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Henry VI, King of England 1422-61 and 1470-71
Henry inherited an England at the height of her imperial power, he left it defeated, humiliated
and at war with itself. History has not been kind to Henry, judging him naive and ineffective
at best, at worst wholly inadequate for the position of king. At the positive end, Hicks
partially rehabilitates Henry, arguing that he was to a degree capable of effective government
and was the victim of the circumstances ranged against him, whilst at the other extreme Watts
argues that Henry was a vacuum, for most of his reign he had no influence on policy at all.
Between these views is Griffiths who sees a progressive decline from inadequacy into
disaster and Wolffe who believes him to have been an active but perverse and ineffectual
ruler.
Early Years 1421-36
Henry was born in 1421, a glorious year for England and for his father Henry V. Following
his devastating victory at Agincourt in 1415, Henry V had rebuilt the French empire of his
forefather Edward III. Indeed he had gone further, marrying the French king Charles VI’s
daughter Catherine of Valois and securing an agreement that after Charles’ death, it would be
he and his issue that would rule France, not Charles’ son the Dauphin Charles. It seemed to
contemporaries only a matter of time before England and France were joined permanently, an
empire under the Bolingbroke dynasty that would dominate western Europe. This represents
an extraordinary achievement for a dynasty that had seized power in England only a
generation earlier.
The premature death of Henry V when his son was just a few months old created a crisis, but
not an insurmountable one. The English had experience of infant rulers and the measures
needed to secure stable government until they were old enough to rule independently. In
accordance with Henry V’s will the governance of his empire was given over to three men,
his surviving brothers Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester and John, Duke of Bedford, plus his
uncle Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter. Gloucester was appointed guardian of the future
king, and Warden of England, Bedford was to command France whilst Exeter was to
represent the crown at meetings of the royal council. The king’s brothers were thoroughly
capable men who performed their rules very effectively, passing on to Henry an England
prosperous and peaceful and a French Empire enlarged in size even from its considerable
proportions of Henry V’s day. Bedford even managed to hold onto the French capital Paris.
However as Henry matured echoes of the problems that would cloud his reign could be
discerned. In England rivalry between Gloucester and the uncle of Exeter, Bishop Beaufort
occasionally spilled over into ugly confrontation, whilst in France the first signs of a French
resurgence worried Bedford. The latter’s attempt to invest the last remaining major city loyal
to Dauphin Charles, Orleans, were frustrated by a French relief army motivated by the
inspirational Joan of Arc in 1529, and the follow-up capture of Rheims enabled the Dauphin
to be crowned as Charles VII in the traditional coronation ceremony of French kings. This
revival of French fortunes forced the English onto the defensive for the first time in over a
decade and caused vacillation on the part of their Burgundian allies.
In the same year Henry’s domestic arrangements changed. His mother Catherine of Valois
had custody of him until this point, but in 1529 she began a relationship with the
comparatively humble Welsh squire, Owen Tudor and retreated from public life to marry
him. Thereafter Henry was separated from his mother and began a more independent
existence, outwardly expressed in his coronation at Westminster on 5 November 1529. Thus
formally invested with kingship Henry sat a royal council meetings if he did not actively
participate and the awkward state of regency seemed to be drawing to an end.
A partial revival in English fortunes caused by the capture and burning of Joan of Arc in
1431 provided an opportune moment for Henry to be crowned as Henri II of France on 16
December 1430 at Notre Dame in Paris. Although he could not be crowned at the traditional
location of Rheims as this remained in the hands of Charles VII, this was nonetheless an
historic moment, the only time in history that anyone has been crowned king of both England
and France and it was intended to be a huge propaganda coup by Bedford. Unfortunately for
him, popular agitation in Paris, the failure of the new Henri II to distribute the traditional
largess and news of a truce concluded between Charles VII and the Burgundians combined to
sour the spectacle. Shortly afterwards Henry, still only 9 years old, departed from France
never to return.
