Henry VI

David Grummitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317482598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

In this new assessment of Henry VI, David Grummitt synthesizes a wealth of detailed research into Lancastrian England that has taken place throughout the last three decades to provide a fresh appraisal of the house's last King. The biography places Henry in the context of Lancastrian political culture and considers how his reign was shaped by the times in which he lived.

Henry VI is one of the most controversial of England's medieval kings. Coming to the throne in 1422 at the age of only nine months and inheriting the crowns of both England and France, he reigned for 39 years before losing his position to the Yorkist king, Edward IV, in the early stages of the Wars of the Roses. Almost a decade later, in 1470, he briefly regained the throne, only for his cause to be decisively defeated in battle the following year, after which Henry himself was almost certainly murdered. Henry continues to perplex and fascinate the modern reader, who struggles to understand how such an obviously ill-suited king could continue to reign for nearly forty years and command such loyalty, even after his cause was lost.

From his coronation at nine months old, to the legacy of his reign in the centuries after his death, this is a balanced, detailed and engaging biography of one of England's most enigmatic kings and will be essential reading for all students of late medieval England, and the Wars of the Roses.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315708355-1

The royal enigma

To the modern reader, Henry VI presents probably the most elusive king to have ruled medieval England. How could a man so obviously ill suited to the rigours of personal monarchy reign for thirty-nine years, commanding the loyalty of most of his subjects most of the time? How could the king, a decade after his deposition, be freed from imprisonment and placed once more, albeit for only a few months, upon the English throne? Recent historians and Henry's contemporaries alike have struggled to reconcile the various aspects of his reign and have arrived at diametrically opposed views of the nature of his kingship. Despite an explosion of detailed, archival research since World War II, which has shed light on various aspects of fifteenth-century England, and a more recent appreciation of the cultural achievements of the Lancastrian regime and its supporters, Henry himself remains an obscure figure, frequently caricatured and often two-dimensional. Medieval kings are elusive subjects for biographers, and none more so perhaps than Henry VI. In this book I have tried to avoid taking sides in the perennial debate over whether Henry was a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ king. Instead, I have attempted to understand his kingship within the context of a distinctive Lancastrian identity. This identity, which I have labelled as ‘Lancastrianism’, was both political and cultural and it operated at both the national and international levels. Its tenets were also at times contradictory and its meaning almost always contested between the Lancastrian earl, later duke and finally king, and his servants and subjects. I believe it provides a context to explain the actions of Henry VI and the contemporary reactions to his idiosyncratic style of rule.

Principal among the problems of gaining a rounded view of Henry VI are the contemporary sources. A great deal more ink and parchment was used during his reign to describe the life and deeds of his father, Henry V, than was used to write about the king himself. Moreover, the great Latin chroniclers of the previous generation – the monk of St Albans Thomas Walsingham, Adam Usk, and the Westminster chronicler – ended their chronicles as Henry's reign began. The London chronicle tradition and the Middle English Brut that dominated history writing in the mid fifteenth century simply did not relate political events in the same detail or with comparable insight. Their London bias and their sympathy with Henry's Yorkist critics in the 1450s compromised their portrayal of the king. Other chronicle sources, such as John Hardyng's vernacular verse chronicle or the Latin chronicle known to us as Giles's Chronicle, were completed in the knowledge that Henry's reign had led to civil war and the Lancastrian dynasty's hopes and ambitions had collapsed, due in no small part to the personal failings of its last king.¹ This tradition, of an unworldly king simply incapable of ruling competently, was embedded in the Tudor tradition of writing history and has been passed down to us today through the history plays of William Shakespeare.

Acceding to the throne at only nine months old, Henry could expect a great deal of interest in his upbringing and education. It is, therefore, no surprise that he was the recipient of an unusually large number of didactic and exhortatory tracts. Poetic works, such as John Lydgate's Life of St Edmund (dedicated to the young king when he visited the abbey of Bury St Edmunds in 1433) or his Fall of Princes (addressed to the king's uncle, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and written in the mid 1430s), to some extent addressed contemporary concerns over how the young Henry would adapt to the pressures of his office. Similarly, those in the so-called ‘Mirror for Princes’ genre have frequently been used to illustrate concern among his servants over his ability to rule effectively. Yet these texts, as literary scholars are beginning to appreciate, are far more complex and multi-vocal than mere advice manuals for princes. Although they were designed to exhort and coerce Henry into being a ‘better’ king, they also spoke to a wider Lancastrian readership with its own preconceptions about the nature of effective kingship. Similarly, the material produced in the 1480s by John Blacman, one of the king's chaplains, was not simply the reminiscences of someone who knew Henry personally, but a more complex text that drew on other traditions to portray a certain view of the king and the Lancastrian political culture he represented.²

