Who Was Henry VI of England?

Henry VI of England (1421–1471) was King of England from 1422 to 1461 and briefly again from October 1470 to April 1471, and King of France, in the English claim, from 1422 to 1453. He came to the throne as an infant eight months old, lost almost the entire French inheritance he had been given, suffered at least two major breakdowns of mind, and was murdered in the Tower of London on the night of 20/21 May 1471. His reign is conventionally the worst in English medieval history, and it is the hinge on which the political crisis of the Wars of the Roses turned.

Birth and accession

Henry was born on 6 December 1421 at Windsor, the only child of Henry V and Catherine of Valois. He succeeded to the English throne on 31 August 1422, on the death of his father, and to the French throne — under the terms of the Treaty of Troyes — on 21 October 1422, on the death of Charles VI. The dual monarchy, of an infant king of nine months ruling two kingdoms, was the most ambitious construction of the war. The regency in England was exercised successively by John, duke of Bedford, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and (after 1437) by the young king in person. The regency in France was Bedford’s, and Bedford won the major victory at Verneuil on 17 August 1424.

The collapse of the dual monarchy

The English position in France, which had seemed so strong in 1420, dissolved in three stages. First, Joan of Arc’s intervention in 1429 — the relief of Orléans, the Loire campaign culminating in Patay on 18 June 1429, the coronation of Charles VII at Reims on 17 July 1429 — broke the political assumption on which the dual monarchy rested. Second, the Congress of Arras on 21 September 1435 ended the war between France and Burgundy, and Philip the Good committed his state to the Valois. Bedford died at Rouen on 14 September 1435, three days before the treaty was signed. Third, in two autumn campaigns of 1449 and 1451, the French reconquered Normandy and Gascony. The English war effort was funded by parliamentary taxation that was running out of political credit.

The personal rule

Henry was declared of age on 12 November 1437 and assumed personal rule. He was pious, well-intentioned, and intellectually gifted, and he was — on the evidence of the foundation charters and the records of his court — a poor judge of men. He married Margaret of Anjou in April 1445, sold Maine to Charles VII in the same year (a decision that helped trigger the loss of Normandy in 1449), and presided over the slow disintegration of the English political class. He founded Eton College in 1440 and King’s College, Cambridge in 1441; both foundations testify to a serious mind. The English parliamentary class, increasingly aware that they were paying for a lost war, became more difficult to manage.

The mental illness

Henry suffered a complete mental collapse in the summer of 1453, after news of the defeat at Castillon reached England. He was catatonic, unable to recognise his newborn son Edward (born 13 October 1453) for several months, and incapable of public business for more than a year. The crisis of the regency that followed — with Richard, duke of York, claiming the protectorship, and Queen Margaret defending her son’s interests — is the immediate origin of the Wars of the Roses. The first pitched battle, at St Albans on 22 May 1455, opened the civil war.

Deposition, restoration, and death

The duke of York became king as Edward IV in March 1461, after the Yorkist victories at Mortimer’s Cross and Towton. Henry, captured in 1465, was imprisoned in the Tower, briefly restored to the throne by the earl of Warwick (“the Kingmaker”) in October 1470, and finally recaptured after the Yorkist victory at Barnet (14 April 1471) and the Lancastrian disaster at Tewkesbury (4 May 1471). He died in the Tower on the night of 20/21 May 1471. Modern forensic opinion is consistent that he was murdered, almost certainly on the orders of Edward IV.

Reputation

Henry is the subject of a substantial biographical literature. The old image of the saintly incompetent, the antithesis of his father, has been refined by R. A. Griffiths (The Reign of King Henry VI, 1981) and by the contributors to the Oxford Handbook of the Wars of the Roses (2015, ed. Doran). Henry was not stupid. He was a man of devotional seriousness who was completely out of his depth, and the disasters of his reign were as much the work of his councillors and his enemies as his own.