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.