Aware of a growing stalemate, a peace faction led by Beaufort, now a Cardinal, called the
Congress of Arras to discuss a lasting settlement. The formal defection of Burgundy to
Charles VII’s side in 1435 changed the political landscape sharply. Henry still wept about it
years later, declaring in 1456 that Duke Phillip III had ‘abandoned me in my boyhood,
despite all his oaths to me, when I had never done him any wrong’. The balance of power
now tipped slowly but inevitably against England, a situation furthered by the death of
Bedford in late 1435.
At this moment Henry was becoming more aware of the functions of his position, his
governor the Earl of Warwick recording that even as early as 1432 the king was ‘grown in
years in stature of his persone and also in conceyte and knowleche of his high and royale
auctoritee and estate’. In 1436 Warwick resigned his role and was not replaced, Henry now
had the appearances of an adult court taking an active rather than a ceremonial role in council
meetings, with William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, as Steward of the Household. However
Henry, still only 14, was dangerously precocious showing a willingness to dismiss and
engage retainers on his own initiative and that of certain advisors. Despite the personable
nature of Henry therefore a poisonous atmosphere of intrigue gathered around him even at
this early stage. With the death of Bedford, Gloucester and Beaufort headed rival factions
seeking access to the king and appointment to the offices of state.
1437- 1450 Intrigue and disaster
Henry VI took full possession of his royal powers aged 16 on 12 November 1437. His
council changed its role from that of governing regency to an advisory body. At this moment
English border fortresses in France were coming under pressure from a resurgent Charles VII
who reoccupied Paris that year. The pressure meant ever more finance was required to
safeguard Normandy in particular, and it became an acute drain on the royal purse, a situation
not eased by confused leadership, Lieutenancy in France being held by Richard Plantagenet,
Duke of York then Warwick then York again.
A peace conference was held at Calais in which Charles was determined to press home his
advantage. He insisted that any negotiation must involve the English formally recognising his
position as King of France and Henry renouncing his own, something that the latter; already
by turns stubborn and pliable; refused to do. War recommenced in 1440 under the command
of the Duke of York and was at first successful from the English point of view, York winning
plaudits for his recapture of several towns including Harfleur. Unfortunately this strong
leadership was undermined by Henry who insisted on interfering with affairs in France
without coordination with his councillors. In frustration the English Council of Normandy
responded in highly emotional terms comparing its state to ‘a ship tossed about on the sea by
many winds, without captain, without steersman, without rudder, tossed, staggered and
driving along the stormy waves’.
One of the immediate consequences of this was Henry’s decision to release the Duke of
Orleans, a prominent French nobleman captive since Agincourt as a means of showing his
good faith to Charles VII, a policy in total contrast to that advised by York, Gloucester and
others. As Charles VII refused to receive Orleans the gesture was empty and merely served to
demonstrate the credibility and apparent weakness of Henry. He compounded this with his
marriage to Margaret of Anjou in 1544, relative of Charles’ queen and daughter to the
penniless Duke of Anjou whose land the English occupied. In return for her hand and the
lasting peace which he believed it offered, Henry agreed to cede the provinces of Anjou and
Maine to the French, not only against his Council’s advice but without their consultation. In
one stroke he crippled the defences of the northern English provinces, giving away vital
fortifications and towns guarding the heart of English possessions in Normandy. His
motivation for this disastrously naive piece of diplomacy appears to have been a genuine
desire for lasting peace, a reflection of his unworldliness, as the 18th century historian John
Rouys argued he was ‘a most holy man… little given to the world and worldly affairs’.
Margaret turned out to be a powerful and forthright queen who dominated her timid husband
and who would play a decisive role in the Wars of the Roses that followed, but in the short
term her match to Henry had effectively doomed the English empire in France.
