Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  Over the king’s personality, disagreement still reigns. My own book, which follows Wolffe in its insistence on the centrality of the king’s person in the political system, and thus emphasizes the predicament facing leading politicians, nonetheless takes the opposite view on the degree of initiative shown by the king. In my view, Henry was a passive figure, and the problems of the reign arose from the interactions of his subjects – many of them well-intentioned – with a ruler who simply could not fulfil the essential functions of giving judgement, managing counsel and making policy appear his own. Others, notably Ralph Griffiths and Gerald Harriss, have seen the king as a less inert figure than this suggests, capable of exerting himself in the cause of peace, for example, or (at times) against those who threatened his authority. Broadly speaking, those who see some signs of activity in Henry take a more multi-faceted approach to the explanation of his problems, and in this connection it is worth noting that there is now a greater emphasis on the fiscal difficulties of the regime and on the ways in which the mid-century economic slump affected the politics of the reign.16 Even so, the financial, military, diplomatic, judicial and political problems which crowded in on Henry as the 1440s wore on were scarcely unaffected by his own incompetence, and Wolffe’s view that this was the central problem of the reign continues to command support. The nature of that incompetence is as difficult to establish now as it was in 1981: perhaps, as Harriss suggested in his review of this book, we shall never know the answer. And yet, of course, it is an important question. How we distribute our blame for the 1450s and, more importantly, what deductions we make about the norms of politics – the attitudes and practices of noblemen; the nature of royal authority; the expectations of subjects; the degree of political integration in fifteenth-century England – depends a great deal on what kind of king we take Henry VI to have been. It could be argued that we stand a better chance of working out the king’s personality if we start at the other end of politics – setting what actually happened against what we can grasp of how things were supposed to happen. In a way, that was Wolffe’s approach, and whether or not one accepts his reading of the king’s character, this sustained and thoughtful attempt to try it out is unquestionably an important contribution to the larger task of understanding the later medieval polity.

  In the preface to this book, Wolffe wrote that ‘writing a biography of such an insubstantial and unsuccessful king as Henry VI has been a long and sometimes dispiriting task’. One can well see what he meant. The great length of the reign, the wide scope of its politics – from the battlefields of France, to the halls of Westminster, the chambers of noblemen and the streets of English towns – the mounds of records, each adding new detail, but none telling us quite what we want to know about how things really were: all these factors make Wolffe’s subject a challenging one. When the complexities of Henry of Windsor’s own nature are taken into account, the task becomes more daunting still. Wolffe’s central case has been generally rejected – and this must have pained him in the years between its publication and his early death in 1988 – but this is a common fate for such bold exercises in revision, and it does not undermine their value. Quite apart from the useful material it contains, this is a book to provoke thought about a time which, to echo Gibbon, deserves the reflection of a philosophic mind.

  2001

  1 M. E. Christie, Henry VI (London 1922); F. A. Gasquet, The Religious Life of King Henry, VI (London 1923).

  2 B. P. Wolffe, ‘The Personal Rule of Henry VI’, in Fifteenth-Century England, 1399–1509, ed. S. B. Chrimes, C. D. Ross and R. A. Griffiths (Manchester 1972), 29–48.

  3 R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (London and New York 1981).

  4 G. L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort. A Study in Lancastrian Ascendancy and Decline (Oxford 1988).

  5 John Blacman: Biographer of Henry VP, in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to R. W. Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford 1981), 415–44. See also Lovatt’s response to Wolffe’s book: ‘A Collector of Apocryphal Anecdotes: John Blacman Revisited’, in Property and Politics in Late Medieval England, ed. A. J. Pollard (Gloucester 1984), 172–97.

  6 ‘Piety and Propaganda: the Cult of Henry VI’, in Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honour of R. H. Robbins, ed. B. Rowland (London 1974), 72–88

  7 J. L. Watts, Henry Viand the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge 1996).

  8 Notably ‘John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, and the French Expedition of 1443’, in Patronage, the Crown and the Provinces, ed. R. A. Griffiths (Gloucester 1981), 79–102, and ‘War on the Frontier: the Lancastrian Land Settlement in Eastern Normandy’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, XXXIII (1989), 104–21.

