HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-10-14T22:34:41.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/people/henry-vi/feed/atom Jonny Wilkes <![CDATA[16 of the worst monarchs in history]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/9-of-the-worst-monarchs-in-history/ 2026-10-14T22:34:41.000Z 2026-04-17T11:12:27.000Z The past has no shortage of disastrous kings, queens, and other rulers; such a list could easily have been filled with the worst Roman emperors alone. Some have been homicidal, like Nero or Genghis Khan; simply incompetent, like Edward II; completely untrustworthy, like Charles I; or amiable but inadequate, like Louis XVI of France.
But who are truly the worst, and why? Jonny Wilkes makes the case against 16 rulers from history…
1. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus
King of Rome, 534–509 BC
Before Rome had emperors, it had a line of kings going back to the city’s mythical founder, Romulus. The last, however, presided over a reign of terror so bad that the people gave up on the monarchy altogether, heralding the dawn of the Republic.
Lucius Tarquinius Superbus (commonly known as ‘Tarquin the Proud’) had seized the throne by planning the assassination of his own father-in-law, then once in power he killed senators on a whim and imprisoned or executed anyone suspected of disloyalty.
His undoing came when his son raped a noblewoman, which caused such outrage that a revolt broke out that saw the tyrannical king overthrown and exiled. In his doomed attempts to regain the throne, he persuaded neighbouring cities to attack Rome, seemingly unfazed by the damage this would do to his erstwhile kingdom.
2. Commodus
Roman emperor, 177–92 AD
There are a number of contenders to the title of ‘most despicable emperor of Rome’, so we could just as easily be discussing the cruel and murderous rules of, say, Nero and Caligula.
The bloodthirsty, vainglorious spendthrift, Commodus, however, went from inheriting an empire enjoying a long period of peace and prosperity, the Pax Romana, to leaving it broke and in turmoil. If not executing anyone he suspected of plotting against him, he was leaving the job of ruling the empire to a series of corrupt, cruel and incompetent favourites. He much preferred to fight as a gladiator, relishing in slaughtering a menagerie of animals in the arena.
No wonder, then, that Commodus was chosen as the villain in Ridley Scott’s swords-and-sandals masterpiece, Gladiator.
3. John
King of England, 1199–1216
Seriously, how could the arch-villain of Robin Hood not make an appearance? Beyond the tale of the fabled outlaw, John severely damaged the authority of the English monarchy. As a prince, he angered the nobles of Ireland and attempted to steal his brother Richard I’s crown, only ending up as king after Richard died without a legitimate heir. Notably, he also managed to outmanoeuvre a rival claim from his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, whom he is later believed to have had murdered.
Within a few years in power, John had lost Normandy – the foundation of his family’s Angevin empire on the continent – then he emptied the kingdom’s coffers trying to win it back. His oppressively high taxes, his clashes with the church and his cruel and conniving personality all led to a revolt of England’s barons.
Under threat of civil war, John was forced to seal Magna Carta, a historic document that limited royal power. He then proceeded to ignore it. The barons rose up again and John’s reign ended, dying of dysentery, as he fought to keep hold of his kingdom.
4. Wanyan Chenglin
Emperor of the Jin dynasty, 1234
On 9 February 1234, with the warriors of the Mongol empire besieging the city of Caizhou, the emperor of the Jin dynasty in China, Aizong, knew that his 10-year reign would be over shortly. That said, he did not want to be the last in his line, so he abdicated and passed the throne to his general, Wanyan Chenglin, before taking his own life.
The reluctant new emperor began a reign that would be doomed to last just a matter of hours. He was killed leading his soldiers in a last stand when the Mongols broke through the city walls.
5. Charles the Bad
King of Navarre, 1349–87
The name gives away why he belongs on this list, doesn’t it? Charles earned ‘the Bad’ for his duplicitous and treacherous behaviour in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Although King of Navarre in Spain, he owned a lot of land in northern France, which put him in the middle of the conflict, and his response was to keep flipping sides.
Driven solely by ambition, he believed he should be on the French throne, and he plotted and murdered to get it. All the while, Navarre went ignored. What made him truly bad, though, was that his schemes failed utterly. Charles is perhaps best-known today for his grisly end in 1387, when the brandy-soaked sheets he had been wrapped in to cure an illness accidentally caught fire, burning him alive.
6. Henry VI
King of England, 1422–61, 1470–71
Ascending the throne of England as an infant and the son of the hero of Agincourt, the young Henry VI was always going to struggle to live up to his dynastic legacy.
Not helped by his total lack of leadership, it went even worse than feared: he lost control of France (won by his father Henry V), suffered a mental breakdown, and saw his kingdom plunge into the Wars of the Roses. The Lancastrian cause would be headed not by the king, but his queen, Margaret.
Henry’s role amounted to being kicked off the throne by the Yorkist Edward IV, then placed back on it by the ‘kingmaker’, the Earl of Warwick, and finally losing it again after being captured.
7. Christian II
King of Denmark and Norway, 1513–23
Christian’s reign may seem more insignificant than terrible at first glance, but it signalled the end of the Kalmar Union, which had bound together the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden for well over a century. Having been crowned in the first two of those countries in 1513, he set out to secure the third.
It would not be until 1520 that he captured Stockholm, although, hardly magnanimous in victory, his immediate action was to execute 82 nobles. The so-called Stockholm Bloodbath fuelled a Swedish rebellion against Christian and weakened his authority back in Denmark and Norway.
He was overthrown and exiled, and then when he launched a desperate bid to win back his thrones by force, he was imprisoned for the rest of his life.
8. Ivan the Terrible
Tsar of Russia, 1547–84
As the first tsar, Ivan was in some ways an able ruler since he laid the foundations of the Russian empire. He became known as ‘the Terrible’ for a reason, though. Having hated the nobles from an early age (at 13, he had one fed to a pack of dogs), he wasted no time in purging the upper classes.
The domain he inherited clearly was not enough: he instigated numerous, and disastrous, wars of expansion, and even established his own fiefdom within his land where, essentially, anything went. With Ivan prone to paranoia and fits of rage, no one was safe: he ordered a full-on attack on one of his own cities, Novgorod, and beat his daughter-in-law into having a miscarriage, then murdered his son.
9. Rudolf II
Holy Roman Emperor, 1576–1612
Despite being hailed as a generous patron of the arts and sciences, Habsburg emperor Rudolf II utterly failed in his role as the leader of one of Europe’s major powers. Rather than focusing on politics and administration, he instead shut himself away to focus on personal pursuits like alchemy.
When he did show some determination – starting a war with the Ottoman empire to unify Christendom – it proved a disaster. His subjects in Hungary revolted and his family made him hand over power to his younger brother.
Rudolf’s most damning legacy, however, was that his miserable tenure as emperor has been blamed as one of the causes of the Thirty Years’ War, one of the bloodiest conflicts in history.
- Read more | What was the Habsburg jaw?
10. Louis XV
King of France, 1715–74
It could certainly be argued that Louis XV’s status as a poor king of France was overshadowed by his successor, Louis XVI, since he was the one who lost his head in the French Revolution. Yet Louis XV’s reign sowed the seeds of the people’s discontent that would lead to such a violent rejection of the monarchy. In short, he was a deeply ineffectual ruler, let alone the all-powerful absolutist king that France had become accustomed to under Louis XIV.
Reports of corruption and handing over influence to his mistresses hurt the crown’s authority, while his wars and extravagant spending depleted the coffers. France became a less powerful nation under his rule, and smaller too: he gave up New France in the Americas after the disastrous Seven Years’ War.
11. Ferdinand VII
King of Spain, 1808, 1813–33
Shortly after taking the throne in 1808, Ferdinand handed over his kingdom – and himself – to Napoleon Bonaparte. Six years of captivity in France later, he returned with a need to prove his absolutist credentials and so ditched Spain’s liberal constitution that had been written in his absence. This led to multiple uprisings, notably the revolt of 1820, which ushered in three years during which the king was forced to accept a constitutional regime.
While more selfish than monstrous, Ferdinand’s legacy and place on this list were confirmed by two things: he oversaw the loss of nearly all of Spain’s colonial territories in the Americas and, following his death, his petty bid to exclude his brother from the succession resulted in a long civil war.
12. Ranavalona I
Queen of Imerina, 1828–61
To try and hold back the wave of European colonisation in Africa, Queen Ranavalona I, of modern-day Madagascar, would go to any lengths. She wanted to purge all foreign influence, expelling missionaries, persecuting Christians and restricting trade. She even tried to have a giant pair of scissors made so that she could literally chop foreigners in half.
The ones who suffered the most, however, were her people: to preserve her land’s self-sufficiency and way of life, as she saw it, Ranavalona used forced labour for her royal projects and fear to maintain order.
Many executions took the form of the tangena ordeal, a witch-hunt-style trial where the accused was made to ingest poison and if they showed any adverse effects, they were deemed guilty. It is claimed that as much as 50 per cent of the population perished during her rule.
13. Leopold II
King of the Belgians, 1865–1909
Leopold II may not have been a terrible king in Belgium itself, but with the Congo Free State, he revealed just how much of a monster he could be. In 1885, he created his own state in central Africa, having convinced European powers that he intended to improve the lives of the people living there.
In reality, this privately owned kingdom allowed Leopold to exploit the Congolese people so that he could make money from its ivory and natural rubber reserves. Under his system of forced labour, any workers who failed to meet their quotas would be punished with mutilation. Leopold’s preferred method was chopping off hands and feet. Millions died from the brutality and rampant diseases.
This was an age where European empires carved up and exploited the African continent, so the fact that international outrage finally forced Leopold to hand over the Congo Free State illustrates the appalling extent of the atrocities.
14. Khalid ibn Barghash
Sultan of Zanzibar, 1896
Not only did Khalid ibn Barghash rule for just three days, but he was ousted in the shortest war in history. So, in truth, there is no knowing whether he would have been a bad ruler: there wasn’t enough time. In 1896, the sultan of Zanzibar died, which put the British in a tough position. They controlled the islands off the east African coast as it served as a strategic trade post for the Indian Ocean.
Against British wishes, Khalid, who may well have killed his predecessor, assumed the role of sultan and fortified the palace with around 3,000 supporters. The British sent warships, though, and initiated a brief bombardment. The Anglo-Zanzibar War lasted around 38 minutes, and Khalid fled into exile.
15. Nicholas II
Tsar of Russia, 1894–1917
The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia for more than 300 years – and it all ended during the reign of Nicholas II. Not suited to wielding autocratic power over a huge empire, he made a catalogue of errors and refused to adapt beyond his rigid belief that he had the divinely ordained right to rule.
In 1905 alone, Russia lost a war with Japan and broke out in revolution, yet Nicholas only made cursory changes and tried to move on. His court became dominated by the strange and ambitious mystic, Rasputin, his nobles and politicians abandoned him, and his decision to take command of the armies in the First World War meant that he was held personally responsible for every defeat and death.
Revolution erupted again in 1917, forcing his abdication. While imprisoned by the revolutionaries, Nicholas and his entire family were murdered. It was a bloody and definitive end to the tsars, as Russia became a communist regime.
16. Edward VIII
King of England, 1936
Edward became king on 20 January 1936, on the death of his father George V. Before the year was out, he had abdicated in disgrace. His brief reign had entirely been focused on his wish to marry an American named Wallis Simpson, but she had been divorced once and was seeking a second, making her wholly unacceptable to the royal family, the political establishment and the church.
