1

Behind the Facade: Henry’s Character and Capability

Henry was born at Windsor on 6 December, St Nicholas’s day, in 1421, the only child of his father Henry V and his new queen, Catherine of France. Just nine months later, the baby boy acceded to the throne when his father died of dysentery contracted at the siege of Meaux. No Englishman had ever become king so early in life, nor had such a daunting inheritance. Few kings had ever been so respected as his father, Henry V, or so successful during their lifetimes: an intimidating role model for Henry VI to emulate. However, the military, political and economic practicalities he left behind were problematic. Henry V had effectively committed England to a long-term war in defence of his title as heir to the throne of France; but while he and his Burgundian allies controlled northern France, including Paris, most of the central and southern parts of the country remained committed to his Valois opponent, the Dauphin, shortly to become Charles VII of France. After Henry V’s untimely death the English, ably led by the eldest of his two surviving brothers, John, Duke of Bedford, continued to advance until 1429, and then stabilized the military situation after the shock of defeat at the siege of Orléans and the emergence of Joan of Arc. Yet all this brought with it an understanding that the realization of Henry VI’s claim to be King of France was bound to be a difficult process at best.

England itself remained stable enough during Henry VI’s long minority. Political strife between Henry V’s youngest brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who expected to govern England during his nephew’s young minority, and his uncle Cardinal Beaufort, who exercised a considerable amount of power as a result of his prodigious wealth and political ability, did not spill over into violence, and English martial energies were more or less committed to France. However, the latter part of Henry’s minority also saw the beginning of a major economic slump, in part a result of a bullion shortage across Europe, which saw rents fall, but, more pressingly, overseas trade slump dramatically during the 1440s, greatly reducing the crown’s income from customs duties, the biggest single contributor to the English Exchequer.

Henry VI’s fitful engagement with these problems was some years in the future, but while we know a great deal about the warfare and politics of the years between 1422 and 1436 we know little of his early life. Henry’s first years were spent in mainly female company; Elizabeth Ryman seems to have had command around the infant, with a principal nurse, Joan Asteley, and a day nurse, Matilda Fosbroke, his other constant companions. In 1424 Lady Alice Butler was appointed his governess to train him in courtesy, discipline and the other things required of a toddler who happened to be king, and had the power to administer reasonable chastisement as required. Henry’s mother was also close at hand, residing, in part, in the royal household. As queen, she did not have such an immediate and important role in his upbringing as most modern mothers, and indeed was not always physically present, but nonetheless would have had very regular contact with her child. In 1428, the largely female company that had surrounded him was replaced by a largely male one. At this point, aged seven, Henry was deemed old enough to have a tutor, and Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, a paragon of chivalry and other manly virtues, was appointed to teach him ‘good manners, letters, languages, nurture and courtesy’, and, more importantly, to love, fear and honour God, embrace virtue and hate sin.1 This latter element was catered for in part by the purchase of a primer, or religious manual, and within a year Henry could recite some of the services. Martial play was encouraged by the purchase of two little ‘coat-armours’ and ‘eight swords … some greater and some smaller, for to learn the king to play in his tender age’.²

Until 1429, Henry played little public role. He was present on the opening day of most parliaments of the 1420s, and on one or two other ceremonial occasions in London, but was largely secluded from affairs of government, moving between a small number of favoured royal residences in the south-east, such as Windsor, Eltham and Westminster. Henry’s ceremonial and formal role began in earnest in 1429, at the age of eight. On Sunday, 6 November he was crowned King of England at Westminster in a gruelling set of ceremonies, comprising a morning procession from the Tower to show himself to his people, a public audience in Westminster Hall, the coronation itself in Westminster Abbey – including being anointed with the holy oil reportedly given to St Thomas Becket – and which also involved repeated prostrations, disrobings and prayers. This was followed by a huge banquet back in Westminster Hall. What effect the ceremony, specially adapted for Henry in his role as King of both England and France, and the banquet – which had a display with great emphasis on the royal saints of both kingdoms, Edward the Confessor and St Louis – had on the young king cannot be known. Nor can that of his French coronation two years later.

Leaving England in April 1430, Henry was at the Norman capital of Rouen for almost a year while the army that accompanied him stabilized the military situation in northern France caused by the unexpected reversal at the siege of Orléans in 1429 and by Joan of Arc, shining brightly but briefly, who had inspired a French military resurgence. Henry did not enter Paris until 2 December 1431, and was crowned on 16 December amid considerable pomp – not considerable enough, however, to impress at least one contemporary Parisian who complained about the English elements of the coronation service and the food, organized by the English authorities. Even the coronation in Paris was an acknowledgement of English failure, at least to some extent. French kings were traditionally crowned in Rheims, some ninety miles east of Paris, but that city had been captured by the French in the campaign of 1429. That Henry was not crowned at Rheims, where his maternal ancestors had been, is likely to have been a disappointment to him both then and later.

