3

Collapse and Catastrophe, 1453–1461

In early August 1453, at the royal hunting lodge of Clarendon near Salisbury, Henry VI lost his senses. He would never fully recover them. The onset was sudden: one contemporary chronicle described how ‘he fell, through a sudden and unexpected fright, into such an illness that for a full year and a half he was without natural sense or intelligence adequate to administer the government’.1 The juxtaposition of this event and the receipt around this time of news of the defeat of the English army at Castillon in Gascony on 17 July, which doomed the recovery of the duchy, may well not have been a coincidence.

Usually referred to as the king’s ‘madness’, Henry’s symptoms did not require the medieval equivalent of a straitjacket; instead he was, for most of the next eighteen months, in a stupor or catatonic state. Two contemporary accounts illustrate the severity of the attack to which he had succumbed. About three months after his collapse and two months after the birth of his son in October 1453:

the Duke of Buckingham took him [the baby prince] in his arms and presented him to the King in goodly wise, beseeching the King to bless him; and the King gave no manner of answer. Nevertheless the Duke abode still with the Prince by the King; and when he could no manner answer have, the Queen came in, and took the Prince in her arms and presented him in like form as the Duke had done, desiring that he should bless it; but all their labour was in vain, for they departed thence without any answer or countenance, saving only that once he looked on the Prince and caste down his eyes again, without any more.2

Two months later, in a last-ditch attempt to rouse the king, a delegation of lords went to him at Windsor to discuss urgent business, but, reported one of their number, the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, ‘they could get no answer nor sign, for no prayer nor desire, lamentable cheer nor exhortation, nor anything that they or any of them could do or say, to their great sorrow and discomfort’. Later they asked for the king to be moved, ‘and so he was led between two men into the Chamber where he lies’, but again they could get no response.³ Abbot Whethamstede of St Albans, who may not have been an eyewitness, nonetheless provides a description that fits closely with this picture, noting that Henry had lost his memory and control of his limbs, being unable to walk or move without help from where he was seated.

With such scraps of information, it is difficult to produce a definitive modern medical diagnosis. The condition most often ascribed to Henry is catatonic schizophrenia: a state, often brought on by a stressful episode, in which the subject experiences extreme loss of motor ability. It is also hereditable, perhaps between 40 and 80 per cent of the time. Henry’s maternal grandfather, Charles VI of France, had lost his mind in 1392, though in a rather different way. Under physical stress (rather than the mental strain that seems to have triggered Henry’s collapse), Charles became violent, killing four men of his household before he could be restrained; he continued to suffer breakdowns throughout his life. Henry’s great-grandmother, Charles’s mother, also appears to have suffered a breakdown aged thirty-five – ‘losing her good sense and her good memory’4 – although she apparently recovered after a few months, living another five years. It seems very likely that Henry’s mental weakness was inherited from his maternal ancestors.

No adult king of England before this date had ever fully lost his mental faculties, and consequently his ability to rule, in so comprehensive a manner. The nearest equivalent was Edward III, who appears to have been mentally and physically debilitated by a series of strokes by the end of his life, but was still nominally in control of government even if heavily influenced by a clique around him. Clearly Henry could not be considered to be in any sort of control. In the circumstances, it is astonishing that it took eight months before any formal solution to the problem was found, thus reflecting the difficulty and gravity of the situation, the absence of a member of the immediate royal family who could take over, and the factional fault lines within the English nobility. Although marginalized after the failure of his ‘loyalist’ rebellion in 1452, without the king the political isolation of Richard, Duke of York, the most powerful magnate and unofficially next in line to the throne after the infant Prince Edward, was unsustainable. If York was to be brought in from the political wilderness, then he was really the only choice to govern in the king’s stead, and he was eventually appointed Protector of England on 27 March 1454. If York was in, then his political rival, the Duke of Somerset, was out, and was imprisoned in the Tower for nearly a year, though the substantial body of moderate magnates who held the balance of power prevented York from bringing him to trial for the loss of Normandy. While historians have debated just how partisan York’s protectorship was, there is some agreement that it did provide a period of stable government, despite the uncertainty over how long it would last and how far Henry might recover, if he ever did.