Yet his reputation as a bad monarch could have been even worse had he stayed: Edward has long been accused of being a Nazi sympathiser, who toured Hitler’s Germany almost two years before the Second World War.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Married three times by the age of 15: Margaret Beaufort, the woman who birthed the Tudor Dynasty]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/married-three-times-by-the-age-of-15-margaret-beaufort-the-woman-who-birthed-the-tudor-dynasty/ 2026-10-20T12:50:46.000Z 2025-12-01T09:00:03.000Z In March 1457, a short, slight widow left Pembroke Castle to embark on a 100-mile journey across territories stalked by civil war and pestilence. Her husband had died only four months earlier, carried off by plague contracted during imprisonment at another Welsh castle during the spurts of Yorkist resistance that marked the early Wars of the Roses. It was just weeks since she had given birth – a traumatic labour, endured without her family or support network. But she set out now to Newport with a firm sense of purpose. She would protect herself in one of the only ways a woman could at that time: by finding another husband.
This widow and mother was Margaret Beaufort. She was 13 years old.
The newborn she left at Pembroke would, in 1485, become King Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch. Reading history backwards, it has become fashionable to portray Margaret as an obsessive, Machiavellian mother so consumed by the idea of her son’s divine right to the throne that she would commit child murder to bring it about. She, it is insinuated, was the true assassin of the princes in the Tower who threatened the claim of her “good and gracious prince, king and only beloved son”. But this interpretation is entirely fictional, and mired in misogynist oversimplification. Margaret did not aspire to a crown, either for her son or herself, until the unprecedented events of the Wars of the Roses made it essential for their survival.
Child bride
The notion that Margaret’s child might inherit the throne would have been laughable in 1457. The king then was Henry VI (a Lancastrian), who had a healthy son and myriad cousins sharing his royal blood. In contrast, the Beauforts were products of an illicit liaison generations back between a Lancastrian prince and his children’s governess. And, though in later life Margaret and her son were close both personally and politically, for much of Henry’s youth her maternal style can best be described as ‘hands off’ – arguably, emotionally neglectful. Little wonder, given the circumstances of Henry’s birth.
Today we would consider Margaret a victim of child abuse. Her marriage to Henry’s father, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, took place when she was about 12 – the age of consent for medieval girls (for boys it was 14). This was her second marriage, her first having been dissolved in 1453, during a period of political turmoil.
Even in the 15th century, when marriages were arranged for cradle-bound babies, it was highly unusual for unions to be consummated before a bride was 16, and 20 was the average age of first pregnancy for most noblewomen. For good reason: medieval women’s bodies were still developing until then, and early childbirth was far likelier to end in stillbirth, maternal death or physically damaging complications. In later life, Margaret’s confessor, John Fisher, alluded to how underdeveloped Margaret had been when she gave birth, writing: “She is… a woman not of a great stature, but at that time it is said she was much smaller still, to such a degree that it almost seemed a miracle at her age that so little a body could bring forth a child at all.”
Margaret was forced into motherhood so that her husband could claim her considerable inheritance. Her father had died before her first birthday, leaving her an heiress worth, in modern terms, hundreds of thousands of pounds a year – and with a distant royal claim that had seen her welcomed to court as the king’s “right well-beloved cousin”. Ironically, Edmund Tudor died before his child was born, leaving Margaret to face childbirth alone, half a kingdom away from her family, whose main seat was in Lincolnshire.
- Read more | The rise of Henry VII: how a life of cheating death prepared him for the throne as the first Tudor king
Given the trauma of this experience, it is understandable that Margaret left her baby as soon as was physically possible and set out to regain control of her life. Barely three months after leaving Pembroke Castle, she was betrothed again; before her son’s first birthday, Margaret remarried and moved back to Lincolnshire. Henry’s wardship was granted to his uncle, Jasper Tudor, and later to the Yorkist William Herbert. Henry would remain in the care of these Welsh lords, 300 miles from his mother, until he was 14.
Meanwhile, Margaret – still not yet 15 – was on her third marriage. She had reasserted the security torn from her by the marriage to Edmund Tudor. Her new husband, Sir Harry Stafford, was at least a decade older than her, but respectful and affectionate. Their household accounts show the couple working and travelling together, with thoughtful exchanges of anniversary and New Year gifts. In his will, Harry called Margaret his “best beloved wife”.
Margaret was welcomed with open arms by the Stafford clan, especially Harry’s politically astute mother, Anne, Duchess of Buckingham, who took “my daughter Richmond” under her wing and protected her interests at court. Most happily of all for Margaret, the Stafford marriage brought her back to her own adored mother and half-siblings, close to the estates where she had grown up. It must almost have felt to Margaret as if the last few terrible years – encompassing marriage, widowhood and childbirth – had never happened.
Distant mother
It was not unusual for medieval children to grow up apart from their parents, but it is noteworthy – given that both Margaret and Henry grew up without fathers – that, whereas she lived with her mother until adolescence, she left her son shortly after birth. And though there is little surviving evidence for the first decade of Henry’s life, it is unclear if mother and son were in contact. Margaret did not return to Wales for almost a decade. Perhaps she rationalised that she was acting in her son’s interests; he was a boy, in need of male role models. Given the violent turbulence of this period, though, it is significant that Margaret kept her distance.
She had chosen her alliance with the Staffords because, with civil war looming, they represented a dominant, stabilising force. But even they could not keep the incompetent Henry VI on his throne. In March 1461, he was deposed in favour of his charismatic young kinsman, Edward of York.
Margaret and her relatives quickly came to terms with the new king, Edward IV, but her brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor, was a diehard Lancastrian whose rebellions incited Yorkist reprisals. Pembroke Castle was besieged, with Margaret’s son, Henry, inside. Fortunately, as titular Earl of Richmond, Henry was a valuable commodity. His life was spared and his wardship granted to a leading Welsh Yorkist, William Herbert. There is no sign that Margaret protested; perhaps she could not cope emotionally with the responsibility of mothering a child after enduring so much at such a young age.
Mother and son would not meet again until Henry was 10. The causes of their parting and ultimate reunion probably stemmed from the same root: Margaret hoped that she and Harry Stafford would have children of their own. But Henry’s birth had scarred her physically and psychologically, and as years passed it became clear that he would be her only child. Only when confronted with this realisation did Margaret belatedly seek to re-establish a relationship with her son. In September 1467, she returned to Wales for the first time since her remarriage, spending a week with Henry at Raglan Castle. He had grown tall and serious, with her capacity for quick learning. Perhaps she saw in his appearance and character glimpses of herself or her half-siblings – and perhaps, less comfortably, of Edmund Tudor.
The visit to Raglan marked the beginning of Margaret’s self-identity as Henry’s mother, but she was no closer to taking physical possession of her child. Two years later, after another outbreak of civil war, she attempted to regain legal control of her son. When William Herbert was executed after the battle of Edgecote in 1469, Margaret struggled to assemble lost legal documents; to reassert her guardianship of Henry, she convened assignations in the manor houses of aristocrats, and with lawyers in alehouses. Mother and son were reunited briefly in 1470, touring London and Surrey together, indulging their shared love of hunting. Presumably they discussed Margaret’s hope of regaining Henry’s birthright, which had been stripped from him and parcelled out to leading Yorkists – not the crown, which was still entirely outside her aspirations, but the earldom of Richmond.
Dangerous blood
The same forces that reunited Margaret and Henry also drove them apart. The internecine chaos unleashed on England in 1469 was finally resolved in 1471, when Edward IV conclusively vanquished his rivals in battle. Henry VI and his teenage son were killed. So, too, were several of Margaret’s Beaufort cousins and, within a few years, even Edward’s Lancastrian former brother-in-law, the Duke of Exeter. Suddenly, the possession of Lancastrian blood, no matter how thin, was dangerous. According to the Tudor poet Bernard André, Margaret advised Henry to flee into exile with his uncle Jasper: “Unless my imagination or maternal instinct deceives me… [Henry’s] life will be safer on the ocean’s waves than in this tempest on land.”
In September 1471, Henry and Jasper sought asylum in Brittany, where they remained until 1483. Meanwhile, Margaret was left in limbo. Alive to the dangers inherent in Henry’s distant royal claim and traditional family loyalties, she warned him not to return to England until she had assurances for his safety. Mother and son could communicate only through intermediaries, trusted servants who braved the Channel crossing.
Margaret demonstrated a profound sense of responsibility to Henry. The rightful Earl of Richmond was heir to a proud inheritance and, as any medieval aristocrat would, she fervently believed that her son should claim it.
But it wasn’t until 1482, when Henry was 25, that making such a claim seemed possible. The death of her mother, and the ensuing business of settling her estate, enabled Margaret to cut a deal with Edward IV to bring Henry home safely. On 3 June 1482, Edward and Margaret publicly agreed that, if Henry returned “in the grace and favour of the king’s highness”, he could claim his grandmother’s substantial West Country estates. An undated pardon now in the archives of Westminster Abbey suggests that this may have been a precursor to the restoration of Henry’s earldom.
More privately – though loud enough that several leading courtiers later reported it – Margaret and Edward discussed how they were “related in the fourth… degrees of kindred”. This was almost certainly the first step in arranging a marriage between Henry and one of Edward’s daughters which, because of their relation, would demand a papal dispensation. Margaret, always less risk-averse than the men in her life, was willing to gamble her son’s life for this bright future. Unfortunately, 11 years of political exile had left Henry paranoid, and even these substantial guarantees did not convince him that he would be safe. He refused to return.
Then political upheaval simultaneously dashed Margaret’s careful plans and enabled her to contemplate a future for her son that would have previously been inconceivable.
Maternal kingmaker
Margaret’s hopes of regaining Henry’s Richmond inheritance were thwarted when, in April 1483, Edward IV died unexpectedly. With two adolescent sons, Edward’s dynasty should have been assured. Instead, his brother Richard detained those young princes and claimed the throne himself. A contemporary eyewitness reported that the princes “were withdrawn into the inner apartments of the Tower proper, and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, until at length they ceased to appear altogether”. It was rumoured that Richard had murdered them.
For Margaret, like much of the English nobility, Richard’s accession was an unanticipated complication. Her hoped-for marriage between Henry and a Yorkist princess was dead in the water, and the princesses had fled into sanctuary. Moreover, after Harry Stafford’s death in 1471, Margaret had remarried the northern lord Thomas Stanley, whose family were stalwarts of the regimes of Edward IV and his son. Over the years, the Stanleys had had several ugly confrontations with Richard. Indeed, Stanley was briefly arrested during Richard’s coup.
A pragmatist above all else, Stanley soon came to terms with Richard and so, apparently, did Margaret. But the circumstances of Richard’s accession had entirely changed the political landscape. Disaffected opponents plotted rebellion, and Margaret – whose territories stretched from Flintshire to Lincolnshire, Surrey to Devon – had myriad connections through whom she gained intelligence about these nascent conspiracies.
The anti-Ricardians were a disparate band. There were servants of Edward IV who hated his queen’s Woodville relatives; the Woodvilles themselves, fearing reprisals; attendants of the lost princes, jealous of missed opportunities or genuinely concerned for their charges; even Lancastrian stalwarts who wanted rid of the Yorkists altogether.
Their very heterogeneity was a boon to Margaret. If the princes were dead – and by August it seemed they must be – then the rebellion needed a new figurehead. It needed to be an adult with royal blood and no loyalty to Richard – and, because they would have to fight for the crown, a male. Most of all, it needed to be someone impartial enough to unify these factions. In short: Henry Tudor. The exceptional circumstances of summer 1483 made it possible for the first time for Margaret to hope not merely for her son’s return but for his accession as king.
