Henry VI

by Bertram Wolffe

  The testimonies of witnesses cited to produce this picture of innocent, holy Henry may be acceptable to the eye of faith, but almost without exception they are incapable of proof, or disproof. Among the alleged intimations of sanctity appear his shocked reaction to the sight of men taking the waters naked at Bath. All one can say from his lifetime is that he had been in Bath more than once. Likewise his alleged grave displeasure at the sight of dancing girls with bared bosoms may or may not be authentic. According to a contemporary, Thomas Gascoigne, who also deplored it, this was no uncommon sight, apparently a fashion in dress from about 1429. Maybe his hat did sometimes fall from his head unnoticed when he was on horseback and his servants retrieved it, especially after 1453 when he lost his wits. The tract solemnly parades such trivialities as evidence of his otherworldliness. The story that he only removed his hat from his head in passing a church when he divined that the sacrament was reserved within, like the miracle of the loaves, reveals the essential nature and purpose of this hagiographic collection. Alas, some of its stories, even if accepted as authentic, are capable of quite different interpretations just as convincing as those put upon them by the pious collector. His assertion that Henry spied on his courtiers through secret windows in order to control the comings and goings of doubtful women has been taken by one modern writer as evidence that he was in fact interested in observing their dalliances in secret!7

  One specific incident cited in the Blacman tract can be shown to be a manifest invention, though based on certain ascertainable facts. Both Eton and King’s Colleges benefited by £1,000 from the death in 1447 of King Henry’s great-uncle Cardinal Beaufort. The tract states, in proof of Henry’s complete lack of avarice, and his laudable liberality, that when Beaufort’s executors approached him with a gift of £2,000-worth of gold for his own use, to relieve the burden and necessities of the realm, to their-amazement he utterly declined to take it because of his uncle’s great generosity to him in his lifetime. They did, however, prevail upon him to accept it on behalf of his two foundations. In fact Beaufort’s will had stipulated that Henry should pay exactly this sum from what he owed his uncle at his death to the two colleges to secure the cardinal a special collect said there daily, and a yearly obit, both at Eton and King’s.8

  One other incident in the Blacman collection has been made the basis for the assertion that Henry had a distaste for public affairs. He is alleged to have complained heavily to Sir Richard Tunstall, his household chamberlain, when they were together in his chamber at Eltham, busy with his holy books, and were interrupted by a certain mighty duke. The story seems to have been awkwardly contrived to use testimony from Tunstall who still flourished at the court of Henry VII, for why, in a royal household stuffed with chaplains, should it be a layman, the household chamberlain, who was helping him with his ‘holy’ books?9 Polydore Vergil appears to have been glossing this passage when he alleged that Henry preferred leisure to business. In any case his father Henry V, who can hardly be said to have neglected affairs of state, is equally recorded as refusing to allow them to intrude upon his devotions. The compiler of the Blacman tract himself well knew that for a king to neglect the duties of his kingly office could not be considered a mark of sanctity and his ensuing remarks, that Henry spent all his days, apart from high feasts and Sundays, conscientiously treating of the business of the realm with his council, or reading, were designed to meet this objection. These remarks should therefore be given equal prominence if the tract is to be cited as evidence at all, but of course they simply do not fit the overall picture given of the innocent, retiring, monkish king.

  There is no doubt that Henry’s failures as a king, which have to be discussed at length in this book, left Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge as almost the sole record of his achievements. But how far do these support the view of him set out in the Blacman tract? Not all his contemporaries by any means were impressed by his colleges. His faithful Commons in parliament in 1451, mindful of their pockets in supporting their king’s ambition thus to lay up for himself treasure in heaven, told him they considered Eton and King’s Colleges to be ‘over chargefull and noyus’. In his foundation and development of Eton College, his first love, two of his aims became obsessions. His secretary’s letters to Rome show that he was inexorably determined, in spite of all costs, delays and obstacles, to secure for his new college of secular priests an accumulated power to grant indulgences greater than was possessed by any other church in his dominions and equal to the greatest in Rome. Secondly, his new minster there was to exceed all other churches and cathedrals of England in sheer size. As and when he discovered the dimensions of various existing cathedrals, plans had to be revised, even at the cost of much destruction of building work already undertaken. His twenty-five scholars, like the equal number of paupers, were originally only a normal, minor appendage to the foundation at Eton, after the standard practice of the time, but when he became acquainted with William Wykeham’s unique achievement, Winchester College and its twin foundation New College, Oxford, his soaring ambition here also dictated that both Eton and King’s College should have an equal number of seventy scholars each. The intentions and aspirations of the founder of Eton and King’s thus provide no evidence of the saintly spirituality which the Blacman tract subsequently found in Henry. Pretentious in his piety as judged by the scale of his foundations, he was nevertheless as conventional and practical minded in it as those most pious but successful of kings, his father Henry V and his nephew Henry VII.