Henry is generally believed to have been in this catatonic stupor for one and a half years, but this is not quite the whole picture. There were moments where the king, appearing in public, was able to give at least the superficial impression that he was functioning normally. The East Anglian gentleman William Paston, writing from London to his brother John in Norfolk on 6 September 1454, described how the Archbishop-elect of Canterbury had made his formal submission to the king, and received his cross of office in return: ‘My Lord of Canterbury has received his cross, and I was with him in the king’s chamber when he made his homage. I told Harry Wylton the demeaning between the king and him; it was too long to write.’5 While it is frustrating that the king’s behaviour (his ‘demeaning’) is not described, the fact that it was a topic that was too long to commit to paper probably indicates that the king had not recovered that far mentally, even if physically he was able to move about. Nonetheless, homage was a formal and solemn public act, and if his recovery was still very limited it is surprising that he was allowed or even able to appear. Henry’s occasional public appearances (we know of two) must have created more uncertainty than is usually acknowledged for those trying to run the country, particularly Protector York. However, the suspicion that Henry had not made anything approaching a full recovery when he received the Archbishop of Canterbury in September 1454 is confirmed by another of John Paston’s correspondents, writing on 9 January 1455, and describing Henry making a sudden and apparently complete recovery at the Christmas recently passed:

Blessed be God, the King is well amended, and has been since Christmas day … and on the Monday afternoon the Queen came to him, and brought my Lord Prince with her. And then he asked what the Prince’s name was, and the Queen told him Edward … and he said he never knew until that time, nor knew not what was said to him, nor knew where he had been whilst he had been sick until now. And my Lord of Winchester and my Lord of Saint John’s were with him on the morrow after Twelfthday [7 January], and he spoke to them as well as he ever did; and when they came out they wept for joy.6

The tears of joy would soon dry. As one historian put it: ‘If Henry’s insanity had been a tragedy, his recovery was a national disaster.’⁷

Henry’s recovery at Christmas 1454 inevitably brought York’s protectorate to an end. But the implication by contemporaries that Henry had made a full recovery is questionable. Despite apparently being ‘well amended’, he signed no government documents before 8 April 1455, and only twenty-five between then and the following November, a significant contrast with his annual average of around 180 in the 1440s.8 Thus the problem of what happened over the next few months, as so frequently with Henry VI, is one of the king’s agency. Step by step, Somerset resumed his former position as the leading figure in the government (an Italian writer in London noted ‘my lord of Somerset ruled as usual’),⁹ while York and his allies lost power and office, and moves were made against them that might – to them – appear to be hostile. It is simply not clear whether this was Henry’s conscious policy, whether he merely slipped back into the habits of reliance on Somerset and the key members of his household, or whether his recovery was limited enough for those around him to manoeuvre him in order to benefit themselves. But, however it happened, giving Somerset back the reins of government and moving against York was not a prudent policy, and did not go unpunished.

Summoning a great council to meet in late May at Leicester, where the disputes between York and Somerset were to be resolved – with the great likelihood that the latter would have much the better of any settlement – the king left London on 21 May and moved north with a respectable following. But York and his key allies, the Neville Earls of Warwick and Salisbury, took matters into their own hands. Warwick and Salisbury were themselves at odds with Somerset over the ownership of the lordship of Glamorgan, and in the midst of a bitter local struggle with the Percy family for dominance of the north; this struggle had already erupted in bloodshed at the Battle of Heworth in August 1454, and the conflict between these two powerful families was increasingly important in local and national politics. With a larger and better-armed force of perhaps 3,000 men, York, Warwick and Salisbury marched swiftly south, proclaiming their loyalty in letters to the king but also making demands for ‘justice’ against Somerset. The royal force stopped at St Albans, the first major town on the road north from London, on the evening of 21 May, and reinforcements were summoned, but York’s army arrived first.

