To my mother
First published in 1981 by Eyre Methuen Ltd
First published in paperback in 1983 by Methuen London Ltd
Copyright © 1981 Bertram Wolffe
New Edition © 2001 The Estate of Bertram Wolffe
New Foreword © 2001 John L. Watts
Printed in Great Britain by Good News Digital Books
Library of Congress Control Number: 2001087996
ISBN 978-0-300-08926-4 (pbk)
Also in the Yale English Monarchs Series
ATHELSTAN by Sarah Foot
EDWARD THE CONFESSOR by Frank Barlow
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR by David Douglas*
WILLIAM RUFUS by Frank Barlow
HENRY I by Warren Hollister
KING STEPHEN by Edmund King
HENRY II by W. L. Warren*
RICHARD I by John Gillingham
KING JOHN by W. L. Warren*
EDWARD I by Michael Prestwich
EDWARD II by Seymour Phillips
RICHARD II by Nigel Saul
HENRY V by Christopher Allmand
HENRY VI by Bertram Wolffe
EDWARD IV by Charles Ross
RICHARD III by Charles Ross
HENRY VII by S. B. Chrimes
HENRY VIII by J. J. Scarisbrick
EDWARD VI by Jennifer Loach
MARY I by John Edwards
JAMES II by John Miller
QUEEN ANNE by Edward Gregg
GEORGE I by Ragnhild Hatton
GEORGE II by Andrew C. Thompson
GEORGE III by Jeremy Black
GEORGE IV by E. A. Smith
* Available in the U.S. from University of California Press
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABBREVIATIONS
FOREWORD TO THE YALE EDITION (by John L. Watts)
Part I · THE MYTH OF THE ROYAL SAINT
1The Myth of the Royal Saint
Part II · THE MINORITY
2An Infant King
3Coronations
4Royal Adolescence
Part III · MAJORITY RULE
5The Attainment of Power
6The Royal Entourage
7Patronage, Faction and Injustice in England, 1437–1450
8The Founder of Eton and King’s
9War and Peace: the Problems of Normandy and Gascony, 1437–1443
10Marriage and Truce, 1443–1445
11Surrender and Defeat, 1445–1450
Part IV · THE AFTERMATH OF DEFEAT
12Parliamentary Opposition and Popular Risings, 1449–1450
13The Frustration of Richard duke of York, 1450–1453
14Madness, 1453–1455
Part V · CIVIL WAR
15The First Battle of St Albans and its Consequences
16The Loss of the Throne
17The Last Ten Years
Part VI · A POTHEOSIS
Apotheosis
Appendix: Itinerary of Henry VI, 1436–1461
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS
MAPS
1 England and Wales
2 English Normandy and Maine
3 English Gascony
GENEALOGIES
1 The House of Anjou
2 Lancaster and York
Acknowledgements and thanks for permission to reproduce photographs are due to the National Portrait Gallery for plate 1a; to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster for plate 1b; to the British Library
The maps and genealogies were re-drawn from the author’s roughs by Neil Hyslop.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to Miss Irene Bell, Mr A. M. Cockerill, Dr R. J. Hetherington and Mr T. B. Pugh for pointing out errors in the original text. While the hardback edition was in the press, Dr and Mrs Strong published the copy of Henry V’s will referred to on pp. 28–9 in E.H.R., xcvi (1981), 89–102, with comments which show that Henry VI himself received a copy of the will in 1444.
ABBREVIATIONS
B.I.H.R. Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research
B.J.R.L. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
B.L. British Library
C.C.R. Calendar of Close Rolls
C.P.R. Calendar of Patent Rolls
E.E.T.S. Early English Text Society
E.H.R. English Historical Review
H.B.C. Handbook of British Chronology
H.M.S.O. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office
P.P.C. Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council
P.R.O. Public Record Office
R.P. Rotuli Parliamentorum
R.S. Rolls Series
S.R. Statutes of the Realm
T.R.H.S. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
V.C.H. Victoria County Histories
FOREWORD TO THE YALE EDITION
by John L. Watts
In a poem, apparently from the early 1460s, the deposed King Henry VI is depicted wandering in the wild places of his realm and lamenting his fate. In a typical verse, he declares,
Than sette I from my ryalte
As angell dede from hevyn to helle;
All crystyn kinges be war be me –
God amend wikkyd cownsel!
This vision of a mild and martyred king, led astray by wicked counsellors, would have been a familiar one to the poet’s audience. Only the tone of plangent complaint is perhaps untypical, since Henry was conventionally a man of few words and Job-like patience. Defeated in battle in 1455, in 1460 and twice in 1461, he apparently greeted each victor with equanimity. So little was he implicated in Lancastrian resistance to the usurping Yorkists that his allies released him to rove about the north, and Edward IV preserved him alive until after the coup which brought him briefly back to the throne in 1470–1. Before the end of Edward’s reign, pilgrims had made a popular saint of him, and in the ensuing decades they were joined by others: clerics with an eye on the revenues his relics might bring; apologists for the Tudor dynasty which descended from his half-brother; an Eton schoolmaster promoting the imitation of Christ with a biography of his college’s founder. By the time of Shakespeare, the image of the child-like ruler, an innocent abroad in the broils of fifteenth-century politics, was well established in the popular imagination. To B. P. Wolffe, citing the only two modern biographies of the king then available, both written in the 1920s, it seemed that it might still be current.1 It was in order to challenge its historical accuracy that he wrote this controversial book.