  There is equally no contemporary evidence as the Blacman tract suggests, that Henry was uniquely addicted to prayer and private meditation. The unusual fact that as a boy of twelve he had lived with the monks of St Edmundsbury for several months did not, as Cardinal Gasquet would have us believe, indicate an early propensity for the monastic life. On that occasion Henry and his whole court were thrust upon the abbot without notice to enjoy free hospitality from Christmas 1433 to Easter 1434 when his council, who had to provide for his expenses, found themselves totally unable to do so in the severe financial crisis of the autumn of 1433. It is true that altar closets were built for him off the chapels at Sheen and Havering and an oratory constructed for him over the hall porch at Sheen (this latter possibly providing the germ of the idea that he watched the comings and goings of the court to keep out women of easy virtue). However, there is no instance to compare with the devotion of his father, who is recorded as spending the whole night in prayer on the eve of his accession. The only comparable incident cited for our Henry is the testimony of an aged witness to Henry VII’s council that he once knelt in prayer for a whole hour with his chamberlain, Lord Cromwell, and his court standing patiently by, before borrowing Cromwell’s staff of office to indicate the place for his tomb. This strains credibility, as Lord Cromwell was dead by the time it is alleged to have taken place. On the other hand his love of the ceremony of public worship is firmly attested by the record of his royal chapel and by the accounts of his frequent appearances in the chapel of Winchester College.

  Much has been made of the Blacman tract’s description of Henry’s habit of dressing like a townsman and a farmer in plain dark clothing and blunt-ended footwear, not being content merely to mortify the flesh with the customary hair shirt. The most that can be said in support of this view is that it could well have been his disguise during his wanderings in the north of England in the early ‘sixties. General sartorial inferences of this nature are not borne out by contemporary descriptions. There is a fine painting of Henry, one of nine portraits of contemporary rulers, in the diary of the German knight Jörg von Ehingen, who received a decoration, probably the Lancastrian livery collar of esses, from his own hands, some time in 1458 or 1459.10 It could be taken to bear out the Blacman description only to the very slightest extent in that the shoes, although pointed, are not extravagantly so when compared with some of the other eight kings and princes represented there. Henry is one of three who are portrayed unarmed and one of three not wear
ing tight hose. But he is represented in a purple hat with a streamer of the same colour, a light blue cloak with crimson collar and white linen showing at the neck and a crimson girdle with gold buckle and pendant. The only unusual feature is that the hands are particularly delicate. The face is an individual one, showing the same protruding lower lip, broad forehead and wide-spaced eyes as the Windsor portrait.11 Again the costume of the Windsor portrait is certainly not that of a townsman or farmer.