At this crucial juncture, trapped and outnumbered by a ‘rebel’ army, King Henry delegated full responsibility for negotiation with his rebellious leading subjects to the Duke of Buckingham; it was later alleged that York’s letters containing his demands had not even been shown to him. Placing Buckingham rather than Somerset in charge seems to have been one of those occasional assertions of royal will, as Buckingham was a less polarizing and odious figure to the Yorkist lords than Somerset, yet Henry’s refusal to engage in person in the process of negotiating with several of his most important and dangerous subjects was a shocking abdication of personal responsibility. Henry presumably held the naïve belief that the Yorkists would not actually attack the royal force, by then sheltering behind barricades in St Albans. This was a mistake: the Yorkists, frustrated by the fruitless negotiations and presumably thinking that they had had to complete the risky task they had set themselves before royal reinforcements arrived, attacked the town.

During the years of crisis in English-held France, up until the complete loss of English territories there in 1453, Henry had never led a royal army to France. Instead, on 22 May 1455 his first experience of battle was against his own subjects; it was to be a traumatic and disastrous one. Breaking through the barricades, the Yorkists targeted the noblemen around the king. Somerset, the Earl of Northumberland, the head of the Percy family, and his ally Lord Clifford were killed, Buckingham and Henry himself were wounded, and the king, deserted by his men and left alone, took refuge in the house of a tanner.10 Henry himself was unlikely to have been a target for the rebels – killing him would have caused York and his allies more problems than solutions – though this may not have been obvious to Henry, fleeing a shower of arrows and watching his household men cut down around him. Henry’s wound, in the neck, was clearly not deemed too serious, and he was fit to receive York, Warwick and Salisbury as his loyal liege men in the abbey at St Albans the same day. York and his allies now had possession of the king, and, having eliminated their rivals, including Somerset, were now in control of the government.

Although the wound he received at St Albans was apparently quickly treated, there are hints that it had a longer-term impact, that it retarded or reversed Henry’s questionable recuperation from his mental breakdown. His curious passivity before the battle might be an indication that his recovery from mental illness was limited, but some years later, in the autumn of 1457, an approver (an accomplice to a felony who turned king’s evidence) repeated a treasonable conversation in which one Robert Burnet stated that the king ‘sleepeth too much therto he was hurt at Saint Albans, would God he had been hurt so that he could never rise’.11 The reason this evidence cannot just be dismissed as idle chatter is that both the speaker and his listener were yeomen of Westminster: while it is not possible to identify them as men of the royal household, their residence near the epicentre of government there makes it feasible that this gossip came from an informed source. Within a fortnight of the battle, Henry was sick again, perhaps a partial relapse of his mental illness brought on by the shock of the mêlée; a distinguished physician (rather than a battlefield surgeon), summoned on 5 June, was presumed to know the nature of his illness. Henry’s health remained an issue for much of the summer, and in late October one correspondent of the Paston family, whose surviving letters do so much to illuminate the politics of these years, wrote that ‘some men are afraid that he is sick again’.¹²

Uncertainty over the king’s health continued, but there is no incontrovertible evidence that the king had a major relapse in the summer or autumn of 1455. Yet despite this, the Duke of York was appointed Protector of the Realm for the second time. Previously Protectors had only ever been appointed when the king was absent from the realm or clearly unable to rule. In contrast the second protectorate is explained by York’s political ascendancy after his victory at St Albans. Parliament had assembled on 9 July, and sat until prorogued on 31 July, during which time York had pushed through royal pardons for himself and his allies for their actions at St Albans, appointed his supporters and friends to key posts, and begun to make moves to fulfil his reform programme for royal government. The programme, embracing attempts to restore law and order and royal finance, and seek justice on those who had been leading the king astray, was a tall order, but York was bound by his repeated public pronouncements on these topics to attempt to undertake them. When parliament reconvened in November 1455, the Lords agreed to York becoming Protector for a second time. The terms of this appointment were almost identical to those of his first, when the king was in a state of prostration; and York’s protectorate could only be ended when Henry VI’s son came of age, at least fifteen years away, or if the king came in person to parliament to relieve York of his office, with the advice of the lords spiritual and temporal.

Part of the reason for York’s appointment was the dire state of the realm. A resumption of private warfare in the north between the Nevilles and Percies ended in a Neville victory at Stamford Bridge on 31 October, and a new outbreak of violent feuding in the West Country between the Earl of Devon and Lord Bonville, which saw a battle at Clyst on 15 December – which meant that the country was in urgent need of strong government. Accordingly the House of Commons petitioned that York be made Protector.

