Penguin Monarchs

THE HOUSES OF WESSEX AND DENMARK

THE HOUSES OF NORMANDY, BLOIS AND ANJOU

THE HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET

THE HOUSES OF LANCASTER AND YORK

THE HOUSE OF TUDOR

THE HOUSE OF STUART

THE HOUSE OF HANOVER

THE HOUSES OF SAXE-COBURG & GOTHA AND WINDSOR

ALLEN LANE

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First published 2016

Copyright © James Ross, 2016

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design by Pentagram

ISBN: 978-0-141-97935-9

Contents

Genealogical Table

HENRY VI

Introduction: The Enigma of Henry VI

1. Behind the Facade: Henry’s Character and Capability

2. Policy and Profligacy, 1436–1453

3. Collapse and Catastrophe, 1453–1461

Conclusion: Death and Afterlife

Illustrations

Notes

Further Reading

Picture Credits

Acknowledgements

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Introduction
The Enigma of Henry VI

Few would disagree that Henry VI, son of Henry V and last king of the house of Lancaster, was one of the least able and least successful kings ever to rule England, although people continue to disagree, as they did during Henry VI’s reign itself, about how and why this should have been so. Shakespeare, writing his history plays 150 years later, described Henry’s England as a state of which ‘so many had the managing, / That they lost France and made his England bleed’. The great playwright thus neatly encapsulated the disasters of the loss of Henry V’s French conquest and the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses in the last few years of Henry VI’s reign, while emphasizing the common perception that Henry was dominated by the personalities around him.¹ Shakespeare was not incorrect, but both the king and his reign were considerably more complex.

Within a few years of Henry VI’s final deposition from the English throne in 1471, two writers were confronting his legacy. Sir John Fortescue, one of England’s chief justices, the Lancastrian loyalist who disavowed his writings when he made his peace with Henry’s Yorkist successor, King Edward IV, wrote a tract suggesting reforms to the monarchy, known today as the Governance of England, shortly after 1471 as Edward IV, finally secure on his throne, began to rule in his own style. While not explicitly referring to Henry VI’s failings, many of Fortescue’s political solutions were to problems caused by them, at least in part – most notably Henry’s excessive, open-handed generosity, one of the leitmotivs of his reign. Fortescue argued that a king should be restricted in what lands and revenues he could alienate or grant away from the crown estates; trying to square the circle, he argued, not very convincingly, that ‘this may in nothing restrain the King’s power. For it is no power to more alienate and put away; but it is power to more have and keep to himself.’² In other words, Fortescue argued that, in restricting the king’s power to impoverish himself, the king would become more powerful. Fortescue’s advice, cogent though it was, did not noticeably change Edward’s style of kingship, though some of his ideas perhaps influenced Henry VI’s nephew, Henry Tudor, when he took the throne in 1485.

Another contemporary of Henry VI, John Blacman, a fellow of Eton and Henry’s former chaplain, wrote a detailed description of the king around a decade after his death. Blacman passed over the practical and conceptual problems of kingship that Henry’s reign had thrown up, instead focusing on the king’s personality and explaining his failings as an earthly monarch by implying that he led an exemplary religious life that was more in keeping with sainthood than kingship – a picture that historians through the ages have been wary of accepting, given later, official, attempts to have Henry canonized as a saint. As these rather different attempts to understand him – Blacman’s positive spin on his failings, Fortescue’s suggested remedies for his errors – show, Henry VI was and remains an enigma.

There is of course a further issue. It is difficult enough for biographers to grasp the personality and character of great figures of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, despite the comparative abundance of private letters, diaries, public speeches, broadcasts or written works, and contemporary comments. It is far more difficult for medieval historians to grasp the personality and character of those living five hundred years before, even that of a king. Private records revealing innermost thoughts are very rare, governmental records noted acts carried out in the king’s name as a matter of course without necessarily revealing the agency behind them, contemporary comments were likely to be after the event and with an axe to grind, and an individual’s acts, though providing hints as to his or her motivations, are subject to interpretation.

Even in this context, Henry VI’s character and personality are particularly elusive. Not only was he, in the eyes of many contemporaries and historians, a passive, introverted figure, but even the surviving documentary evidence on Henry is peculiarly open to question. For few other kings would we question so closely, and with some justification, whether the words written in his name were his own, whether the documents he signed or the acts he made as king were his or were inspired, manipulated or dictated by those around him, his wife, his leading ministers or his courtiers and household servants. For almost no other medieval figure is the evidence so lacking in authority.

The nature of the evidence explains why there has been such a variety of views among modern historians on Henry’s character. The most devastating view was that of one of the greatest of late-medieval historians, K. B. McFarlane, writing in the 1930s, for whom in Henry, ‘second childhood succeeded first without the usual interval’.³ This judgement was little questioned for almost half a century until Ralph Griffiths, in his monumental study of the reign, portrayed a king who made decisions, especially in the areas that interested him, but who left most of the government of the realm to others until his collapse in 1453, from which he was unlikely to have made a full recovery: Henry was ‘well-meaning, but lacking in judgement’.⁴ Griffiths’s view has been influential, but in 1996 John Watts published a radical new interpretation of the king, much closer to McFarlane’s, in which Henry was little more than a puppet, with no independent will, and all the acts of his reign were actually carried out in his name by those around the king – royal authority was thus an elaborate facade. While the argument is sophisticated and the conclusions on the political culture of English politics at the time are of great interest, Watts’s view of Henry himself has not been accepted by many historians. Indeed, recent accounts of Henry have emphasized the evidence that shows Henry’s active decision-making.⁵

Henry reigned for thirty-nine years until his deposition in 1461, was in exile or captivity for a further nine, and resumed his royal power in 1470 for seven months until his murder. He succeeded his father as king at only nine months, and the first half of his reign was dominated by the latter phases of the Hundred Years War, which finally ended in catastrophic defeat for the English in 1453. Conflict shifted from foreign war to civil war, while one faction then another sought to dominate the governance of England, as Henry failed to supply the requisite royal leadership to lead to successful war or domestic stability. Eventually he was dethroned by the first Yorkist king, Edward IV, after the bloody Battle of Towton in 1461. His cause seemed hopeless, especially after his capture and imprisonment in 1464, and was only revived by splits in the Yorkist regime, though Edward IV ended these with his victory at the Battle of Barnet in 1471; a few weeks later, Edward’s victory at Tewkesbury saw Henry’s son killed and his last chance to remain king ended. Henry was put to death in the Tower of London a few days later.

This book cannot hope to give a detailed analysis or narrative of the events of Henry’s reign. Instead, the focus will be on Henry as a man and as a king: a biography of a man whose reign has been condemned as the ‘nadir of the English monarchy’,⁶ and yet a man who was admired during his lifetime for his piety, and who perhaps would have been England’s royal saint had Henry VIII not broken with the papacy after 1529. It will show an ‘occasional’ king; a man who could, on occasion, assert his royal will and make decisions, but whose interests were not those of most medieval kings, being far more focused on his afterlife than his actual life, whose faith, piety and spirituality were far more important to him than the administration, warfare and politics that comprised the essence of late-medieval kingship. His different priorities and only occasional engagement with the vital task of governance were directly, though not solely, responsible for the disasters that engulfed England during his reign.