The reign of Henry VI, spanning 1422 to 1461 and again from 1470 to 1471, stands as a tragic coda to the triumphs of his father Henry V. Where Henry V had been a warrior king who expanded English power in France, his son proved a disastrously ineffectual ruler whose manifest failings shattered the realm. The seeds of dynastic civil war were planted in the 1440s and 1450s, as weak kingship, a bankrupt treasury, scheming nobles, military losses, and popular unrest steadily eroded Lancastrian authority.
A Child King and His Quarrelsome Kinsmen
Henry VI acceded to the thrones of England and France as an infant just nine months old.[^1] His father‘s conquests had made the baby the nominal ruler of a sizable empire stretching from the Channel coast to Paris and beyond. But maintaining those gains and governing the realm would prove an impossible challenge for a minor king.
Custody of the new king became a source of strife between Henry V‘s surviving brothers. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, asserted his right to act as regent but was opposed by Cardinal Beaufort, the infant‘s great-uncle.[^2] In the end, a Regency Council was appointed to govern but the rivalry between Gloucester and Beaufort remained a constant of Henry‘s early reign.[^3]
| Year | Regent | Key Events |
|---|---|---|
| 1422 | Regency Council | Death of Henry V, accession of Henry VI |
| 1429 | Humphrey of Gloucester | Gloucester consolidates power as Lord Protector |
| 1435 | Regency Council | Congress of Arras fails to secure peace with France |
| 1437 | Henry VI | Henry comes of age and assumes personal rule |
An Inexperienced King and a Crumbling French Empire
As an adult ruler, Henry proved a study in contradictions. Tall and handsome, he projected an image of kingliness.[^4] But in character he was pious, scholarly, averse to warfare, and prone to bouts of mental illness.[^5] He took little interest in the details of governance and was easily swayed by favorites.
Henry‘s most pressing challenge was the ongoing war in France. English forces had already begun to lose ground in the 1420s but suffered catastrophic reverses in the 1440s. The Siege of Orléans (1428-29) and capture of Joan of Arc briefly stalled French momentum but the initiative had clearly passed to the Valois king Charles VII.
graph LR
A[1415: Henry V‘s victory at Agincourt] --> B[1420: Treaty of Troyes]
B --> C[1422: Death of Henry V and Charles VI of France]
C --> D[1429: Siege of Orléans lifted]
D --> E[1435: Congress of Arras]
E --> F[1450: Normandy lost to French]
F --> G[1453: Gascony lost, end of the Hundred Years‘ War]The Congress of Arras in 1435, intended to reconcile the English and French crowns, ended in failure.[^6] The defection of the Duke of Burgundy to the French in 1435 was a major blow. By the mid-1440s, with Gascony under siege and Normandy crumbling, Henry desperately sought peace.
Margaret of Anjou and the Unpopular Peace
Henry‘s marriage in 1445 to the fifteen-year-old Margaret of Anjou was meant to secure a truce. But the bride came without a dowry and at a terrible diplomatic cost: the cession of Maine and Anjou to the French crown. This secret provision of the Treaty of Tours was widely condemned when it became public knowledge.[^7]
The strongmen behind this unpopular pact, Edmund Beaufort (Duke of Somerset) and William de la Pole (Duke of Suffolk), further inflamed resentment by monopolizing royal favor. As historian Ralph Griffiths has noted, Margaret‘s court party "made many enemies" among the ancient nobility.[^8]
Misrule and Rebellion
With defeat looming in France, political dysfunction mounting in England, and the crown‘s finances in ruins, popular anger began to build. In the summer of 1450, a revolt in Kent led by the mysterious Jack Cade galvanized opposition to Henry‘s misrule.[^9]
Some 5,000 rebels under Cade‘s command occupied London and presented the court with a list of grievances. They demanded an end to official corruption, the removal of "traitors" from the king‘s council, and the appointment of Richard, Duke of York as heir apparent.[^10] Henry crushed the uprising but its very occurrence demonstrated how far respect for Lancastrian rule had fallen.
Instead of heeding the calls for reform, Henry proceeded to alienate Richard of York, the realm‘s most powerful magnate. A royal cousin, York possessed potential claims to the throne and a bitter rivalry with Somerset. In 1450, Henry dismissed York as Lieutenant in France and appointed Somerset Constable of England.[^11]
York‘s response came in 1452, when he assembled an army and marched on London, demanding that Somerset and other "evil councillors" be handed over for trial.[^12] At a tense confrontation in Dartford, Henry managed to defuse the crisis without bloodshed. But the king‘s reconciliation with York proved short-lived.
A Sickly Heir and a Looming Succession Crisis
By 1453, Henry‘s already tattered authority was shattered by two hammer blows. First, the last English toehold in Gascony fell to the French, ending the Hundred Years‘ War in abject defeat.[^13] Second, the king suffered a catastrophic mental and physical collapse, leaving him unable to govern.
Into this power vacuum stepped Richard of York, who had himself appointed as Lord Protector during Henry‘s incapacity.[^14] Crucially, up to this point Henry and Margaret had failed to produce a male heir. With York now empowered and Somerset imprisoned, the prospect of a Yorkist succession seemed increasingly plausible.
The king eventually recovered his senses in late 1454. But the political landscape had shifted decisively against him. York commanded widespread support among the nobility, gentry, and commons. Even more dangerously, he and his allies now questioned whether Henry was fit to reign.
A Legacy of Misrule
Modern scholarship has reached a damning verdict on Henry VI‘s reign to 1454. Leading historians like Ralph Griffiths and John Watts portray him as a ruler singularly ill-equipped for kingship.[^15] Henry‘s manifest shortcomings – his naivety, mental fragility, ineptitude at war, and weakness for unpopular courtiers – undermined the foundations of Lancastrian power.
By 1455, with the king discredited, the treasury bankrupt, the great magnates split into armed camps, and the succession in doubt, England stood on the precipice of dynastic civil war. The disasters of the reign‘s early years had sown the wind; in the Wars of the Roses that followed, the realm would reap the whirlwind.
[^2]: R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 20.
[^3]: Ibid., 25.
[^4]: Wolffe, Henry VI, 3.
[^5]: Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, 243.
[^6]: C.T. Allmand, Henry V (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 440.
[^7]: Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, 495.
[^8]: Ibid., 723.
[^9]: Ibid., 610-611.
[^10]: I.M.W. Harvey, Jack Cade‘s Rebellion of 1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 77-84.
[^11]: John Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 298.
[^12]: Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, 692.
[^13]: Ibid., 536.
[^14]: Wolffe, Henry VI, 286.
[^15]: See Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship; Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI.