The two coronations were not prompted by the need to accommodate Henry within the governance of the realm, but by the military situation in France – a greater visibility as king and heightened legitimacy as a result of the ancient ceremonies would encourage Frenchmen to accept his claim – and nor did they result in Henry becoming directly involved in royal business between the tender ages of eight and ten. Nevertheless, from his return from France onwards, Henry was more publicly visible, and there was an understanding that it would not be that long before he took power into his own hands. In 1432 his tutor, the Earl of Warwick, reported him as being impatient with restrictions and having an awareness of his regality, but complained that Henry ‘hath been stirred by some from his learning and spoken to of diverse matiers not behovefull’, in other words that someone had been trying to involve Henry in (political) matters not suitable for his tender age.3 This seems likely to have been prompted by the king’s uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, trying to use the king in his ongoing political struggle with Cardinal Beaufort, rather than genuine precociousness in Henry, and is also early evidence that Henry was easily influenced – unsurprising in the boy, but also prevalent in the adult. In 1434 the royal council praised his ‘great understanding and feeling as ever they knew or saw in any prince, or other person of his age’, but went on to say, reasonably enough, that he did not yet have sufficient knowledge or experience to dispense with the council, which administered government on the young king’s behalf.⁴ It was, in fact, the death of his elder uncle Bedford, regent of English France, on 14 September 1435 that pushed the adolescent Henry into closer involvement in the active ruling of his kingdoms. He was present at a meeting of the royal council on 1 October 1435, the first evidence of the appearance of a personal act of government was on 10 April 1436, and in July and August Henry was personally signing writs. In May 1436 the Earl of Warwick resigned as his tutor, citing the need to focus on his own affairs, and Henry was free to rule. One further influence was removed soon afterwards: on 3 January 1437, after a period of illness, Henry’s mother, Queen Catherine, died at the age of just thirty-five.

The young king was not just surrounded by adults. Some sons of members of the nobility were required to be resident in the royal household, in an attempt to strengthen the links between the future adult and his leading lords, and Henry formed close attachments to more than one. Perhaps the most important was Gilles, a younger son of the Duke of Brittany, who had been sent to the English court in 1432; they became firm friends and Gilles offered his service to Henry, proving loyal despite his father’s defection to the King of France. Henry Beauchamp, four years younger than Henry and the son of Henry’s tutor, the Earl of Warwick, also became close to the king, who showered him with marks of favour until Beauchamp’s early death, aged twenty-one, in 1446.

Henry received the type of education typical of the royal family and the nobility at this time, balancing book-learning with chivalric attainments both social – courtesy and good behaviour – and physical, including military exercises. The adult Henry was fluent in French as well as English, and was able to read in Latin. He also seems to have had an interest in old texts and chronicles, evidenced in the crisis of 1460 when Richard, Duke of York claimed the throne and parliament asked the king to counter his claim from his own knowledge of ‘many diverse writings and chronicles’.5 There were also a string of works addressed or dedicated to him which proffered advice on being a king. Some of these comprised direct models for Henry to emulate, such as a life of his father,⁶ and a Life of Saint Edmund, which depicted the Anglo-Saxon royal saint as a perfect blend of piety and chivalry.⁷ Some contained more generic advice, such as the Tractatus de Regimine Principium ad Regem Henricum Sextum (On the Rule of Princes to Henry VI), almost certainly presented to Henry in the later 1430s or early 1440s, which placed an unusually strong emphasis on Christian kingship.⁸ This flood of advice literature could, perhaps, indicate some anxiety about Henry’s emerging personality among Henry’s circle and family, who were responsible for the commissioning or authorship of some of these works. There is, though, no evidence that Henry either read any of them – or, if he did, that he took any of the advice on board.

There survives an unusual snapshot of Henry as a boy of twelve, when, in the midst of a dire financial crisis provoked by the ongoing war in France, the entire royal household decamped to the Suffolk monastery of Bury St Edmunds for four months, thereby passing on the bill for their upkeep from the royal Exchequer to the monastery’s abbot. Two aspects stand out from the brief account of the visit that the abbot copied into his register. Henry, perhaps a little surprisingly in light of Blacman’s picture of him as a man more given to prayer than ‘practising vain sports and pursuits’,9 regularly hunted, both with dogs and hawks, and fished. While such pursuits were perhaps the quintessential leisure activity of the upper classes, there is little other evidence of Henry enjoying physical activities as anything other than occasional pastimes. The other striking aspect of the description of Henry’s stay at Bury was the notable piety he displayed: in the welcoming ceremony, he knelt to worship the image of the cross in the monastery precinct and then kissed it when it was brought to him; at the end of his stay he demanded to be admitted to the fraternity of the monastery, as did a number of his nobles who had stayed with him there. The abbot’s description of this contains a note of surprise, as Henry was the patron and representative of the founder of the abbey, so to be part of the fraternity was rather superfluous; but it was Henry’s pious desire, superfluous or not, so the abbot acceded.¹⁰

If there was one thing missing from an upbringing that was designed to prepare Henry to be an active king, it was, in the words of one of his most significant biographers, ‘the creation of an environment in which he could develop sound, independent judgement that would eventually free him from the tutelage of his uncles and councillors’.¹¹ His adolescent years were dominated by the forceful personalities of his uncles, Gloucester and Bedford, and his great-uncle, Cardinal Henry Beaufort, while as an adult he seems to have relied to an excessive and dangerous degree on a number of powerful personalities, most particularly his successive leading ministers, the Dukes of Suffolk and Somerset, and his wife, Margaret of Anjou. Yet such an outcome was not inevitable: Richard II, who came to the throne at the age of ten in 1377, had also grown up alongside powerful, manipulative uncles, John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock, and yet from very early on had tried to assert his independence from them – admittedly with disastrous results. Had Henry VI had a more forceful personality, he might have been able to play the dominating role in government and war that the role of king demanded. Instead his energies seem to have been devoted less to governance and politics than to something rather more personal: his soul.

The most important facet of Henry’s emerging royal personality was his piety. Like all medieval monarchs, he had been instructed in the Christian faith from an early age. His first confessor was in office by 1424 (when he was three), and there were a number of chaplains and confessors around him from then onwards. Henry visited, and resided in, monasteries more often than was normal for kings in this period, and his interest in Anglo-Saxon saint-kings such as Edmund, Fremund and Alfred was stimulated during these visits and by manuscripts made to commemorate them (for an example, see plate 2).