It was unfortunate that Henry’s magnanimous treatment of his enemies did not extend to his
own kin. Gloucester’s position as a factional leader in Henry’s court was abruptly
undermined in 1441 when his wife Eleanor of Cobham was accused of practising sorcery
against the King. Found guilty, her accomplices died agonising deaths and she was sentenced
to life imprisonment, after completing the public penance of walking through the streets of
London with a lighted taper, a fate normally reserved for convicted prostitutes on Henry’s
orders. She had been condemned on flimsy evidence by a court controlled by Gloucester’s
rival Beaufort, but as Henry had conceived an irrational fear that the former was plotting his
downfall he allowed the trial to take place unhindered. Gloucester’s impotence was
confirmed when Henry forced him to divorce Eleanor and vindictively denied him access to
the court before finally arranging for he and his entourage to be arrested and detained in
February 1447. This last shock proved too much for Gloucester and he died shortly
afterwards. Even this was not sufficient for the paranoid Henry who had Gloucester’s bastard
son Arthur and eight other members of his household arraigned for treason and pardoned on
the point of evisceration at the scaffold in what was supposed to be at once a warning to
traitors and a display of royal grace. In fact it achieved the opposite effect; Henry’s partisan
treatment of one of the most prominent nobles of the realm allowed the Beaufort faction to
dominate politics and bred fear and mistrust from the nobility outside this faction. Cardinal
Beaufort died in the same year and control of the faction shifted to William de la Pole, Duke
of Suffolk.
In the meantime matters were approaching a conclusion in France. A raid by Francois de
Surienne from English territory on the French held town of Fougères gave Charles VII the
pretext to renew war on England in 1449, this time with a decisive advantage thanks to the
loss of Anjou and Maine. Charles’ decision to build three professional royal armies rather
than rely on his nobility proved decisive. Better trained and equipped than the English they
also benefitted from nationalist sentiment in many English held French towns such as Rouen
which in several cases expelled their English garrisons before the French even arrived. As the
three armies converged in the heart of Normandy a last relief force under Sir Thomas Kyriel
was destroyed at the Battle of Formigny in March 1449 where French artillery prevented the
English from deploying the longbow formations that had served them so well in the past.
After the destruction of Kyriel’s force the English position collapsed and by August all that
remained was the port of Calais.
English sensibilities at all levels of society were appalled by the humiliating loss of the
empire. However the loss of Henry V’s inheritance rebounded first not upon his son but upon
Suffolk, who was already suspected of self-aggrandisement, betrothing his eldest son John de
la Pole to the grand-daughter of John of Gaunt Lady Margaret Beaufort in an apparent
attempt to provide for a candidate if Henry were to die without heirs. Now serving as
Lieutenant of Ireland, York championed the growing discontent of the nobility outside the
Beaufort faction and orchestrated a campaign against Suffolk, blaming him for the disaster in
France by virtue of his involvement in the gifting of Anjou and Maine to the French and
arraigning him for treason. This, plus equally unfounded charges of corruption caused him to
be imprisoned by parliament. In March 1450 he was summoned to the king’s mercy.
Henry was faced with a very difficult decision, either to abandon his friend Suffolk to certain
death and appease a growing mob calling for his head in London, or exercise a clemency
which would seem to confirm that he was under the control of the Beaufort faction. The
compromise he reached; rejecting the charges of treason but upholding those of corruption
and sentencing him to five years of exile; pleased nobody. Suffolk narrowly escaped London
with his life from the mob that was now thoroughly stirred up against him. He was less
successful in his attempt to leave the country and begin his exile. On 30 April 1450 his ship
was intercepted by a flotilla that included a royal ship the Nicholas of the Tower. Suffolk was
decapitated and left on a beach in Kent.
The instigator of this murder is most likely York, who though in Ireland had the wealth to
bribe the sailors who carried out the deed. Even if it were not him, the fact that plotters felt
able to make use of a royal ship to carry out an assassination in direct contradiction of
Henry’s orders was a milestone in his reign. In precedent had been set for direct defiance of
Henry’s authority, which would wane ever further in the coming years.
