It was Henry VI’s tragedy that he took after his mother rather than his father. Passive, pliant, indecisive and mentally fragile, Henry VI was dominated by those around him. Facing a situation at home and abroad which required all Henry V’s abilities, Henry VI showed not the slightest aptitude for warfare or government. His main interests were spiritual and educational — his collegiate foundations at Eton and Cambridge and the new university at Caen. Described as a ‘dangerous compound of forcefulness and weakness’, Henry’s forays into diplomatic negotiations with the French were invariably disastrous. Nevertheless, the impression of forcefulness was perhaps an illusory one, created by the nature of the office rather than the man. In the fifteenth century the king’s will remained the first mover in government, and in its absence it had to be manufactured.
The character of government under Henry VI reflected the king’s personality (or lack of it). The conciliar regime of the minority soon fell away, to be replaced by the rule of a narrow clique based on the royal household, led by William de la Pole, earl (later duke) of Suffolk, who had been steward of the household since 1433. The king’s pliability and lack of interest in government meant that the normal flow of power was reversed. Instead of the king ruling through his household, the household ruled through the king, a situation not seen in England since the reign of Edward II.
The king’s coming of age prompted a scramble for patronage, the main beneficiaries of which were inevitably members of his household. The young king’s generosity in granting petitions was so profligate that in 1444 an attempt was made to set up an advisory body to monitor petitions and prevent inappropriate alienations. This appears to have had no more than a temporary effect.
An example of the indiscriminate nature of Henry VI’s patronage was the grant to the earl of Devon in 1441 of the stewardship of the duchy of Cornwall, an office already held by Devon’s enemy Sir William Bonville. The double grant needlessly increased tension between the two magnates and caused consternation and confusion at the centre, necessitating lengthy council sessions to defuse the problem.
The financial consequences of such mismanagement, on top of the heavy burdens of Lancastrian France, were disastrous. The commitment to a policy of ‘bone governance’ involving tight financial controls, which had been the keystone of Henry V’s success, went by the board. In the early 1440s the regime was kept afloat only by the enormous sums lent by Cardinal Henry Beaufort, which gave the Beauforts a disproportionate influence over policy.
The king’s majority sparked off fundamental debate over the direction of policy towards France, which had been in suspense since 1422. The pacific Henry VI favoured peaceful negotiation leading towards a final settlement. In 1440, as a token of good will, he unilaterally freed Charles duke of Orleans (captured at Agincourt), whose release Henry V had considered such an important diplomatic asset that he had forbidden it until his son was of age. Gloucester, Henry V’s last surviving brother, furiously opposed Orleans’s release, and championed a policy of vigorous military action to counter the reverses of the previous decade. Elder statesmen such as Cardinal Beaufort and the treasurer, Lord Cromwell, recognised the precariousness of royal finances and of the military situation in France, acknowledging the need for negotiations to win time for recovery. Henry VI’s title as king of France remained non-negotiable, however. Even the suspension of his use of the title, proposed at the Gravelines peace conference of 1439, was unacceptable.
Meanwhile the military situation in both Normandy and Gascony continued to deteriorate for want of money, men and royal concern. After the death of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, the king’s lieutenant in France, in 1439 Normandy was left without a supreme commander until the despatch of Richard duke of York as king’s lieutenant in 1441. Shortly before York’s arrival the royal council in Normandy sent Henry VI a bitter complaint, lamenting what they saw as the king’s abandonment of the duchy. The defence of Gascony was similarly neglected, and only the French invasion of 1442 and panic-stricken appeals from Bordeaux prompted some reaction at Westminster. Temporarily abandoning his peace policy Henry resolved upon a great expedition under the command of his cousin John Beaufort, duke of Somerset. Unfortunately, as Treasurer Cromwell made clear, the resources were not available for campaigns in both Normandy and Gascony. Instead the objective was for Somerset to relieve the pressure on the two duchies by marching into the Loire valley and bringing Charles VII to battle — a plan substantially determined by Somerset’s desire to consolidate his own territorial interests in Maine and Anjou. In the event the 1443 expedition was a costly anti-climax, and Somerset died in disfavour the following year.
