Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  From the day when Henry landed at Calais ‘for the safety, defence and good governance and rule of our kingdom of France and the recovery of our rights there’, until his re-embarcation early in February 1432, Bedford’s title and powers as regent lapsed, the government being taken into the hands of those members of the English council who accompanied the king, reinforced by his Grand Conseil in France. At its head Cardinal Beaufort was specially named as abiding personally with the king and representing his interests. Everything was done under this authority, including the burning of Joan of Arc at Rouen on 30 May 1431. Bedford thus had to accept that his regency was an appointment and not a birthright. Confined to his military tasks as commander-in-chief, he himself had been able to return to the near-starving capital from Rouen, bearing supplies by river, in January, but it was not judged safe to bring on the young king until after the capture of Louviers in October.

  With an entourage of several thousands, Henry began his solemn entry into Paris for his coronation round about midday on Sunday 2 December 1431, the first day of Advent and four days before his tenth birthday. After spending two nights at St Denis he was met halfway by an escort of burghers, in crimson satin gowns and hoods led by the Provost Simon Morhier. At the entrance to the city he was greeted by the goddess Fame with the nine male worthies and the rarer nine female worthies, all conquerors and warrior women, as the prelude to one of the finest successions of pageants and tableaux fully recorded in the fifteenth century. Having received the various dignitaries of the city in their robes of office, the commandant of the watch, the provost of the merchants, the president and members of the Parlement, the chambre des comptes, masters of requests, royal secretaries, etc., he proceeded amid shouts of ‘Noel!’ under an azure canopy worked with golden fleur-de-lys, carried by four aldermen ‘as was done for Our Lord at Corpus Christi’, through streets festooned with rich hangings. The cardinal of Winchester, four bishops, twenty-five heralds and twenty-five trumpeters went before him. At the outer gate of St Denis was a huge shield of the city arms bearing a silver ship under sail, with a crew of twelve representing bishop, university and city. They presented him with three hearts, opening to release showers of birds and flowers, to signify that the three estates of the realm were opening their hearts with joy at his presence. At the Ponceau St Denis, in a wood within a richly-mounted pavillion, male and female savages fought a mock battle, while below was a fountain of hippocras, with three mermaids swimming in it. These mermaids held the boy’s attention for a long time, while the fountain flowed continuously for all who would and could drink of it. In front of La Trinité and stretching to the inner gate of St Denis were tableaux vivants of the nativity of the Virgin, her marriage, the Adoration of the Magi, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Flight into Egypt and a good man sowing his corn, who acted his part particularly well. Above the inner gate itself were enacted scenes from the life of St Denis, including the beheading of the glorious martyr, all of which particularly held the attention of his English entourage. Here the drapers took over the canopy from the aldermen, to be succeeded in due course by the grocers, the money changers, the goldsmiths, the furriers, the butchers and, finally, sergeants-at-arms, who delivered it to the prior of St Catherine’s, their own foundation, as of right.

  In front of their respective churches were assembled the clergy with holy water and relics, most notably the arm of St George which Henry reverently kissed. Before the church of the Innocents a forest had been created in the street where a stag was hunted by horsemen and hounds right to the feet of the king’s horse. He graciously spared its life. Outside the Châtelet he was confronted with a representation of himself, a boy of his own age and build, seated on a high platform, beneath a canopy, with two crowns suspended above and the arms of England and France worked on a satin tapestry behind. To the right were represented lords of the royal house of France: Burgundy (the most notable absentee), Anjou, Berry, Nevers, etc., presenting him with a shield of the arms of France and on the left the duke of Bedford, the earls of Warwick and Salisbury and other great English lords, all in their own correct tabards of arms, presenting the arms of England. Also on the right, on a separate lower platform, appeared a pageant of the clergy, the Provost and the citizens of Paris. Finally, before he entered the Palais, the butchers of Paris presented him with a live stag, caparisoned with the arms of his two kingdoms, which was conveyed to the Hôtel des Tournelles where he was to dine. At the Palais the clergy of the Sainte Chapelle and members of the university greeted him and after viewing and kissing the relics he proceeded to his dinner where Anne duchess of Bedford and the ladies were waiting to receive him. After dinner he resumed his progress, doffing his hat to his grandmother Queen Isabeau, waiting at the window of the Hôtel de St Pol with her ladies. The following day he removed to the castle of Vincennes to await his coronation. It is surprising that, unlike the accounts of the rather less arduous progress awaiting him on his return to London, no one here remarked on the boy’s obviously quite remarkable stamina.