1450- 1455: Rebellion turns to war
With the death of Suffolk, Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset now assumed control of the
faction surrounding the king and almost immediately ran into profound difficulties. A chance
remark by Lord Saye and Sele, Sherriff of Kent and Warden of the Cinque ports that Kent
should be punished for its role in the murder of the queen’s favourite Suffolk strained the
peace in the country; already rendered fragile by French raids on its coasts and the burden of
taxation needed to repay the debts of the failed attempt to retain the French empire; to
breaking point. Jack Cade’s rebellion as it became known was led by a commoner variously
known as ‘Jack Cade’ or more ominously 'John Mortimer'; the maternal family name of York
and a nod to the legitimacy of his position as a potential heir to Henry; but directed by the
gentry of Kent. It was well ordered, disciplined and restrained. Meeting en masse at
Blackheath in June 1450 to the south east of London it demanded the removal from power
and punishment of the Beaufort faction, holding it guilty for the fact that the king ‘has false
counsel, for his lands are lost, his merchandise is lost, his commons destroyed, the seas are
lost, France is lost, himself so poor that he may not for his meat nor drink’.
As with previous mass rebellions such as the Peasants’ Revolt the person of the King was not
threatened, nor was his office. If Henry had dealt with the rebels in the conciliatory manner
that Richard II had dealt with the Peasants’ Revolt then perhaps disaster could have been
averted. Instead the peculiar vindictive streak that clouded the otherwise benevolent nature of
Henry caused him to take violent but indecisive and futile action. Arriving at Blackheath with
a royal army stronger than Cade’s rebels, Henry first rejected their demands outright then
sought to crush them with force of arms. Cade’s pragmatic retreat to Sevenoaks caused a
crisis in the command of the royalist army, with Henry unable to let a commoner defeat him,
but unwilling to wage war on his subjects. At his queen’s suggestion, Henry made the fatal
decision of dividing his forces, keeping the larger part with him at Blackheath whilst
dispatching a smaller force under Sir Humphrey Stafford to Sevenoaks to defeat Cade.
Between Bromley and Sevenoaks the royal army was ambushed and destroyed by Cade with
Stafford being slain. Henry wished to take the main body of his army to avenge this defeated
but it rebelled. Faced with the collapse of his royal authority Henry fled to Kenilworth Castle
in Warwickshire leaving the southeast to the mercy of the rebels, soon to be joined by
uprisings in East Anglia and the West Country. On 2 July Cade and his followers were
admitted to London by cheering crowds. Although Cade’s rebellion collapsed soon after as
royal forces regained control, when Henry returned to his capital he found the political
situation much changed. He had been directly implicated in the violent repression of his
subjects and thus lost the veneer of innocence which had clung to him. In many quarters, both
common and noble, his weakness was openly discussed and for the first time his ability to
rule the country was openly challenged.
Henry gave common cause to the rebels by his controversial decision to renew his
dependency on the Beaufort faction by appointing Somerset Constable of England, in spite of
the latter’s ignominious role in the fall of France. This had the further regrettable effect of
elevating Somerset in rank to the point where he was in direct competition with York,
Lieutenant of Ireland. At this stage Henry was still childless and Somerset and York were
thus heirs to the throne by virtue of their descent from John of Gaunt, Edward III’s brother.
York felt that his distance from court made him very vulnerable, believing that Somerset
would seek to procure his arrest and execution on a charge of assisting the Cade rebellion, a
charge unlikely to be true but likely to be believed by Henry who was still paranoid about the
rebellion. Acting out of self-preservation therefore, York and his retainers staged a peaceful
landing in Wales in September 1450 and marched on London, picking up both armed and
popular support as they advanced form a discontented population who regarded them as
saviours. York brushed aside Henry’s attempt to arrest him as a traitor, the contemporary
chronicler Benet recording that York ‘commended himself to the king’s good grace and
saying that he had never rebelled against the king and would obey him always. He asserted
that his uprising had been directed against those who betrayed the king and the kingdom of
England and that he was not against the king and desire nothing but the good of England’.