Negotiations resumed at the peace conference at Tours in 1444, the English delegation being led by Suffolk. The weakness of the English position was painfully apparent, and the valuable diplomatic asset of Henry VI’s marriage was traded for a mere two-year truce with France. Furthermore, Henry’s bride Margaret, daughter of Rene, duke of Anjou, proved at first little more than a vehicle for Charles VII to exert pressure on Henry VI to surrender the English-held county of Maine. The king secretly agreed to the surrender shortly after his wedding in 1445, but the proposal caused uproar when it became known, and was finally effected only in 1448. Once again, Charles VII had won a major concession at no significant cost to himself.
During the periods of truce after 1444 Henry VI’s government showed no sense of urgency in restoring the crumbling defences of Normandy. York was recalled after the expiry of his term of office as lieutenant in 1445, and his successor, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, did not arrive in the duchy until March 1448. With the acute financial problems of the late 1440s, the funds were simply not available to maintain adequate garrisons in Normandy. By contrast, Charles VII exploited the truces to carry out a fundamental and far-reaching reorganisation of his army.
Confusion and indecision abroad were matched by profligacy and mismanagement at home. The crown’s indebtedness had grown to such an extent that by the late 1440s it was effectively bankrupt. In 1449 the cost of meeting the crown’s debts and current charges was estimated at £372,000 (as against the proceeds from a single parliamentary subsidy of only about £30,000). In spite of this financial crisis, however, Henry VI continued with the lavish dispensation of patronage. The Lancastrian affinity and the establishment of the household swelled to unprecedented numbers. The provinces were dominated by household men who exploited their power to manipulate the law and local government. Suffolk’s retainers, Thomas Tuddenham and John Heydon in East Anglia, and James Fiennes, Lord Say and Sele in Kent, provided the most notorious examples of such exploitation.
The nadir of Henry VI’s rule during the 1440s was reached with the arrest on suspicion of treason of the king’s uncle Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, in 1447, an event so traumatic and humiliating for the duke that the shock of it killed him. The suspicions were almost certainly baseless, but Gloucester’s vocal opposition to Henry’s peace policy had fostered the king’s mistrust, which was clearly played on by the Suffolk clique in order to destroy the duke, whom they feared as the only magnate with the standing to oppose them. The arrest, at Bury St Edmunds, was dramatic and unexpected: most of Gloucester’s retinue was arrested with him. Gloucester’s estates were dispersed with unseemly haste, some of the grants being dated on the very day of his death.
The crisis of the Lancastrian monarchy was inevitably precipitated by events in France. The trigger was the capture and sack of the Breton border fortress of Fougeres, with the connivance of the dukes of Suffolk and Somerset, in March 1449. The duke of Brittany appealed for aid to Charles VII, to whom he had paid homage in 1446. This provided Charles with the pretext to reopen the war, and at the end of July 1449 the reconquest of Normandy began. The defending forces, under Somerset’s command, were totally unprepared for the invasion, and French armies advanced through Normandy virtually unopposed. The most humiliating moment in this military catastrophe was the surrender by Somerset of Rouen, in October, without even a token siege. Rouen was the capital of the duchy, and had held out for six months against Henry V in 1418. Its loss was to bulk large in the charges brought by York against Somerset as their feud gathered momentum in 1452. Harfleur fell in January 1450, and an inadequate relieving force under Sir Thomas Kyriell was defeated at Formigny in April. Caen was lost in June, and Cherbourg, the last stronghold held by the English, on 12 August 1450.
