Edward VI became interested Finally the United States forced Japan to open to the West when Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Edo Bay with a flotilla of warships Meanwhile, anti-Tokugawa sentiments had been growing that demanded the restoration of imperial power In 1867–68, the Tokugawa government collapse was partly due to foreign threat and to tensions that had been growing against a political and social system that had outlived its usefulness The shogunate surrendered power in 1867 to Emperor Meiji, who began the Meiji Restoration in 1868 See also Bushido, Tokugawa period in Japan; Tokugawa bakuhan system, japan Further reading: Gordon, Andrew Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present New York: Oxford University Press, 2002; Jansen, Marius B The Making of Modern Japan Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002; McClain, James L L Japan: A Modern History New York: W W Norton, 2002 Mohammed Badrul Alam Edward VI (1537–1553) king of England Edward VI was the only son of Henry VIII, king of England, born from his marriage to his third wife, Jane Seymour, on January 28, 1537 He succeeded to the English throne at age nine by his father’s last will and by the parliamentary statute of 1543, and died unmarried at the age of 16 on July 6, 1553 The young king inherited from his father a constitution, under which he was not only the secular king but also the supreme head of the Church of England However, the kingdom was deeply divided among factions of great nobles in the court, and, in the countryside, the people were unsettled by the direction of the religious policy under the new king In spite of his lovable personality, good education, and well-respected intellectual capacity, the young king could hardly design and dictate policies on his own Edward Seymour, the duke of Somerset and the king’s maternal uncle, ran the kingdom as lord protector in loco parentis (in the place of a parent) for the first three years After his dismissal from the court in 1549, John Dudley, the earl of Warwick, who became duke of Northumberland in 1551, ruled the nation as the chief minister under the pretense that the king had assumed full royal authority 119 The two chief ministers shared similar interest in moving the Church of England toward Protestantism In 1547, Parliament repealed the Six Articles, enacted in 1534 by the Reformation Parliament, to keep Catholic doctrines and practices in the Church of England In 1549, the publication of Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and the adoption of his 42 Articles by Parliament pushed the Anglican Church closer to Calvinism In 1552, Parliament enacted the Act of Uniformity, requiring all Englishmen to attend Calviniststyled Anglican Church services Moreover, Parliament stopped enforcing laws against heresy, permitted priests to get married, and even confiscated the property of Catholic chantries, where for centuries, local priests had been praying for souls wandering in purgatory To the Protestants in the Continent, these policy changes made England a safe haven and an escape from persecution by the Catholic Church In England, the Protestants welcomed the reforms, although they felt that the policies did not satisfy their Calvinist needs The Catholics, however, were shocked by their loss of properties, privileges, and powers and were provoked into rebellions in 1549 Neither of the two chief ministers was a master of statesmanship They failed to curb runaway inflation and continuous devaluations of English currency They lacked competence in pacifying domestic unrests caused by enclosure of land and worsening living conditions of the rural poor They appeared shortsighted and clumsy in maneuvering diplomacy to meet increasingly complicated challenges from other European nations Most of all, they mismanaged the young king’s marriage, the great affair of the state The duke of Somerset invaded Scotland in 1547, intending to conclude the negotiation, which had begun under Henry VIII, for the marriage of Edward VI to Mary of Stuart, the four-year-old daughter of King James V Although the duke defeated the Scots at the Battle of Pinkie, the Scots betrothed the princess to Francis, the dauphin of the French throne, in 1548 After the fall of Somerset, the duke of Northumberland appeared to be actively negotiating a marriage of Edward to Elizabeth, the daughter of French king Henry II, in 1551 The marriage never materialized In 1553, rumors spread around the diplomatic circle in Paris that the duke was going to manage a marriage between Edward VI and Joanna, a daughter of Ferdinand, the brother of Charles v, the Holy Roman Emperor Despite his apparent busy diplomacy, the duke was secretly carrying out a plan of his own, probably with the king’s