For all these peaceful words, York did not disarm his followers and Henry was
understandably fearful of the former’s entry to Westminster on 29 September at the head of
cheering crowds. Henry was confronted by York in his apartments who again affirmed his
loyalty but called on the king to call a new Parliament to hear his grievances against
Somerset. Henry acceded to this and the parliament opened on 6 November packed with
Yorkist supporters. Faced with a demand by parliament for the removal of twenty nine
courtiers for ‘misbehaving about your Royal person and in other places’ including Somerset,
Henry was pressurised into removing the men, the leading members of the Beaufort faction
and consigned the former to the Tower briefly.
York’s scattered lands meant that he was unable to sustain a large retinue to pressurise
Parliament, and the Parliament broke up at the start of 1451 without the permanent exclusion
of the Beaufort faction, all of whom were returned to court favour and York was compelled
to go into internal exile in England, disillusioned with Henry’s good intentions. In the
meantime, so weakened was Henry’s authority that noble families in the regions began to
wage their own private disputes in direct defiance of royal command. Ironically it was York’s
decision to use an army of 2,000 retainers to put down one of these disputes that threatened to
turn unto full scale war that renewed the king’s fear of the threat he posed.
In January 1452 York became alerted to outward moves on his position by the Somerset
dominate court when the Yorkist Speaker of the House of Commons Sir William Oldhall was
driven into sanctuary to escape a charge of high treason. Fearing the same threat York issued
a public declaration of support for Henry which; on receiving no reply form the king; was
followed up by the marshalling of an army with the intent of destroying Somerset. Henry
remained loyal to the latter and when he learned that York was writing to Midlands towns for
support he responded promptly under the bidding of Somerset and Margaret, leading his own
army to Northampton. He was outmanoeuvred by York who marched to London. Finding it
defended he established himself on Blackheath, the site of Jack Cade’s camp. Henry’s army
arrived a few days later and the two armies drew up in battle order in sight of each other at
the end of February.
Negotiation rather than battle followed with Henry agreeing to York’s demands that in return
for standing down his army Somerset would be arrested and punished. However Henry’s
characteristically weak resolve undermined the arrangement when his queen not only
persuaded him not to arrest Somerset but to display him prominently by the throne as a mark
of royal favour. Patently outnumbered, it was York who was humiliated, forced to march into
London at the head of the royal delegation in the manner of a prisoner, to make a solemn
pledge of allegiance on the high altar of St Paul’s cathedral and then to retire in exile to
Ludlow.
Henry VI at last felt himself to be in the ascendant, a mood strengthened by news of the
Queen’s pregnancy, giving birth to a son and heir Edward of Westminster in October 1453.
He decided to capitalise on this by emulating his father and seeking to recover the
possessions lost in France. January 1452 saw him attempting to raise funds for shipping ‘for
our crossing into the kingdom of France, which, God willing we are disposed and determined
to undertake with the greatest diligence and expedition’. This uncharacteristic energy was
blunted by the need to reassert royal authority through a series of progresses to meet out
justice in the summer of 1452 against those areas guilty of supporting the Yorkists. By the
time this process was completed it was too late.
Having completed the conquest of the northern English possessions in France saving only
Calais, Charles VII turned his attention on the provinces of Gascony and Aquitaine in the
south eats, English since 1152. With overwhelming superiority in firepower the French
armies swiftly overwhelmed the English defences. The Earl of Shrewsbury was sent with a
relief force in October 1452 but was trapped in an artillery barrage at the battle of Castillon in
July 1453, he was killed and his army destroyed. With this defeat the Hundred Years’ War
finally ended and with it all realistic hopes of recapturing French colonies. To compound the
sense of shame, dispossessed English refugees were told by parliament that they would
receive no compensation or the loss of their livings. England was angry once again.