In the long term it is clear that the loss of Normandy was a fatal blow to the house of Lancaster. The military collapse revealed the scale of paralysis, confusion and incompetence which had gripped royal government since 1437. The immediate target of popular and parliamentary fury was not Henry VI himself, however, but his court. In January 1450 Adam Moleyns, keeper of the privy seal, was murdered at Portsmouth by troops on their way to Normandy. The following month parliament commenced impeachment proceedings against Suffolk. As the king’s chief minister during the 1440s the duke was held responsible for all the diplomatic and military failures of the decade, from the release of Charles of Orleans to the surrender of Maine and the loss of Normandy. All were now seen as part of a treasonable conspiracy by Suffolk to overthrow Henry VI, and, with French help, to place on the throne his own son John, who had been betrothed to Margaret, daughter and heiress of John Beaufort, duke of Somerset. Henry, showing the loyalty to his servants which was one of his few redeeming features as king, cut short impeachment proceedings and banished Suffolk for five years. This was, however, insufficient to save the disgraced favourite, for on his way into exile in May 1450 Suffolk was murdered by seamen on a ship in the Channel. His headless body was found on Dover beach.
Within weeks of Suffolk’s murder rebellion swept across Kent and much of the south-east, sparked off by the disastrous news from Normandy and the oppressiveness of the king’s household men. The rising in Kent, led by Jack Cade, began comparatively peacefully as a mass demonstration demanding the removal of the ‘false traitors’ around the king and the restoration of substantial aristocratic counsel. Henry responded ineptly with a show of arms, and then fled to the midlands when the rapacity and indiscipline of his forces inflamed rather than forestalled the rebellion. The Cade rebels advanced on London early in July and pillaged the city for three days from their base in Southwark; they captured and executed the Treasurer Lord Say, who was particularly hated as a royal favourite and extortionate Kentish landowner. The rebels dispersed after the grant of a general pardon on 7 July, but unrest continued throughout the south-east during the summer and autumn.
One of the complaints of the Cade rebels was against the ‘covetise’ or greed of the king’s household men, who had enriched themselves at the expense of the crown and the realm. This was a leading theme of the reaction against Henry VI’s regime, appearing also in the charges against Suffolk and later in York’s articles against Somerset in 1452. In parliament it took the form of demands for the annulment of all grants made by the king or in his name since his accession: resumption, rather than further taxation, was the Commons’ immediate response to the calamitous financial situation. The first act of resumption was passed in 1450, but was so qualified by exemptions as to be largely ineffective. A second resumption was, however, passed in the parliament of 1451, which for a time allowed revenues from crown lands to be assigned in the traditional way to the expenses of the royal household.
The crisis entered a new phase in August 1450 with the return of Richard, duke of York, from Ireland, where he had been serving as king’s lieutenant. By virtue of his exclusion from the inner circle of Henry VI’s counsels during the 1440s, the logic of events now drove York willy-nilly into opposition to the court. York was untainted with responsibility for the failures of the regime. In the febrile atmosphere of 1450 his blood, wealth and status as a possible heir to the throne made him an object of seditious rumour. One of Jack Cade’s aliases was John Mortimer, a possible reference to the Mortimer claim to the throne now represented by Richard duke of York, and the rebels found it necessary to deny that they intended to make York king in Henry’s place.
York’s avowed intention in returning to England without the king’s permission was to protect his honour and defend his name from any imputation of treason. With the death of Suffolk, Somerset’s humiliation in Normandy and the collapse of the regime’s credibility, he might also have been expecting to return to a leading role in government. Instead, he found that Somerset, far from being disgraced, had succeeded Suffolk in the king’s favour, and had been named constable of England. This was doubly intolerable for York inasmuch as Somerset’s abandonment of Rouen in 1449 called into question his own honour under the law of arms as captain of the city, although absent in Ireland at its fall.