At stake for Wolffe was the question of who should bear responsibility for the Wars of the Roses, which began in the disorders of Henry VPs last decade. Earlier accounts, he thought, had tended to present the king as a hapless bystander, and to lay a corresponding emphasis on the inadequacy of his ministers. To Wolffe, this traditional picture was wrong on two counts. First of all, it rested on a view of Henry VI which was more the product of Tudor hagiography than mid-century reality. Vergil’s history and Blacman’s memoir, which seemed to underlie historians’ views of the king, were thoroughly unreliable sources. Henry’s own subjects had a more jaundiced perception of their ruler, and if historians abandoned the myth of the king’s innocence and paid attention to the records of his actions, they would find him to be a very different kind of man: self-important, erratic and determined to intervene in political questions which interested him. Such a king might have had a more substantial part to play in causing the troubles that engulfed his realm, and indeed, argued Wolffe, how could it be otherwise? ‘A fifteenth-century king,’ he wrote, ‘both reigned and ruled. … On the personality of the king depended the tone and quality of the life of the nation’.
Behind this observation lay the second set of considerations which provoked Wolffe’s revisionism. The work on the crown lands which had d
ominated his career until the 1970s, and perhaps the influence of K. B. McFarlane, who had supervised his doctorate in the 1950s, had developed in him a view of the constitution which emphasized the personal agency of kings, and the informal means – curial, patronal, lordly – through which they typically ruled. Earlier constitutional historians had proposed a kind of cabinet government as the Lancastrian norm, and so found it easy enough to imagine that an unobtrusive man like Henry of Windsor could have remained at the margins of politics, but Wolffe’s formation as a historian came at a time when these ideas were losing their hold, and although a new synthesis was yet to emerge, the emphasis of political history had shifted. McFarlane himself, of course, was at pains to re-centre that history on the nobility as the most powerful class in the realm. He argued that historians were inclined to be ‘King’s Friends’, and were unduly concerned with arcane constitutional questions thrown up by the institutions of central power; but in exploring the relationship between the great landowners and their ruler, he sketched a picture of how kings should rule which Wolffe clearly took to heart. The king must attend to ‘the arts of political management’, showing good lordship to the magnates by protecting and advancing them and their clients, pacifying their quarrels and, above all, offering them inspiring leadership in war. If relations broke down among the political elite, this was almost always the king’s fault.
It was apparently with these impulses in mind that Wolffe proposed a new account of Henry VI’s reign, first in a conference paper in Cardiff in 1970 – where it contributed to the sense of a real take-off in fifteenth-century studies – and then, after a decade’s further research and refinement, in this book. Its outlines can be simply described. Discarding the better known biographical information on Henry as the product of propaganda, Wolffe focused his efforts on the study of the king through his actions, and thus particularly on the period from 1437, when he was sixteen and acquired full power, to 1453, when he was first afflicted with a mental illness from which he made only partial and temporary recovery. All the same, the book begins with a study of the minority, which is shown to have been a broadly successful period of rule, its feuds the inevitable result of a lack of royal direction, and their significance for the rest of the reign limited. Although there were financial problems by the mid-1430s, Henry’s councillors had done their job well: the king came into an inheritance substantially the same as it was in 1422; unity prevailed among the magnates, and only the most unsustainable of French titles and territories had been lost. Having strained towards power for some years, the king was admitted to it – in full – in 1437, and chapters five, six and seven of the book describe, in thematic style, his rule in England up to 1450.
As was customary, in Wolffe’s view, the household was the centre of power, while the council existed to sort out the details of what had been authorized. With the king unable to exercise any discretion in the management of patronage or the making of policy, Henry’s household was an ineffectual and unpopular organization: it did not bind the realm together; rather, the indulgence shown to its members caused division and destroyed confidence in royal justice. Royal neglectfulness in this area produced mounting disorder and played a part in the uprisings of 1450, but for Wolffe it was not the real cause of the civil wars of the next decade. Divisions among the magnates stemmed, above all, from Henry’s mismanagement of the war, which forms the subject of chapters nine, ten and eleven. The king’s foolish policies – in particular the Anjou marriage and the related cession of Maine – set up a climate of confusion, suspicion and recrimination which issued forth in a full-scale conflict between York and Somerset in the wake of the humiliating defeats in France. This fundamental cause was exacerbated by other features of Henry’s rule, such as his vindictiveness towards those who seemed to threaten him (notably York), and his capacity to generate faction. Apart from a brief spell in the early 1450s, when the king seemed to manage his military and judicial responsibilities well (and earned the usual rewards from a grateful parliament), these characteristics lent stimulus to a conflict which gradually resolved into a struggle to control him. His ejection, in 1461, was richly deserved: it was, as Wolffe argued, Henry’s ‘gross misgovernment and mismanagement of the nation’s affairs at home and abroad’ which created enmities among his subjects and produced a civil war that took another decade to resolve.