Put kindly, Henry had a deep, sincere and prominent faith; put unkindly, his was an excessive, consuming and compulsive religiosity. Deep piety was not in itself a barrier to effective kingship. Indeed, the advice literature to kings commended personal devotion, while contemporaries expected public acts of alms-giving and religious ceremonial, and English kings swore to uphold the peace of the Church in their coronation oaths. When combined with other qualities, piety could enhance effective kingship, and Henry would have been very much aware of his direct ancestor, Louis IX of France, who became St Louis, canonized twenty-seven years after his death in 1270. Often considered the epitome of Christian kingship, Louis had been an effective ruler of France in many respects, as a law-giver, administrator and in mobilizing the resources of his kingdom into two mighty crusades, although both were disastrous failures. Louis’s sanctity reinforced his authority: one contemporary stated that ‘he exercised priesthood like a king and kingship like a priest’.12

That was not the case for Henry. Two accounts, one written by a foreign observer at close quarters to the sixteen-year-old monarch and the other by one who knew him in his mature years, show this clearly. The later medieval papacy placed emphasis on an individual’s exemplary life rather than on the violent death, the ‘martyrdom’, that governed the sanctity of so many earlier saints, and it is a description of such an exemplary life that fills the account by John Blacman, his former chaplain. While the purpose of Blacman’s text was clearly to provide a description of Henry’s saintliness during his lifetime, rather than an account of his reign, he knew Henry well and was an eyewitness to some of the events he describes, and clearly spoke to others who served Henry at different periods of his life. Treated with caution, and placed within the context of other evidence, Blacman’s depiction of Henry has some strength.

The picture of Henry given by Blacman is of a virtuous man, with a fear of God, who was a diligent worshipper, ‘more given to God and to devout prayer than to handling worldly and temporal things’. He was humble in his devotions, ‘so that even when decked with the kingly ornaments and crowned with the royal diadem he made it a duty to bow before the lord as deep in prayer as any young monk might have done’. Henry was chaste, eschewing all licentiousness in word and deed while he was young until his marriage to Margaret, to whom ‘he kept his marriage vow wholly and sincerely’. He could not abide even seeing nakedness, lest he be ‘snared by unlawful desire’, and fled from the sight of unclothed bathers at Bath.13 He was not avaricious but generous to his servants and to the Church. Henry was also humble in his dress, and wished nothing better than to pray or read rather than attend to business; he was, in particular, patient in the face of many adversities and compassionate and merciful towards those who wronged him.

Fifty years earlier than the composition of Blacman’s account, a papal tax collector, Piero da Monte, was intermittently at Henry’s court and met the king on a number of occasions. In 1437, in a letter to the Archbishop of Florence, he wrote a description of the young king. Although still of tender years, commented da Monte, Henry had an old man’s sense, prudence and gravity. Each day he read the divine office with a priest, attended Mass and most devoutly observed fasts, and restrained his body through abstinence and continence, in particular through fleeing the sight and speech of women. Those who knew him well affirmed that he was a virgin, and had resolved not to have intercourse with any woman unless within the bonds of marriage. He detested scurrilous games, obscene words and indecent mimes and plays. Amidst ceremony and crowds he showed humility, among attendants and bodyguards an easy accessibility, amidst banquets abstinence. His singular reverence for, and devotion to, the Church and the pope were to be marvelled at in one so young. He seemed, concluded da Monte, ‘not a king or a secular prince … but a monk or a religious man, more religious than a man of religion’.14

The striking similarities of the two descriptions by two very different individuals half a century apart can in part be explained by the fact that these qualities – which contemporary advice literature found desirable – were not singular to Henry but were generic to descriptions of princes. The civil servant and versifier Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, composed some decades before for Henry VI’s father when Prince of Wales, urged him among other things to patience (the gentle sufferance of wrongs), mercy and chastity – which was convenable and convenient for a king; and ‘who so chaste shall live / Must scourge his fleshly lust with abstinence’.¹⁵ Meanwhile, the Tractatus de Regimine Principum, a treatise of the duties of a king, written for and presented to Henry probably in the late 1430s, places much emphasis on a king’s private devotions, urging that a king must try to live like Christ, but also on his patronage of learning and the universities, another prominent element of Henry’s piety. Indeed, da Monte’s language was particularly reminiscent of hagiography, idealized biographies of religious figures. Yet literary precedent is only half the story. Both da Monte and Blacman contain unique material. Moreover, their descriptions of the king, so similar despite being written fifty years apart by such different men, chime with Henry’s actions throughout his lifetime, while other contemporary comments fit with this picture of a pious, meek and prudish king. For example Abbot Whetehamstede of St Albans, who met Henry on a number of occasions, described him (admittedly after his deposition in 1461) as a king who did not cultivate the art of war, but instead was a ‘mild-spoken, pious king’, adding critically that he was ‘half-witted in affairs of state’.16 John Rous, connected with Henry’s Beaufort relatives, commented that ‘To God and the Virgin Mary he was most devoted, but to the world and worldly things he was least devoted, always committing them to the Council.’¹⁷ Henry also owned a vernacular bible, highly unusual at this date, and it can be presumed that such an unusual item was used by the owner. The bible still survives in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (plate 3). The confluence of all the evidence makes the picture compelling: so many sources paint this same image of a pious man, concerned with religious matters to the point of prejudicing his royal duties.