This appointment was not explicitly justified on the grounds of Henry’s health but on his incapacity to rule. On 11 November a great council, at which York was not present, concluded that the king was not able to preside over the new parliamentary session in person. Nothing explicit was said in the address to the Commons the following day about Henry’s health – just that ‘for certain just and reasonable causes’ he was unable to attend – and the Commons, requesting the appointment of the Protector, noted that the king ‘might not personally hereafter attend to the defence of this land’, as such business must be ‘over grievous and tedious to his Highness’.13

Yet one wonders about Henry’s health during this time. If it was simply a question of York wanting to sideline Henry and rule as Protector, it seems strange that he waited until the second session of parliament in November, rather than pushing the act through parliament as soon as it met in July, not long after his victory at St Albans. There is very limited evidence of Henry’s engagement with government between April and November 1455. Yet it took three months after the dissolution of the protectorate on 25 February 1456 before the king signed a warrant or council minute on 12 May (some warrants were passed by the king himself to the Lord Chancellor from 2 March). The fact that essential business could be portrayed by the Commons as grievous and tedious to the king suggests an acknowledgement by the political elite that Henry’s recovery was limited, and had perhaps been set back by the trauma of his wounding at St Albans; for all York’s political ascendancy, it was Henry’s weakened state that made the second protectorate possible.

The end of York’s protectorate did not, unlike the end of the first, appear to have been dependent on improvements in the king’s health. Rather, it stemmed from York’s failure to gather enough support to push through the centrepiece of his reforms, an Act of Resumption revoking many of Henry’s grants of land and office, which would impact negatively on many individuals, such as the queen and Henry’s Tudor half-brothers, and institutions such as Eton and King’s, but would significantly improve royal finances. That failure ensured that a majority of the lords in parliament backed the ending of his protectorate in February 1456. However, the end of York’s protectorate also marked the end of effective government under Henry VI. Over the next five years, the political elite descended into factionalism and, ultimately, civil war.

Henry’s weakness was the root of the political tension and turmoil after 1455. Before 1453 he was a king who, if only intermittently engaged with policy and decisions, nevertheless could and did engage. After 1455 contemporaries perceived that he was not ruling as he had done before, and the resulting uncertainty was a major cause of the collapse into civil war. A king whose health was fragile, the extent of whose recovery from an unparalleled mental collapse was uncertain, who could be sidelined by more forceful political players and to whom the business of kingship was ‘over grievous and tedious’ was a problem the political community had to face. While, when it suited his supporters, Henry could be portrayed as an active king, a ruler whose knightly courage caused York to capitulate in 1452, who had endured the rigours of a campaign in 1459, full of the ‘spirit of wisdom of God’ – such a portrayal was never entirely convincing.14 Yet, and most importantly, his legitimacy as king was accepted by almost all until well after the outbreak of civil war; they fought over who should have control over him. It was only after five bloody battles between 1459 and early 1461 that the Yorkist faction was able to claim, with any chance of success, that Henry should be replaced.

Delving beneath the political propaganda to find Henry’s real state in these last few years is harder even than in the period before his collapse. Authoritative evidence is almost non-existent, and chronicles, often written significantly after the event and under a Yorkist king, become increasingly partisan. We are forced to rely upon scraps of information from interested observers, and the records of the royal administration, which generally give conflicting representations of King Henry VI. Differing pictures from the evidence have led historians to reach differing conclusions about the state of Henry’s mental health and his fitness to rule, with views ranging from ‘a pathetic shadow of a king’ to ‘a king with decided opinions’.¹⁵