  This dubious Blacman picture of a meanly clad king has sometimes been taken as confirmed by another largely apocryphal story of Henry giving away his best robe to St Albans abbey and of the embarrassed servant who had perforce to ask for its return because it was the only decent one he had. The original facts on which this story is based, as related in Abbot Wheathampstead’s register, tell a different story. It was customary, when the king visited a church in state, for the ceremonial robe he used on that occasion to be presented to the authorities to be made into vestments. Another instance of this practice is found in the Coventry Leet Book where it is recorded that when Henry visited the church of St Michael there in state on Michaelmas Day 1451 he subsequently sent them his robe of gold ‘tussu’ furred with marten sable.12 He spent the whole of the Easter festival at St Albans in 1459 and wore the very special, unique robe which was kept solely for his use at the Easter festivities each year and for no other occasion. This was the robe which was nevertheless formally and correctly presented to the abbey on his departure, but his household treasurer immediately redeemed it for fifty marks to be paid at the exchequer and for sufficient costly gold cloth called ‘crimesyne thisswe’ to make a whole set of vestments and altar cloths worthy of the protomartyr’s altar. This had to be fetched from the great wardrobe in London.13 The redemption may be compared to the custom in his chapel, where the gold talent equivalent to five nobles by weight, which he offered daily, was daily redeemed by his clerk of the jewels for the payment of seven pence sterling to the dean;14 or to his offering at the high altar every Good Friday of the gold and silver rings which he wore when he touched for the king’s evil. These, together with some of the most precious jewels of the chapel, were then redeemed by his jewel clerk for one hundred marks. In short, this presentation of his best robe was no more than any king would have been expected to do on such an occasion, and its redemption was routine practice.

  The concomitant impression of a shabby, indigent and dull, because exceptionally devout, court, generally associated with Henry VI on the basis of the Blacman tract, again is not supported by any contemporary evidence. It is true that one chronicler wrote in the late ’fifties that ‘he maintained no household’, but it had not always been so. Circumstances then were quite exceptional. This stricture came after twenty years of intermittent complaint in parliament and elsewhere about the size and expense of a royal establishment which the dean of the chapel royal had stated in 1449 numbered twelve hundred persons, but which had probably been virtually disbanded in 1454 during Henry’s first attack of mental illness.15 A magnificent French embassy of 1445, for which Henry provided a small fleet of ships to bring them across the Channel and three hundred horses to transport them from Dover to the capital, was much impressed by his rich attire, by the ceremony surrounding his person and by the splendour of its reception. A modern discovery in Portuguese archives has revealed that a Portuguese nobleman at Henry’s court in 1449 so admired the dignified order and ceremonial of the royal household chapel that he persuaded the dean, William Say, to set down all the details in a book for presentation to his own king, in the hope that he might imitate it. The ceremonies there described are in every sense impressive. The introduction of Burgundian court fashions are sometimes supposed to have transformed a shabby royal household which Henry kept into a court fit for kings under his successor Edward IV. But the discovery of this book, Henry’s Liber Regis Capelle,16 must make this doubtful. The elaborate ceremony of his chapel was an integral part of court life and may be taken to indicate a well ordered and dignified royal court in general. It reveals, for example, in its detailed description of the solemn crown-wearing processions, that state crown wearings were now held not merely at the traditional Christmas, Easter and Whitsun festivals but also at Epiphany, All Saints and the two feasts of the Confessor. Similarly, Henry’s detailed ordinances for the daily regulation of the whole household, promulgated in 1445, were the first of the century. How far they were observed may be doubtful, but it must at least be stated that the much praised provisions of the 1478 household ordinances of his supplanter Edward IV were in fact largely based on these precedents set in Henry’s reign.

  It is inconceivable that certain unpalatable basic facts of Henry’s rule can have been completely forgotten by the date when the Blacman tract was compiled and indeed traces of them can still be discerned there through the hagiographic mist. It was the fact that policies, actions and attitudes of his had brought great trouble and harm to his subjects which dictated the portrayal of one who was not personally responsible, though such a claim was foreign to the very nature of fifteenth-century kingship. Again the undoubted fact of his recurrent mental incapacity from 1453, never mentioned in the tract, could likewise only be covered by the portrayal of a holy innocent. A series of parliamentary acts of resumption had been necessary to try to undo the damage which his exercise of his powers of patronage had done to the substance of the monarchy; this could only be portrayed as selfless generosity. Setting aside the attribution to him in the tract of supernatural powers of divination, the portrayal which remains there of his strict morality, chastity and scrupulous observance of the requirements of his religion as king, while setting him apart from some of his predecessors on the English throne, could have been applied equally well to others such as his successful father or his nephew Henry VII himself, who probably commissioned this compilation. But for these kings subsequent political circumstances never made desirable the achievement of their canonization.