Henry’s marriage presents another set of problems and conflicting evidence within this framework of a spiritual king. It was not until 1445, by which time Henry was twenty-three, that he was finally married, to Margaret, daughter of a great French nobleman, René, Duke of Anjou, in a ceremony away from the main centres of the English monarchy, at Titchfield Abbey in Hampshire on 22 April 1445, with the ceremony conducted by Henry’s confessor, William Aiscough, Bishop of Salisbury. It was extraordinary that Henry’s marriage took so long to be arranged, given both the ever-present threat of disease and death in war even for kings, and also the scarcity of male members of the Lancastrian dynasty who could succeed him. Most kings were married in their teens, in part so they could produce children more quickly, but on occasions when other kings had married late, such as Henry V and Edward IV, they had several brothers who could have succeeded them without question, thus providing dynastic security. Henry had only his uncle, Duke Humphrey, who was childless and, with his wife imprisoned for life for treason from 1441, was unlikely to produce children. Other male relatives were not in a position to succeed. The Beaufort family, descended from an illegitimate liaison of Henry’s great-grandfather, John of Gaunt, had been formally disbarred from succeeding to the throne, while Henry’s two half-brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor, had no drop of English royal blood in their veins, being the issue of Queen Catherine’s second marriage to Owen Tudor. Thus Henry, and England, needed a son and heir.

Even after the marriage took place, it was to be eight years before Margaret produced her one child, Edward. The dynastic situation had become even more acute after Gloucester’s death in 1447, as Henry was the only male of the house of Lancaster left alive, and England only a single accident or fatal illness away from dynastic chaos. Such a delay between marriage and progeny was not unprecedented, but in Henry and Margaret’s case people started speculating about the reason for the delay. On 11 January 1447 John Page of London, a draper, was indicted for alleging that when Henry wished ‘to have his sport’ with his queen, his confessor Bishop Aiscough prevented him from coming ‘nigh her’.18 This may have reflected the unpopularity of Aiscough and others at the court rather than the reality, but the perception of Henry as being ruled by his spiritual advisers was not unique to this incautious London merchant, and fits with the picture given by da Monte and Blacman. Predictably enough, however, in the male-oriented world of the fifteenth century Margaret also took the blame for the couple’s lack of children: one man from Canterbury was alleged to have said that ‘our queen was none able to be Queen of England … for because she beareth no child, and because that we have no prince in this land.’¹⁹ In the more polarized and factionalized world of the later 1450s and early 1460s it was alleged that Prince Edward was not Henry’s son but a product of Margaret’s adultery. While easy to explain as a slur by Margaret’s and Henry’s political enemies, it may have been effective as propaganda, drawing as it did on earlier rumours and innuendos about the royal couple.

Henry’s attitude towards his marriage is more difficult to gauge. Da Monte, writing of the teenage Henry, was told that he had resolved not to have intercourse with any woman unless within the bonds of marriage. Blacman, fifty years later, described Henry as keeping ‘his marriage vow wholly and sincerely, even in the absences of lady [Margaret], which were sometimes very long: never dealing unchastely with any other woman. Neither when they lived together did he use his wife unseemly, but with all honesty and gravity.’20 Sex within marriage, condoned and encouraged by the Church, should not, therefore, have been a moral problem for Henry. Yet one might wonder if there were more psychological issues. Henry, as portrayed by Blacman, avoided the sight of the female body, apparently averting his eyes and leaving the room when confronted by ‘a show of young ladies with bared bosoms who were to dance in that guise before the king, perhaps to prove him, or to entice his youthful mind’.²¹ Da Monte noted that ‘The sight and conversation of women he avoided, quoting from the gospel: “he who casts his eyes on a woman so as to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart”.’²² Both comments might of course be read in other ways – chastity was essentially for the saintly picture Blacman was painting; da Monte’s comments were approving of Henry’s attitude, showing a young man able to resist temptation – but much of the evidence that historians have used to argue for normality in Henry’s attitude towards marriage generally, and his marriage with Margaret in particular, is ambivalent.

During the long-drawn-out search for a bride for Henry, before Margaret of Anjou was settled on, there was some consideration of the daughters of the Count of Armagnac, in the south-west of France. Ambassadors were despatched in 1442 with instructions, written by the king’s secretary, Thomas Bekynton, which included an order that portraits be made of the girls ‘in their kirtles simple, and their faces, like as you see their stature and their beauty and colour of skin and their countenances, with all manner of features’. The portraits were to be delivered in all haste ‘to the king, and he to appoint and sign which he likes’.23 Clearly this could reflect the king’s actual instructions, revealing a healthy interest in the looks of potential brides; yet the phrasing suggests this is at one remove, as if Bekynton or others were trying to engage Henry’s enthusiasm and interest in the matter, rather than the king being eager. A story, recounted second-hand to the Duchess of Milan ten years later, recorded that Henry was so eager to see Margaret after she had disembarked that he dressed as a squire to deliver her a letter, and Margaret, unknowing, kept him on his knees while she read the letter and he took stock of her. This tale almost certainly has its basis in chivalric romance rather than fact.²⁴ Another description, used as evidence of Henry and Margaret’s happy marriage, also needs revision. An aside in a court manual reported Henry and Margaret receiving New Year’s gifts together in bed in the king’s chamber, suggesting a picture of uxorious comfort and familiarity. The text, though, states ‘beddes’ rather than ‘bed’, and although it does use the singular of ‘chamber’, by the following reign, however, the same source makes it absolutely clear that Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville were receiving their gifts in bed in separate chambers.²⁵