It is, however, the voluminous records of royal government that present the greatest obstacle to understanding the nature of Henry VI's kingship. In the fifteenth century all government was carried out in the king's name and the records of parliament, the council and other institutions of royal government are the mainstay of any historian seeking to reconstruct the king's life and reign. These bodies did not, by and large, have corporate identities that were independent of the prince in whose name they functioned. At all levels, government proceeded according to the king's will (with appropriate input, of course, from his councillors) and it was dependent upon the king's signature or his personal seals to set the wheels of government in motion. Thus there exist among the records of the king's chancery, exchequer, and other departments of government literally hundreds of documents to which Henry VI either set his personal seal or applied the royal ‘RH’ monogram. Occasionally, notes in the hand of his household servants appear to record direct involvement by Henry in the passage of some grant or other request: in July 1457, for instance, the chamberlain, Sir Thomas Stanley, scrawled upon a warrant granting a pension to one of the clerks of the avery ‘The king has granted this.’³ Was this evidence of Henry's personal involvement in the everyday business of kingship, of him exercising the royal grace – the most fundamental aspect of his vocation – or merely an administrative by-product of a chaotic system made worse by the ‘king-shaped vacuum’ at the heart of the polity?⁴ It is certainly true that there is little among the administrative records that compares with Henry VII's annotations of his financial accounts or with Richard III's impassioned missives in his own hand to his supporters during Buckingham's Rebellion in 1483, yet the vagaries of archival survival are such that we should not preclude the possibility that such things once existed. Other official records, such as the Parliament Rolls or minutes of council meetings, appear to record the king's personal intervention in matters of national importance. Yet these too, it has been argued, merely continued the fiction of royal government dependent on the proper functioning of the king as a personal monarch. On the other hand, the frequency with which he signed diplomatic documents and those related to his great educational foundations at Cambridge and Eton could be seen as testimony to his personal interest and involvement in those aspects of his rule.

The documentary record is therefore problematic, to say the least, and open to a number of possible readings. Yet, taken together and read in the context of Lancastrian kingship as a whole, it records the actions of a king who was neither mad nor uninterested in his vocation. The sources reveal a king who acted in accordance with a set of values that were recognisably Lancastrian; that is to say, Henry's actions were consistent with the political, religious, and cultural forms that had developed during the preceding century or so and had become associated with the House of Lancaster and its servants. These values, moreover, were broadly congruent with those of English political society at large. This book will reinterpret Henry's life and reign within this specifically Lancastrian context.

The verdict of history

Given the intractable and often partisan nature of the sources written during his lifetime, it is no surprise that subsequent assessments of Henry VI have differed widely. Yorkist authors writing during the reign of his usurper, Edward IV, were unsurprisingly negative in their judgement. The so-called English Chronicle stated simply that Henry failed in the basic requirements of effective rule; he was a king who ‘held no household, nor maintained no wars’, as a result of which ‘the realm of England was out of all good governance’. Nevertheless, the author, like most of his contemporaries, hesitated from direct criticism of an anointed king and laid the principal blame instead on ‘covetous counsel’ and those self-interested courtiers and nobles who had exploited the hapless king.⁵ By 1484, when Richard III arranged for Henry's body to be transferred from Chertsey Abbey to a more fitting tomb at Windsor, a picture had emerged of a king whose deep piety had made him ill suited to kingship, yet which nevertheless had left him largely guiltless in the civil wars of the 1450s and 1460s. By the time the Yorkist author of the Crowland Chronicle wrote his account in the mid 1480s Henry was widely revered as a saint ‘by reason of the innocence of his life, his love of God and of the Church’ and the many miracles performed at his tomb.⁶ Henry VII tried unsuccessfully on more than one occasion to have his uncle canonised, and the image of Henry VI as a ‘saintly muff’ grew apace in the sixteenth century.⁷ It is as such that he figured in the Tudor chronicles of Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed and ultimately in Shakespeare's three-part history play that bears his name. In Shakespeare's work Henry was peripheral to the real action. His life was dominated by ambitious nobles, such as the duke of York, and by scheming and dangerous French women (in the persons of Joan of Arc and his queen, Margaret of Anjou), while the final part of the trilogy was designed principally to reveal the villainy of the future Richard III.