At its first outing in 1970, in sketch form, this new interpretation was greeted with a mixture of debate and enthusiasm. Several reviewers singled it out as the most exciting contribution to the book of essays which emerged from the Cardiff conference.2 This was a heady time for fifteenth-century history: a widening number of research students and established scholars were working on the period, but publications bringing the new learning of McFarlane and his students into print were yet to appear. A revision of Henry VI’s reign, to parallel Charles Ross’s emerging work on Edward IV, would help to establish the new understanding of the period and to drive out those lingering Victorian assumptions about the Wars of the Roses, which sat so uneasily with a more positive understanding of fifteenth-century lordship and kingship. In the event, readers had to wait until 1981 for a book-length development of Wolffe’s ideas, and this delay may have played a part in the rather critical reception that greeted its appearance.
But before we look at the criticisms made of Henry VI, we should pay some attention to its virtues. First among them, though it was not particularly fashionable in 1981, was Wolffe’s insightful, if selective, handling of contemporary political values and power-structures, and his recognition that a grasp of these was fundamental to an understanding of Henry VI’s rule. He showed, for example, how the deep impropriety of challenging a late medieval king set the terms for politics as Henry’s inadequacies became apparent: not only does this help to explain why such an incompetent king was able to remain in power, and incidentally to justify Wolffe’s view that criticism of Henry’s ministers cannot be taken at face value, it also gives us a sense of the magnitude of the political problem facing leading men and a reason why their efforts to resolve it caused divisions among them. Similarly, while most historians would already have accepted that the later medieval king was effectively sovereign, Wolffe is unusual in the care he took to show what that meant in practice: the centring of power in the royal person and his household, and the impossibility of conciliar control, once the king was admitted to power. Once again, the scale of the problem facing the political elite – even those well-disposed towards the king – is underlined, and this helps us to understand why the reign unfolded as it did. Much more than a biography, then, this is a study of kingship and its implications, as a system, for the king himself, his servants and his most powerful subjects. If Wolffe’s perception of that system was limited in various ways – he took little account of the expanding volume of research on the localities and on the gentry, for example, and he avoided a fuller exploration of contemporary political thinking – he made important efforts to demonstrate the interplay of ideas, institutions and politics, and in his remarks on the council and the household, in particular, made real advances and anticipated later work. Where other historians identified a decline in the council from the mid-1440s and saw in it both a sign and cause of the iniquities of Henry VI’s regime, Wolffe insisted that such a decline (which he placed earlier) was only to be expected. As he pointed out, ‘the king was the government’, so that once Henry had come of age, as he did in 1437, it was natural for him – and therefore the household – to be the centre of rule. In this respect, therefore, Henry VI’s government was quite normal in its forms: what was wrong with it was the idiocy with which the king exercised his powers.
Other notable features of Henry VI include its coherent, and broadly positive, interpretation of the minority regime. This was the first extended account of the minority, and the outlines of Wolffe’s picture have been generally accepted by historians, though later accounts have been more emphatic about the extent of Cardinal Beaufort’s influence over a
ffairs, and the lengthy treatment of the minority in R. A. Griffiths’s Reign of King Henry VI gives a more pessimistic impression, of worsening fiscal and military conditions and a decline in discipline among the ruling class, both at the centre and locally.3 Where Wolffe’s argument sought to concentrate the causes of disaster in the period of Henry’s adulthood and the problems generated by his personal direction of affairs, other studies have restored longer term and wider causes to prominence. This is also true of other areas where Wolffe’s book broke new ground. His depiction of a governmental estate at the king’s sole disposal has been qualified by the emphasis given by other historians to the difficulty of managing it: the pressure from suitors and counsellors, acknowledged by Wolffe but skated over in assigning responsibility for policy, has been demonstrated in most other work on the reign. Meanwhile, the financial and administrative problems of defending Lancastrian France, which Wolffe neglected, emerged strongly in both Griffiths’s book and G. L. Harriss’s important biography of Cardinal Beaufort, the latter supplying a detailed narrative of politics up to 1447 and showing how frequently policy was constrained by the need to secure fiscal and political support.4 But perhaps the most prominent feature of Wolffe’s account of the adult reign was its lengthy discussion of affairs in France and, in this area, his emphasis on the failure of royal policy has been more fully accepted. Wolffe had worked harder than any previous historian at unravelling the diplomatic dimensions of the bungled defence of English holdings, reading widely in French literature and showing unusual sensitivity to the rhythms of politics within Valois France and Burgundy. As we shall see, debate continues to rage over the part played by the loss of France in the convulsions of the 1450s, and over the degree of responsibility which Henry VI’s government, and the king himself, must bear for that loss; but Wolife’s firm views on all three of those questions have certainly found supporters.
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