Henry VI was the first substantial modern attempt to make sense of the politics of the reign, and it marked out areas of understanding which continue to form part of most fifteenth-century historians’ thinking. On publication, however, it elicited a mixed reaction in the academic press. While reviewers welcomed Wolffe’s emphasis on the prime importance and power of the king in later medieval government, and praised his account of the minority in particular, they were unanimous in rejecting the new portrait of Henry which was the intended centrepiece of the book. None was convinced by the actively malign and incompetent ruler Wolffe depicted: his manner of reading the evidence as if every royal act was the king’s own initiative was widely questioned; and the inconsistencies implicit in the ‘dangerous compound of forcefulness and weakness’ which he found in the king were noted by at least one critic. Nor was this all. Another found the book a disappointing synthesis, citing Wolffe’s failure to incorporate unpublished work, notably on the localities, which would have helped to explain the internal politics of the reign. The insistence on a wilful king, and the failure to explore the regime’s judicial and fiscal relations with his subjects had led Wolffe to give too much weight to the foreign policy of the 1440s as an explanation for the divisions of the 1450s. Even the more sympathetic reviews were somewhat muted, and a possible reason for this was that the appearance of Henry VI had coincided with a burst of publishing on the reign. Among the new work was an important article by Roger Lovatt, which firmly countered Wolffe’s depreciation of Blacman’s Collectarium as a source for the king’s personality, and reinstated the weak and pious figure familiar from older writing.5 But what really put Wolffe in the shade was the simultaneous appearance of Ralph Griffiths’s book on Henry’s reign, almost three times the length of Wolffe’s and far more exhaustively researched. Faced with such a mighty object of comparison, no one was likely to praise Wolffe’s labour in the archives, or his success in producing new detail on the politics and personnel of the reign: much more was on offer in Griffiths, and its presentation of what Colin Richmond called ‘a well-intentioned duffer’, grappling with a host of difficulties far beyond his capacities, seemed a far more convincing interpretation of the king and his role in politics. Only a gadfly critic from outside the period was prepared to say that the shorter book was the better one, and it is The Reign of King Henry VI that has been regarded as the standard text.
What was wrong with Wolffe’s depiction of the king? The two main premises on which he based his revision were certainly sound. First, it is true that later fifteenth-century portrayals of Henry cannot be treated as straightforwardly reliable. Second, it is indeed ‘incredible that Henry VI was surrounded by a unique pack of self-seeking knaves, fools, or incompetents’, and clear that the king’s administration of his sovereign power and authority must be a central cause of what went wrong during his reign. Wolffe’s error lay in his assumption that Henry had to be the active and deliberate initiator of bad policy for his authority to be felt and for his rule to have the disastrous effects that it did. In a sense, Wolffe was hoist on the petard of his own insight. Having established that, in a fifteenth-century monarchy, authority was personal and the king could not effectively be prevented from exercising it, he ought to have seen that acts of government would have been represented as coming from Henry – would indeed have required his participation – whether or not he positively willed them. A system in which authority conventionally belonged to the king could be worked by others as well as by the king himself: all the king had to do was to acquiesce in their demands and to endorse their counsels as his own. As many historians have noted, this is exactly what many contemporaries thought was happening under Henry VI: the king was being run by his counsellors and intimates. Such an interpretation does not rescue the king from responsibility for the resulting political disasters, and it helps to explain both the weakness of the policies pursued by Henry’s various regimes and the divisions which attended them. It also fits the evidence for Henry’s personality and activity more consistently than Wolffe’s alternative. Descriptions of Henry need to be handled with caution, but Wolffe seems to have missed a basic homogeneity in both praise and criticism of the king which has been remarked upon by other commentators, notably J. W. McKenna.6 Not only Blacman, but Henry’s contemporary detractors presented a man of little political force; indeed Wolffe himself gives copious examples.
