Lauren Johnson (author)

Lauren Johnson is a British historian, writer and heritage interpreter. Her focus is on the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Quotes

The Shadow King: The Life and Death of Henry VI (2019)

All page numbers are from the hardcover first edition published by Pegasus Books, ISBN 978-1-64313-128-3, first printing

All unlinked mentions of Henry refer to Henry VI

Italics and ellipses as in the book

• How did a man with such good intentions cause such an outpouring of blood and horror? The answer lies in Henry himself. In an age of personal monarchy, the character of the ruler was of vital importance, and Henry’s proved to be his reign’s fatal flaw. For a medieval king, good intentions in themselves were of no use whatsoever. What mattered was the ability to turn intention into action. What mattered was royal will, and in that respect, Henry showed himself to be singularly lacking.
  • Prologue, “Woe to thee, o land, whose king is a child” (p. xxvi)

• Although Henry’s treaty at Troyes formally declared perpetual peace, in reality all it did was guarantee further war, since it committed Henry to fighting for his French crown until Dauphin Charles was brought to heel.
  • Part I, “Child King”, Chapter 1, “That divine king your father” (p. 21)

• Unlike Bedford, Gloucester had chosen a bride who suited his own desires, not those of his family. In autumn 1422 he had married Henry’s godmother, Jacqueline of Hainault, a young woman of renowned intelligence, beauty and spirit. The only trouble was, she was already married.
  • Chapter 3, “The universal joy and comfort of us all” (p. 47)

• Here was the insurmountable problem preventing peace between England and France. The English would not negotiate a peace that cost Henry his French crown and the French would not consider one that allowed him to keep it. Now that both Henry and Charles had been crowned, it was impossible for a treaty to be negotiated without one of them losing face.
  • Chapter 8, “Mother of mercy, save both realms” (p. 121)

• Stafford advised Henry that ‘prudence should be placed at the front of the crown… adorned with three jewels, to wit, recollection of the past, circumspection of the present, and foresight of the future.’
  • Chapter 10, “The royal crown is in the hand of God” (p. 147)

• It made his message abundantly clear: these peace talks should be different. They should be respectful and affectionate, not coolly diplomatic and suspicious. Such intentions were admirable but they were unfortunately counterproductive.
  • Part II, “Adult Rule”, Chapter 15, “Stretch forth the hand” (p. 202)

• Henry was capable of ruthlessness, as his treatment of the mad woman who railed at him about Eleanor Cobham demonstrated, but he was not consistent. ‘Justice without mercy is cruelty,’ as a contemporary proverb went, but ‘mercy without justice, folly.’
  • Chapter 18, “O king, if king you are, rule yourself” (p. 239)

• Folly and the negligence were becoming the recognized characteristics of Henry’s regime. Even in areas of his policy where he applied himself fully to the task, his interference could be a malign force.
  • Chapter 18, “O king, if king you are, rule yourself” (p. 239)

• In less than three hours of battle, York had achieved more than he had managed in five years of politics.
  • Part III, “A Kingdom Divided Against Itself”, Chapter 26, “The sword of vengeance” (p. 340)

• Here, in essence, was the weakness of Margaret’s position – the same fundamental flaw that had beset every one of Henry’s chief counsellors. Regardless of which advisor was uppermost in the king’s confidence, delicately guiding his policy and applying firm will to his vacillating or disinterested rule, Henry would occasionally assert his royal will in a way that demonstrated invariably poor judgment and which almost always faced opposition.
  • Chapter 27, “Of queens that be crowned, so high none know I” (p. 359)

• But despite the political folly of these actions, on the rare occasions that Henry chose to assert himself, it was impossible to naysay him. He was a weak king, but he was still king.
  • Chapter 27, “Of queens that be crowned, so high none know I” (p. 359)

• Rumors of Margaret’s infidelity are not corroborated by any contemporary source, but through repetition they took on something of the veneer of truth, dangerously undermining the image that Margaret had carefully cultivated for the past four years.
  • Chapter 30, “The test of the sword” (p. 395)

• As is often the case in politics, the truth was less important than public perception.
  • Chapter 32, “Out of the north an evil shall break” (p. 430; emphasis added)

• Partly of necessity and partly from policy, it seems to have been decided that Edward would be exposed to the harsh realities of kingship far earlier than Henry had been. Henry’s rule, after all, was hardly a shining example of the merits of kingship based on theory and delegation rather than direct experience.
  • Chapter 32, “Out of the north an evil shall break” (p. 437)

• A rival prince returning to claim the inheritance of which he had been dispossessed, and thereby ousting the present king, was fast becoming a cliché of English politics.
  • Part IV, “The Great Rebellious Henry”, Chapter 34, “Perverse and variable fortune” (p. 457)

• The very nature of fifteenth-century kingship was that it did not involve choice – you were born to be king, anointed in a sacred ceremony and acclaimed by your people, then ruled until you died. A king’s exalted status came not merely with superior power and wealth, it also came with a heavy sense of responsibility. ‘The king… is given for the kingdom,’ as Henry’s chancellor Sir John Fortescue wrote, quoting St Thomas Aquinas, ‘and not the kingdom for him.’
  • Chapter 34, “Perverse and variable fortune” (p. 457)

• These claims have to be taken with a pinch of salt however, since Blacman had a deliberate desire to cast Henry as a holy individual; if we unquestioningly accepted everything Blacman wrote we would have to believe that Henry also miraculously multiplied loaves of bread for his followers in the north. Literal-minded descriptions of ‘visions’ and prophecy could be accepted by Henry’s contemporaries in a way that they are not by us. Where we might see in Blacman’s account possible evidence of hallucinations or mental illness, Henry and his subjects could accept these visions as being entirely supernatural in character.
  • Chapter 37, “I am the rock of the English kingdom” (pp. 496-497)

• With Henry imprisoned and his family indefinitely exiled, it appeared that the kingship of Edward IV was finally assured. But Fortune’s Wheel had not finished its revolutions.
  • Chapter 37, “I am the rock of the English kingdom” (p. 498)

• By the time Richard had taken the throne, Henry VI’s cult had grown enormously in popularity. It is possible that some sense of personal guilt – whether for his own role in Henry’s death, or for his brother’s – prompted Richard to have Henry exhumed from the isolation of Chertsey and brought to Windsor. But it is also possible that it represented the combination of piety and self-interest in which fifteenth-century minds saw no contradiction.
  • Chapter 42, “Holy King Henry” (pp. 549-550)

• 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.
  • Epilogue (p. 555)

• Henry’s fall from grace was, then, far from inevitable and it resulted not from the benign – or malevolent – revolutions of a power beyond his control, but from a complex array of competing forces in which Henry’s choices and character were crucial.
  • Epilogue (p. 559; closing words)

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