Inextricably linked with Henry’s piety are his building projects. Eton College (founded in 1440) and King’s College, Cambridge (1441) have been the focus of much attention, therefore, as almost the only positive achievements of Henry’s reign, not least because they exist today in much the same form as when they were established. Both were indisputably royal foundations, but nonetheless there has been some question over Henry’s personal contribution to the establishment of Eton and King’s. While all was done in the king’s name, others have been credited with being the real inspiration and guiding lights behind the foundations, pushing Henry into more ambitious designs. Candidates include Henry’s clever secretary Thomas Bekynton and the influential William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, both of whom had been educated at institutions with the same links between school and college as that proposed between Eton and King’s. It is also clear that the Duke of Suffolk, the king’s leading minister in the 1440s, made many of the day-to-day decisions and played a major role in the early years of both colleges. A considerable body of contemporary opinion sought to use English lands granted to religious houses which were under the direct control of foreign (French) monasteries, and which had been seized at the resumption of the Hundred Years War in 1415, for religious foundations. Given that much of Eton’s endowment was from these lands, one historian has argued that ‘The vision was less Henry’s and rather the result of a pre-existing pressure.’26

If Henry was less directly involved, then the purpose of the colleges fits neatly within a tradition of religious foundations designed to bolster and project the image of the English monarchy and the Lancastrian dynasty and to elevate the crown far above its greatest subjects, thus giving the foundations a political rather than a religious purpose. Certainly it is true that most of Henry VI’s predecessors and successors had made major initiatives towards the establishment of religious foundations or the enhancement of existing institutions. Yet placing the foundations within this existing tradition has the effect of rather minimizing what was achieved: unlike his predecessors or successors, Henry established educational institutions rather than just houses of prayer or elaborate venues for a monarch’s burial (although Henry may have seen Eton as his preferred place of interment).

The evidence, however, suggests very strongly that Henry was the instigator or, even if the idea was suggested to him by others, that he enthusiastically embraced it. Given Henry’s piety in general and his adulation of King Alfred, an educational reformer, in particular, such institutions would have fitted perfectly with how Henry saw his role. Indeed, he tried to have Alfred canonized as a saint in 1442; the sudden flowering of interest in the canonization at exactly the time that Henry was setting up his educational institutions, as well as the fact that one of Henry’s closest advisers, Adam Moleyns, was sent to Rome to argue the case to the pope, strongly suggest that it was Henry’s personal initiative. Beyond his own foundations Henry was a generous educational patron, giving a large donation of books from the royal library to the newly established All Souls College at Oxford in 1440, and in 1445 he endowed a new library at Salisbury Cathedral. In response to a petition by King’s College, Cambridge, Henry granted £20 due to him from the forfeited goods of a felon, adding, however, it was ‘to be employed upon books and other necessary stuff’.27

More importantly, Henry took a close personal interest in his collegiate foundations that has no parallel in his attitude towards other public business. Several documents are explicit about Henry’s engagement in the foundations, but the most extraordinary was written in 1448. It is headed ‘My [Henry’s] will and my intent’, and in it the king stated that:

for as much as it hath liked unto our lord for to suffer and grant me grace for the premier notable work purposed by me after I, by his blessed sufferance, took unto myself the rule of my said Realms, for to erect, found and establish unto the honour and worship of his name specially and of the blessed virgin our lady saint Mary, [to the] increase of virtues, and cunning in [the] expansion and [the] establishment of Christian faith, my two Colleges Royal, one called the College royal of our lady of Eton beside Windsor, and the other called the College royal of our lady and saint Nicholas of Cambridge.28

The document then sets out the exact dimensions of all the buildings, including the main choir of the church at Eton, which was to be 207 feet long, 32 broad and 80 high – an extraordinary size, surpassed only by the projected length of King’s, which was to be 288 feet. A later design extended the length of Eton’s church to 318 feet. Phrased throughout in the first person (rather than the normal royal ‘we’), and surely reflecting Henry’s personal vision for his foundations, the document was sealed and ‘signed with my own hand’.²⁹ It is impossible to dismiss this unusual and personal statement, shorn of the normal excessive verbiage and well-worn phrases of the royal chancery, as anything other than Henry’s direct wishes. In addition, a considerable number of other documents relating to both colleges were initialled ‘RH’ – ‘Rex Henricus’ – in his own hand and show that he took a direct interest in the building, down to the smallest details. There is yet more evidence of Henry’s personal involvement with the projects. He laid the foundation stones at both institutions. Favouring residence at Windsor so he could supervise the building works at Eton, he also visited Cambridge on at least ten occasions between 1441 and 1461, trips that were usually connected with the college he was building. He also sought to secure papal bulls for an extraordinary set of ecclesiastical privileges to ensure that Eton and King’s College stood apart from and far above other educational institutions. Henry’s almost childlike personality perhaps emerges most clearly in his devotion to these two cherished building projects. Such was his enthusiasm to see progress on them that in February 1443 his secretary, Thomas Bekynton, wrote to Vincent Clement, Henry’s chief agent in Rome, urging Clement to push the king’s requests to the pope for spiritual privileges for Eton and King’s. The king, wrote Bekynton, was pestering him daily, asking: ‘When will we have news from Master Vincent?’30

Henry devoted huge financial resources to the projects, endowing them with land (not just from confiscated foreign priories but also with other estates), and providing both with building funds running at approximately £1,000 each annually. During the period 1444–61, when the French war and then civil faction reduced the crown to almost total poverty, spending an estimated £15,000–£16,000 on each foundation was a great commitment, and indeed provoked parliament to complain in 1450 that the two colleges were ‘prejudicial to your highness and very burdensome and harmful to your liege people of this your realm’.31

Burdensome or not, the two colleges were almost the only tangible achievements of Henry’s reign. Seven years of building at Eton were abandoned in 1448 in order to start again on even more grandiose designs, and continued sporadically during the 1450s. Eton was briefly threatened by the Yorkist takeover after 1461 but Edward IV was eventually to relent and allow its continuation, though on a more moderate scale. King’s also continued to be built during the 1450s, but the sheer scale of the chapel in particular meant that it was not completed until Henry VIII’s reign. Nonetheless, both had scholars during the 1450s, and both became highly prestigious educational institutions, and remain so to this day.