  9 M. H. Keen, ‘The End of the Hundred Years War: Lancastrian France and Lancastrian England’, in England and her Neighbours, 1066–1453: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais, ed. M. C. E. Jones and M. G. A. Vale (London 1989), 297–311. A. Curry, ‘English Armies in the Fifteenth Century’, in Arms, Armies and Fortifications in the Hundred Tears War, ed. A. Curry and M. Hughes (Woodbridge 1994), 39–68.

  10 This view receives a cogent statement by Michael Jones, however, in an important article which contains a wealth of information on the situation in France in the 1440s: ‘Somerset, York and the Wars of the Roses’, E.H.R., CIV (1989), 285–307.

  11 C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity. A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–99 (Cambridge 1992). Other important works exploring the localities in Henry VI’s reign, and published since Wolffe, include: M. Cherry, ‘The Struggle for Power in Mid-Fifteenth-Century Devonshire’, in Patronage, the Crown and the Provinces, ed. Griffiths; S. J. Payling, ‘The Ampthill Dispute: a Study in Aristocratic Lawlessness and the Breakdown of Lancastrian Government’, E.H.R., CIV (1989), 881–907, and Political Society in Lancastrian England: the Greater Gentry of Nottinghamshire (Oxford 1991); A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses (Oxford 1990); and see Castor below p. xx

  12 Locality and Polity, chs. 10–12; The Wars of the Roses (Cambridge 1997), chs. 5–7. This is also a prominent theme in Watts, Henry VI, chs. 5–7.

  13 H. R. Castor, The King, the Crown and the Duchy of Lancaster. Public Authority and Private Power, 1399–1461 (Oxford 2000).

  14 Harriss, Beaufort, and ‘Marmaduke Lumley and the Exchequer Crisis of 1446–9’, in Aspects of Late Medieval Government and Society: Essays Presented to J. R. Lander, ed. J. G. Rowe (Toronto 1986), 143–78; D. A. L. Morgan, ‘The Household Retinue of Henry V and the Ethos of Public Life’, in Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. A. Curry and E. Matthew (Woodbridge 2000), 64–79.

  15 Examples of recent work with an emphasis on the political ideas and attitudes of this period are Watts, Henry VI and ‘Ideas, Principles and Polities’, in The Wars of the Roses, ed. A. J. Pollard (Basingstoke 1995), 110–33; Jones, ‘Somerset and York’; Carpenter, Locality and Polity; M. A. Hicks, ‘Idealism in Late Medieval English Polities’, together with other essays in his Richard III and his Rivals (London 1991), 41–59; Morgan, ‘Household Retinue of Henry V’ and ‘The House of Policy: the Political Role of the Late Plantagenet Household, 1422–85’ in The English Court, D. Starkey, et al. (Harlow 1987), 25–70; A. Gross, The Dissolution of the Lancastrian Kingship (Stamford 1996

  16 Harriss, Beaufort and ‘Lumley’; Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, chs. 6, 15. The impact of the agrarian economy on aristocratic politics in the north of England is a notable feature of Pollard, North-Eastern England, esp. chs. 2–3 and 10.

  PART I

  THE MYTH OF THE ROYAL SAINT

  Chapter 1

  THE MYTH OF THE ROYAL SAINT

  Of all the adult English kings from Richard II to Henry VII who cross the stage in Shakespeare’s historical plays, Henry VI alone has yet to receive a comprehensive modern biography. Indeed, since the mid-sixteenth century he has hardly been noticed at all by students of the past and remains today the most shadowy figure of all England’s
post-Conquest kings. Most Englishmen and women take their history of the fifteenth century, in the first instance, from Shakespeare, and Henry’s lifespan from 1421 to 1471 covered half of it, yet even though Shakespeare devoted three plays, Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3, to him by name, Henry himself was peripheral to all of them. If he is remembered at all from Shakespeare it is probably only for the poetry of his soliloquy on his mole-hill at the battle of Towton, wishing he had been born a shepherd, not a king. Other English kings of Henry’s day and age have never ceased to interest successive generations as kings; no such interest has ever been shown in Henry. Such memories of him as do persist today centre on Eton schoolboys and Christmas carols from King’s College, Cambridge. As king, he is traditionally seen as the innocent victim of the men and forces which caused the Wars of the Roses and made his reign, in Hazlitt’s phrase, a perfect beargarden.