The image of the saintly Henry, the tragic victim of the Wars of the Roses, emerged virtually unscathed from the first decades of ‘professional’ academic history writing in the mid nineteenth century. William Stubbs, bishop of Oxford and the first Regius Professor of History at that university, considered Henry largely blameless in the catastrophe that afflicted England in the mid fifteenth century: ‘he was without doubt most innocent of all the evils that befell England because of him’. The king was hard working, loyal, and, above all else, pious; only the frailties of his body and ‘the germs of hereditary insanity’ prevented him from carrying on ‘the great Lancastrian traditions’. Yet Henry did manage to perpetuate some of the Lancastrian traditions of his ancestors: ‘he was the last medieval king who attempted to rule England as a constitutional kingdom or commonwealth’.⁸ Stubbs had more to say about the king than almost any of his contemporaries and Henry escaped the sort of detailed attention that saw multi-volume histories published of the reigns of his father and grandfather. It was not until 1922 that Mabel Christie published the first full-length biography of Henry VI. Christie marvelled that in the Middle Ages there should come to the throne ‘a man so wholly devoid of self-seeking ambition, without a trace of that bold and warlike spirit so much admired by his age, whose sole aim seems to have been the practice of those virtues usually known as the “fruits of the spirit” – charity, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance’. Henry's fate was saintly indeed: he sacrificed himself for the good of the country, for without his ‘ruin’ England would ‘never have known the strong, regenerating rule of the Tudors’.⁹ A year after Christie's biography, Cardinal Francis Gasquet, an English Benedictine and Vatican librarian, published his Religious Life of Henry VI, which drew heavily on the work of John Blacman. This was an unashamedly partisan account of Henry, designed more to make the case for his canonisation than to offer any objective assessment of his reign.¹⁰ Whatever dubious merits these accounts had as works of scholarship, the image of Henry VI they portrayed proved a remarkably persistent one. Indeed, as late as the early 1970s serious attempts were still being made in English Catholic circles to canonise the king.

In the mid twentieth century the Oxford academic K.B. McFar-lane established a new orthodoxy for researching and writing on the fifteenth century. McFarlane, and subsequent generations of his students, transformed our understanding of late medieval England, particularly with regard to the role of the nobility and land-owning classes and the institutions and cultural assumptions that conditioned their behaviour. It was McFarlane and his students who were the first to explore systematically the copious archival records of fifteenth-century England and to shift the focus of their enquiries away from the king and towards the nobility. He argued that the social and political system in late medieval England was robust and had developed, over the centuries, into an effective and reciprocal system of relationships between kings, their magnates, and lesser landowners. For McFarlane the crisis of the mid fifteenth century did not arise from structural weakness, which allowed ‘overmighty subjects’ to challenge the authority of the crown, but revolved around the effectiveness of kingship as an institution and, in particular, the inadequacies of Henry VI himself. He brilliantly summed up this position in his 1964 lecture to the British Academy: ‘in fact only an undermighty ruler had anything to fear from overmighty subjects, and if he was undermighty his personal lack of fitness was the cause, not the weakness of his office and its resources’.¹¹

McFarlane's legacy directly influenced the three most influential modern accounts of Henry VI's reign. In 1981 two major new studies of the king were published: Bertram Wolffe's Henry VI and Ralph Griffiths's The Reign of King Henry VI. Of the two, Griffiths (who had himself been taught by one of McFarlane's own students, Charles Ross) perhaps owed most to the ‘McFarlane legacy’. At almost a thousand pages, The Reign of King Henry VI was a massive achievement and it placed Henry VI within the wider context of fifteenth-century government and politics, particularly the reciprocal obligations of service and patronage. For Griffiths, from at least 1437 Henry was a king who ruled as well as reigned. While happy to leave the minutiae of government to his advisors, he nevertheless took an active role in matters that concerned him_ the French war, the foundation of his royal colleges at Eton and Cambridge, and, perhaps most controversially, the dispensation of patronage. From 1453, however, Henry's mental incapacity prevented him from exercising any real authority and the chaos that followed was largely due to the rival ambitions o...