A lifetime of political and economic activity had readied her for this moment. Even the collapse of their first rebellion in autumn 1483, which left Margaret under house arrest and deprived of her fortune, could not cow her. She was linked by blood, marriage and loyalty not only to most of the nobility of the realm but also to the working men and women who served them. Her vast network of connections can be read in her memberships of religious guilds, gifts and letters exchanged with neighbours, favours recorded in her household accounts, payments to merchants and craftsmen who provided for her husbands and family, and in many more ways – scarcely tangible then and almost entirely lost now.
The loyalty of these associates to Margaret was longer-standing, and more immediately beneficial, than their allegiance to Richard III. When Margaret mobilised her network, she was able to gather considerable sums of money – and money meant weapons and manpower for Henry, which he used to invade and then defeat Richard in battle at Bosworth.
Thus the mother who had been absent from her son’s life for so long was essential to the success of the campaign that won him the throne. Margaret enabled Henry to be crowned Henry VII in 1485 – and so to re-enter her life and build a close, lasting relationship. In an undated letter as king, son told mother: “I am as much bound [to you] as any creature living, for the great and singular motherly love and affection that it hath pleased you at all times to bear towards me.”
Perhaps Margaret had not shown that affection “at all times” – mother and son both had a habit of rewriting their pasts to better suit their present circumstances. But, after a long, difficult journey, they ultimately built a relationship that proved unbreakable.
Lauren Johnson is a historian specialising in the 15th and early 16th centuries. Her new book is Margaret Beaufort: Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker (Apollo, 2025)
This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Spectral beasts and hounds of hell: a spooky history of Britain's ghost dogs]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/spectral-beasts-and-hounds-of-hell-a-spooky-history-of-britains-ghost-dogs/ 2025-11-16T09:01:12.000Z 2025-11-16T09:00:41.000Z On the morning of 4 August 1577, the good Christian folk of Bungay assembled in St Mary’s Church for their regular Sunday service. But more sinister forces were also gathering in the Suffolk town. Dark clouds massed above, then “there fell from heaven an exceeding great and terrible tempest… not simply of raine but also of lightening and thunder”.
This storm was only the prelude to a “straunge and terrible Wunder” described by Abraham Fleming in a pamphlet published soon after the event. For the church was plunged into darkness and a “black dog, or the divel in such a likenesse” burst in. It wrung the necks of two worshippers then “passing by an other man of the congregation… gave him such a gripe on the back, that therewith all he was presently drawen togither and shrunk up, as it were a peece of lether scorched in a hot fire”.
The story of the Black Dog of Bungay is extraordinary, but far from unique in the region – East Anglia is the primary hunting ground of the spectral beast named Black Shuck – and, indeed, across the country.
Britain is, famously, a nation of animal lovers, with 36 per cent of households having at least one dog. The UK canine consumer market is worth around £10bn a year, while millions of us tune in to watch dog-centric television programmes. These animals have become our trusted aides and loyal companions since domesticated dogs arrived on this island with the first human migrants during the Stone Age.
It’s not surprising, then, that Britain’s population of paranormal pups is more diverse and widespread than anywhere else in the world, according to Mark Norman, a folklorist specialising in black dog apparitions. Such creatures reputedly stalk villages and lonely roads from Aberdeen to Penzance, and the British landscape echoes with their chilling howls.
Hellhound is round the corner
Dogs and humans have lived and travelled together in Britain since the Mesolithic age. Archaeological surveys place dogs at the UK’s oldest excavated house – at Star Carr, Yorkshire, dating from around 9000 BC – and at the oldest site of journeying, a camp at Blick Mead near Stonehenge. Dogs accompanied pastoralists rounding up sheep in grasslands and joined hunters tracking deer in forests, before settling down to snooze in front of the communal fire. No wonder they also populated ghostly tales.
In story and song, from whispered yarn to local gazetteer, ghost dogs bound across the folkloric and literary record, with perhaps the most famous fictional example being the Hound of the Baskervilles investigated by Sherlock Holmes. In many reported cases, a factual explanation remains deliciously elusive.
All manner of spirit dogs have been reported. Some are devoted pets pining for lost masters and mistresses, padding eternally along the walks they took in life, carrying with them the textured reportage of hearsay, tradition and family fortunes. Some are seen as portents of doom, some relate particular cultural coordinates of injustice, wrongdoing or violent ends, and others just are.
Some people who are convinced by such tales claim that these are beasts appearing to us from ancient days – messengers demonstrating the existence of a time-slip or a ‘thin place’. The unconvinced retort airily that we like to tell tales – Booker Prize-winning author Graham Swift called humans “storytelling animals” – and that of course those yarns frequently invoke our long-standing companions of homestead and hearthside.
Most of Britain’s ghost dogs are connected to specific sites of historical significance where long-standing relationships between humans and canines have been written repeatedly into the material and imagined environment. They haunt village streets, ancient camps, burial mounds and graveyards, historic houses and castles.
Road ragers
Ancient trackways, roads and paths seem to attract a special breed of spectral beast – black dogs that leap out at unsuspecting travellers on dark, lonely nights. These are the most prolific canine apparitions, accounting for about a third of British sightings. Most of them are large and sport flaming eyes; some clank chains, while others can talk. All are fearsome.
One of the most striking highway hauntings was reported on the road between Tavistock and Okehampton on Dartmoor. Here, on dark nights, the ghost of Lady Howard rode out from her home at Fitzford House in a grisly coach made from the bones of her dead husbands, heading to Okehampton Castle. Running ahead was a hellhound with blazing eyes and a demonic disposition. Sometimes she offered a lift to lost travellers: accept at your peril.
Also on Dartmoor, you might encounter the Wisht Hounds kennelled by the devil in Wistman’s Wood. And at the East Dart Hotel, a former coaching inn near Postbridge, a ghostly bloodhound appears each night at 3am to snuffle eagerly at the road outside, hoping to lap up the remnants of discarded booze poured into the gutter by the guilt-ridden landlord, John Webb, over a century ago. The dipsomaniac dog follows the road down the hill to a clapper bridge, eternally searching for the long-discarded grog in the early hours.
Dartmoor epitomises the kind of place where ghost dogs congregate: bleak, lonesome spots where the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Dark copses. Craggy peaks. Desolate moors. These are environments that inspire awe and even fear. No wonder they host such beastly apparitions as the Gytrash – a massive dog-spirit frequenting the remote highways of the West Riding of Yorkshire – and the Barghest, a demonic hound with huge teeth and claws roving the darker stretches of the Yorkshire Dales. One Barghest near Whitby sometimes dragged chains behind it, and could vanish into thin air by walking backwards. All were best avoided, auguring bad fortune or death – though they reputedly could not cross rivers.
In Wales, the Cŵn Annwn, or ‘hounds of the underworld’, were often seen or heard before a funeral, baying mournfully. Typically, they sported glowing red eyes but their appearance otherwise varied depending on where they were seen: they might be huge and white, small and liver-coloured, or even red-coated, dripping with blood. They might rove lonely roads in a pack but sometimes travelled singly, often accompanied by Arawn, Lord of the Underworld and leader of the ‘wild hunt’. They were particularly associated with crossroads, enjoyed haunting graves, and often frequented mountains.
These examples reveal much about our complex relationship with wild spaces. Sure, today we seek out these places for forest bathing, wild camping and an escape from modernity. And yet the vestigial unease they inspire in some people is a psychological throwback to our ancient past, when wolves and bears dwelt in uncharted spaces, and when wilderness connoted chaos, a descent into feral madness and devilry. They are places where Canis familiaris might revert to its lupine ancestor, Canis lupus, transforming from strong and trusty aide into a savage, malevolent assailant.
Not all ghost hounds are out for blood, though. Though most tales about Black Shuck portray his appearance as an omen auguring imminent death or ill fortune, on occasion he struck fenland folk as friendly, and even had a penchant for helping women travellers. And the Gurt Dog of Somerset’s Quantock Hills was an entirely affable apparition: a shaggy Samaritan that appeared from the fog to guide lost children safely to their homes.
Good or bad omens?
Inhabited places, too, harbour their share of spectral hounds. Not one but two black dogs are said to wander the grounds of Leeds Castle, Kent (coincidentally home to the world’s largest collection of dog collars). One, a portent of doom, first appeared in the 1440s, after Eleanor Cobham, Henry VI’s aunt, was tried for witchcraft and incarcerated in the castle. The second, a more benign spectre, is said to bring good luck, and once reputedly saved a visitor from falling out of a window, having attracted their attention by barking. Both are curly coated retriever types, so anyone encountering such a spectre here might struggle to determine whether it is a good or bad omen.
The story of the Black Dog of Newgate was popularised in a sensational 1596 pamphlet describing a canine phantom that stalked the notorious prison. During the reign of Henry III, the yarn goes, inmates of the prison were so hungry that they killed a new arrival, a scholar, and devoured his body. His ghost then wandered the confines of the prison – as did the spectre of a huge black dog. Some prisoners died of fright upon seeing the beast. Others were ripped to pieces by its fearsome jaws in retribution. Even those who escaped the prison were pursued by the avenging animal.
Friend or foe?
Why are dogs the creatures most commonly cited in accounts of animal apparitions? Partly, it’s because of their long relationship with and proximity to humans. The dog’s alter ego, the wolf, also adds that sense of the fearsome wild into the psychological scare-scape.
There is also a biological factor at play: an awareness that dogs are gifted with extraordinary sensory powers. A dog’s nose is equipped with about 300 million olfactory receptors – far more than a human’s paltry 5–6 million. Their hearing, too, is vastly superior to our own. These endow them with almost ‘supernatural’ abilities, reflected in their roles in the beliefs and legends of various cultures worldwide.
The Aztecs believed that their Xoloitzcuintli dogs could ‘smell’ ghosts, and thus protect their owners from spirits. In Norse mythology, Freya, a god linked with death, rode a chariot pulled by huge cats – thus a household dog might alert the residents to her approach by howling and barking, potentially averting a fatal incident. And in ancient Greek legend, the three-headed hound Cerberus guarded the entrance to Hades, suggesting that dogs were equipped to patrol the boundary between the living and the dead. Such beliefs in the extrasensory abilities of animals persist: in a 2019 survey for the Blue Cross animal charity, 63 per cent of owners said they believed that their pet had seen (or had the capacity to see) a ghost or other supernatural presence.
Indeed, perhaps the most intriguing part of spectral dog stories is the fact that in many places they are still thriving today. Ghost dogs are seen through the windscreens of cars, stalking major roads just as happily as they did ancient trackways.
Take that infernal assailant in Bungay in 1577. Black Shuck became – and still is – a widespread legend across East Anglia, written into regional folklore by Reverend ES Taylor in a 1850 issue of Notes and Queries, describing “Shuck the Dog-fiend… this phantom I have heard many persons in east Norfolk, and even Cambridgeshire, describe as having seen as a black shaggy dog, with fiery eyes and of immense size, and who visits churchyards at midnight”.
- Read more | When a Victorian ghost hunter investigated Britain’s most haunted house, this is what he found
Paranormal investigators documenting reports of Shuck sightings found that the majority of alleged encounters occurred after 1900 – so, in fact, his presence in the regional psyche appears to have burgeoned rather than receded in the modern age.