It is clear that after the end of York’s second protectorate Henry was able to walk, talk and play some public role. Henry made a speech and engaged in conversation when receiving French ambassadors in 1456, and at his entry into Coventry on 16 August 1457 he ‘gave the mayor and his brethren and all the commons by his own mouth rehearsed great thanks’.¹⁶ Earlier in the year, meanwhile, Henry and his queen went in procession around Coventry, crowned and in great state.¹⁷ Some vivid eyewitness descriptions (albeit made nearly forty years later) show Henry in action. On more than one occasion in the late 1450s he visited Westminster Abbey to plan the location of his tomb. Having identified a site, he then in person commanded a mason to mark out the length and breadth of his tomb. Yet in their informal accounts, the witness statements also show a more troubled and diffident king. When the abbot suggested that it would be appropriate for Henry to be buried in a chapel alongside his father, the king replied: ‘Nay let him alone: he lieth like a noble prince, I will not trouble him.’18 Perhaps he did not consider himself worthy of lying alongside his father. Instead, all the witnesses agreed that he intended to be buried next to Henry III, ironically enough a pious king whose reign was troubled by civil strife. One of these witnesses was John Ashby, clerk of the signet, a man who must have spent much time in Henry’s presence. He described how, while Henry was still looking for the best position for his tomb within the abbey, various suggestions were made, to each of which the king made no answer. Presumably in veiled exasperation at his silence, some of the people accompanying Henry said to him:

‘Sir this is the first time that you have anything done in this matter, we think it best that upon a better deliberation you determine your mind therein.’ To the which the said King Henry gave answer in effect ‘I hold that well done.’¹⁹

This intimate depiction of a king, either unable to make up his mind or unable to speak it, and needing to be managed by those around him, is striking.

Other evidence from the last few years of the reign also depicts a king withdrawn from the troubles of his realm. In 1460, he visited Crowland Abbey in Lincolnshire. Despite the ongoing political turmoil the Prior of Crowland, writing his chronicle, observed that ‘here he stayed, in the full enjoyment of tranquillity, three days and as many nights, taking the greatest pleasure in the observance of his religious duties, and most urgently praying that he might be admitted into the brotherhood of our monastery’.20 This was hardly the dynamic, active king of royal propaganda: rather the pious king with his eyes upon heaven, but more passive, limited and weakened than he had been for most of his long reign.

Nor, after 1455, was he even perceived as the leading member of the royal family. Henry had always been seen by critics as being too receptive to, and overly reliant on, the counsel of his ministers. Yet after York’s second protectorate had come to an end, people started to focus increasingly on the role of Henry’s undeniably active queen, Margaret of Anjou, to the exclusion of her husband. Sources that do so have to be treated with some caution: the queen, female and French, was naturally vulnerable to hostile comments in the misogynistic and xenophobic world of late-medieval England, and it was easier to blame her for the troubles than it was to attribute them to her husband – direct criticism of the king was always dangerous. However, these wide-ranging sources, written for both public and private consumption, together present a convincing picture that is hard to ignore. The Chancellor of Oxford University, Dr Thomas Gascoigne, writing in 1457 and thus strictly contemporary, noted that after York had been dismissed from the protectorship the queen ‘dragged’ the king to her houses in the county of Chester, from where she ruled.21 Meanwhile, the anonymous writer of the chronicle known as the Brut commented that ‘every lord in England at this time dared not disobey the Queen, for she ruled peaceably all that was done about the King, which was a good, simple and innocent man’.²²

By 1461, with Henry deposed and the new Yorkist king, Edward IV, on the throne, writers were freed from the need not to criticize the reigning king and the verdicts on Henry and his kingship are damning. For the Crowland chronicler, writing after 1461 but having observed him at first-hand in 1460, ‘in consequence of a malady that had been for many years increasing upon him, he had fallen into a weak state of mind’.²³ Bishop George Neville, admittedly an opponent and the brother of the Earl of Warwick, one of the leading Yorkist lords, described him as ‘that puppet of a king’ and a ‘statue of a king’ in a letter of April 1461.²⁴ Pope Pius II, presumably on information received from his legate in England, Francesco Coppini, who was excessively inclined towards the Yorkists, described Henry as ‘more timorous than a woman, utterly devoid of wit or spirit’.²⁵ Even allowing for the pro-Yorkist perspectives of such works, these judgements on Henry are devastating.