  In the present century the advent of the five-hundredth anniversaries of his birth and death have generated brief revivals of interest in the long-neglected Henry VI; in the possibility that he was a saint, whose blameless, praiseworthy life as well as the miracles worked in his name after his death, require his canonization. This development focuses attention on one of the greatest obstacles in the path of a modern biographer who would penetrate right back to his lifetime in order to present an authentic picture of the living king. In contrast to the neglect of later times, the first fifty years after his death saw Henry VI revered as a royal saint in popular esteem who rivalled St Thomas Becket in the fame of his cures: the last great posthumous miracle-worker in England before the Reformation. This early-Tudor, posthumous cult was responsible for the production of almost all the record of Henry’s character and personality which is known today. Modern advocates of his canonization would gladly accept the succinct character-study of Henry provided by the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil who wrote as the official court historiographer of the first Tudor king, Henry VII. Polydore was hired by Henry VII to set his employer in history as the lawful, godsent ruler and conveniently recorded for his master how the holy man Henry VI, in the year of his death, had actually prophesied that he, Henry of Richmond, his half-brother’s son, would in the end inherit his kingdom. When Polydore wrote, Henry VII was petitioning three successive popes, in vain, to canonize Henry VI, so that he could appear as the lawful heir of his sainted uncle.

  King Henry was a man of mild and plain-dealing disposition, who preferred peace before wars, quietness before troubles, honesty before utility, and leisure before business; and to be short, there was not in this world a more pure, honest, and more holy creature. There was in him honest shamefacedness, modesty, innocency and perfect patience, taking all human chances, miseries, and all afflictions in this life in so good part as though he had justly by some offence deserved the same. He ruled his own affections, that he might more easily rule his own subjects; he gaped not after riches, not thirsted for honour and worldly estimation, but was careful only for his soul’s health; such things as tended to the salvation thereof he only esteemed for good; and that very wisely; such again as procured the loss thereof he only accounted evil.1

  Polydore Vergil did not have entirely to invent this picture of Henry and his blameless life. In general those who write about medieval kings have to make do without the help of any intimate, personal memorials of their subject, but Henry VI at first sight appears to be the exception to this rule. When Polydore began work on his English History for Henry VII there already existed a ‘Life’ of that king’s uncle, ‘holy King Henry’, which appears to constitute a rare, intimate record. It was rescued from centuries of oblivion in 1919 by M. R. James, Provost of Eton College, who published it as a tract on the personality of Henry VI, allegedly written by his spiritual director or confessor, John Blacman. It thus appears to provide all the evidence needed for an intimate life of Henry VI. But is this tract what it seems to be? Can it be accepted as reliable first-hand evidence of the living Henry?

  Henry of Windsor, as he was known after his deposition in 1461, was done to death in the Tower during the night of 22–23 May 1471 after ten years of wanderings and imprisonment. He was hastily buried a few miles up-river in the Lady Chapel of Chertsey abbey. Towards the end of the decade the appearance of pilgrims at the grave with thank-offerings indicated that he had become an invocatory miracle-worker. Twenty years later hundreds of attested cases of cures, of calamities averted and misfortunes relieved by his intervention demonstrate that by the turn of the century he did indeed rival St Thomas of Canterbury in public estimation as the most popular saint in the south-east of England. Richard III felt compelled to remove the body to Windsor; Henry VII encouraged the cult of his uncle for obvious political reasons and pressed successive popes hard for his canonization. Official inquiries were set in motion and the canons of Windsor duly supplied the commissioners with sworn evidence of hundreds of posthumous miracles.