Reflecting the continuing salience of this legend, and a broader revival of interest in all matters folkloric, in 2022 a Black Shuck Festival was launched in Bungay to celebrate the town’s famous fiendish beast. Perhaps these tales of Shuck and his phantom canine kin have even more relevance in our polarised and fractured society today. They speak of the importance of roots, of the storied pasts that bind humans to other species. And in a time when anthropogenic change threatens us in far-reaching and fundamental ways, they speak of the importance of acknowledging the limits of what we, as humans, can know and control in the natural (or supernatural) world.
Karen R Jones is professor of environmental and cultural history at the University of Kent. Her latest book, Beastly Britain: An Animal History, was published in May by Yale University Press
This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> Joanna Arman <![CDATA[England’s forgotten medieval hero: how John, Duke of Bedford carried on Henry V's fight]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/john-duke-of-bedford-henry-v-brother-who-life-accomplishments-legacy-hundred-years-war/ 2025-02-20T16:52:50.000Z 2025-02-20T16:52:50.000Z As black skies faded to grey, and dawn broke on that fateful day in the early 15th century, an English army gazed across a field in northern France. What their eyes encountered was a vastly superior force: some 15,000 French-led troops glared back – their numbers nearly double those of England’s men-at-arms and archers.
The English had faced seemingly insuperable odds before, and emerged victorious. But could they really triumph over this well-armed force bolstered by fearsome international allies?
The Hundred Years’ War had been raging for close to a century already, with negotiations between England and France coming and going – but all ultimately failing to decisively end the conflict. The balance of military success had swung one way and then the other in clashes on land and, occasionally, at sea.
- Read more | Jonathan Sumpton on the Hundred Years’ War: “It was Joan of Arc who persuaded the French that they could win”
Many confrontations had ended with English longbowmen proving decisive. But as morning ebbed and the afternoon rolled on, the outcome remained uncertain. Finally, battle commenced – and the English won a great and memorable victory against the odds.
Sounds familiar? No, this is not a description of the battle of Agincourt, Henry V’s famous victory of 1415. Instead, it’s the story of the clash fought on 17 August 1424 – nearly nine years after Agincourt, and two after Henry’s death – outside the town of Verneuil-sur-Avre in Normandy.
Here, the English army led by Henry’s younger brother John, Duke of Bedford, hammered a combined force of French and Scottish solders plus 2,000 Milanese heavy cavalry, killing perhaps 6,000 enemy troops while suffering minimal losses. Historians refer to the battle of Verneuil as ‘the second Agincourt’ – yet that clash, like John himself, is largely forgotten today.
Why has such a heroic victory faded from memory? And what part did John play in that tumultuous period of English and French history?
Born to battle
We’ll return to the battle later, but to answer those questions, we must first turn the clock back 25 years. In 1399, Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster – better known today as Henry IV – usurped the English throne from his cousin Richard II. John was just 10 years old at the time and, as Henry’s third son, would be unlikely to inherit the throne.
- Read more | The tyrant and the usurper: Richard II v Henry IV
Yet the young man quickly proved himself a highly capable leader during his father’s turbulent reign. In 1403, aged just 14, John was made Warden of the East March, the region on the Scottish border around Berwick-on-Tweed. He soon proved his mettle defending England’s northern borders against Scottish incursions alongside his older cousin Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmoreland.
After his brother succeeded to the English throne as Henry V in 1413, John was trusted with the rule of England during his warlike sibling’s many expeditions abroad, and was created Duke of Bedford in May 1414. The new king was closer to John than to any of his other brothers – even Thomas, Duke of Clarence, who was next in line for the throne.
Henry was absent from England for almost half of his nine-year reign, and allowed Bedford to act as regent in all but name during most of that time. John appears to have discharged his growing responsibilities with aplomb. Yet nothing could have prepared him for what happened next.
In August 1422, Henry V died while on campaign in France, possibly from dysentery. England had lost its indomitable warrior king. It was a perilous moment. With the crown now passing to Henry’s nine-month-old son, Henry VI, and England embroiled in war with the French, the nation urgently needed someone to shepherd it through the dangerous months ahead.
- Read more | Alternate history: what if Henry V hadn't died in 1422?
Luckily, Henry V had realised that Bedford was up to the task, and appointed his brother as regent of France just before he died. For 13 years, Bedford effectively held together the English presence in the country.
Ten months after his brother’s death, John married Anne, sister of Phillip, Duke of Burgundy. Unusually for medieval noblemen, a picture of John created during his lifetime survives in the Bedford Hours, a beautifully illuminated manuscript given by John to Anne as a wedding present and containing images of both him and his wife. It reveals that John bore a striking resemblance to his father and brother: tall, with a beaked nose and dark hair cut in a pudding-bowl style.
A son’s guerrilla war
John’s marriage to Anne cemented England’s alliance with the Duchy of Burgundy – and that alliance was to grow ever more crucial as relations between England and France continued to plumb the depths. In 1420, Henry V had been nominated as the heir of Charles VI of France by the terms of the Treaty of Troyes.
This created a ‘dual monarchy’, by which the kings of England were entitled to rule both England and France. The biggest loser from the Treaty of Troyes was Charles VI’s disinherited son, also called Charles – and, in the early 1420s, he waged a sort of guerrilla war against the English, bolstered by aid from Scotland.
It was in the younger Charles’s name that, in 1424, the French Count of Aumerle (along with John Stewart, Earl of Buchan and Archibald Douglas, Earl of Douglas) joined battle with the English outside Verneuil, which had recently been taken by trickery.
After brutal hand-to-hand fighting, English longbowmen and crossbowmen turned the course of the battle, and the French were routed. John then determinedly finished off the Scottish contingent, reportedly crying out the name of Clarence – an act of vengeance for his brother, who had been killed three years earlier by a largely Scottish army at the battle of Baugé.
- Read more | What was it like to be a Prisoner of War during the Hundred Years’ War?
John took seriously his promise to uphold his nephew Henry VI’s claim to the French throne and continued to defend the English territories in France over the years that followed.
The fortunes of his forces oscillated in this war – not helped by the ill-advised marriage of his youngest brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, to Jacqueline of Hainault, cousin of the Duke of Burgundy. This union threw the alliance with Burgundy into jeopardy, as Humphrey clashed with the duke, and John spent valuable time and effort building diplomatic bridges with England’s longstanding ally.
Then, in 1429, a French peasant girl named Joan arrived on the scene.
John and Joan of Arc’s paths crossed only a few times, and his relationship to the saintly French warrior is much misunderstood. In movies about Joan, John is typically cast as the villain, even the man responsible for her fate. In reality, the two never met, though Joan addressed two irate letters to him.
“You, Duke of Bedford who call yourself Regent of France… make satisfaction to the king of Heaven,” she demanded in one missive. “Surrender to the Pucelle [maiden], who has been sent here by God, the king of Heaven, the keys of all the good towns that you have taken and violated in France… I am commander of war, and in whatever place I come upon your men in France, I will make them leave, whether they wish to or not. And if they do not wish to obey, I will have them all killed; I have been sent here… to drive you out of all France.”
At first, John wasn’t too troubled by Joan’s declamations. Within five months of her arrival on the scene, however, she had relieved the siege of Orléans, and on 17 July had the younger Charles crowned King Charles VII of France in Reims Cathedral.
By summer 1429, then, John was worried and annoyed. Like most of his English contemporaries, he considered Joan a witch – and he wasn’t going to allow her to threaten the dual monarchy. So he devised a plan to stop her in her tracks.
First, he sent word to England to have Henry VI crowned king of France (though he’d succeeded his father in 1422, his coronation hadn’t yet taken place). Then, as his next gambit, he lured Joan and Charles to Paris, forcing them to expend time and resources in taking the capital instead of focusing on weak spots such as Orléans.
John shored up Paris for a long siege that summer, and set about winning hearts and minds. His plan worked remarkably well. When Joan arrived in August, she was forced to wait outside the city, failing in her attempts to draw her enemies into open battle. John had learned from observation of Joan’s previous engagements not to take the bait, preferring to fight her on his own terms.
Following a siege, the French took the small suburb of Saint-Denys, but Paris itself eluded them. Eventually, in frustration, Joan of Arc appeared before the walls, screaming that all inside should surrender – or, she threatened, she would bring down the wrath of God upon them and kill everybody.
The defenders of Paris were not impressed: an English soldier reportedly shot her with a crossbow, calling her a “bloody tart”. Joan had to be dragged away from the gate, bleeding and humiliated, and Charles’s army withdrew from Paris.
In 1430, Joan was captured – but John wasn’t able to enjoy this moment. As Henry VI was now in France, the council didn’t technically need a regent and so it threatened to fire John. As a result, he spent much of that year in limbo, unable to do much politically or militarily. He did not play a role in determining Joan’s fate; by then, she had been condemned for heresy, so the matter was left almost entirely in the hands of the church.
John was not even present in Rouen on 30 May 1431, when Joan was burned at the stake. Instead, he was bringing supplies to Paris, which continued to suffer frequent attacks.
Their fortunes at that moment contrasted starkly: while the young woman who became France’s potent and enduring figurehead was being brutally executed in Rouen, John of Bedford was being greeted as a hero in Paris. Yet the situation then was not as clear-cut as it may seem today.
Timeline: the remarkable life of John, Duke of Bedford
20 June 1389
Mary de Bohun, wife of Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby, gives birth to her third son, probably at Kenilworth Castle. He is named after his paternal grandfather, John of Gaunt.
30 September 1399
John’s father is proclaimed King Henry IV after deposing his cousin Richard II.
1403
In the aftermath of the battle of Shrewsbury on 21 July, John is appointed Warden of the East March, aged just 14, marking the beginning of his military training.
1414
At the second parliament of his oldest brother, Henry V, John is made Duke of Bedford and Earl of Kendal.
October 1422
Just weeks after Henry V’s death, John takes up the office of regent of France.
May 1423
John marries Anne, younger sister of Philip, Duke of Burgundy, one of England’s most important allies.
17 August 1424
John leads an English army to victory against combined Franco-Scottish forces near Verneuil-sur-Avre, Normandy. The battle becomes known as the ‘Second Agincourt’.
August – September 1429
In response to a challenge by John, Joan of Arc and Charles VII of France attempt to take Paris, starting a fruitless siege. Bedford’s careful preparations ensure that the city does not fall.
13 November 1432
Anne of Burgundy dies in Paris, possibly of plague. John marries Jacquetta of Luxembourg the following April.
14 September 1435
John dies in Rouen, aged 46, one week before the Congress of Arras ends the alliance between England and Burgundy.
A family at war
Henry VI crossed the channel to France in the summer of 1430, and for the next 18 months rivalry simmered between John and various members of the council, especially his paternal uncle, Cardinal Beaufort, who was determined to assert his own primacy. These tensions resulted in the regency being removed from John, and for a time Henry’s council took charge of the war effort in France.
Yet John had always had a good relationship with the young king. He had been in England when his nephew was born in late 1421, while Henry V was away in France. And his campaigns in France had been undertaken, it seems, not only to preserve his brother’s legacy but also to advance the interests of the young English monarch.
- Read more | How Henry VI's love of peace cost him the throne – and his life
He must, then, have looked on with some satisfaction when – on 16 December 1431, at the tender age of 10 – Henry VI was crowned King of France at Notre Dame de Paris. The coronation proved something of a turning point for both Henry and John.