Yet a different picture is, perhaps inevitably, painted by the sources of the royal administration between 1455 and 1460, one that apparently shows Henry actively involved in the government of the realm. A rather different image of Henry in the last few years of his reign can thus be constructed. Many of the chronicle accounts are problematic, and, using the procedural records behind the king’s grants and decisions, the warrants for the Great Seal, it is possible to argue that they record decisions genuinely being made by the king.26

Documents could be authorized by fifteenth-century kings in a number of different ways. Many were simply passed to the senior officials as granted without alteration, and a later endorsement added by a clerk. However, kings could also show their approval by sealing the document with their signet, kept normally by their secretary, or even by writing on the documents themselves. Late-medieval kings rarely signed documents with their full names, but did add their initials – R (for ‘Rex’) and the first letter of their first name – known as the sign manual. This was a practice seen only intermittently before Henry’s reign, but one that became frequent after he came of age in 1436: as discussed above, it is direct evidence that governmental business was placed before him for approval. Should the many documents on which Henry added his sign manual not be accepted as the king’s decisions? There are at least a dozen examples after 1455 where the king’s personal wishes were also added to his authorization, as had happened occasionally prior to 1453, such as that on a petition asking for the goods of a deceased man in 1458. A note was added to the petition by one of the king’s attendants: ‘the king wills that the said John have the one half of the goods of the foresaid Adam for the good service that he hath done unto the king and that the other half be brought to the Treasurer of his chamber and from thence to be delivered and be distributed in alms among the poor people’.27 This characteristically pious gesture seems authentic and very much in keeping with examples from before the king’s collapse.

However, the overall picture after 1453 is not so clear-cut. There are only a dozen or so examples where the king’s personal wishes have been added to such documents – not so big a sample over seven years, and evidence only of Henry’s occasional interventions with specific cases, several of which might in any case be characterized as pious or charitable gestures in keeping with his occasional decisions before 1450. With the rest of the warrants authorized by the royal sign manual, meanwhile, there are several problems. Given Henry’s suggestibility, can we be sure that these decisions were actually his? It is very rarely recorded who was present when Henry signed these documents, but the king would never have been alone. There is no direct evidence that the documents put before Henry were pre-vetted but, then again, no such evidence could possibly have survived. If Henry was, in effect, rubber-stamping decisions, putting his mark where he was told to, was he actually ruling? Or was he merely a source of authority which others used for their varied purposes?²⁸ It is, besides, worth questioning whether all of the signatures on these documents were indeed Henry’s. The sign manual in his last few years shows a considerable variation in letter forms as well as in the quality of their execution (see plate 8). This is most likely a result of Henry’s variable health affecting his penmanship rather than forgery by those around him, but the latter cannot entirely be ruled out.

Another type of document, which with other kings is seen as a sign of personal involvement, is equally problematic as evidence of Henry’s participation in decision-making. There are a small number of warrants authorized after 1454 by the signet. The same problem – the extent to which he was being managed – applies to the signet warrants as to those authorized by the sign manual, but there is an additional issue. Assuming that the sign manual was indeed Henry’s, he had to be well enough to sign his name. With the signet, however, he did not: it could be used by somebody else on his behalf. There is at least one signet letter written in October 1453, well after Henry’s collapse and before any hint of recovery, of which he cannot have had any knowledge.29

Then there is the volume of business apparently carried out by Henry in person. Between March 1456, after the end of the second protectorate, and the Battle of Northampton in July 1460 when Henry was captured by the Yorkists, there are 600 warrants for the Great Seal in the sequence for signed bills, an annual rate of 139.³⁰ This was a lower rate than earlier in the reign: in the regnal year between September 1445 and August 1446, Henry authorized 189 warrants, in that between September 1448 and August 1449, 184 were signed (though admittedly there was probably less business passing through the chancery in the later 1440s as government shrank in the face of political tension and then civil war). This was not a heavy workload, averaging a bill approximately every three days. Furthermore, the bills the king signed reflect only a fraction of the business a king did or ought to deal with – several thousand grants came out of the royal chancery each year, and they cannot be used as incontrovertible evidence of a king in control of the decision-making process.