  Early on Sunday 16 December, on foot from the Palais, attended by a numerous company of ecclesiastics, nobility and townsfolk ‘all singing very tunefully’, he processed to Notre Dame for his coronation. Here a huge platform, approached by steps wide enough for a procession of ten abreast, painted azure and starred with fleur-de-lys, led through the nave, under the crucifix, into the choir. The ‘Bourgeois of Paris’ records simply that the coronation ceremonies were more in the English than the French mode and that a large silver-gilt pot containing the wine at the offertory was afterwards seized by the king’s officers and only returned to the canons as their perquisite as a result of a long and costly law suit. The alleged Englishness of the ceremony is at first sight surprising, since the English coronation ordo had already been revised on the basis of Charles V’s French ordo. It may have been partly a question of personnel, since the cardinal of Winchester himself not only did the crowning this time, but also insisted on singing the mass, to the great displeasure of the bishop of Paris. But the part of the ceremony which would undoubtedly appear foreign to a Parisian spectator was the recognition, with its great shouts from the four corners of the cathedral, which had not been seen at a French coronation for more than 150 years.

  Afterwards, at the Palais, was held the traditional coronation banquet in the great hall at a great marble table, with the king served in state by all the appropriate officers. Monstrelet describes four of the elaborate ‘subtleties’: a figure of Our Lady with an infant king crowned by her side, a fleur-de-lys surmounted with a crown of gold and supported by two angels, a lady and a peacock and a lady and a swan. The anonymous ‘Bourgeois of Paris’, again derogatory, says the food, like the organization, was shocking; the English were again in charge and most of it had been cooked the previous Thursday. Away from the high table chaos reigned with the Parlement, the university, the provost of the merchants and the aldermen all unable to find seats, unless they sat amid the ravenous common herd who had waited since early morning to guzzle and steal. Only the thieves had a heyday, stealing hoods and cutting off purses. The bread and circuses were mean and despicable, ending with one single, small tournament. Paris, unaccustomed to coronations, had yet done more to honour this boy king than ever it had done for any other, yet these events brought little profit to the traders and craftsmen who had a right to expect them. Moreover, the king left the impoverished city on St Stephen’s Day to endure a bitter winter of inflated prices, scarcity of fuel and provisions, without even doing the final things which were confidently expected of him: releasing prisoners and abolishing evil taxes.42

  The memories retained by the young Henry of this climax to what was to be his one and only visit to his French kingdom remain a matter for some conjecture, It is hardly surprising however that he subsequently regarded himself as the rightful king of France. One precious and practical memento of his French coronation was his beautiful, illuminated, personal psalter, executed for him in Paris, probably as a gift f
rom his mother, since her name-saint is conspicuous in one of the miniatures portraying the child king and elsewhere in the volume.43 Another splendid memento of his visit, which he might have been expected equally to treasure and to have ensured its transport back to London, was left behind forgotten. On Christmas Eve 1430 Anne duchess of Bedford, with her husband’s consent, presented him with the illuminated Bedford Book of Hours in the Paris Use, which the duke had given her as his wedding present. John Somerset, Henry’s personal physician, recorded the presentation on a blank page.44 But Henry left it to fall into the hands of his adversary of France when he took Rouen in 1449 and to be treasured by the French royal family until it returned to English hands in the eighteenth century.45