The king would soon depart for England, never to set foot on French soil again. As for John, he was immediately reinstated as regent – reflecting overwhelming trust in his abilities, even if some in the English court didn’t want to admit it. He immediately set about reversing some of the policies Henry VI’s council had put into place.
Then, in 1432, John lost the love of his life and his greatest ally: his wife, Anne. She was only in her late 20s, possibly succumbing to an outbreak of plague in Paris. Though John remarried the following year, he never produced any legitimate children. Anne’s death proved the final nail in the coffin for the alliance between England and Burgundy, though John managed to hold it together for almost three more years.
During this time he had to return to England because he was the only person considered trustworthy enough to mediate between the rival factions forming in Henry VI’s government. His brother Humphrey and uncle Cardinal Beaufort were at odds – not for the first time – and the division was tearing the government apart.
John had another problem: the continuing conflict in France was becoming increasingly unpopular in England. In the words of medieval historian Jonathan Sumption, John was “the only statesman who truly understood the demands of the dual monarchy and in the end truly believed in it”.
That belief was stretched to breaking point in the summer of 1435 at the Congress of Arras. This summit saw Charles VII and Philip, Duke of Burgundy embarking on a series of negotiations that threatened to conclude with both of them rejecting English claims to the French throne.
A young and healthy John, Duke of Bedford might have better represented English interests at the summit. But John, who hosted the English delegation at the congress, was not young and healthy. He was in his mid-forties, exhausted and on the edge of death.
In fact, John died before the summit reached its end, breathing his last in Rouen Castle on 14 September 1435. One week later, Philip and Charles came to terms, ending the alliance between Burgundy and England that had endured for almost 15 years.
John was buried not in England but in Rouen Cathedral. Today, nothing remains of his tomb nor any other memorial. Though England clung on to control of Normandy for 15 years after John’s death, the nation had been deprived of its most loyal, capable and dedicated leader.
After his demise, commitment to the war in France waned, and the divisions in Henry VI’s government became increasingly virulent. By 1453, England had lost almost all of its remaining French possessions. In death, as in life, John’s reputation remained untarnished. The English would look back on the days of his regency as a golden age. He was even respected and admired in France.
- Read more | The miraculous afterlife of Henry VI
One cannot help but think that if he had lived longer, the course of Henry VI’s reign might have run differently. Would the king’s famous and beloved uncle have helped to heal divisions – perhaps even persuading his nephew to go to France and fight?
If John had produced a legitimate heir, would Henry have had a loyal cousin by his side when the House of York rose to challenge his throne? We can only guess at the answers to those conundrums. But we can, at least, remember and honour the valour and loyalty of this long-forgotten prince.
This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Why Henry VI’s reign was such a disaster]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/plantagenet/henry-vi-reign-disaster-failures-why/ 2023-11-15T10:12:35.000Z 2022-11-08T06:21:51.000Z In Westminster Abbey, the tomb of Henry V is hard to miss. Towering above the mosaic-encrusted tomb of St Edward the Confessor and his royal successors, for centuries Henry’s final resting place was topped by a shield, helm and warhorse’s saddle. All are symbols of the martial glory of a man many still consider to be the best English king of the Middle Ages.
Meanwhile, in the Lady Chapel behind, tucked away and noticed by almost no one, is a small wooden pew-end representing Henry V’s successor, and only child, Henry VI. Can anything more aptly demonstrate the reputations of this father and son? Henry V loomed over his offspring from the grave, and in his father’s shadow Henry VI grew up stunted, emotionally and politically.
On the 600th anniversary of his death, Henry V’s triumphs are still rehearsed in productions of the eponymous Shakespeare play. His appears to be the ultimate underdog success story. Eldest son of a Lancastrian usurper, Henry V united England to claim the French throne, overcame substantial odds to win the battle of Agincourt in 1415, and was rewarded at the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, where he was named heir to the French kingdom and married Princess Catherine of Valois. Revered as “the flower in his time of Christian chivalry”, he died on campaign, aged 35 in 1422, leaving a nine-month-old son who shortly after was proclaimed King Henry VI, of England and France.
Henry VI’s life also gained Shakespeare’s attention, but in the three plays bearing his name he is an insubstantial figure with few lines, completely overshadowed by more dynamic characters, chief among them his queen, Margaret of Anjou. Where Henry V’s reign is a litany of triumphs, his son’s reads like a top trumps of failure: he lost the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses, was twice imprisoned by his Yorkist rivals and died, almost certainly murdered, in the Tower of London shortly after his only child had been hacked to death in battle.
But if we peer beyond the lustre of the father and misfortune of the son, a more complicated image emerges: there is much to praise in the character and priorities of Henry VI, and a good deal reprehensible in the actions of Henry V. Most damningly of all, many of the failings of Henry VI can be traced back to his father. Although Henry VI reaped a bitter harvest for his people, it was Henry V who sowed the seed.
- Read more | Why is Henry V's portrait in profile?
Lover and fighter
The defining difference between Henrys V and VI can be summed up in a single word: warfare. Henry V was first and foremost a soldier, witness to military campaigns from the time he was 11 and left with a disfiguring scar when struck in the face by an arrow in his first battle, aged 16. The primary focus of his energies was gaining the French throne by military force.
Henry VI, by contrast, was an out and out pacifist. In the cause of peace, he chose his queen, sacrificed bellicose advisers and surrendered vital bargaining chips to the French. Although Henry VI was willing to don armour and ride to battle, he never once raised his sword against an enemy, and his first experience of military violence came in his 34th year, when he watched impotently as his leading supporters were butchered in the streets of St Albans.
Henry V’s military activity provided common experience and a focus for loyalty with his peers and subjects. It made them, to quote Shakespeare, a “band of brothers”, winning Henry fame and his subjects glory.
- Read more | A wayward prince? King Henry V's misspent youth
Henry VI was trained for warfare by a military veteran and kitted out with weapons and armour as a child. He even rode a courser (warhorse) from the age of three. Yet the only time he visited France was for his coronation as a 10-year-old. Military leadership was always deputised to a noble kinsman.
Why, then, did the son not become a formidable military leader in the mould of the father? After all, the Hundred Years’ War was far from over. The answer is a question of nature but also, importantly, of nurture. Henry V was extraordinarily fortunate in his upbringing, and in many ways his formative years and ultimate monarchical successes mirror those of Henry VI’s Yorkist rival and successor, Edward IV. Both Henry V and Edward hailed from families with many sons. This meant they were expendable, and therefore benefited from being allowed to witness lordship and warfare first hand.
By contrast, Henry VI was an only child in the utterly unprecedented position of governing two realms, as a baby. His life was so precious that it could not be endangered by proximity to war. Henry VI’s insecurity was exacerbated by biological factors beyond his control: despite marrying and producing illegitimate children, none of his Lancastrian uncles had legitimate offspring, which meant that until 1447 his closest heir was the 50-something Duke of Gloucester, and after that, his distant cousin Richard, Duke of York. If Henry died fighting in France, as his father had done, the Lancastrian line would die with him.
Nonetheless, if Henry VI had really wished to lead an army, he could have done so. The teenage king Henry VIII insisted on riding to war early in his reign, despite lacking brothers or an heir. Indeed, more than once in the reign of Henry VI, preparations were made for him to cross the Channel in force before royal command was delegated elsewhere, and when the Lancastrian throne was threatened by internal rivals it would have greatly bolstered Henry’s cause if he had personally fought alongside his men.
Henry V knew the power that the presence of the king in the field could hold. At Agincourt, the French noblemen were numerous but their king, Charles VI, was too mentally unwell to attend. By contrast, Henry V was, according to a contemporary English chronicler, “the first to charge the enemy… giving his men in his own person brave examples of daring as he scattered the enemy ranks with his ready axe”.
Henry V’s dominant leadership was a major factor in English victory, but there was a dark side to warfare that never sat well with the pious Henry VI. He never forgot that his father’s “glorious” French wars had unleashed suffering on both sides of the Channel. Indeed, by modern standards some of Henry V’s military choices rank as atrocities. After Agincourt, he ordered that prisoners of war be murdered.
And it was not merely enemy combatants who suffered. Innocent women and children were starved to death during Henry V’s five-month siege of Rouen in 1418 and 1419. Even his direct contemporaries found some of the king’s actions excessive. An English eyewitness at Rouen described with pity: “A child of two years or three going about to beg its bread, [as] father and mother both were dead… And women holding in their arms dead children… and the children sucking in their pap within a dead woman’s lap.”
- Read more | Henry V: the cruel king
Two years after Agincourt, another (anonymous) Englishman commemorated Henry’s victory in ambiguous terms: “Our England, therefore, has reason to rejoice and reason to grieve. Reason to rejoice [in] the victory gained and the deliverance of her men, reason to grieve for the suffering and destruction wrought in the deaths of Christians.”
This was the true face of medieval war, and it was a reality that Henry VI could not stomach. In this, he was far from alone. By the time his father died, the English were sick of conflict, being already 85 years into the Hundred Years’ War. It was increasingly difficult to extract taxes to pay for military campaigns from a parliament that felt the war offered little advantage to Englishmen. The sheer scale of the bloodshed was starting to be questioned.
By 1439 it was claimed that more men had died in the century of warfare than were alive now in both kingdoms. As a member of Henry VI’s council (or the king himself) observed: “So much Christian blood shed that it is [both] a sorrow and a horror to think or hear it.”
In 1440, aged 18, Henry VI marked his accession to adult rule – which had been slowly proceeding since 1437 – with two statements of intent. He founded Eton College and shortly thereafter another at Cambridge, becoming the first king to create his own educational establishments. And he took the first step towards peace with France, defying his father’s last wishes by freeing the French prisoner of war, Charles, Duke of Orléans. Orléans had been pulled from a pile of corpses on the battlefield at Agincourt 25 years earlier – and his release had been expressly forbidden by Henry V. Flouting the late king’s will yet further, Henry VI suggested to one of his negotiators with France that in return for an alliance, he would surrender the French crown.
Henry’s peace policy was so audacious that it divided public opinion and alienated his closest advisors. His uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, declared it was “the greatest sign of infamy that ever fell to [the king]… or to [his] noble progenitors”, and that he “would rather die” than accept it. Henry VI was at pains to emphasise that his new peace policy was the natural continuation of his ancestors’ wars. They, too, had ultimately negotiated peace – Henry V’s Treaty at Troyes was a case in point. But his subjects were not appeased. And worse was to follow.
Ceding territory
Henry VI was right that a grand gesture was required to end the Hundred Years’ War – but his judgment was poor on exactly what that gesture should be. Having freed Orléans, he then married the impoverished French noblewoman Margaret of Anjou to please her uncle, Charles VII of France, and ceded the hard-won territory of Maine in the process. He lost control of his disgruntled garrisons in France, giving the wily Charles VII justification for military vengeance. The result, ultimately, was the loss of all Henry’s French territories, including some that had been held by the kings of England for centuries.
This was one of several instances in which Henry’s good intentions, but poor judgment, proved his undoing. He was honest to a fault, politically naïve, generous in the extreme. In a king, such virtues became vices. He failed to match his rivals for guile and was horrified by what he considered their treachery in abandoning alliances with England.
In his own realm, Henry rewarded servants and overlooked wrongdoing in his supporters. When asked for favour, he invariably showed it, without considering the consequences. In the most notorious instance of his absent-minded liberality, he gave the same West Country title to two men at once, inciting a decades-long civil war. His constant desire was to avoid conflict. Where he had a choice between something right but difficult, or wrong but easy, he always chose the latter.
