Henry VI
Page 5
This beautiful manuscript, originally prefaced by the king’s portrait and bound up with a collection of matutinals and prayers to the Virgin, St Bridget and St John of Bridlington, the most recent English saint, to whom Henry acknowledged a special devotion, was probably the king’s own presentation copy. Intended to be Henry’s own personal political mirror, it is unambiguous and emphatic on the most controversial issues of this period: to its author, Henry’s claim to the French throne was a just one, in pursuit of which, as a proven peacemaker, he had nevertheless to be prepared to fight bravely in person on the battlefield, with an effective army, should his peacemaking efforts ultimately fail. In this respect within a few years the author, a member of a religious order, but no pacifist, must have been gravely disappointed in his king. In the weightiest problems of governance Henry was here instructed to take the advice of wise and discreet councillors. He was especially advised to guard himself against a partisan dispensation of his patronage. This should never be bestowed in the presence of a few, the unknown author advised, badly needed advice which was patently ignored. The king in his unique position of dignity and responsibility had to ensure that just law was effectively administered. This was his responsibility and in this respect too it cannot be claimed that Henry ever excelled. The author of the De regimine was however still able to congratulate his patron on the state of his realm because his reign had so far been undisturbed by horrible rebellions such as had so often marred the reigns of his predecessors. By 1450 this would no longer have been possible. This tract then gave sound advice and indicated how Henry’s conduct of affairs was likely to be judged and criticized. It shows that even a member of a religious order expected that his king should fight his people’s just battles on the battlefield in person, that he should preside over a government which had no cliques or favourites and that he should actively concern himself to ensure that good justice prevailed in his kingdom. By the very nature of this tract the effective performance of these kingly duties was shown to be necessary even for Henry’s personal salvation. This is in stark contrast to the alleged attributes praised in the Blacman tract.
Between 1444 and 1453 Henry presided over the liquidation of our first overseas empire and by his policies provoked the first significant revolt among his English subjects for three-quarters of a century. From this time also dates the work of his first tentative biographer. John Capgrave, an Augustinian friar from King’s Lynn, had laboured to produce a collection of the lives of many illustrious Henries for his king’s edification and naturally felt bound to include Henry’s own life to date at the end. This appears to have been an embarrassing task, particularly since he brought the work to fruition at the unfortunate point in time when not only Paris but also London had rejected Henry. This can only have been during Jack Cade’s Kentish rebellion of 1450,18 when Henry fled from London, since the work was definitely written before the birth of Prince Edward in 1453 and could not therefore apply to his later absences from the capital. Apparently there was little positive Capgrave could say in appreciation of his king, except that he had founded colleges, was an example to his subjects in his adoration of the holy cross and had married a wife. Otherwise his life of Henry himself perforce consisted of hopes and the introduction of further edifying exemplars whose names were not Henry. On one score alone he could not restrain his criticism. England’s enemies, he lamented, were saying with justifiable scorn, ‘Put a sheep on your English noble in place of a ship’: the current failure to keep the seas was a disgrace.19 Living on the Norfolk coast he well knew the dangers from French, Breton and Norman pirates who could land, plunder and depart with impunity. Clearly he expected his king to do something about these misfortunes. But Capgrave did feel it his duty to contradict those of Henry’s own subjects who were then proclaiming ‘Woe to thee O land when thy king is a child’. He had first heard this said at the time of the boy’s Westminster coronation in 1429, and in 1450, when Henry was some twenty-eight years old, men were now saying that the prophecy was being fulfilled. This was not the only reference in these years to the old saw from Ecclesiastes, and the natural inference to make is that men were indeed now saying that their adult king was childishly inadequate. Furthermore, Capgrave only lamely attempted to refute them here on a point of theology: the best he could do was to claim that the scripture was meant to refer to corrupt morals, not to the age of a ruler, and so had no relevance to Henry!