Following his return, York sought to claim a place in government, and to oust Somerset from power and bring charges against him for the loss of Normandy. Late in 1450 he pressed his case on Henry VI in personal encounters, written bills (which were widely publicised) and, in November, in parliament, where York’s chamberlain, Sir William Oldhall, was elected speaker. The duke associated himself with the bitter complaints of the Commons against Henry VI’s household, and the demands for justice to be done against the ‘traitors’ round the king. The political atmosphere remained highly unstable. Several magnates brought large retinues to London for the parliament, and sporadic unrest continued in Kent and the south-east. In December Somerset narrowly escaped assassination and had to be placed in the Tower for his own protection.
The king and the court remained hostile to York and intensely suspicious of his motives. Henry VI repudiated York’s proffered counsel and rejected his offers of assistance in restoring order and justice. In parliament a petition for the banishment of some thirty members of the royal household, headed by Somerset, met a cool response from the king; while the proposal from York’s councillor, Thomas Young, for the recognition of York’s title as heir to the as yet childless Henry VI was answered by the prompt dissolution of the parliamentary session in June 1451.
1450 was potentially a revolutionary year. What was at stake was not Henry VI’s throne, but the structure and personnel of his regime as it had developed since 1437. York was clearly the magnate best placed to profit from the collapse of that regime and to sweep it away, yet in the event it survived, and the duke was left isolated and dangerously exposed. Paradoxically it seems as if York’s challenge may have rallied the demoralised household, providing a focus against which it could regroup behind Somerset. York’s failure to seize the moment in 1450 was in large part the result of his inability to carry a significant section of the nobility with him: the magnates were not sufficiently convinced of the justice of York’s charges against Somerset. The survival of the regime, however, may ultimately have cost Henry VI his throne: if York had successfully challenged Somerset and purged the household in 1450, the polarisation of national politics which led to the first battle of St Albans in 1455 might have been avoided, and thus the descent into dynastic rivalry and civil war.
With the initial crisis past, the years 1451—2 saw a modest revival in royal authority, despite continuing losses in France. The king, with uncharacteristic energy, embarked on a series of punitive judicial visitations around the south and midlands. As Somerset consolidated his power, York felt his position increasingly threatened. The arrest of Gloucester, less than five years before, was an obvious reminder of the risks of opposing the court. In the autumn of 1451 York further incurred the king’s displeasure by his intervention in the dispute in the south-west between Lord Bonville and the earl of Devon. With a miscalculation born of desperation York risked an armed demonstration to force his will on the king, which barely stopped short of open rebellion. At Dartford in March 1452 a royal army supported by most of the leading nobility faced down York’s forces. The duke was compelled to make a humiliating submission. The king dismissed the articles which he had presented against Somerset, and he was made to take an oath of loyalty to Henry, swearing not to attempt anything against the crown, and to attend the king when summoned.
Events in the summer of 1453 rescued York from the political margins. The defeat of the expeditionary force in Gascony at the battle of Castillon in July extinguished any realistic hope of the recovery by the English crown of its territories in south-western France, over-run by Charles VII’s forces in 1451. A few weeks after Castillon Henry VI suffered a mental collapse from which he did not emerge until the beginning of 1455. York could not be excluded from the magnate councils which were convened to respond to this unforeseen crisis. Once admitted he soon became dominant: Somerset was committed to the Tower in November 1453, and following the death of the chancellor, Archbishop John Kemp, in March 1454, York was named protector and chief councillor.
The escalation of violent magnate disputes was no less important than the king’s madness for the revival of York’s fortunes. The most serious of these was the Neville—Percy dispute in the north, which broke out into armed confrontation in August 1453, when forces led by Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont, ambushed a Neville wedding party at Heworth Moor in Yorkshire. Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, was also in dispute with Somerset over the lordship of Glamorgan, while the young duke of Exeter, Henry Holland, was prosecuting a bitter feud against the long-standing Lancastrian servant, Lord Cromwell.
The proliferation of such disputes reflected the king’s signal failure to contain and resolve conflict amongst his nobility. Their significance ran still wider, however, for they foreshadowed the break-up of the nobility into factions. The cohesion amongst the leading magnates, long sustained by the common purpose of defending Lancastrian France, began to disintegrate. Most important was the rift between Somerset and the Nevilles, which facilitated the alliance between the latter and York. The Neville—Beaufort connection had been the backbone of Lancastrian magnate support since the reign of Henry IV, and its demise marked an important step in the fall of the house of Lancaster.
