Henry VI of England

Henry VI (6 December 1421 – 21 May 1471) was King of England from 1422 to 1461 and 1470 to 1471, and disputed King of France from 1422 to 1453. The only child of Henry V, he succeeded to the English throne at the age of eight months, upon his father's death, and to the French throne on the death of his maternal grandfather, Charles VI, shortly afterwards.

Henry was born during the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453); he is the only English monarch to have been crowned King of France, following his coronation at Notre-Dame de Paris in 1431 as Henry II. His early reign, when England was ruled by a regency government, saw the pinnacle of English power in France. However, setbacks followed once he assumed full control in 1437. The young king faced military reversals in France, as well as political and financial crises in England, where divisions among the nobility in his government began to widen. His reign saw the near total loss of English lands in France.

Quotes

• Kingdoms are but cares;
  State is devoid of stay;
  Riches are ready snares,
  And hasten to decay.
  Pleasure is a privy prick
  Which vice doth still provoke;
  Pomp, unprompt; and fame, a flame;
  Power, a smold'ring smoke.
  Who meaneth to remove the rock
  Out of the slimy mud
  Shall mire himself, and hardly 'scape
  The swelling of the flood.
  • Attributed to Henry by Sir John Harington in a letter to Prince Henry, dated 1609; printed in Nugae Antiquae (1769)

Quotes about Henry VI

• The story of Henry’s kingship is an unexpected one. That the son of Agincourt’s victor should grow up never to raise a sword against an enemy is surprising. That he should posthumously become a popular ‘saint’ is unusual. That the baby who was king of England and France before his first birthday should die a prisoner, shabbily dressed, retreating into melancholy visions and abandoned in the Tower of London is unique. His was an exceptional position and perhaps the reason he failed to live up to his early promise is that Henry was, ultimately, a far from exceptional man. He was kind-hearted, charitable, generous to a fault, but he was never strong-willed nor focused enough to fulfil the hopes invested in him. Henry knew off by heart the lessons he had learnt in his education about what a king should be, but he never witnessed what a king really was, the core of steel necessary at the heart of a medieval monarch.
  • Lauren Johnson, The Shadow King: The Life and Death of Henry VI (2019), Epilogue, p. 555

See also

• Henry VI, Part 1 · Henry VI, Part 2 · Henry VI, Part 3

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Henry VI of England on Wikipedia