In the French wars the years between 1444 and 1450 were years of truce, leading to English military disasters in Normandy and Gascony, the like of which had not been seen since the reign of King John. At home the years from 1450 to 1453 were years of rebellion and armed risings. The period from 1444 to 1453 alone can provide the crucial test of what his subjects thought about Henry in his prime, because the first onset of his mental illness in the summer of 1453 must have coloured all later opinions. We must of course remember the sacred nature of the crowned and anointed king. He was the personification of the unity of the realm and of all due order in society, the linchpin holding it together from dissolution and anarchy. There were dreadful penalties, easily incurred, for any derogation of kingship, because to attack the king was to promote the dissolution of society, a heinous sin as well as a crime. Except in the direst extremities the politically discontented and those who sought to apportion blame for disasters generally accused the king’s ministers and alleged favourites in the name of the public weal, not the king himself. The king could do no wrong. Nevertheless, significant comments on King Henry VI were recorded in these years and they cannot be discounted simply because they were the opinions of unimportant, genuinely ‘obscure men’. For example, Thomas Carver, bailiff of the abbot of Reading, in 1444 rashly glossed a court sermon preached before Henry on the text ‘Woe to thee O land when thy king is a child’; he suffered most, but not quite all, of the gruesome penalties of treason for it. Obviously, whatever the preacher himself had said before the king, it was not to the effect that the adult king himself was mentally still a child, and Carver did not actually say this either. What he did say was that Henry was a less than perfect king because he was not leading his armies in the field to recover and maintain the rights of his subjects as he should be doing.20 Other careless talkers now expressed, in part, the guarded, critical, collective views later found in the manifestos of the Cade rebels of 1450.21 For example, a London draper said in October 1446 that the marquis of Suffolk and Bishop Aiscough so dominated the king ‘that his rule is nought’ and even blamed them and his other lords for the lack of an heir, since they kept him from having ‘his sport’ with the queen. But he added, Henry had a child’s face, he was not steadfast of wit as previous kings had been and, proof of it, he had lost all his progenitors had gained.22 In 1447 the yeoman keeper of Gloucester castle, who presumably owed his position to Henry’s uncle, Humphrey duke of Gloucester who had died under arrest at the opening of the Bury parliament of 1447, baldly declared that Henry had killed his uncle and he would rather Duke Humphrey had killed the king and queen since the duke would have made the better king. Six months later the keeper of Guildford gaol, on the testimony of the same approver, wished the king hanged and the queen drowned and added that nothing had gone right since this queen, Margaret of Anjou, had come to England in 1445.23 An alien resident at Ely, a Dutchman, who was alleged to have christened his two fighting cocks Henry of England and Philip of Burgundy and applauded the victory of the latter, incautiously cursed the king for a tax on aliens, prophesied his early death and also said a sheep would be a better emblem than a ship on his noble. He further added that Henry looked more like a child than a man.24 Men as far apart as Cley in Norfolk and Brightling in Sussex in 1449 and 1450 expressed opinions that Henry was a natural fool and no fit person to govern the kingdom.25 Men of Wales, Shropshire, Kent and elsewhere, subsequent to Henry’s humiliation of the duke of York at Dartford in 1452, were indicted for conspiring to levy war against Henry at Baynard’s Castle, at Ludlow and in Kent, and for slayi
ng his valet of the chamber, Richard Fazakerley. They were accused of purposing to replace a king who, they said, was neither fit nor able to rule the kingdom, nor ought to rule it. His replacement was to be chosen by authority of a parliament of the whole community of the realm, with the help of their friends and of ‘another who was entitled to the crown of England’.
Undoubtedly the fact that Henry occupied the throne by virtue of the usurpation of his grandfather Henry IV in 1399 was remembered throughout his reign,26 but here in 1452 he was to be deposed, not for a deficient title, but for his unsuitability and inefficiency. In this case the principal accused were gentry, a former Member of Parliament for Warwickshire, Robert Ardern esquire, and John Sharpe, gentleman, of London.27 Again, after the news of the disaster of the battle of Castillon in 1453 by which English Gascony was finally lost, and, coincidentally, on 1 and 3 August 1453, just about the time when Henry really did go out of his mind at Clarendon, two men in Southwark, having possessed themselves of one of his velvet cloaks, were allegedly engaged in the black art of destroying him. Their treasonable words were ‘would God that the captain of Kent had reigned and then we should have had a merry realm, for the king is but a sheep and hath lost all that his father won and would God he had died soon after he was born’. For Jack Cade’s head on London Bridge they proposed to substitute the heads of those who were then considered his chief advisers: the chancellor and archbishop of Canterbury and the dukes of Somerset and Buckingham.28 Thus some of Henry’s more articulate, obscure, but careless subjects had such low opinions of their king in his prime as to claim he was simpleminded or dim-witted on the evidence of the failure of his policies. Conspicuously to these ordinary subjects he was not the kind of king his father had been. That was what they wanted and expected.
From late July or early August 1453, for nearly eighteen months, Henry did suffer from totally prostrating mental illness. Then a relapse in the autumn of 1455 was followed by some measure of recovery in the following spring, which was probably never subsequently complete. The fact of his total incapacity was, as far as possible, concealed for eight months, but the death of the chancellor and the consequent inability to use the great seal of England finally forced its complete revelation. Descriptions of him from 1454 must therefore have been affected by the knowledge of this mental collapse. There is a subsequent first-hand description of Henry recorded by Abbot Wheathampstead of St Albans, when he entered in his register details of an act to resume all Henry’s lavish grants which was passed in the parliament of 1455–6, and a description of how he had obtained his abbey’s exemption from it by expending much time and money up to November 1457. The abbot, who had met the king on a number of occasions, was by nature a verbose and often tediously obscure writer. He began with a lengthy dissertation on the necessity of conciliating the great, rather than of uttering anything which might offend them. Illustrations from ancient times follow and then an example from his own day. A certain lawyer John Holton had been drawn, hanged and quartered merely for writing something derogatory of the king’s person. The cautious abbot said he did not know what this was. All he knew of Henry’s actions was that, when dealing with petitions, he was indeed a generous king because he did not ask what a man deserved but gave what it was fitting for a king to give! King Henry VI himself was simplex et probus. This would normally be translated by a good latinist as ‘honest and upright’ and Abbot Wheathampstead has thus been cited as strictly contemporary evidence in this instance for accepting the laudatory Blacman memoir of Henry as the true picture.29 But a few years later, immediately after recording the usurpation of Edward IV in 1461, the abbot gave a further description of Henry, this time in verse, which is seldom cited:
his mother’s stupid offspring, not his father’s, a son greatly degenerated from the father, who did not cultivate the art of war … a mild-spoken, pious king, but half-witted in affairs of state.30
In these circumstances one must wonder whether the earlier description of the king as simplex, with all the circumlocution surrounding it, was not really a daring double entendre.