At first however this anger had no outlet, for Henry’s visitations had served to effectively
stamp out Yorkist support whilst the man himself languished in isolation at Ludlow. A
blatantly favouritist settlement of a land dispute between the powerful Earl of Warwick and
Somerset in the latter’s favour in July 1453 regarding the former’s possession in Wales
procured the enmity of the Nevilles, the most powerful noble family in England. Warwick,
whose family was also under pressure in land disputes regarding its possession in the north
with the Percy family refused to concur with royal demands.
Shortly afterwards Henry suffered a complete mental collapse, the chronicler Benet
describing how he was ‘so lacking in understanding and memory and so incapable that he
was neither able to walk upon his feet nor to lift up his head, nor well to move himself form
the place where he was seated’. He did not even react when his newborn son was placed
before him. The causes of Henry’s malady are unclear, but the result was that Henry’s court
was left leaderless at precisely the time when leadership was desperately required. Without
Henry the court led by Somerset became in the eyes of many nobles merely a faction, and
hence a body that could be challenged without committing treason.
Margaret’s arrogant attempt to claim regency whilst Henry was incapacitated proved to be a
tipping point for many nobles’ loyalties, the Nevilles amongst them. A resurgent York
gathered them into a faction of his own and assumed the reigns of government from February
1454, imprisoning Somerset in the tower. This period was broken on Christmas Day when
Henry was suddenly and inexplicably restored to his senses, recalling nothing of the past few
months. Soon afterwards Henry reasserted control of government, dismissing many Yorkappointed officials and freeing Somerset. His illness had done nothing to weak Henry’s fatal
insensitivity, his decision to summon a council meeting in Lancastrian Leicester in April
1455 that excluded York and his allies Salisbury and Warwick made the latter convinced that
they were about to be attainted as traitors. Pre-empting this move they retired to their own
lands and set about building a large army from their retinues.
Henry was in thrall to the Queen who insisted that York intended to seize the throne;
although there is no evidence for this at this stage; and accepted that war was inevitable. The
Lancastrian nobles combined their own retinues into a royal army and on 22 May the two
sides met at the First Battle of St Albans.
1455-70: Imprisonment, escape and recapture
Henry fought alongside Somerset at St Albans, being wounded in the neck and pulled out of
the fate he escaped the latter’s violent fate. Instead he became prisoner of York and Warwick
who was taken to London. On 25 May he was shown to Londoners at St Paul’s wearing the
crown as a sign that his authority remained intact, but it was a façade. York claimed the
offices of state and Henry was a prisoner, indeed he was kept away from London altogether
when the Yorkist Parliament met on 9 July to shape government, languishing in Hertford
Castle having once more succumbed to mental paralysis.
Henry’s recovery in February 1456 enabled him to reassert control in government, for by this
time his queen had succeeded in building a Lancastrian party of nobles opposed to York and
his ambitions which prevented him form openly defying the king. As before York
relinquished his powers to Henry, although this time he was careful to conciliate both York at
Warwick, confirming the former in his post of Lieutenant of Ireland and the latter as Captain
of Calais. His queen however was not, even going as far as moving herself and her son into
an alternative court in the securely Lancastrian West Midlands. With two centres of power
emerging, the renewed impotence of central government became apparent and the regions of
Henry’s realm slid once more into anarchy. What is most striking about this period is the
virtual disappearance of the king from records after his conciliation with the Yorkists, the
English Chronicle mourning that ‘the realm of England was out of all governance… for the
king was simple and led by covetous council, and owed more than he was worth’. Spiralling
events seem to have shaken Henry’s fragile grip on reality once more, causing him to retreat
into private contemplation more and more. He was still used as a figurehead, for instance in a
show of conciliation between Lancastrians and Yorkists on the ‘love day’ of the Feast of the
Annunciation but he had little active input.