Under these circumstances, it might have made more sense to assume that Henry was indeed the cypher he had usually been thought to be. Reviewers and other historians have cited numerous instances in which actions that Wolffe ascribed to the king were believed to be, or can be shown to have been, inspired by others. In his review of the book, for example, Gerald Harriss noted that initiatives ascribed to Henry by Wolffe, on paying the duke of Orleans in 1437 (p. 90) and in negotiating the indentures of the duke of Somerset in 1443 (pp. 164–5), were clearly drawn up by the council. The defence of the decision to release Orleans in 1440, for which the king took personal responsibility (p. 158), seemed to Harriss to have been written by Beaufort, and was regarded by its fifteenth-century editor as a declaration made not by the king, but by the council. Even the decision to cede Maine to the Angevins, regarded (perhaps inconsistently) by Wolffe as made by Henry under his wife’s influence (pp. 183–9), likely to have been a policy agreed by his ministers: the record of the embassy of July 1445, several months before the royal letter promising cession, shows clearly that Maine was not featured among the territories to be retained by the English. Wolffe himself remarked in various places on Henry’s ‘undue susceptibility to influence by persons with wills stronger that his own’. He should have seen that the tendency for Henry’s decisions to be ‘weak, faulty and subject to changes and reversals’, or to lack ‘consistent purpose’, was the direct result of this problem. When he went so far as to observe that ‘it is hard to believe that in the 1440s Henry weighed the consequences of granting any petition which reached him, or refused it’, Wolffe came very close to presenting his forceful king as the flimsy creature historians had always imagined; indeed, it is possible that the reference to a ‘dangerous compound of forcefulness and weakness’ was an attempt on his part to reconcile his thesis with the evidence of an inanity which he could not really deny.
Interestingly, Wolffe’s handling of the period following the king’s madness of 1453–4 takes us much closer to the problems touched on by McFarlane and developed in my own book on the reign.7 From this point in the narrative, the problem is one of how to manage a king who could not manage himself, how to resolve conflicts over influence when the one force that could resolve them was useless. Wolffe’s analysis is frequently compelling, but what it overlooks is that the problems now identified could have been the problems of the entire reign. Apart from in 1453–4, and to an extent in 1455, there is as much superficial evidence of royal activity in the 1450s as in the 1430s and 1440s. What happens is that Wolffe chooses to read it differently. It may be that the king was more inert in the later 1450s than he had been earlier, but there is plenty to suggest that the same fundamental difficulty had shaped politics since the mid-1430s, if not since 1422. Henry was all too obviously the weak holder of a powerful and personal office; his personal weakness left much of his authority and all of his agency intact for others to exploit. Like McFarlane, Wolffe was right to say that this made him much more a negative force than a neutral one in the politics of his reign – indeed, better than McFarlane, he showed in detail how political society might have been divided against itself by an incompetent king – but his strained interpretation of the king nonetheless obscures some of the predicaments which Henry’s rule created.
Having identified the king himself as ‘the essential unique feature of the reign’, Wolffe might also have taken a more sympathetic view of his leading subjects – indeed, this is a novel feature of the 1970 paper from which this quotation is taken. A king of the kind Wolffe describes would have created enormous problems for the rest of the
ruling classes, and one might reasonably expect those problems to have been a driving force in politics. Curiously, however, Wolffe was reluctant to see either the king’s opponents – most obviously York – or his leading ministers – Beaufort, Kemp, Suffolk, Somerset and others – in a statesmanlike light. Whether the politics of managing the king were a curial, or parliamentary, or national problem, they are undeveloped in this book. Instead, as has been noted, Wolffe makes the war the engine of politics, and reduces the motivations of the leading players in the 1450s to a mixture of wounded pride and competition for advancement. We are asked to accept, as the major chroniclers of the period argued, that the Wars of the Roses stemmed from the disastrous diplomacy of the 1440s, which in turn produced defeat in France and a feud between York and Somerset.