During his brief Protectorate York sought to restore public order and to reduce the size and expense of the royal household. Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, was appointed chancellor, and with the support of Cromwell and the Nevilles, York led a judicial visitation to Yorkshire to discipline followers of Exeter and the Percies. Exeter himself, who openly defied York’s authority, was imprisoned in Salisbury’s castle at Pontefract. York, however, failed to bring charges against Somerset, and although he took over the captaincy of Calais from the latter, he was unable to establish his authority there before Henry VI’s recovery early in 1455.
Henry VI’s return to sanity abruptly ended York’s pre-eminence and restored his enemies to power. Somerset was quickly released and declared free of any suspicion of treason. Salisbury, having been forced to release Exeter, resigned the chancellorship in March. A magnate council summoned to meet at Leicester in May, ostensibly to provide for the king’s safety, was probably designed to compel the Yorkist lords into submission. They responded with force. At St Albans they attacked the court on its way to Leicester; Somerset and the Percy earl of Northumberland were murdered and the king was seized.
At the battle of St Albans York ‘had finally achieved by force of arms in half an hour what in politics had painfully eluded him for the last five years: the elimination of his chief political rival ... and control of the king’s person’. The advantages he gained were comparatively short-lived, however, and they were won at the price of abandoning the traditional constraints against violence in the king’s presence. The decline of respect for the king’s person — he was slightly wounded at St Albans — revealed the decrease in his own personal authority. Henry became a passive repository of royal charisma, bestowing legitimacy on whichever faction controlled him. More fundamentally, the battle of St Albans witnessed the collapse of any semblance of normal political discourse, initiating as it did a string of aristocratic blood-feuds.
Having gained custody of the king, York now controlled government for about a year after St Albans. Henry VI suffered a mental relapse in November 1455 (from which he appears never to have fully recovered) and York was for a short period re-elected protector. In the summer of 1456, however, Queen Margaret withdrew the king away from Westminster to the Lancastrian strongholds in the midlands. The queen, as mother of the infant Edward, prince of Wales (born on 13 October 1453 during Henry VI’s first bout of insanity), now assumed leadership of the Lancastrian and household faction. Like Richard II after 1388 she sought to rebuild royal authority on a regional basis, using in particular the duchy of Lancaster estates, the principality of Wales and the earldom of Chester. Her intention was to accumulate sufficient military resources to overwhelm the Yorkist lords and prevent a recurrence of St Albans. The withdrawal from London nevertheless marked a further stage in the process of political fragmentation.
By the summer of 1459 Queen Margaret and her allies felt strong enough for a confrontation with the Yorkists. In May loyal Lancastrians were summoned to Leicester for military service, and the following month a great council was held at Coventry. York, Salisbury and Warwick received summonses to this council but failed to appear. Their non-appearance provided the pretext for military action. In October a royal army encountered a Yorkist force near Ludlow: the latter broke up in confusion, the soldiers refusing to oppose the king in the field. York fled to Ireland, and his son Edward, earl of March, escaped with the Nevilles to Calais, where Warwick was captain. Parliament was immediately summoned to Coventry, where the attainder of the Yorkist lords was proclaimed and their estates confiscated.
The queen’s triumph lasted less than a year. Calais, with its garrison of professional soldiers, was an ideal base from which to launch a counter-attack. In June 1460 Salisbury, Warwick and March landed in Kent and occupied London. A few days later Warwick and March defeated a royal force at Northampton and captured the king. The rebel lords continued to stress their loyalty to Henry VI, but on York’s return from Ireland in September he soon made clear his intent to claim the royal title. He apparently expected to sweep to the throne on a tide of popular acclaim: events proved that he had miscalculated. The magnates and prelates would not countenance a deposition. Henry VI, for all his failings, was not a tyrant like Richard II, nor was he childless. An awkward compromise, the Act of Accord, was agreed which owed much to the Treaty of Troyes: Henry was to remain as king but York was named as his heir, thus disinheriting Prince Edward.