It was at the queen’s instigation, and not Henry’s therefore, that Warwick was summoned to
the council to justify his piratical activities from Calais in May 1458 and so triggered
renewed conflict. It was also a Margaret-led council that prosecuted successful war against
the Yorkists in October 1459 and it was she that defied the calls of York and Warwick form
their exile in Ireland for conciliation with Henry and attainted the rebels.
Irrelevant though he might have been in decision making, possession of the king’s person
remained a vital political weapon. Henry assumed new importance in March 1460 with the
renewal of the Yorkist offensive however, for he was captured at the Battle of Northampton
and brought to London, where it was widely beloved he would once again serve as figurehead
to a York dominated government. York however took the unprecedented step in October of
claiming the throne for himself. Although there was a precedent for this in the form of Henry
VI’s own grandfather Henry IV, it broke consensus at a vital time for York, many retaining
their loyalty to Henry who was surprisingly clear and calm, declaring in the House of Lords
‘My father was king; his father was king; I have worn the crown for forty years from the
cradle. You have all sworn fealty to me as your sovereign, and your fathers did the like to my
fathers. How can then my right be disputed?’
Impotent for so long, Henry’s words had an electrifying effect, shattering the shallow
consensus around York and his government. Although a compromise agreement was reached
whereby Henry would name York as his heir and disinherit his own son Edward of
Westminster, enough supporters of the Lancastrians existed for the furious queen to rebuild
her faction and wage renewed war on York. In the ensuing Battle of Wakefield York was
killed and shortly after Henry VI captured by Lancastrian forces after the 2 nd Battle of St
Albans. His return to his wife and child was touching but had the effect of creating a political
vacuum in London. Now he was clearly identified with the rampaging Lancastrian faction
which seemed poise to descend upon London and loot it, the inhabitants, who had been
unsure of York’s claim to the throne, now enthusiastically supported that of his surviving son
Edward, Earl of March, who was duly declared Edward IV and as such led a vast army to
confront the Lancastrian army in the north. Henry was not present at the horrifying battle of
Towton on 29 March 1461 which saw the total destruction of the Lancastrians, he and his
family biding in York to await developments. As a result he was able to escape with his wife
to their ally Mary of Gueldres, Regent of Scotland. There they maintained a scanty court
whilst Margaret plotted on her husband and son’s behalf for a reclamation of the throne.
Henry relapsed into helplessness, occasionally adding legitimacy to cross-border raids by
accompanying them but playing no other effective role.
In spring 1462 Margaret secured limited support from the new French King Louis VII in
return for a promise to cede Calais to him in the form of 800 soldiers. With this force she
gathered her husband and son and seized the Northumberland fortresses of Alnwick and
Bamburgh. Unfortunately much of the queen’s force was wrecked and massacred at sea and
Warwick recaptured both fortresses. Margaret and Edward of Westminster escaped to France
whilst Henry was returned to Scotland under the protection of Bishop Kennedy first in
Edinburgh then St Andrews.
He was brought south again to participate in the Percy rebellion against Edward and
Warwick, once again in Northumberland. This time Henry was less fortunate, being captured
near Clitheroe in Lancashire. In June 1462 Edward had him incarcerated in the Tower of
London. Contrary to the allegations of later Lancastrians chroniclers, he appears to have been
well treated and housed in considerable comfort. After the intrigues and reverses of the
previous months, Henry may even have welcomed this change of circumstances and retreated
into private prayer and contemplation. He was maintained in this state for eight years whilst
Edward IV consolidated his hold on power.
1470-71: Readeption and death
Warwick’s falling out with Edward and remarkable decision to switch his support to the
Lancastrians meant that the sorry figure of Henry had one final part to play in the unfolding
tragedy of the Wars of the Roses. Having driven Edward into exile, Warwick freed Henry
from the Tower in October 1470. The man they saw before them must have caused them
dismay; for Henry’s mental retreat had reached an advanced state during his years of
imprisonment. Contemporaries describe him as bewildered by events and unable to respond
to them, the feeblest of puppet rulers. Despite this Warwick passed a series of measures
through parliament known as ‘readeption’ which saw Henry formally restored to the throne.