Another contemporary, the rhyming chronicler John Hardyng, made no comment at all on Henry’s personality or abilities in the first version of his chronicle which he dedicated to Henry, his queen and his infant son, in the vain hope, as it turned out, of obtaining a royal grant of the manor of Geddington in Northamptonshire. But a second version, which he dedicated to Richard duke of York between 1458 and his death in 1460, does describe the king. In a reference to Henry’s boyhood tutor, Richard Beauchamp, he projected dim wits and indeed a lack of sound moral judgement right back to his minority:
Therle Richard, in mykell worthyhead,
Enfourmed hym, but of his symplehead
He could litle within his brest conceyve,
The good from eivili he could uneth perceyve.31
Towards the end of his reign the three rebellious magnates – York, Salisbury and Warwick – in their manifesto of 1460 were still observing the fundamental social conventions of the age about the person of the king, so they officially declared that the man they wished to control, but not yet to depose, was ‘hymself as noble, as vertuous, as ryghtwys, and blyssed of dysposicione as any prince erthely’. But the chronicler who recorded their manifesto for posterity had himself starkly recorded under the previous year: ‘the kyng was simple and lad by covetous counseylle … the quene with such as were of her affynyte rewled the reaume as her lyked …,’32 Likewise a chronicler of the fenland abbey of Crowland, who had opportunity to observe Henry at close hand, when he stayed there during Lent 1460, wrote of him at this time that in consequence of an illness which had been increasing upon him for many years he had fallen into a weak state of mind and for long remained in a state of imbecility, holding the government of the realm in name only.33
With an apparently successful deposition in 1461 came at last completely open contempt from those who had brought it about. The earl of Warwick’s brother George Nevill, bishop of Exeter, writing to the papal legate Coppini to announce the decisive Yorkist victory at Towton on Palm Sunday 1461, now referred to Henry as ‘this puppet king’.34 A similar opinion was now expressed by Pope Pius II (1458–64). In his memoirs the pope described Henry as ‘more timorous than a woman, utterly devoid of wit or spirit, who left everything in his wife’s hand’, and he put into Warwick’s mouth, when in conversation with his legate at Calais in 1460, the description of Henry as ‘a dolt and a fool who is ruled instead of ruling. The royal power is in the hands of his wife and those who defile the king’s chamber.’35 It should also be noted that the pope’s memoirs alone provide any explanation why in October 1460 Henry agreed to an ill-fated compromise which disinherited his heir Prince Edward of his succession to the kingdom of England in favour of Richard duke of York and his heirs, who then became Protector for the third time. The pope wrote: ‘by the wisdom of the Legate the dispute was settled’.36 In papal eyes this was the best solution for Henry’s evident personal deficiencies.
Thus, although at first sight the biographer of King Henry VI is presented with a near-contemporary, ready-made ‘Life’ of his subject, the early-Tudor Blacman tract, the historical circumstances of its production suggest that it should be discounted in any portrait of the living king. No testimony prior to his death in 1471 supports this hagiographic view of him. The opinions of his contemporaries in fact show that the king in life was adversely judged by criteria quite different from those proposed for his canonization in the early sixteenth century. Henry’s biographer in fact is confronted with the normal problems of the biographer of any medieval king. There is no personal memorial and precious little intimate detail on which to base it. He must be brought to life through his actions, through what was done in his name and the consequences thereof.
1 Polydore Vergil’s English History, ed. Sir Henry Ellis (Camden Society, 1844), 70–1.
2 According to the eighteenth-century antiquarian Thomas Hearne, who reprinted 150 copies of it.
4 Henry the Sixth a reprint of John Blacman’s Memoir, ed. M. R. James (Cambridge, 1919).
5 B.L., Cotton MS Vespatian A xii, printed by Thomas Hearne in 1716 with a second edition in 1745.
6 Dr A. B. Emden in his Biographical Register of the University of Oxford (Oxford 1957–9), gives January 1485 as the date of Blacman’s death, but he kindly informed me that he based this solely on Sir Wacey Sterry’s statement in Etoniana 56 (June 1934). Sterry was in error here and appears to have conflated John Blacman with a William Blackden and a John Bonor in transcribing details of probate and obit from the Eton College Audit Rolls and Register.