1453
In August of 1453, King Henry VI of England ceased even to appear to be a competent monarch. He fell into a mysterious catatonia that lasted about eighteen months, and emerged with an irremediably tarnished reputation. In May of 1455, at St Albans, forces led by the Duke of York defeated the royal army, and the Wars of the Roses began. When, thirty years later, Henry Tudor defeated Richard III, English government was on a new footing. The transition from Henry VI to Henry VII is arguably the most interesting in English history. In 1453, England was unmistakably medieval. It was something else in 1485.
For what it's worth, the cause of Henry VI's illness was genetic. His grandfather, Charles VI of France, spent most of his long life running in and out of madness. Royal unsteadiness, in both cases, created a power vacuum. In France, the king's powerful brothers fought to control access to royal power. In England, where Henry VI came to the throne as a child without siblings, the factions that would eventually launch a string of short-lived civil wars gathered around the king's cousins, descendants of the prolific Edward III and his equally philoprogenitive son, John of Gaunt.
"Lancastrian" and "Yorkist" are anachronistic terms that nobody used in the fifteenth century. "Lancastrian," in fact, meant little more than "anti-Yorkist." The Yorkist party gathered round Richard, Duke of York, descended from Edward III via two different ancestors. York would die at the threshold of victory, in 1460, fallen in the battle of Wakefield. In the following year, his eldest son would climb the throne as Edward IV. Edward turned out to be a good king in that he used his strength to introduce many streamlining innovations to the functioning of government, most notably in the field of fiscal management.
The Lancastrian party was led by Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI's queen. Margaret was vilified from the start as a transgressive woman who rejected her rightful role (submissive spouse) to interfere with Yorkist control of government. Even when her husband regained his health, he failed to demonstrate any monarchical backbone whatsoever. Margaret rallied the Lancastrian cause largely to protect the interests and claims of her son, Prince Edward. As a woman, however, she could claim no authority of her own. It was only as the representative of her husband and her son that she could act. An interesting recent book by Helen E Maurer, Margaret of Anjou: Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England (Boydell, 2003) strips away the myths about Margaret and replaces them with a carefully reconstructed context, in which Margaret's position is shown to have been untenable.
I have never read a history book quite like this. Professor Maurer scrupulously presents her evidence as it would have been seen by its actors - without foreknowledge.
Continue reading about Margaret of Anjou at Portico.