  Henry landed at Dover on 9 February 1432, reached Eltham about St Valentine’s Day46 and made a solemn entry into London on 21 February, through festive streets displaying pageants appropriate to a now twice-crowned king entering into his estate, or, as London was privileged to call itself, his ‘chamber’.47 The city dignitaries rode out to meet him at Blackheath: the mayor in red velvet, the sheriffs and aldermen in furred scarlet cloaks, the crafts in white livery, embroidered with their own devices and alien merchants in their national costumes. After a loyal address the mayor conducted him into the city. At the entry to the bridge, raised on a pillar between antelopes bearing the arms of England and France, the now traditional giant, a sturdy champion, declared confusion to his enemies. At the centre of the bridge three empresses, Nature, Grace and Fortune, presented him with gifts: strength and comeliness, knowledge and understanding, prosperity and riches, while their fourteen attendant maidens welcomed him in song. In Cornhill there was first a tabernacle of wisdom, with the seven sciences in attendance: Priscian for grammar, Aristotle for logic, Cicero for rhetoric, Boethius for music, Pythogoras for arithmetic, Euclid for geometry and Albunisar for astronomy. On the castellated conduit called the ‘l’un, in the middle of Cornhill, was a child king enthroned, with Mercy, Truth and Clemency to govern him and attended by two judges and eight sergeants-at-law. At the Great Conduit, at the junction of Poultry and Cheapside, specially appropriate in view of the name of the mayor, John Wells, three virgins, Mercy, Grace and Pity, drew up wines of temperance, good governance and consolation from a well amid a bower of fruit trees, and Enoch and Elias blessed the king. At Chepe Cross was a royal castle of jasper, with the inevitable branching genealogical tree demonstrating, yet again, his descent from St Edward and St Louis and matched this time by a tree of Jesse demonstrating the descent of Jesus from King David. Finally, at the Little Conduit, at the west end of Cheapside, stood a representation of the Trinity, with a great multitude of angels.

  There followed a solemn service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s and then a further procession escorted by the mayor and citizens to Westminster abbey, where the chapter met him with the relics and the sceptre of St Edward. Long and heavy as this was, the young king still had the strength to bear it on his shoulder into the minster. After the singing of a Te Deum he was finally escorted to Westminster palace where, on the Saturday, a deputation of mayor, sheriffs and aldermen waited upon him with a present of a golden casket containing £1,000 in gold.

  The tremendous English national effort which culminated in Henry VI’s coronation in Paris brought little tangible gain to anyone. Nevertheless, Henry had safely entered into possession of his French patrimony as a crowned and anointed king. It is true that no subsequent resumption of military advance ever took place, and this coronation chevauchée was ‘the swan song of Lancastrian military glory’.48 However, apart from the subsequent loss of the French capital itself, a tenuous and illusory possession, which had been vital only for this one event, little more was lost. The English-held territories, as stabilized in 1431, now remained essentially intact until English plans of military advance were finally abandoned, and all hopes were transferred to peace negotiations at Tours in 1444.

  1 W. Stubbs, Constitutional History, II, 18, 31–2.

  2 Walsingham, Historia Anglicana (R.S., 1863), 337.

  3 P.P.C., III, 6–7, council orders to supply Philip Dymmock, Esquire, with the accustomed trappings, war-horse and armour for his appearance, dated 4 November 1429. Gregory’s Chronicle, 164 70, for the most detailed account, cf. ‘On the Coronation of Henry VI. A balade made of the same kynge’, printed by T. Wright, Political Poems, II, 46–8, from B.L. MS Lansdowne 285 fol. 5.

  4 ‘Register of John Amundesham’, in Annales Sancti Albani (R.S.), I, 43–4.

  5 In details of the procession (modern transcript) in B. M. Harg. 497, fols 29, 30, partly printed by L. G. Wickham Legg in English Coronation Records (Westminster 1901),

  6 Chronicon Adae de Usk, ed. and trans. W. Thompson (London 1904), 298.

  7 P.P.C., III, 7–8, order from the council to the treasurer and chamberlains of the exchequer to deliver the vessels to John Merston, keeper of the jewels for the king’s use, dated the day of the coronation, 6 November 1429.

  8 P. E. Schramm, Der König von Frankreich (Tubingen 1940), 150. On the legend of the oil reputed to have been brought from heaven during the baptism of Clovis see also F. Oppenheimer, The Legend of the Sainte Ampoulle (London 1954). On the Becket legend see most recently T. A. Sandquist, ‘The Holy Oil of St Thomas of Canterbury’, in Essays in Medieval History presented to Bertie Wilkinson, (ed. T. A. Sandquist and M. R. Powicke, Toronto 1969), 330–44, who nevertheless claims that there is no definite proof that the Becket oil was used for the coronations of Henry V and Henry VI, in spite of its mention in a mid-fifteenth-century account of Henry V’s coronation, Vita et Gesta Henrici Quinti Anglorum Regis, ed. T. Hearne, 21, and in Henry VI’s Liber Regie Capelle (see footnote 9).

