At the heart of Edwardian kingship was the notion of a reforming king, a second Josiah, supreme head of the Churches of England and Ireland on earth next under God, but a king counselled, profoundly conscious of his duty of care to God and to His subjects. Edward VI was very personally associated with the kingly, and definitively and distinctively Tudor, Reformation of 1547–53. This Reformation was a complex creature, a challenging set of claims and notions of power and authority designed in part to compensate for the restrictions or weaknesses of royal minority; but it was also strongly, and more positively, associated with the governance of England as a ‘Christian commonwealth’ and the return of the kingdom's worship to the form of the ‘primitive’ Church of Christ's apostles.

Reformation defined Edward's kingship, and vice versa. The relationship between the two was a complex one. Edwardian preachers and writers regularly presented their king as the godly son of a godly father, personally and valiantly moving to a natural second stage of the Reformation begun by Henry VIII. This presentation had as much to say about the nature of middle Tudor kingship as it did about Edwardian theology. At the king's coronation Archbishop Cranmer had sketched a model of absolute royal power and linked it explicitly to Edward's role as a second Josiah. During the course of his reign Edward embraced the projection of himself as the principal agent in the rescue of his realm from the corruption of Roman Catholicism.