While piety may have been Henry’s defining characteristic, it did not and could not impinge on certain aspects of being a late-medieval king. One of those was the need to appear kingly, to dress in a magnificent way, and for his court to overawe his subjects and foreign visitors alike. The advice manuals were all in agreement on this point, and even the arch-pragmatist, Sir John Fortescue, concerned with restraining the spending power of late-medieval kings, acknowledged the point that: ‘it shall need that the king have such treasure, as he may make new buildings when he will, for his pleasure and magnificence; and as he may buy him riche clothes, riche furs … and other jewels and ornaments convenient to his estate royal.’ This was so, Fortescue added, as ‘For if a king did not so, nor might do, he lived then not like his estate, but rather in misery, and in more subjection that doth a private person.’32

Blacman, seeking to portray Henry’s humility, got rather carried away in his depiction of a dowdy king, asserting that, among other things, ‘it is well known that from his youth up’, Henry ‘always wore round-toed shoes and boots like a farmer’s … [and] customarily wore a long gown with a rolled hood like a townsman … rejecting expressly all curious fashion of clothing’, while at the principal feasts of the year, particularly those few days in the year on which it was customary for English kings to wear their crown, he would wear a hair shirt so that ‘all pride and vain glory, such as is apt to be engendered by pomp, might be repressed’.³³

Henry, though, did not ‘always’ wear humble clothes; in fact, there is evidence of considerable luxury. In 1438–9, in his late teens, his wardrobe accounts reveal a number of high-quality items made for him: a short gown of black velvet, furred with the skins of at least 220 martens; another velvet gown adorned with gold, pearls and furred with sable; six other gowns of scarlet, red and russet, furred with martens; a hunting gown of green cloth; a scarlet mantle and two black riding hoods; dozens of pairs of black hose; handkerchiefs and other accoutrements.³⁴ Such a level of expenditure, moreover, was the norm in years to come. In 1443–4 the quality and quantity of items of clothing made for the king was similar. These included: a gown of black velvet, furred with the skins of 234 martens; a black velvet hat, furred with ermine; a velvet tabard, furred with ermine; a kirtle of velvet; a long gown of purple velvet, furred with martens; another long gown of velvet, adorned with cloth of gold; a long cloth gown lined with ermine; a scarlet gown; a purple gown; and a red-velvet mantle for the feast of St George, embroidered with the arms of the saint.35 Nor was such expenditure in vain. French ambassadors meeting Henry at Westminster in 1445 were impressed by his appearance, noting in particular his clothing, a ‘rich robe down to the ground, of red cloth of gold’, and his surroundings, as he was seated beneath tapestries ‘of gold, very rich’.³⁶

Henry’s court is often thought of as ‘shabby and indigent’, especially in comparison with the splendour of those dynasties to come.³⁷ Although this may have been the case in the years following Henry’s collapse in 1453, it was demonstrably not true earlier in his reign. In the eyes of foreign observers, the Lancastrian court dazzled and was extravagant enough to generate complaint in the eyes of the taxpayers. Henry’s royal chapel, comprising a dean, thirty singers, two priests, one choirmaster, one master of grammar, one serjeant, one yeoman, ten choirboys and two servants, so impressed a visiting Portuguese nobleman that he asked the then dean, William Say, to write its procedures and ordinances down so he could present them to his own monarch; the manuscript, probably based on a set of English ordinances now lost, still survives in a Portuguese archive.³⁸ David Starkey has proved that part of an influential text on the ceremonial, procedure and organization of the royal household, known as the Ryalle Book, previously thought to be from the reign of Henry VII, in fact dates in part from that of Henry VI.39 It describes in minute detail the great days of state when the king wore his crown, led a procession to the chapel where he attended a special Mass, had a formal dinner with a multitude of guests in his hall or chamber, then mingled with them rather more informally over dessert and wine, part of the occasion known as the ‘void’. Henry, contrary to a common perception of him, lived at the centre of a magnificent court, at times perhaps comprising 1,200 people, whose ceremonial impressed those who came into contact with it. He was also, at first glance at least, physically impressive. When his tomb was opened in 1910 his bones were examined, and it was discovered that Henry was at least five feet nine inches in height, perhaps a little taller, well above average height for the time. The man at the heart of this court looked and dressed like a king. Whether he acted as a king should is another matter.

Henry had to engage with a further requirement of kingship, that of government, and it was here that, right from the outset of his majority, he fell noticeably short of what was necessary. Late-medieval kings were expected to govern personally. While they had a more or less formalized council that had authority to take some decisions, offer advice on many subjects, and was certainly expected to carry out executive work, the king himself was required to make big decisions – to summon a parliament, go to war and make peace, appoint councillors and his chief officers – while being seen to take advice from his officials and from both lay and spiritual peers, and to attend himself to matters of grace. The latter were decisions reserved to the king alone and included grants of pardon for crimes, of annuities, of lands, of wardship, of offices on the king’s estates, and of presentation to Church livings, among many other things.

Kings received thousands of petitions a year in writing and in person, and had a duty to consider them, weigh them, grant some but not all and to keep the interests of the crown in mind. Henry, seemingly, considered none of these things. Instead he appeared to grant almost everything. Petitions that were refused are hard to find for any king, but there is almost no evidence that Henry turned any down. It is in any case clear that Henry granted so many that there were very serious repercussions for his subjects and his government; by 1450, his generosity threatened his tenure of the crown.