The personal decision-making of any other medieval king, as evidenced in the signed bills, would not be questioned, and indeed this study has used similar evidence before 1453 to argue for Henry’s involvement with government, at least in a limited way. However, the case of Henry VI is different, certainly after his collapse. No other medieval king had such demonstrably serious mental health issues; no other king was so notoriously susceptible to those around him; no other king was so clearly uninterested in the business of government. Furthermore, while each of these documents signed by the king was important to the recipient, they were not key decisions of national policy but generally minor matters of patronage. The most important questions were decided not by the king on paper but in council, parliament or just with his closest advisers behind closed doors. In other words, there were plenty of opportunities for the key figures to manage, cajole or force the king to do as they wished. This is particularly true after Henry’s capture at the Battle of Northampton in 1460, when he seems to have acquiesced meekly to everything required of him. Indeed, he was in Yorkist hands for eight months before being recaptured by his wife’s troops at the second Battle of St Albans; during this time he had declined, when asked, to make any case for why he ought to stay on the throne rather than being displaced by his rival Richard of York, and in fact had meekly accepted the compromise eventually agreed which disinherited his own son, then a small boy, in favour of York as heir to the English throne.

It is not possible to make a truly accurate assessment of Henry’s mental or physical state after his madness. Probability and plausibility are the highest levels to which it is possible to aspire. The sources are thin, frequently lacking in insight, often with a not-so-subtle agenda, or, in the case of administrative documents, following formulae designed to hide authorship, initiative, direction and policy behind the impenetrable veil of royal authority. Yet what is opaque to the modern reader at the distance of half a millennium and with recalcitrant sources was not to some contemporaries. The great majority of Henry’s subjects would never have seen him; most of those who did would have glimpsed Henry only from a distance on state occasions, when he could be stage-managed. But the great lords – the Dukes of York and Somerset, the Earls of Salisbury and Shrewsbury, Warwick and Wiltshire, to whom access to the king’s person could not be denied – would have seen and spoken to the king in audience, in council and in private, and would have witnessed first-hand what mental damage had been wrought, and the extent of his recovery. This knowledge must have impacted on their decisions; that those decisions tended to be violent and made without much reference to Henry himself is telling. He was not fit enough to rule but fit enough not to be entirely discounted.

What can be seen of Henry as king from the politics of the last five years of the reign, from the end of the second protectorate in February 1456 to the climactic Battle of Towton in March 1461? The most obvious point emerging from any study of the period before the actual outbreak of war in September 1459 is the sheer inconsistency of royal policy. In 1455 and 1456 Richard of York was treated with some respect; even before the dissolution of his protectorate one contemporary reported that ‘the King, as it was told me by a great man, would have him chief and principal councillor’.31 During the late 1450s several of his allies remained in key posts, and most strikingly, when the King of Scots invaded northern England in May 1456, it was to York that Henry entrusted an army to resist him. There were alternative candidates – the Duke of Buckingham was the wealthiest peer after York himself, had royal blood and military experience in France, and was a political moderate and acceptable to all sides – yet it was York who was chosen, who marched north, and who missed out on the opportunity for military glory when James II of Scotland left Northumberland for his own soil in face of the advancing English.

However, by that autumn, York and his allies were summoned to a council, where they were upbraided for their actions at St Albans the previous year and forced to swear an oath on the gospels and give a signed undertaking that they would do nothing to endanger the safety of the king or kingdom. Humiliating as these actions were, they must also have worried York and his Neville allies, Richard, Earl of Salisbury and his son Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’, that they were no longer safe from reprisals for their actions at St Albans. Yet, having alienated the Yorkists by such actions, another policy was put in place by autumn 1457 when there were moves towards a general reconciliation, culminating in the so-called Loveday of March 1458 when the two factions walked in procession through London to St Paul’s Church, York walking hand in hand with Henry’s Queen Margaret of Anjou, Salisbury with Somerset, in apparent amity, though the Yorkists had also been forced to agree to pay reparations to the heirs of the nobles killed by Yorkist troops at St Albans. Shortly afterwards, however, the king and queen returned to the Midlands, where Margaret began military preparations, gathering a force known to chroniclers as the ‘queen’s gallants’ in order to defend her family. In June 1459 a great council was called to Coventry; York and the Nevilles were either not invited or, presumably in some fear for their safety, chose not to attend. In their absence they were accused of treason. York, Warwick and Salisbury, finding themselves faced with open hostility, sought to join forces, but Salisbury, marching from Middleham in Yorkshire to the Welsh border, was intercepted and attacked by Lancastrian forces. Despite being outnumbered, he defeated the queen’s men at Blore Heath in Staffordshire on 23 September 1459. If the first Battle of St Albans in 1455 is usually seen as the beginning of the civil war, Blore Heath marked the opening of the most intensive and bloody period of the entire Wars of the Roses.