Wolffe seems to have favoured this interpretation of the 1450s for three main reasons: first, because it enabled him to blame the king, in person, for the disasters of the reign; second, because it was an interpretation which enjoyed contemporary support; and third, because fighting their subjects’ battles was the pre-eminent responsibility of medieval rulers. In fact, all three of these positions are open to challenge. We have already noted that Henry is unlikely to have been the sole director of English policy towards France, even if he must bear responsibility for what was done (partly because elements of that policy seem to have been conceived to fit a king incapable of leading his armies in person). It is clear that the leading politicians of the 1450s, as Suffolk more or less pointed out, were all implicated in the policies of the previous decade. This makes their mutual recriminations and conflicts a much more complex affair and, of course, helps us to understand why they fought one another and not the king. How much should be blamed on the policy of the 1440s is, in any case, open to question. The Angevin marriage and the cession of England’s tiny holdings and empty titles in Maine and Anjou could have gained the English political advantages when the policy was first developed in 1444–5. The disasters which followed – the fall of the Angevin party at Charles’s court, and the failure to maintain Norman defences, or to call the French king’s bluff, or to intervene effectively in Brittany, or to mount an effective campaign in Normandy in 1449–50 – are all failures of Henry VI’s government, but they are not the inevitable consequences of the policy of 1444–5. We are still waiting for a substantial book on the last few decades of the Hundred Years War, but the essays of Michael K. Jones have shown us how much could still be achieved by English arms in the 1430s and 1440s.8 Some others writing since Wolffe have offered a less optimistic picture: Maurice Keen, for example, has argued for a growing divorce between the concerns of Lancastrian warriors and domestic politicians, and Anne Curry has documented the prolonged decay in English defences.9 We are still not sure why France was lost, but – if we can agree with Wolffe that Henry’s failure to lead his people in war was a fundamental problem – we cannot put all the blame on English diplomacy.
Nor can we explain the 1450s wholly in terms of the French war. As Wolffe acknowledged, the king had two fundamental duties to his realm: justice was important alongside defence, and, in fact, contemporaries looked beyond the defeat in explaining Henry VI’s downfall. Sir John Fortescue, Cade’s rebels, York himself and George Ashby, Lancastrian author of a book of advice written for Henry’s son, pointed at the domestic shortcomings of the government as the major causes of civil disorder. The king had covetous counsellors; he was not accessible to good advice, notably from the magnates; he lacked the financial resources to preserve his authority; he had failed to uphold justice, or protect men’s property; he had been insufficiently prudent and active: these were the problems identified by those most involved in the politics of the 1450s, and it is clear that, to them, the loss of France was more a symptom of the pathology affecting English politics than the cause of it. Wolffe’s efforts to pin down York’s rebellion to a resentment of Somerset born of the war lacks any firm foundation in the evidence.10 However opportunistic was York’s association with the cause of reform – and we have no real evidence to help us decide – the cause itself was a real and powerful one, and driven by forces internal to English politics: the ‘treasons’ supposedly committed by the victims of York and Cade included far more domestic betrayals of king and people than external ones. We must recognize the domestic agenda as a factor in the convulsions of the 1450s, including the contest between York and Somerset, which was as much a contest between vox populi and the court, or between an emphasis on counsel and an emphasis on authority, as it was a conflict between two competing magnates, or two erstwhile lieutenants of France. Central to the domestic problems of England in the 1440s and 1450s was, of course, the inadequacy of Henry VI’s kingship. Wolffe’s book prepares the ground for understanding how the king drove his subjects into internecine conflict, but does not follow through, except on the rather narrow ground of the French war. Indeed, the account tends to lose interpretative steam as it moves into the 1450s, perhaps because the story of Henry’s greatest error of judgement is more or less complete.