The leading Lancastrians were not a party to this abortive settlement. The queen and the prince took refuge in Scotland, while Exeter, Northumberland and Somerset defied the regime in the north. In December 1460 they took their revenge for St Albans, inflicting a crushing defeat on the Yorkists at Wakefield in which York and Salisbury were both killed.
The death of York finally broke the impasse which had paralysed national politics since the crisis of 1450. March, York’s heir, now considered himself absolved from any allegiance to Henry VI. The triumphant Lancastrians saw victory within their grasp and advanced south. At St Albans in February 1461 they defeated Warwick’s forces, and the road to London lay open before them. At this critical moment the queen hesitated fatally. Instead of pressing home her advantage she withdrew her forces once more to the midlands, abandoning the capital to the Yorkists. Warwick and March re-entered London, and on 4 March 1461 York’s heir went through a form of coronation and claimed the throne as Edward IV. Three weeks later, at the battle of Towton, the new king inflicted a decisive defeat on the Lancastrians and the reign of Henry VI was effectively at an end.
The disintegration and collapse of Henry VI’s regime reveal again the significance for the history of the Lancastrian monarchy of the themes of warfare, service and finance identified at the beginning of this chapter. In all three areas, Henry VI showed himself to be completely unsuited to kingship. His most significant failure was military. The victories of Henry V, culminating in the Treaty of Troyes, linked the fortunes of the Lancastrian dynasty inextricably to continued military success in France. Remarkably, and uniquely among medieval English kings, Henry VI never took an active part in any military campaign. Nor did he ever visit his French realms as an adult. Without his leadership, and despite the efforts of his military captains, the Lancastrian cause in France ultimately went by default. The marked decline in aristocratic and gentry participation in the last phases of the Hundred Years War was clearly attributable in part to Henry VI’s own example.
Henry VI’s failure to provide military and political leadership rendered him incapable of commanding the quality of service from the nobility and gentry necessary for stable and effective government. His effective abdication of the king’s political role to surrogates such as Suffolk and Somerset meant that the exercise of royal power was distorted through the prism of sectional magnate interests. It was in this context that the aristocratic divisions which made possible the Wars of the Roses were generated. Henry IV had relied for his survival on the Lancastrian affinity; Henry V transcended his father’s limited support to create a genuinely national following. Under Henry VI the duchy of Lancaster again became the power base of a faction, whose members exploited royal authority for their own advantage.
The crisis in the crown’s finances was closely linked to Henry VI’s failure to provide military and political leadership. The parliamentary taxation necessary to finance adequately the war in France could only have been negotiated by an active warrior king, and strict financial controls were necessary to make the most of the crown’s limited resources. Henry VI’s inability to maximise war taxation was compounded by the profligacy with which he dispensed patronage. The cumulative result was a deficit by 1450 tantamount to bankruptcy, which crippled royal policy and rendered illusory any prospect of the recovery of Lancastrian France.
Henry VI’s misrule had far-reaching effects which long outlasted his reign. The political instability engendered in the decade between 1450 and 1460 was so profound, and the divisions amongst the nobility so bitter, that they took more than a generation to eradicate. The Wars of the Roses, and the Tudor settlement which followed, led to permanent changes in English political society. Royal authority emerged considerably enhanced from the crisis (as it had in France under Charles VII). The forfeitures and redistribution of estates which accompanied the changes of dynasty undermined traditional loyalties to regional magnate houses, and fostered more direct links between the crown and the gentry in the provinces. Finally, the traumatic memory of instability and civil war remained lodged in the collective consciousness of the nation, and helped to shape the political culture of sixteenth-century England.