  There is thus no evidence dating from Henry’s lifetime to support this posthumous early-Tudor hagiographic picture of Henry as a saintly, blameless, ascetic royal pauper. Yet the only two modern studies of him, both published near the five-hundredth anniversary of his birth, are squarely based on an acceptance of the Blacman tract. Mrs Christie in her Henry VI accepted it as reliable chronicle material. Cardinal Gasquet in his Religious Life went further. He claimed that it presented the only authentic picture of the living king, recovered by early-Tudor England after wilful denigration of Henry by the usurping Yorkists. Thus notions that Henry had been a weak-minded and useless ruler were fabrications of his supplanters and his rule had in fact been just and upright. It is therefore most important to try to recover what Henry’s contemporaries did actually say, write and think about him during his lifetime. Such material is extremely scarce, if only because few people ventured to express the unvarnished truth about their king in the king-centred society of fifteenth-century England. In Henry’s case we cannot even have the record of an independent life before he became king, as was the case with his two Lancastrian predecessors, his father Henry V and his grandfather Henry IV. Henry VI was unique among English kings in being reared as a king from the cradle. The only child of the illustrious Henry V was not only born in the purple but was hedged about with the divinity of kingship before he was twelve months old.

  Nevertheless, there is some evidence of the kind we need. The earliest surviving testimony to his character and abilities dates from 1432, on the approach of his eleventh birthday. It was recorded in a report to the royal council from his tutor Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, made because he required extra powers from them in order to control the boy. Henry, he said, was already showing exceptional precocity, impatience with restrictions and an awareness of the regality which was in him. As a comment on royalty this may not be entirely reliable, but twelve months later Burgundian ambassadors, who had no reason to lie, reported back to their master, Philip duke of Burgundy, that the king was a handsom
e, robust child who would converse with them in French at his ease. In November 1434, when he was still scarcely thirteen years old, his council had occasion to remonstrate with him over his eagerness to seize the reins of power. There is no other useful comment on the youthful, untried Henry, except that his physical stamina, his ability to endure long and arduous ceremonies with cheerfulness and without fatigue, had already become apparent at his two coronations in London and Paris in 1429–30, with all the journeyings, pageants, thanksgivings, feastings and solemn entries into his cities which they had entailed. When his council began to hand over real powers to him from 1435 they can thus have had no reason to suppose that he would not turn out to be a replica of his formidable father.

  That this was what the age required, indeed demanded of him, can hardly be doubted. It can be read between the lines of his ‘Mirror for Princes’, a manual on king-craft which was presented to him, probably in the late 1440s, after he had been rulling personally for some ten years or so. This is the until recently unknown Tractatus de regimine principum ad regem Henricum sextem.17 As its modern editor says, the author, a king’s orator and religiosus, was presenting a Christian mirror for a prince to Henry, concerned with his attainment of ultimate, personal salvation amid all the snares and temptations peculiar to a great and powerful king. At the same time his concern with temporal achievements and the great deal of advice given on secular matters more than justifies its secular title. It shows what the age expected of Henry and is therefore infinitely more valuable than the Blacman tract as a yardstick against which to measure his policies and actions. The only evidence which this author could cite to show Henry as the effective defender of his realm, which he had to be, was the repulse of the duke of Burgundy from Calais and the Scots from Berwick, both of which had happened in 1436, at the end of his minority, hardly achievements personal to him. But the tract cannot have been submitted to the young king at that early date, near the start of his majority, because he was not married until 1445 and ‘nostra dulcissima regina’, whose marriage, in the author’s opinion, brought the blessings of peace to the two kingdoms of England and France in fulfilment of the prophecy of St Bridget, cannot have been his mother, Catherine of Valois, who died in 1437. At no time in her seventeen years as queen and queen dowager of England could such a happy state be considered attained. Rather does this reference, together with another reference to Henry’s ‘preclarissima regina’ point to composition after the truce of Tours in 1444 and after his marriage in 1445, when the author could still praise the success of Henry’s peace efforts to date (’pads tempora tranquillastis … prestantissime ac metuendissime Rex et princeps gracie celestis spiramine tot remedia pacis elaborastis’). While unable to contemplate that Henry would himself break the truce he had made with the French, the author assured him that should his enemy do so his cause for waging effective war, however long, would be a just one.