The subsequent parade through London brought a groundswell of popular support, proof of
continuing popular respect for the legitimacy of Henry’s position.
Unlike previous occasions, Henry did not recover his senses and was a mute spectator to
Warwick’s attempts to defend the readeption; ultimately ending with the latter’s death at the
Battle of Barnet followed by the destruction of the remaining Lancastrians and the death of
his son at the Battle of Tewkesbury. Before Barnet Henry had been secured by Edward on 11
April, the former optimistically greeting him with the words, ‘My cousin of York, you are
very welcome. I know that in your hands I will not be in danger’.
Edward initially demurred from killing Henry even at this stage when he remained virtually
the only obstacle to his unchallenged rule. The raid on London by Kentish men led by
Warwick’s cousin the Bastard of Fauconberg mounted at the end of May with the intention of
freeing Henry was effectively the latter’s death sentence. As soon as Edward regained control
of the capital he ordered Henry’s death in the Tower. It is highly probable that Edward’s
brother Gloucester was involved in the deed. Pro-Yorkist chronicles such as the Arrivall of
Edward IV claimed that Henry had died naturally ‘of pure displeasure and melancholy’ but
this was not widely believed even at the time. The exhumation of Henry’s body in 1911
showed that his skull had been smashed by several sharp blows to the head.
Legacy
With Henry’s death the main Lancastrian line was extinguished, leaving his distant relative
Henry Tudor as the new claimant, but he was languishing in exile, militarily helpless and had
a slender matrilineal claim to the throne and Edward was unassailable for the remainder of
his reign. Indeed given his fecundity it seemed likely that the Yorkist dynasty would occupy
the English throne permanently. As it turned out, Edward’s brother’s treacherous removal of
the young Edward V and his brother and replacement with himself as Richard III generated
sufficient revulsion for the Wars of the Roses to run one last course that enabled Henry Tudor
to finally and irreversibly claim the throne in the Lancastrian cause. Thus Henry’s cause
ultimately prevailed, but it must be said this was entirely in spite of the contribution of this
utterly ineffective monarch.
The new Henry VII hastily took steps to canonise Henry VI and he was celebrated for his
saintly love of education, foundation of religious houses and private contemplation. To the
Tudor propagandist machine, most notably Shakespeare, he served as useful tool, a martyr of
Yorkist villainy. To almost everyone else of his period and subsequent historians he was a
pitiable disaster, a prince patently ill-equipped by temperament to deal with the manifold
challenges of 15th century kingship and who, by an almost remorseless chain of misguided
actions lost first one of his kingdoms then the other. Henry was in many ways the worst
possible occupant of the throne, by turns showing a credulous generosity that others took
advantage of; notably the French king; and vindictiveness when pressured that often fell upon
those whom he should have conciliated with such as his uncle Gloucester. The problems of
Henry’s reign were not all of his own making, any inheritor of Henry V’s legacy would have
faced formidable twin challenges of an English nobility grown over mighty by ‘bastard
feudalism’ destabilising England and the problem of a reinvigorated French monarchy
bringing her superior population to bear on English possessions in France in a decisive
manner. However in both cases Henry caused an already bad situation to degenerate further
by his own actions, his flagrant favouritism of Somerset and his faction and manipulation by
his formidable wife being a prime mover in the drift from faction into civil war in England
whilst his spectacularly ill-advised cessation of Anjou and Maine in France made the fall of
England’s tottering empire there all but inevitable.
Henry could act as a graceful sovereign on occasion, his reception of York when he claimed
the throne is a case in point, and his religious and educational bequests such as Eton College
and King’s College, Cambridge are eloquent testimony to a mind capable of sincere and
genuine largesse. But when one adds the faults already considered to his unfortunate
tendency to relapse into insensibility at key moments in his reign it is possible to see Henry
VI as the worst monarch to ever govern England.
CJE May 2009