Carelessness, lack of attention to detail and sheer incompetence were the hallmarks of the king’s involvement in government. In February 1438 the same landed estate was granted to two different individuals on consecutive days. Two months later, a grant to Walter Strickland of an office in the king’s lordship of Kendal was qualified so that it could only be made ‘provided that the office shall not have been granted previously to any other person’.40 Such qualifying clauses were not usually to be found under other kings, who would have delayed making any grant until a clerk could check whether or not it was still in the king’s gift. Those around Henry who had his and the kingdom’s best interests at heart were well aware of the problem and tried to open his eyes to the issues. As early as February 1438, the clerk of the royal council, Henry Benet, noted that he had to speak to the king ‘to be aware how that he granted pardons or else how that he does them to be amended for he does to himself therein great damage, and now late in a pardon that he granted unto a customs official the which lost the King 2,000 marks’41 (a mark was two-thirds of a pound). The following day Benet wrote a further note that he should speak to the king about the loss of 1,000 marks which he had sustained by the grant made of the constableship of the castle of Chirk.

In 1444 ordinances were drawn up by the council to address the issue of the king’s endless bounty to all who asked it of him. While respecting the king’s power to do as he wished, they advised that all petitions be scrutinized by a number of assessors: if they were matters of justice they would go to the council; if matters of grace they would go to Henry. But in the latter case a clear summary of the contents would be written on the back of the petition to help the king assess it, and decide whether he ought to refer it to the council for advice. The ordinances also specified the standard and very bureaucratic process by which such petitions should then be executed, which many grants made by Henry had been bypassing; the ordinances explicitly stated that the more hands a grant passed through, the more likely it was that any hurt to the king or prejudice to other persons would be noticed and eschewed. To many kings, any such attempt to restrict their decision-making would have been a direct assault on the royal prerogative and an insult to their competence, but Henry approved it without a murmur. Regrettably for his government, the ordinances had only a limited impact, both in terms of numbers of petitions they affected and the duration for which they, in practice, lasted, as Henry was soon carelessly signing petitions drawn up by the petitioners in a manner specifically designed to avoid oversight, limit the bureaucratic process and to expedite the benefits to the grantee.

Matters of grace had to be carried out by the king, rather than any other agency, and Henry, in his unique way, did carry them out. There were many, and we know that Henry did indeed look at most of them, as he signed a great number – 1,407 alone among the warrants for the Great Seal (the final administrative stage before the formal grant was issued to the recipient) between 1437 and 1453. Given this, and with patronage very much part of the exercise of government, we can hardly dismiss Henry as ‘playing no operational part in government for years’.42 Yet so many of Henry’s interventions in government bear the hallmark not of his rather limited interest in justice, warfare or statesmanship, but of his piety. In a famous case of July 1444, one Thomas Kerver was accused on six counts of treason, and found guilty in five. Not content with this – probably because the one ‘not guilty’ verdict was that of the key crime of inciting others to kill the king – members of the council and the royal household organized a second trial, in order to find Kerver guilty of all six counts, and thus to use him as an example to discourage any others from such treasonous thoughts and actions. But, condemned to a traitor’s death by hanging, drawing and quartering, Kerver was then pardoned at the last minute by Henry on the grounds that the feast of the Assumption – which had special importance for his royal foundation at Eton College – was imminent. Given that this pardon went directly against the wishes of those around Henry, it is good evidence not only of his capacity to make his own decisions, but also of the basis on which he made them: this decision reflected his spiritual priorities, not the political ones of his advisers.

Kerver’s case is not the only example of such pious reasons behind Henry’s decisions. Pardons were issued to members of the Duke of Gloucester’s household in 1447 on exactly the same grounds of the forthcoming feast of the Assumption. In November the same year, Henry granted a charter to the priory of Bridlington, which he signed ‘RH’, adding a Latin note in his own handwriting (see plate 9) to the effect that the grant was his alms to St John of Bridlington, a saint whose cult had close associations with the Lancastrian dynasty. Other examples of Henry’s occasional personal pious interventions are written on the petitions handed to the king by the chamberlain or clerk in the royal presence, but there is no reason to doubt they reflect Henry’s personal words or opinions. In 1448, for example, the king, ‘of his own mere motion without stirring or moving by any person earthly for the devotion that he hath to the blessed Virgin our lady Saint Mary’, granted a petition by the priory of Our Lady of Walsingham, and returned it with his own hands to the prior;⁴³ a year earlier, a petition by a house of friars at Marlborough to have fees liable in the chancery waived was granted by the king, ‘considering the great poverty of the house’.⁴⁴ Very occasional additions also written by the chamberlain on petitions as if by the king directly, reflecting technical or legal additions, qualifications or changes, may also reflect Henry’s thoughts, but might also suggest the expertise or advice of councillors, household men or administrators present. The pious statements of intent are less plausibly those of others.

In areas of government other than matters of grace, Henry played a less obvious role than other medieval kings. He seemingly had little interest in the process of government, wished to avoid problems, and was quite content for others to do as much as they could, so he could concentrate on other projects and interests that were more important to him. Henry’s lack of interest in government and politics is neatly encapsulated by Blacman’s anecdote of how one night, when Henry was sitting with his chaplain, a ‘mighty duke of the realm’ knocked at the door and the king complained: ‘they do so interrupt me that by day or night I can hardly snatch a moment to be refreshed by reading of any holy teaching without disturbance’.45 While the incident itself is hardly verifiable, and clearly fulfils Blacman’s brief of portraying Henry in a saintly way, it does, in the context of the records, have the ring of authenticity. Man-management of such great lords, whose cares were those of both Henry’s state and their own localities, was critical to good kingship. It is clear that as the political heavyweights of Henry’s minority, Gloucester and Beaufort, began to fade from the political scene after 1440, Henry did not emerge as the centre of all operations. Instead, he left an unusual amount of business to others. The royal council, according to one influential view, played an unusually prominent role under the adult Henry until about 1445; and from then until 1450, a group led by the Duke of Suffolk and comprising Lord Say, Adam Moleyns, William Aiscough and others seems to have dominated government.46 The extent to which Henry made decisions is debatable, but it was nonetheless obvious to at least some contemporaries that he was not ruling as he should.