How does Henry VI’s reign look now, two decades after Wolffe wrote? There has certainly been a huge amount published, and a host of articles and books now cover in detail many of the leading personnel and major episodes of the reign. To survey this literature here would take up far too much space, but it is possible to draw attention to some of the ways in which it modifies the picture presented in this book. Perhaps the most marked feature of recent writing has been its attention to the wellsprings of landed power: the operation of politics and justice in the localities. Wolffe already possessed an appreciation of the importance of the king’s function of justice, of the mediating role played by the nobility, and of the consequences of Henry’s ineptitude in this sphere, but his treatment of these themes is thin. More recent accounts, in particular Christine Carpenter’s study of Warwickshire landed society over the course of the fifteenth century, have enabled us to see the centrality of landed interests in the politics of the realm.11 It had long been understood that the authority of the later medieval king depended on harnessing the power of the nobility, but the complex world behind that statement had been surprisingly little explored. We now understand that the roots of noble power lay in the management of gentry property-holding, and in the judicial and extra-judicial agencies – law-courts, officers, affinities, networks – which enforced such management. The administration of justice has thus emerged not only as an important issue in the political debates of later medieval England, but as the central means through which order was maintained and power expressed, both locally and nationally. Although landed society possessed many of the means of its own management, and felt pressures towards consensus and restraint, as well as the more familiar pressures in favour of conflict, a crucial role in the containing of disputes and the upholding of order and the credibility of the law remained to the king. Henry VI’s failures in this sphere must therefore have been central in his downfall, and Carpenter herself has now written two accounts of the reign in which the predicaments of landowners drive much of the narrative.12 Wolffe noted the king’s iniquitous distribution of patronage, and the opportunistic behaviour of men with links to the household, but he did not explain how (or if) this pattern of favour was turned into power in the localities, or why most the nobility – who might have been expected to resist the operations of Henry’s agents – responded so inertly until the 1450s, and even then were more inclined to fight each other than the king. Only in the last decade or so have we been able to piece together the hierarchies of power that held together (and blew apart) the realm of Henry VI. As Helen Castor’s new book on the Duchy of Lancaster affinity particularly demonstrates, the old image of a curial clique, run by Suffolk and holding the country to ransom, will no longer do.13 The England of the 1440s was governed by a very extensive network of men, including most of the old nobility: their difficulties stemmed more from lack of co-ordination and lack of authority than from partisanship. The picture of the localities p
resented in the works of Carpenter, Castor and Watts, is one of extreme weakness at the centre, and of a noble class trying, on the whole, to make authority work. The tragedy of the reign is that this was a task which, as McFarlane pointed out, they could not perform on the king’s behalf.
Seen from perspectives like these, the magnates cease to be autonomous figures, squabbling over the fruits of power at the centre, but participants in a complex hierarchy, motivated by a wider range of concerns than their own honour and material interest. This evokes two other strands in recent writing which add something to Wolffe’s work: an emphasis on the collective concerns and activities of leading figures; and a burgeoning interest in the conceptual, rhetorical and cultural dimensions of politics. The efforts made by Lancastrian elites to compensate for Henry’s weaknesses have been a theme of a number of recent works. Once again, Wolffe’s own handling of the minority pointed in this direction, and studies by David Morgan, Gerald Harriss and myself have, in different ways, emphasized the commitment of leading Lancastrians to the maintenance of effective rule in England and France right up to the later 1440s, and in some senses, beyond.14 It is possible to show that the magnates, as well as the ministers, were aware of their common dependence on an effective royal authority and took steps to provide for it. Even the conflicts of the 1450s can be presented in these same terms, with different groups pursuing different solutions to a common problem of disorder and weak authority. Accounts of that decade have often focused on the escalation of disputes, but now attention has begun to be paid to why and how, in McFarlane’s words, ‘the onset of real warfare was agonisingly slow’. None of this is to suggest that the nobility, or other men, were high-minded altruists (though we are perhaps more inclined to see them as less low-minded these days), but rather to recognize that their private interests intersected with their public ones and that they were aware of the fact. The public and ideological aspects of the Wars of the Roses are thus beginning to receive more attention, alongside the better known struggles for advancement and security. At the same time, a reviving interest in the ideas and attitudes of the politically significant – whether these were political, chivalric, dynastic, patrimonial, devotional, legal or indeed medical – has helped to explain both conflict and consensus in the politics of the time.15 The ‘mind’ is coming back to fifteenth-century history, and it helps to create a richer and more sophisticated picture of the society in which Henry VI moved.
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