- On the podcast | Lauren Johnson discusses the life and reign of Henry VI, whose decades on the throne coincided with the disaster of the Wars of the Roses
The cause of this character fault is to be found in his childhood. It had taken an extraordinary collective effort by the ruling elite of England to ensure Henry V’s son inherited England peacefully. There had been boy kings before – the last, Richard II, was crowned at the age of 10 half a century earlier. But there had never been a baby king of England. While who should rule was never in question, how they should rule was, and the resulting factionalism dividing Henry’s council was to blight his childhood.
Henry VI had a superfluity of uncles and mentors, each with their own ideal of government. His great uncle, Archbishop (later Cardinal) Henry Beaufort, led a band of noblemen and bishops who favoured a royal council; his eldest uncle John, Duke of Bedford, sought to rule France and act as protector over a council in England; and his youngest surviving uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, craved the regency of England solely for himself.
- Read more | The miraculous afterlife of Henry VI
These were powerful men, the wealthiest and most influential of the realm, and reconciling their conflicting demands would have been challenging for an adult king. It proved insurmountable for Henry. Time and again during his childhood he was called upon to witness public peace-making between his uncles, only for cohesion to collapse in private. Bedford was often abroad fighting Henry’s wars, leaving Cardinal Beaufort and the Duke of Gloucester to scrap things out between them: in parliament, palaces and even the streets of London, where tensions once escalated to such an extent that armed men faced off across London Bridge.
Gloucester was the first to realise that Henry’s essentially pliable nature made him susceptible to coercion, and tried to motivate his nephew into assuming power early so he could rule through him. This led to a bewildering face-off between king and council, where the adolescent monarch was told, with all possible respect, that he simply wasn’t up to the job of ruling yet.
The encounter compounded the sensitive Henry’s mistrust of his own judgment, encouraging his instinct to delegate authority to one leading courtier after another: first Gloucester, then the generally despised Duke of Suffolk, the unfortunate Duke of Somerset under whom France was lost, and eventually his queen, Margaret of Anjou.
The fatal flaw
But Henry V must share some of the blame for the problems of his son’s reign. In 1422, as he lay dying in France, physically wasted by camp sickness but still mentally acute, Henry V added codicils to his will that dictated how his successor should fight the French war. Those deathbed directions held his successor hostage for 20 years, leaving no room for his son and his advisors to manoeuvre, even as circumstances changed beyond the late king’s foresight.
Had Henry V lived, he almost certainly would have adapted his policy, as Henry VI was forced to do. But leaving no latitude in his directions, Henry V effectively stymied Lancastrian government. Henry V’s decision to lead his armies in person at the sickness-ravaged siege of Meaux was also disastrous to his regime. It directly caused his death, and left his infant son without kingly example or paternal protection.
This proved to be Henry VI’s fatal flaw. Because he never met his father – who departed to France during Queen Catherine’s pregnancy – Henry VI never witnessed kingship in action. He never even saw true leadership first hand, since those ruling on his behalf took pains to defer to him in public. His exempla were biblical figures and historical kings, but he never learned how to temper the ideals of kingship with the realpolitik of medieval rule.
If Henry V had lived to have more sons, and to offer an example to his heir, things could have been different. He would have been beset by the same troubles as his son. Charles VII would have raised an army against him. Continental intrigues and English infighting would have bedevilled attempts at peace. The English treasury would have been drained to breaking point. Henry V was lucky, then, to die at the height of his powers, ensuring his lasting fame.
Had Henry VI died in spring 1453, when his wife was pregnant, French lands being reclaimed, talk of a fresh invasion led by the king himself on the wind, and parliament pliable, we would remember him considerably more kindly. Instead, he died a prisoner of Edward IV, aged 49, shabby and bearded, teeth ground down by years of anxiety, having lost almost everyone he cared about – most of them violently. As William Shakespeare recognised, Henry V’s life story is a glorious history because of how it ended, just as Henry VI’s life was a tragedy.
Lauren Johnson is a historian and writer. Her books include Shadow King: The Life and Death of Henry VI (Head of Zeus, 2019)
This article was first published in the September 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[How Edward IV reclaimed his throne at the battle of Tewkesbury]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/battle-tewkesbury-1471-what-when-who-fought-who-won-bloody-meadow/ 2023-11-23T15:20:00.000Z 2021-04-12T12:20:46.000Z On 14 April 1471, the very same day that Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick was meeting his end just north of London at the battle of Barnet, Henry VI’s wife Margaret of Anjou and his son Edward of Westminster were arriving back in England from exile in France.
After landing at Weymouth they were joined by Lancastrian supporters led by the Duke of Somerset. Knowing that they needed to reinforce their army if they were to stand any chance of defeating Edward IV, they headed for Wales where they knew they could count upon the support of Jasper Tudor.
Realising what the Lancastrians were up to, Edward set off in hot pursuit. The Lancastrians never made it to Wales. Their plans to cross the Severn at Gloucester were scuppered when the city refused to let them in; instead they were forced to march north in a bid to cross the river at Tewkesbury. They reached the town on 3 May after covering the last 24 miles in just 16 hours. But Edward was closing in. Not wanting his army to be caught in a bottleneck as they tried to cross the river, Somerset chose to stand and fight.
What happened at the battle of Tewkesbury?
The following morning he drew up his forces south of the town, where Edward’s Yorkists confronted them. Somerset, who had taken command of the troops on the Lancastrian right, had come up with quite a crafty plan. Leaving a few men to mask what he was up to, and with his movement hidden by trees, he led the bulk of his force in a flanking march round the Yorkist left. It was a bold move and had all gone to plan Somerset would have taken the Yorkists by surprise.
However Edward, who was no mean general himself, had foreseen the danger and had hidden 200 cavalry to guard against such a move. Somerset duly launched his attack against Edward’s left flank and in fact enjoyed some success before the Yorkists fought back and the 200 cavalry joined the fray. Somerset was now being attacked on two sides, and to make matters worse Lord Wenlock, an ex-Yorkist who had been given command of the Lancastrian centre – failed to advance in support of his commander.
Who won the battle of Tewkesbury?
Gradually the pressure on Somerset’s troops began to tell; they were pushed back before they finally broke and fled. Some got away, others got no further than what is now called Bloody Meadow. Somerset managed to escape back to his lines where he angrily sought out Wenlock. According to one account he rode up to the former Yorkist “called him traytor [and], with his axe he strake y braynes out of his hedde”.
Under increasing pressure from the Yorkists and with their leadership in disarray, Lancastrian resistance collapsed. The fleeing Lancastrians were pursued to the town where many were cut down. Others drowned as they tried to cross the Severn. Edward of Westminster was amongst the slain. Somerset and a number of other Lancastrian leaders tried to seek refuge in Tewkesbury Abbey – they were later taken out, tried and executed.
Why was the battle of Tewkesbury important?
Edward IV's victory and the death of Henry VI’s son and heir destroyed hopes of a Lancastrian succession and led to 14 years of peace. Edward finished the job by having Henry VI quietly murdered in the Tower of London. But it wouldn’t be the end of the Wars of the Roses, which bloomed once more following Edward IV’s death in 1483 and the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower.
Julian Humphreys is a historian and battlefields expert
This content was first published by HistoryExtra in 2011
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[The battle of Barnet, 1471: the Wars of the Roses clash that killed the Kingmaker]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/battle-barnet-1471-what-happened-who-won-death-kingmaker/ 2025-02-14T14:19:17.000Z 2021-03-24T11:40:58.000Z It was a foggy Easter Sunday in 1471, and Warwick the Kingmaker was running for his life. His army had just been defeated by the forces of his former ally, Edward IV, and now his only hope was to reach his horse and ride away to safety. But he was no longer a young man. His armour slowed him down, his enemies closed in and he was knocked to the ground. Someone pulled up his visor, a blade flashed, and one of the most powerful men in England became just another corpse on the blood-soaked fields around Barnet.
When Edward IV had won the throne in 1461 during the Wars of the Roses, he knew that he could never have done so without the support of Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick. Initially, at least, the king was content to follow his advice. But in 1464, Edward secretly married Elizabeth Woodville, a beautiful Lancastrian widow. It was a humiliation for Warwick, who had been trying to arrange Edward’s marriage to a French princess to cement an alliance. He felt his influence slip further as the king heaped favours on his new wife’s family, arranged profitable marriages for her siblings and favoured an alliance not with France, but with Burgundy.
Warwick’s attempts to reassert his position in 1469 led to a period of chaos and rebellion, as he and the king jockeyed for power. In 1470, Warwick concluded an alliance with his old enemy, Margaret of Anjou – the wife of Henry VI – and Edward was forced into exile. Henry VI was reinstated as king, with Warwick as the country’s effective ruler.
But Edward still had plenty of fight left in him. In March 1471, he raised an army and returned to England to reclaim his throne. On 25 March, he reached Leicester, where he was joined by 3,000 men – retainers of his old friend, Lord Hastings. Four days later, he arrived outside Coventry, where Warwick was based. Secure behind its powerful city walls, the Earl probably planned to sit it out until he could be joined by his various allies, but his plans were wrecked when one of these, the Duke of Clarence, changed sides and joined his brother the king. Edward now decided to strike for London and, on 11 April, the city opened its gates to the Yorkist king.
Battle of Barnet facts
Fought on: 14 April 1471 Location: North of Barnet, Greater London Outcome: Victory for Yorkists
Warwick, who had followed Edward south, drew up his army on high ground north of Barnet and offered battle. On 13 April, Edward – no doubt hoping to defeat his former ally before he could join forces with Margaret – led his army back up the Great North Road and advanced through Barnet. By now, it was getting dark, so he decided to spend the night in order of battle, ready to attack in the morning. However, in the failing light, he miscalculated where Warwick’s army actually was and pitched his camp much nearer to the Earl’s forces than he intended. Furthermore, the two armies weren’t directly opposite each other. Each army’s right flank overlapped its opponent’s left – a misalignment that would have a major effect on the course of the battle on the following day.
What happened on the battlefield?
That night, Warwick tried to make the most of his superiority in artillery by ordering a bombardment of the King’s position. His primitive cannon duly opened fire, but because the two armies were so close, his guns overshot the Yorkist army. Edward made sure that Warwick’s men were unaware of their error by forbidding his own gunners from shooting back, with the result that Warwick’s gunners pounded away all night with little effect.
The following day was Easter Sunday. Edward had his troops ready for battle before dawn. The precise site of the action is still unknown, although an ongoing archaeology project being carried out by the Battle of Barnet Project may eventually supply us with some answers. What does seem likely is that the two armies were both deployed in three 'battles' or divisions in the vicinity of the Great North Road. The Lancastrians were drawn up, with Warwick and his brother the Marquess of Montagu in the centre, flanked on the left by forces under the Duke of Exeter and on the right by the troops of the Earl of Oxford. Edward's army was deployed in a similar way. The king was in command of the centre, while the flanks were led by his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and his friend Lord Hastings. Exactly who was where is a matter of debate.
- The battle of Towton: did the biggest, bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil take place during the Wars of the Roses?