  9 Charles V’s coronation ordo is B.L. Cotton Tiberius B. viii, published as The Coronation Book of Charles V of France, ed. E. S. Dewick, XVL (Henry Bradshaw Society, London 1898). The evidence for its influence on the English coronation ordo is demonstrated in the Liber Regie Capelle, ed. Walter Ullman (Henry Bradshaw Society 1961), 26–42, 77, 80, 90. The two other innovations in the French mode were prayers already recognizing the king’s full regality, said over the king by the bishop of Durham (matching the role of the bishop of Laon in the Rheims coronations), before he was raised from his seat in Westminster Hall and by the bishop of Bath on his reception at the door of the abbey.

  10 Gregory’s Chronicle, 169–70, for full details and menu.

  11 P.P.C., III, 5–6, and ibid., IV, 10–11, to the inhabitants of Paris, Rouen and other towns of France where it is again stated that this was the reason for the Westminster anointing and crowning.

  12 John Capgrave, De illustribus Henricis, ed. F. C. Hingeston (R.S., 1858), 129–30.

  13 A canon of Rheims who in 1425 dared to deface the picture was punished partly by having to pay for fresh copies of it.

  14 Details in B. H. Rowe, ‘King Henry VI’s claim to France in picture and poem’, The Library, 4th ser., XIII (1933), 77–88, from which this information is taken.

  15 B.L. MS Royal 15 E vi fol. 3a.

  16 J. W. McKenna, ‘Henry VI of England and the Dual Monarchy: Aspects of Royal Political Propaganda’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXXVIII (1965), 145–51, with plates of the coinage. As Dr McKenna points out, the designer could not reverse the relative positions of the two shields as an alternative, since the arms of France, the country for which the coins were struck, necessarily took precedence on the heraldic right, that is the left to the viewer.

  17 P.P.C., IV, 223.

  18 B. J. H. Rowe, ‘The Estates of Normandy under the duke of Bedford’, E.H.R., XLVI (1931), 564–5; Wars of the English in France during the reign of Henry VI, Letters and Papers, ed. J. Stevenson (R.S., London 1861–4), II, pt. i, 76ff.

  19 P.P.C., IV, 223.

  20 Ibid., III, 332–3. G. Du Frêne de Beaucort, Histoire de Charles VII (Paris 1881–91), I, 31, cites an agreement of 16 and 17 July 1428 between Bedford and Suffolk and Dunois, for his brother, not to attack
Charles of Orleans’s possessions during his captivity.

  21 Usually known as Dunois. Created count of Dunois 1439.

  22 P.P.C., IV, 223.

  23 Bedford and Beaufort entered Paris on 25 July. Ethel C. Williams, My Lord of Bedford 1389–1435 (London 1963), 176.

  24 Papal Letters, vii, 25, 30–2.

  25 P.P.C., III, 323.

  26 Ibid., 330, 334 (18 June 1429).

  27 Ibid. 322–3, 326; 100 spears and 700 archers against 200 spears and 1,200 archers requested.

  28 Ibid., 339–44.

  29 Subordinate to the archbishop of Canterbury and bishop of London in the Westminster coronation: Gregory’s Chronicle, 167.

  30 R.P., IV, 338.

  31 K. B. McFarlane, Cambridge Medieval History, VIII, 394.

  32 P.P.C., IV, 34.

  33 Ibid., 35–6.

  34 Ibid., 37.

  35 Ibid., 91–7.

  36 Notably Creil, Pontoise, Meaux, Montereau and Montargis.

  37 Anthony B. Steel, The Receipt of the Exchequer, 1377–1485 (Cambridge 1954), 172–5, and his graphs in Appendix E.

  38 M. R. Powicke, ‘Lancastrian Captains’, in Essays in Medieval History presented to Bertie Wilkinson, ed. T. A. Sandquist and M. R. Powicke (Toronto 1969), 371–82.