  But the attainment of sanctity also depended on evidence of fitting achievements by the postulant during his life on earth. The difficulties here were great; somehow they had to be met. The result, the required companion to the record of posthumous miracles, appears to have been this ‘Blacman’ tract, or to give it its full title, a ‘Compilation of the Meekness and Good Life of King Henry VI’. It is now known only from two rare copies of Robert Coplande’s printed version, which was published in 15102 and probably written at the behest of Henry VII himself.3 It is a collection of a series of apocryphal anecdotes, with deductions made from them by the collector.4 Its nature was surely foreshadowed in a Historia Regum Angliae written by a sycophantic priest, John Rous, between the birth of Prince Arthur in 1486 and Rous’s death in 1491, and dedicated with a fulsome panegyric to Henry VII. This states that Henry VI had been twice entombed and that many thought his body should now be entombed elsewhere a third time, a clear reference to his nephew Henry VII’s desire to found his dynasty on the basis of an official translation of the relics of a new royal saint to a new chapel, built to house the remains of his sainted uncle and, ultimately, his own. Rous’s description of Henry VI, followed by an account of his foundations and benefactions, is thus summed up: ‘a most holy man, shamefully expelled from his kingdom, but little given to the world and worldly affairs which he always committed to his council’.5 The legend of holy and blameless Henry had begun.

  John Blacman was fellow and precentor of Eton College, 1445–52, subsequently of King’s Hall, Cambridge and later a monk at the Witham Charterhouse, Somerset, but how long he lived is not known. There is no evidence to support the contention that he died in 1485 before the advent of the first Tudor king.6 In any case the title of the printed version on which the attribution of the work is solely based reads Collectarium … ex collectione Magistri Joannis Blakman and the possibility that this merely signified that it was originally found among Blacman’s books and manuscript collections at some unknown date cannot be overlooked. It is presented mainly as the recollections of one of Henry’s chaplains and other intimates of the king. But the only ones mentioned by name are from his later life after his deposition, the companions of his wanderings in the mid-’sixties, Doctors Manning and Bedon, and Sir Richard Tunstall. Blacman’s own name in fact never appeared among the dozens of clerks described as royal chaplains during Henry’s lifetime, so it must be very doubtful whether he was the unnamed author who speaks in the first person in this collection. Internal evidence places the composition of the tract in the middle or later years of Henry VII’s reign. Henry VI is referred to as rightly included in the register of saints. A long series of miracles worked at his tomb is mentioned. While this cult of a murdered, anointed, popularly sanctified king certainly began at Chertsey in the latter years of Edward IV’s reign, the recorded miracles, with one or two exceptions, all date after his translation to Windsor by Richard III on 12 August 1484 and the establishment of a ‘long series’ required the subsequent passage of quite a few more years. There can be no question of its having been written before the advent o
f the Tudors because there is a reference to Henry being twice crowned rightful heir of his realm. This would have been treasonable at any time before the battle of Bosworth Field which gave his Tudor nephew the throne. There is also a clear reference to the downfall of the House of York. Those who put him to death are referred to as no longer possessing his inheritance.

  The problem before the unknown compiler of this early-Tudor hagiographic collection was that he could not present Henry, like St Louis, as a candidate for sainthood by reason of his kingship. The aim of this collection was therefore to present, as nearly as possible, a Christ-like figure whose kingdom was not of this world, who is alleged to have performed during his lifetime a miracle of loaves, if not of fishes, for his hungry troops on campaign; who ‘patiently endured hunger, thirst, mockings, derisions, abuse, and many other hardships’, including wounding in the side with a dagger; who foretold his own Christ-like end but was not believed, and who ‘finally suffered violent death of the body that others might, as was then the expectation, peaceably possess the kingdom’. In fact there is no evidence that he had ever suffered physical injury prior to his murder, except for an arrow wound in the neck at the first battle of St Albans, or of any ill-treatment during his captivity. This appears to have been comfortable and considerate, with those who wished to do so having free access to his person.