A contemporary account said there was “so exceeding a mist that neither host could plainly see the other”, and the smoke from Warwick’s guns can only have made the visibility even worse. As a result, as the two armies closed in for combat, neither was aware that they weren’t correctly aligned. As one chronicle put it: “So it was, that the one end of their battle overreached the end of the King’s battle, and so, at that end they were much mightier than was the King’s battle at the same [end] that joined with them, which was the west end… and, in likewise at the east end, the King’s battle, when they came to joining, over-reached their battle, and so distressed them there greatly…”
Outnumbered and outflanked by the Lancastrians, the troops on Edward’s left soon broke and fled down the road to Barnet, with Oxford’s men in hot pursuit. Some of the fugitives didn’t halt until they reached London, where they announced that Edward had been defeated, causing brawls to break out between the supporters of the rival factions. Oxford’s men stopped in High Barnet, where they set about both looting the village and rifling through the Yorkist baggage.
In the centre, completely unaware of what had happened, the armies battled it out with men laying about each other with swords, bills, poleaxes and maces. Farther east, where they outflanked the Lancastrians, it was the Yorkists who had the advantage, and as they pushed back their opponents, they slowly rotated through 90 degrees.
Meanwhile, Oxford had managed to persuade some of his men to leave their plundering and return to the fray. Peering through the fog, Warwick’s men saw them coming. The line of advance of Oxford’s men must have made them look like Yorkist reinforcements, and if one contemporary chronicle is to be believed, the star badges of Oxford’s men bore an unfortunate resemblance to the sun badge of Edward IV. Thinking they were about to be attacked, Warwick’s men loosed arrows into the advancing troops. Oxford’s men shot back and in the ensuing chaos, Lancastrian morale collapsed and their line began to crumble.
How did the Earl of Warwick die?
Finally, amid cries of “treason”, it broke altogether. It was now that the Lancastrian army suffered the bulk of its casualties. Among them was the Earl of Warwick himself, chased down and killed as he tried to get to his horse and ride away. His brother Montagu was also killed, along with perhaps 1,000 Lancastrians, but Oxford succeeded in escaping to Scotland.
The battle was over before noon. Edward hurriedly returned to London and, in an act of pure theatre, strode into St Paul’s Cathedral while a service was taking place and laid Warwick’s banner on the altar. He then ordered that the bodies of Warwick and Montagu be brought to the city and displayed on the cathedral steps so that there could be no rumours that they were still alive. Three days later, they were taken for burial at Bisham Abbey.
It had not been an easy victory. At least 500 Yorkists had fallen, including Lords Cromwell and Saye, and many more had been wounded, among them Edward’s brother Richard (the future Richard III). A merchant in London who witnessed the return of the Yorkist army later wrote: “Those who went out with good horses and sound bodies brought home sorry nags and bandaged faces without noses etc and wounded bodies, God have mercy on the miserable spectacle…”
But Edward’s victory and the deaths of Warwick and Montagu had broken the power of the Nevilles. Much of their land in the north would be taken over by Richard. Three weeks later, Edward completed his triumph by defeating Margaret at Tewkesbury and killing her son, the Prince of Wales. The Lancastrian cause was all but extinguished and Edward made doubly sure by having Henry VI, now a pathetic prisoner in the Tower of London, quietly put to death.
Julian Humphrys is a historian and battlefields expert
This article was first published in the June 2018 edition of BBC History Revealed
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[The miraculous afterlife of Henry VI]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/holy-king-henry-vi-miracles-canonisation-saint/ 2025-02-14T14:21:44.000Z 2021-02-11T07:34:14.000Z Listen to this article:
On 7 February 1486, Alice Newnett of Mere in Wiltshire was raised from the dead. She had been the latest victim of a virulent plague sweeping through England – a sickness so fast-acting that the priest who had been called to give her Extreme Unction (the final anointing administered to the dying) arrived to find she was already almost lifeless. Before he finished the last rites, Alice apparently expired. The priest hurriedly made his last anointings and commanded the women present to lay Alice out for burial while he arranged her gravesite. (In cases of plague, it was best to bury the dead swiftly, to prevent infection spreading.)
Alice’s body was laid on the ground and, sorrowfully, her mother sewed the girl into her shroud. There the corpse lay for two hours. But then, as evening drew near, Alice suddenly sat bolt upright inside her shroud. The priest had been too hasty. She was not dead after all. Indeed, on closer inspection it was discovered that all signs of plague had disappeared from her body.
As she explained to her marvelling mother, Alice knew the cause of her resurrection. While she had lain still, she had received a vision of a holy man wearing dark silk and a golden crown, who promised to restore her to life on two conditions: one, that she lay in her shroud until he told her to rise; the other, that she make a wax candle as tall as she was and deliver it to the tomb of King Henry VI at Windsor Chapel. Alice’s surprising saviour was apparently none other than the late King Henry himself, a man who had now been dead for 15 years.
Chains and nooses
Just as Alice had been directed in her vision, she took a large wax candle to the Chapel of St George in Windsor, and there it nestled among an array of votive offerings from others who believed that “Holy King Henry” had saved their life or livelihood. Chains and nooses hung over the tomb, left by wrongfully condemned prisoners who had been saved from imprisonment or death by hanging thanks to the mystical appearance of King Henry VI, sometimes flanked by angels or the Virgin Mary. In some cases, it was claimed, Henry had slipped his hand between the hanging man’s neck and the noose to prevent him suffocating.
A smeared knife on the tomb was testament to what was believed to be another miraculous resurrection: the servant Helen Barker had used the blade to slit her throat “from ear to ear” after being falsely accused of theft by her employer, a London soap-boiler. Repenting after the fact, Helen asked for Henry’s prayers and within 20 days was, it was claimed, fully recovered.
Not all the offerings testified to quite such dramatic miracles. A silver ear had been placed on the tomb by a Devonshire man who had lived for 37 years with a bean in his ear, which only prayer to Henry had released. More than one set of crutches were left by the lamed and sickly whose ailments Henry had apparently healed, enabling them to walk to Windsor on their own two feet. In some cases, thanksgiving was merely for the return of runaway pigs.
These offerings were tended to by the canons of St George’s Chapel, who assiduously recorded the miracles that grateful supplicants came to report at Henry’s tomb. Between 1481 and 1500, more than 300 miracles were ascribed to his agency – an extraordinary success rate for a king who had, in life, been a singular failure.
Catastrophic collapse
Henry VI of the House of Lancaster had inherited the English and French thrones before his first birthday in 1422. His father was the great warrior, Henry V, but Henry VI proved a very different character. Zealously committed to peace, Henry lacked the worldliness or willpower to put his good intentions into effect. His ham-fisted attempts to end the Hundred Years’ War by marriage – or treaty, or release of prisoners, or cession of land – all failed spectacularly, and within 30 years of inheriting France he had lost everything except a sliver of land around Calais.
In England, rebellion and bloody civil war followed. Henry VI suffered a catastrophic mental collapse – what we might term today a psychotic break – and for 16 months was unresponsive and apparently incapable of physical or mental activity. He may never have fully recovered.
During the Wars of the Roses with his Yorkist dynastic rivals, Henry had the dubious distinction of being deposed twice – on both occasions by Edward IV of York, a man cut from a very different cloth. Edward was militarily minded, charming, sexually alluring and possessed the innate steeliness that Henry lacked. In May 1471, after crushing Henry’s Lancastrian followers during the battle of Tewkesbury, Edward had his rival secretly put to death in the Tower of London. By then, Henry had been Edward’s prisoner, on and off, for six years.
Having processed Henry’s corpse through the streets of London “open visaged” (ie with his face open to inspection), Edward had him buried in a quiet little monastery up the river Thames at Chertsey. He also released an exculpating document that insisted the late Lancastrian king had died “of pure displeasure and melancholy”. Edward hoped this would lay the ghost of Henry to rest – instead, the king continued to trouble the Yorkist regime from beyond the grave.
As if expressing divine displeasure with Edward, the following years were marred by plague. Pestilence swept through the kingdom, driving the English out of their cities and onto the roads towards holy shrines, where they prayed for deliverance from one fatal scourge after another. The first outbreak of plague appeared within four months of Henry’s death. In autumn 1471, plague killed a fifth of the adult population of East Anglia.
After so many years of political turmoil, the recurrence of sickness fed an underlying sense of instability and vulnerability. In their time of need, the English began to pray to the man who until recently had been their king – now conveniently positioned in the afterlife, where he could more readily intercede on their behalf to God.
Henry had always been a man who inspired sympathy and a peculiar sort of paternalistic care in those who met him. After his death, memories of his good intentions, his concern for children, his heartfelt desire for peace and his renowned piety scrubbed away the recollections of his personal inadequacies as a ruler.
Combined with stories of his suffering – his deposition, exile, imprisonment and violent death – Henry gained a reputation as a man who had been too good for this corrupt world. This concept of the late king as a holy innocent was most clearly expressed in a biography written by his confessor, John Blacman, in the 1480s. Blacman insisted that Henry had eschewed magnificence and experienced mystical visions – both stories of questionable veracity that nonetheless fed an appetite for an image of “Holy King Henry” that helped promote his cult.
Embarrassingly for the Yorkist regime, among the earliest devotees of Henry’s cult was their namesake city of York. Within a year or two of Henry’s death, an image of him had been placed in York Minster and was already receiving offerings. The archbishop of York received a royal directive to ban this veneration, but to no avail.
The cult of Henry VI spread far and wide, with shrines appearing everywhere, from rural churches in Norfolk and Northumberland to major cathedrals including Hereford and Durham. Pilgrim badges began to be cast in metal, showing Henry clasping his orb and sceptre and occasionally bestride an antelope, the symbol of the Lancastrian dynasty. The badges were carried from Chertsey back into the shires, and then on to ports like London, King’s Lynn and Southampton – even to Rouen, across the Channel. Nearly 400 such badges associated with Henry still survive.
Relics connected to the late king also started proliferating. At Bridgnorth in Shropshire, Henry’s coat was displayed to visiting pilgrims, while the Lady Chapel on the bridge at Caversham near Reading boasted the blade with which Henry was allegedly murdered, “sheath and all”. (Caversham held a veritable ossuary of the holy, having assembled a jawbone of St Æthelmold, St Anastasius’s hand and an angel with one wing.) Windsor Chapel exceeded them all, however, with a pair of Henry’s spurs, a chip from his bedstead and his red velvet hat, described as “a sovereign medicine against headache”.
By 1484, in the reign of the second Yorkist king, Richard III, Henry’s cult had grown to unprecedented levels of popularity. Richard attempted to control – and benefit from – the rising tide of pilgrims by transporting Henry’s body from Chertsey to the Yorkist dynasty’s chivalric mausoleum at Windsor, where Edward IV was himself buried.
On Henry’s tomb being opened 13 years after death, it was discovered that his corpse was uncorrupted and sweet-smelling (it was believed that God could intervene to prevent the decomposition of saints). To facilitate the reburial, Henry was dismembered and placed in a small lead coffer, but not all of him made it to Windsor. At some point during this transfer, Henry’s right arm was stolen, presumably as a relic, and replaced in the coffin with the left humerus of a pig. The switch was not discovered until Henry’s tomb was reopened in 1910 – where Henry’s arm ended up remains a mystery.
Mad, imprisoned, dead
Under the Tudors, interest in Henry’s cult intensified, spurred by the fact that the new king, Henry VII, was the nephew and namesake of his Lancastrian forebear. Henry VII made repeated appeals to the pope to have his uncle canonised, and he even planned to move the corpse again, to Westminster Abbey, to lie close to his own tomb.
