked into a church: three new pieces of church furniture - a wooden communion table, a poor box, and a pulpit.
“The extent of the change would have been obvious to anyone walking into a fully reformed English church building in 1553. The greatest visual impact came from words: words in painted plaster, boards or on printed posters stared down from the white washed walls, turning the church interior into the pages of a giant scrapbook of scripture.
Three new pieces of church furniture stood out amid the mostly adapted and purged remains of the old. A wooden table, moveable into the body of the church for communion services, symbolized the overthrow of the old mass, with all its associated theology of a sacrificing, celibate priesthood; to emphasize this rejection, the table was placed at right angles to the alignment of the old altars. A poor box to collect alms, which the Edwardian government ordered to be placed in every church, was an official reminder that people’s charity was to be directed not to the masses or graven images, but to needy people made in God’s image. A pulpit reinforced the message of the walls that God was to be approached most directly through his biblical word: even where the pulpit was inherited from the old pre-Reformation days, it was now used exclusively for preaching, not for leading the recital of the rosary or the medieval extended vernacular prayers known as the bidding of the bedes. The pulpit would remain the central visual emphasis of most English parish churches down to the nineteenth century, when the Oxford Movement, in a remarkably successful piece of theological alchemy, restored the primacy of the altar.”
The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch