Lauren Johnson

Henry VI is an unfairly overlooked monarch. Without “the shadow on the wall”, as one contemporary called him, there would be no Wars of the Roses and no Tudors. His reign was disastrous, but completely compelling.

Lauren analyses the character flaws that scuppered Henry VI’s reign

Henry VI was merciful and generous. But what English kings required most during the Wars of the Roses was a core of steel – and Henry’s lack of one would make him easy prey for his foes. Lauren Johnson tells the story of a monarch who was simply too soft to lead his troubled nation

On the morning of 22 May 1455, King Henry VI heard the tolling of the bells of St Albans in the shade of his battle standard, surrounded by armed followers. For the first time, at the age of 33, he was about to experience battle – against his own subjects.

Yet Henry was no bellicose tyrant. He was devoted to peace, and even now, with a Yorkist army at the gates, led by his greatest enemies, he was so confident that matters could be resolved peacefully that he and his bodyguard failed to don armour. But as the bells fell silent, the distant sounds of violence shattered the king’s complacency.

The Yorkists had abandoned negotiations with Henry’s commanders and forced an entry through the gardens on the edge of the city. Henry’s refuge in St Albans marketplace was suddenly overrun with enemy soldiers, arrows whistling through the air, his attendants clustering around the horrified king as they faced an opposing army unarmoured. The result was inevitable. Henry’s escort was slaughtered, defensive wounds to the face and arms attesting to their inferior preparations. The king was wounded in the neck and dragged into a tanner’s cottage to save him from the hail of arrows. Within half an hour the town, and Henry, were in Yorkist hands.

The battle of St Albans was a contest for control of the king – and, as such, is widely regarded as the opening clash of the Wars of the Roses. The result was that England collapsed into a state of civil war – between supporters of Henry’s Lancastrian dynasty and his Yorkist rivals – from which it would not recover for 30 years.

Henry VI’s reign is rightly remembered as a nadir in English history and 1455 signalled the beginning of the end. But defeat at St Albans was not the first calamity to assail the king. Between 1450 and 1453, Henry had lost the majority of his continental kingdom, as it tumbled to a resurgent French army. By 1453 the English had been expelled from every corner of the realm but Calais. That collapse inspired rebellion in England. Within six months, four of Henry’s chief advisers had been butchered by his vengeful subjects. Even worse, these events prompted the arrival on the domestic scene of a man capable of rallying the growing opposition to Henry: the king’s distant cousin Richard, Duke of York.

In his struggle to retain control of at least one kingdom, and to reject rival Yorkist aspirations for government, Henry exhausted himself physically and mentally. In 1453 he collapsed into a profound mental breakdown from which he had only just recovered when his forces were routed at St Albans.

In 1461, six years after St Albans, Henry’s Lancastrians suffered an even more damaging defeat, at the battle of Towton. Here, in the Yorkshire snow, 28,000 men were slaughtered in what is the bloodiest battle in English military history.

Even that was not the end of Henry’s troubles. He was twice deposed by Edward IV, son of the Duke of York, so that by the time Henry died at the age of 49 in 1471 he had the unfortunate distinction of having lost two kingdoms – one of them twice. He had also lost his only child, Edward, in battle, and his liberty to the Tower of London. He was murdered there, on Edward IV’s command, on the night of 21 May 1471. One source claimed that, by the end, he had retreated into mystical visions and hallucinations, perhaps once again suffering from the mental ill health that had troubled him for two decades.

Son of a war hero

How had it come to this? Henry VI had seemed to be in a formidable position when he inherited the ‘dual monarchy’ of France and England in 1422. His father was Henry V, the victor of Agincourt, whose right to the French throne had been confirmed in the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, which it was hoped would end the long war between England and France. The Lancastrian dynasty was replete with capable, experienced statesmen, chief among them Henry V’s brothers John, Duke of Bedford and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. Henry VI had every advantage then, except his youth. For when Henry V died – having never met his only child – Henry VI was only nine months old.

The example of previous child kings was disheartening: Henry III (who inherited his throne at nine in 1216) had faced prolonged civil war with his own barons; Edward III (who acceded, aged 14, in 1327) had endured a faction-ridden infancy as his mother and her lover controlled the kingdom; Richard II (king at 10 in 1377) had been deposed by

By the time he was killed in 1471, Henry had the distinction of having lost two kingdoms – one of them twice