Differing theories have been put forward for Henry’s lack of engagement with the normal processes of government. One proposes that Henry was simply not up to the job of ruling, and the absence of his royal will forced others to try to rule in his name. Others have suggested that Henry, as he grew up, became rather dependent on others ruling in his stead, though still capable of making judgements. Much of the available evidence, indeed, would suggest that while Henry did make decisions, he only did so on an occasional basis on subjects of particular interest to him; in this way, he was usually content to sign whatever was put in front of him without much thought to the consequences, letting others do most of the work.

This ‘occasional’ king is consequently one in whose reign much care must be taken when assessing the decision-making process. Crucially, however, those areas where we can see Henry’s active involvement – both bigger policy decisions, such as the foundation of Eton and King’s and the diplomacy that sought peace with France throughout most of the 1440s, and occasional interventions in minor matters – are frequently those that accord with Henry’s religiosity, from pardons in honour of a forthcoming saint’s day to the foundation of religious institutions ‘according to the measure of our devotion’. We should see Henry’s piety as the keynote of his kingship. One does not need to accept uncritically Blacman’s description, or to believe Henry a non-canonized saint, to see that as a man or as a king his priorities were more spiritual than temporal, devotional rather than martial, and, while admirable in their own way, were not what was required of a fifteenth-century king – most particularly one who had inherited, alongside the undisputed crown of England, the disputed crown of a war-torn France.

It is on the absence of any martial activity during the later 1430s and 1440s that the most damning indictment of Henry’s kingship can be built. Parliament implied during Henry’s minority that a king had the personal duty of attendance to the actual defence of the land.47 The advice manuals were unanimous that, while peace was desirable, war should be prosecuted in the defence of a king’s rights and his kingdom, and that the king himself should lead and fight in war. Frulovisi’s life of Henry V contained a direct address to Henry VI, in which he was enjoined that ‘thou shalt seek peace and rest with victory to both thy realms by thy virtue and battle, and by those feats by which thy Father tamed both his adversaries and thine’.⁴⁸ While it is not known if Henry ever read these works, or other advice literature (and one should not build too much on these as direct influences on him), it is clear that the expectation that Henry should lead an army to France was both widespread and disappointed. Henry was the only king of medieval England (other than the boy-king Edward V) who did not lead an army in war against a foreign enemy, and in the circumstances of the 1440s this complete neglect of his personal duty was detrimental to his subjects and problematic for his kingship. Certainly, some contemporaries were caught complaining about it – Thomas Kerver, pardoned by Henry for treason, was alleged to have compared Henry unfavourably to the French Dauphin, Charles, who was said to have acted manfully in conquering English lands, and that Henry would have held those lands peacefully and quietly if he were of ‘like stuff’.49 In a letter of 1443 issued under his most personal seal, the signet, Henry wrote to William Wells, Bishop of Rochester. Noting the great army that the French were readying to attack Normandy and Gascony by land and sea, Henry describes how, by the advice of his council, a great army was being raised to resist them:

nevertheless for as much as we know and consider well that the prosperity and welfare of princes and of their Realms, lands and subjects, and the getting and achieving of victories upon their enemies rests not principally in man’s wisdom or strength nor in multitude of people, but in the hands, disposition and grace of God, the which it likes him to grant to those that set their hope and their trust principally in him and lowly sue and seek unto him … by sacrifice of humble and devout prayers, by fasting and by chastising of themselves by alms, deeds and other blessed works⁵⁰

Henry therefore specified, at some length, how the bishop and his flock should pray for the success of his forces and the defence of all his realms. Similar letters were sent to other bishops. These epistles and the faith behind them are in many ways conventional, and appeals to God were part and parcel of any great military effort, but it remains striking that, in an hour of need, Henry’s recourse was not to his martial duty but to his faith; it was not to lead troops in defence of his subjects but to organize prayer for them; it was not to his captains but to his bishops that he turned. Even when concerned with very earthly matters, Henry’s eyes remained fixed on heaven.

The extent to which Henry’s failure to go to war was a personal choice, reflecting a distaste of warfare and his Christian piety, or whether those around him, shuddering to think of the issues a malleable, inexperienced commander like Henry would have created as head of an army on foreign soil, discouraged him is not possible to establish, but perhaps his failure to lead his armies might have stemmed from both. Henry was also not clearly a natural warrior. Unlike his father, wounded at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 at the age of sixteen and the victor of Agincourt at twenty-eight, or his supplanter, Edward IV, who fought in the front line at several battles, there is no evidence that Henry ever actually engaged in combat or ‘wielded anything more lethal than a prayer-book’.51

When he reached the age of twenty-one in 1442, Henry had many of the attributes necessary in a king. He looked the part, tall and well attired, while his court impressed foreigners and subjects alike. He had a deep Christian piety that was expected of medieval kings, and had just embarked on two major building projects that reflected both this piety and the power of the Lancastrian monarchy. While he was not as active in government or as careful of the royal finances as might have been expected, these were not necessarily crippling faults in a king. Yet as the decade wore on the fault lines in Henry’s kingship grew deeper rather than better: in particular his reliance on a chosen few to run his realm and his own failure to lead his desperate subjects in war. By 1450, both of Henry’s realms, England and France, were in chaos, and criticism of his ministers and their policies, for which Henry was ultimately responsible, had reached fever pitch. By 1453 the French realm had been lost, and Henry had suffered an unprecedented mental and physical collapse brought on by the strain of domestic chaos and foreign defeat.