From employment to alienation to reconciliation to hostility within three years, the crown’s policy towards the Yorkist lords was changeable and unpredictable. This was surely not the work of an active king making decisions, but of a king who was a puppet of different factions around him. Contemporaries clearly identified the queen as the most prominent influence around Henry: one chronicler ‘knew well that all the workings that were done grew by her, for she was more wittier than the king’.32 A number of noblemen, including the young Duke of Somerset, but also the Earls of Shrewsbury and Wiltshire and Viscount Beaumont, were closely associated with the queen, and were frequently at the king’s court in the Midlands. Yet this group remained just a faction until 1459, and whenever there was a larger gathering of lords at great councils, the queen’s outright hostility to York and the Nevilles was usually neutralized by the mass of the peerage, who did not want open conflict. It is surely in the interplay of these two groups that the inconsistency of policy can be found. As those who knew him or had access to him realized that Henry could not rule, the knowledge of the king’s incapacity can only have confirmed the need to exert control, to defeat political opponents and to look to the good of the nation as a whole, however they perceived that to be exercised best. Queen Margaret sought to maximize royal authority and use the lands held directly by the crown, particularly in Cheshire, Lancashire and parts of the Midlands, to provide a basis for power; York and his allies tried to become the king’s leading ministers, while marginalizing him and ruling through constitutional means in a protectorate; the bulk of the peerage sought good governance through noble unity and compromise under the king’s authority. From all these viewpoints the king was a figurehead but little more.

None of these competing policies was ultimately successful. The last eighteen months of the reign saw outright war. There were seven battles (including the rout of the Yorkists at Ludford Bridge, where there was little fighting), and Henry was captured twice, firstly by the Yorkists at Northampton in July 1460 and then by the Lancastrians at the second Battle of St Albans in 1461. He seems to have been no more than a passive spectator at those battles where he was present: at Northampton he was captured in his tent, at St Albans he was allegedly found sitting under a tree, singing. By the time of the huge, bloody and decisive battle outside the Yorkshire village of Towton in March 1461, Henry was not even on the battlefield with the men who were fighting in his name. Instead he was with his wife and son ten miles away at York. In the end the solution to Henry’s inability to rule was found: rather than ruling through him, he was to be replaced.

Richard of York had always had a latent claim to the throne that was arguably better than Henry’s. In late 1460 he put forward his claim in parliament, though to general consternation, even from his allies. In the end the claim was fudged, with Henry allowed to keep his throne but York made his heir, disinheriting Prince Edward, in an act known as the Accord. York’s personal quest to wear the English crown was ended by his death at the Battle of Wakefield a few weeks later, but he left a son, the eighteen-year-old Edward, Earl of March, to succeed him. Edward won his first battle at Mortimer’s Cross in February 1461 over Welsh Lancastrians, but Henry was recaptured at the second Battle of St Albans two weeks later as Queen Margaret’s army defeated the Earl of Warwick. In returning (or being returned) to his wife and allies, the Yorkists argued, in a rather legalistic way, that Henry had broken the Accord made between York and himself in parliament, which all the lords present had sworn to uphold. York’s son Edward thus felt able to proclaim himself king, and it was as King Edward IV that he led the Yorkist army at the Battle of Towton, on 29 March. The state of Henry’s broken realm, split politically, dynastically and geographically between north and south, was uniquely evident as perhaps 50,000 Englishmen fought each other all day in a snowstorm in a battle of unparalleled savagery. Contemporaries claimed that 28,000 men died; even if a more realistic estimate of 9,000 is accepted, it was still the bloodiest battle on English soil until the civil war of the seventeenth century. Edward’s victory turned Henry, over the next decade, successively into a fugitive, a prisoner, a puppet, and finally a victim of murder.