Henry VI (Penguin Monarchs) by James Ross

Author:James Ross [Ross, James]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780141979359
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-12-28T16:00:00+00:00

3

Collapse and Catastrophe, 1453–1461

In early August 1453, at the royal hunting lodge of Clarendon near Salisbury, Henry VI lost his senses. He would never fully recover them. The onset was sudden: one contemporary chronicle described how ‘he fell, through a sudden and unexpected fright, into such an illness that for a full year and a half he was without natural sense or intelligence adequate to administer the government’.1 The juxtaposition of this event and the receipt around this time of news of the defeat of the English army at Castillon in Gascony on 17 July, which doomed the recovery of the duchy, may well not have been a coincidence.

Usually referred to as the king’s ‘madness’, Henry’s symptoms did not require the medieval equivalent of a straitjacket; instead he was, for most of the next eighteen months, in a stupor or catatonic state. Two contemporary accounts illustrate the severity of the attack to which he had succumbed. About three months after his collapse and two months after the birth of his son in October 1453:

the Duke of Buckingham took him [the baby prince] in his arms and presented him to the King in goodly wise, beseeching the King to bless him; and the King gave no manner of answer. Nevertheless the Duke abode still with the Prince by the King; and when he could no manner answer have, the Queen came in, and took the Prince in her arms and presented him in like form as the Duke had done, desiring that he should bless it; but all their labour was in vain, for they departed thence without any answer or countenance, saving only that once he looked on the Prince and caste down his eyes again, without any more.2

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