By then, Henry’s cult had grown into one of the most successful of the Middle Ages. Perhaps this was because Henry was undiscriminating in who he helped. Epileptic nuns, children choking on fish bones, farmers struck by lightning, those afflicted with scrofula – the mad, the imprisoned, the dead. All were healed by his intercession. A high preponderance of dead children were brought back to life by Henry, cementing an association between the king and the young that had begun when he founded Eton and King’s College, Cambridge in the 1440s. Now he rescued children who fell on pitchforks or were crushed beneath woodpiles.
Unsurprisingly in an era that endured new and devastating forms of pandemic, Henry was also associated with mystical cures. Surviving prayers, including a book of Dublin provenance, plead for him to preserve the orator from epidemics, while on a Devon rood screen he was painted beside the plague saints Sebastian and Roch. Little wonder his cult was promoted by Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother and matriarch of the Tudor dynasty – a woman deservedly paranoid about pestilence. (Her husband, Edmund Tudor, had died of plague while she was pregnant with the future Henry VII.)
Despite the widespread popularity of Henry VI’s cult, he was never canonised as a saint. Throughout the Middle Ages the papacy was uneasy with the beatification of murdered laymen, and they resisted Henry VII’s fervent efforts.
Ultimately it was the Tudors who destroyed any chance of sainthood. The religious changes of Henry VIII in the 1530s entailed the widespread destruction of pilgrims’ shrines, including Henry VI’s. The reliquary at Caversham was dispersed, and Henry’s exact burial place in Windsor was lost to memory for centuries. As late as 1543, however, pilgrims still travelled from Cornwall and Devon to surreptitiously visit his tomb. And still, today, a wrought-iron money box stands beside the plain stone tomb of Henry VI – a last testament to the hundreds of pilgrims who had deposited their coins in thanksgiving to “Holy King Henry”.
Cult figures: three other medieval miracle-workers who attracted devoted followings
St Gwenfrewi: the nun who sprang to life
St Gwenfrewi’s brutal death – and remarkable afterlife – made her a popular saint in England and Wales. A seventh-century nun from Tegeingl (now Flintshire), St Gwenfrewi was educated to a high standard by her patron St Beuno. Despite her vow of virginity, a local prince called Caradog ab Alog demanded sexual favours from her, and when Gwenfrewi tried to flee towards her church, Caradog overtook her and beheaded her with his sword. Miraculously, a spring bubbled up in the place her head fell. Even more miraculously, Beuno rejoined her head and body, restoring Gwenfrewi to life. Caradog was killed with a curse.
After her “first death”, Gwenfrewi went on pilgrimage to Rome and later settled as an abbess of nuns at Gwytherin, where she died for a second time. Five hundred years later, she was still sufficiently celebrated that her remains were removed to Shrewsbury Abbey. The hallowed spring where she had first died became known as Ffynnon Gwenfrewi, or “Holywell”, and was a popular site of pilgrimage for centuries, said to have curative powers for all manner of ailments.
In 1483, William Caxton printed Gwenfrewi’s biography. As late as the 16th century, poems were composed in Gwenfrewi’s honour and religious buildings were constructed at Holywell. The site can still be visited today.
John Schorn: The man who kept the Devil in a boot
Henry VI shared the attentions of Windsor pilgrims with another popular saint whose body was translated there in the 15th century: John Schorn, a Buckinghamshire vicar famous for catching the Devil in his boot. This boot would be produced during John’s sermons, to the mingled amazement and horror of his parishioners, who could glance inside at the Devil.
Schorn’s other chief claim to popularity was that during a local drought, he had produced a perpetual spring by striking the ground with his staff. The spring, laden with gypsum, epsom salts and carbonic acid, had healing properties, particularly for those suffering from eye conditions and rheumatism. After his death in c1314, both the spring and Schorn’s tomb at North Marston became a popular resort for pilgrims – so popular that a later vicar dug up a skull from the graveyard, sprinkled it with blood and exhibited it as Schorn’s head.
In 1478, as Edward IV undertook extensive building work to the chapel at Windsor, Schorn’s corpse was moved to a new shrine there, in the hope that the newly constructed tomb would be a money‑spinner with pilgrim visitors.
Richard Scrope: The angel of the north
In his lifetime, Archbishop Richard Scrope had been a thorn in the side of Henry VI’s Lancastrian forebears. The northerner had joined the doomed Percy uprising against Henry IV in 1405 and, on being captured, became the first English bishop to be executed after trial. He was beheaded on royal orders outside York, allegedly by five blows of the axe (representing the five wounds of Christ).
Viewed by many northerners as a martyr, Scope was buried inside York Minster, where his tomb was swiftly the site of several miracles. Within a year, his cult had grown so popular that Henry IV ordered Scrope’s tomb to be cordoned off with high log barriers.
A popular myth claimed that Henry IV was struck down with leprosy as divine punishment for killing Scrope. During the Wars of the Roses, Scrope was held up as a champion of anti-Lancastrianism, and Edward IV tried to secure his canonisation. Ironically, it was probably Yorkist victories in the wars that ended Scrope’s cult. His veneration seemed superfluous in an age of Yorkist ascendancy.
Lauren Johnson is a historian and writer. Her books include Shadow King: The Life and Death of Henry VI (Head of Zeus, 2019). She discussed Henry VI in a 2019 episode of our podcast
This article was first published in the February 2021 edition of BBC History Magazine
]]> Rachel Dinning <![CDATA[Henry VI may have had a "sex coach" - plus 4 more curious facts about his life]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/king-henry-vi-facts-life-death-reign-marriage-sex-coach-wife-illness-mental-health-mysterious-strange/ 2024-10-11T16:01:25.000Z 2020-11-26T16:00:32.000Z How much do you know about Henry VI? We reveal the most curious facts about the king's life – from his relationship with his wife, Margaret of Anjou, to his mysterious 18-month illness...
When Henry’s wife, Margaret of Anjou, visited the king’s bedroom, they were sometimes joined by “trusted attendants”
Pious, simple and puritan. This is how Henry VI is often described by historians and scholars. And the label certainly fits: the medieval king spent his free time meditating on the sufferings of Christ; staying in monasteries; and practising Devotio Moderna, a movement for religious reform that advocated humility and obedience.
It was therefore unsurprising when historian Lauren Johnson revealed that Henry VI may have had a “sex coach” in his marriage bed in 2019. Johnson, who had been investigating the king’s private life, claimed to have discovered evidence in the National Archives and royal household accounts that suggests Henry and his wife, Margaret of Anjou, were occasionally joined by “trusted attendants” in the bedroom.
Was it because the famously chaste Henry didn’t know what he was doing? “I think it’s entirely possible that it had reached a certain point where it perhaps became necessary to make clear to him what he should be doing,” Johnson told the Observer. “That couldn’t be done in a public way at all. The king’s chamber is the most private place [where] you could be having this conversation or, indeed, checking what was going on.”
Read Lauren Johnson's article on Henry VI in the March 2019 issue of BBC History Magazine
He was more popular after he died than when he was alive
Henry VI was not a vengeful king – if anything, he was quite the opposite. He once ordered a deceased traitor’s impaled ‘quarter’ to be taken down, commenting: “I will not have any Christian man so cruelly handled for my sake.” And in 1452, on Good Friday, he issued 144 pardons following an attempted rebellion by the Duke of York.
While the king was certainly a kind man, he made for a poor monarch. “He failed spectacularly as a ruler, losing two kingdoms,” wrote historian Desmond Seward in the April 2014 issue of BBC History Magazine. “Not only did he lose Lancastrian France but his inability to provide good government resulted in the Wars of the Roses and eventually in his own murder.”
Despite his poor leadership, people across England venerated Henry as a saint-like figure following his death on 21 May 1471. An increasing number of people embarked on pilgrimages to Chertsey Abbey, where the king was buried, before Richard III had Henry’s remains reinterred at St George’s Chapel in Windsor. The idea of ‘Henry the holy man’ was rapidly accepted, and in 1500 a book materialised that suggested the king could perform miracles, even after his death – from resurrecting plague victims to saving a servant unjustly accused of a capital offence.
So why did the cult of ‘Saint Henry’ take off? The answer, claims Seward, lies in the fact that he was unjustly murdered: “There was widespread pity for a king who, after his deposition, was treated as a thief, then put to death without having committed any crime.”
He experienced a mysterious illness that lasted 18 months
In August 1453, Henry VI fell into an inertia that lasted 18 months. Some historians believe he was suffering from catatonic schizophrenia, a condition characterised by symptoms including stupor, catalepsy (loss of consciousness) and mutism. Others have referred to it simply as a mental breakdown. He certainly had the genetic disposition for it; his maternal grandfather, Charles VI of France, suffered from recurrent bouts of mental illness for the last 30 years of his life.
There are few contemporary accounts that shed light on the matter, but those that do exist suggest Henry had a notable lack of interest in the world around him during this time. In January 1454, a London merchant called John Stodeley wrote of how Henry barely responded when first introduced to his own new-born son, Edward. “He looked on the Prince and cast down his eyes again,” Stodeley reported. A few months later, visitors to the king described how “they could obtain no word or sign” from Henry after travelling to inform him of the death of Archbishop John Kempe.
When Henry finally recovered from his 18-month illness, he was reportedly “astonished to find his wife had given birth to a son”. Edward was born in October 1453 – just a few months after Henry became unwell.
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He was the youngest person to become king of England – and the first (and only) English monarch to be crowned king of France
Henry became king of England on 1 September 1422, at nine months of age, following the death of his father, Henry V. A regency council governed the country until 1437, when Henry was considered old enough to rule. He was the youngest person to inherit the English throne.
Less than two months after he succeeded the English throne, Henry added another crown to his belt. His grandfather, King Charles VI, died on 21 October – and Henry was proclaimed king of France in line with the terms of the 1420 Treaty of Troyes. The military successes of Henry’s father, Henry V, meant that England held vast territories in France. These were, however, gradually lost over the course of Henry VI’s reign – and by 1453 (and the end of the Hundred Years’ War) England was left with only Calais.
He tried to stop the Wars of the Roses by implementing a ‘Love Day’
So devoted was Henry to the idea of peace, he once attempted to instigate a ‘Love Day’ to help reconcile the warring factions of the Wars of the Roses. The premise was as follows: a parade (or something similar) would take place on 24 March 1458 in which the leading Lancastrians would hold hands with the leading Yorkists as they walked through the streets of London. Needless to say, the plan did nothing to quell the hostility between the two sides.
Why did Henry have such a problem with conflict? In the latest issue of BBC History Magazine, Lauren Johnson speculates that the roots of Henry’s troubles lay in his childhood. “His uncles were ambitious men who blighted Henry’s youth with their sometimes violent disputes,” she explains. “Time and again Henry was called upon, despite his youth and inexperience, to resolve their quarrels, expected to serve as final arbiter of complex, adult dynamics that had taken form before he was born. As he was a sensitive, serious child, it is little wonder that he shrank from conflict in later life.”
Rachel Dinning is Digital Editorial Assistant at HistoryExtra
This article was first published on History Extra in February 2019
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Exclusive podcast: Lauren Johnson on the life and death of Henry VI]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/exclusive-podcast-lauren-johnson-life-death-henry-vi/ 2023-10-05T09:18:24.000Z 2020-08-01T06:05:00.000Z In this lecture recorded at BBC History Magazine’s 2019 History Weekends – and available exclusively on HistoryExtra.com – historian Lauren Johnson reappraises the often-overlooked Henry VI, who inherited the thrones of England and France before his first birthday, and lost both during a reign beset by mental illness and civil war.
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