It was probably because of his unfair treatment when he was a child
that Henry VI of pathetic memory was driven “psychasthenic” in its
etymological meaning of “weak-souled.” His father was Henry V, the strong
man of Agincourt; his mother Katherine of Valois, herself the daughter
of a lunatic. This little boy, of unsound heredity, was born at Windsor
while his father was fighting in France, and barely was he five months
old when his mother bethought her that her duty was by the side of her
husband. She therefore left her baby to the care of a wet-nurse while
she herself crossed the Channel. At that time Henry V was sickening for
the illness which was soon to kill him. Probably it was the result of
hard fighting and worry, together with, as was so often the case with
fifteenth-century kings, eating too much.
When he was less than two years old his faithful lieges of the House of
Commons asked that they might see him; so mother, nurse and baby set off
in “chairs” from Windsor to London. On a certain Saturday they reached
Staines, on the banks of the Thames, and on the following day they had
purposed to journey to London. But alas! this defilement of the Sabbath
so horrified the little king, then doubtless “teething,” that he set up
a vast hullabaloo: so bitterly did he weep that the distracted mother
and nurse had perforce to take him back to his lodgings, where doubtless
the maternal slipper bore its part in his education, for the horrified
chronicler tells us that she used every effort. This may have been
the first of the famous thrashings that little Henry received, though
probably there had been others; in fact, his boyhood seems, to put it
crudely, to have been one long wallop. The day of rest having been passed
in consoling the infant, and no doubt giving him teething powders or
dill-water, and other days having arrived by effluxion of time, they
finally got him up to Westminster, where doubtless he twiddled his toes
and “gooed” before an admiring concourse of members of Parliament.
Soon afterwards the privy council appointed another nurse, probably
because the first had so signally failed to smother his bawlings when
his subjects had wished to see him. To her he gave an edict that she
was to use “every effort to reasonably chastise Us on meet occasion”;
so it was clear that chastisement bulked largely in the thoughts of
fifteenth-century educationists in dealing with Henry VI.
When he was five he opened Parliament in person, and was set upon a horse
to ride throughout London, where the lieges remarked upon the wonderful
likeness he bore to the “lovely countenance” of his illustrious father.
Quite probably there was a certain amount of imagination in this remark,
because everybody knows how a lump of putty on a baby’s face is stoutly
asserted by an adoring nurse to be the living image of the noble Roman
nose of its father. The imagination of nurses is indeed wonderful.
Then he was, by the terms of his father’s will, put into the hands of the
Earl of Warwick as preceptor. Warwick is generally held to have been the
model of a preceptor, but one has doubts; for in after years, when Henry
had reached the years of articulate complaint, he meekly spoke to the
privy council of the thrashings that he had had to endure. Byron has well
summed up the orthodox method of instruction:
“O ye who teach the ingenuous youth of nations,
England, France, Holland, Italy or Spain;
I pray you chastise them on all occasions;
It mends their morals—never mind the pain.”
And as the House of Lancaster was nothing if not orthodox I have no doubt
that the good Earl did his duty faithfully by his pupil.
Next he had to be crowned King of England; and the ceremony seems to
have been distinguished by the inordinate number of times that the
archbishop had to strip the little boy to his undershirt and make him don
other robes. A collection of clerics had to assist him off the platform
staggering under the weight of that crown which was to prove too heavy
for him when the murderous political uproar of the Wars of the Roses came
to pass.
Then they took him to Paris to crown him King of France, by order of
his father, who, dying, still considered himself the great conqueror of
France. According to Miss Christie, biographer of Henry VI, the English
did everything possible on the occasion to hurt the feelings of the
French, but probably little Henry quite enjoyed the service, just like a
modern schoolboy. At any rate he got away for a time from his preceptor,
who had been busily employed as gaoler to Joan of Arc, treating her with
quite unnecessary savagery.
Then came the long process of making peace with France after the Hundred
Years’ War. It seems to have consisted of each side making truces which
were meant to be broken as soon as made. Then, when he was twenty-three,
his subjects ordered their meek king to get him a wife, and after a hunt
with varying fortunes among all the princesses of Western Europe who
seemed likely to suit, he selected Margaret of Anjou, an exceedingly
pretty and lively girl with whose portrait he fell in love. She was then
sixteen, and set off for England with high hopes on both sides. Alas!
once more the pathetic tragi-comedy of poor Henry VI’s life displayed
itself; for the crossing was terribly rough, and Margaret was desperately
seasick. Henry rushed to meet her, doubtless to see if she was as pretty
as her picture, but she had caught chicken-pox on the ship and he had to
postpone the wedding until the pretty bride recovered. Her experience was
almost like that of some English brides, who, reaching Melbourne, have
found the mosquitoes so attentive that they have come on to Sydney a mere
simulacrum of the blooming fresh beauty that had got on board the ship so
hopefully at Tilbury Docks.
Six years later, when the Wars of the Roses were coming into full blast
and England was rent in twain by quarrels among aristocratic families
which were only to be settled by the rise of the heavy-handed Tudors,
she bore him his only son; but the effort was disastrous not to her,
but to poor young Henry himself. The anxiety, both over her and over
his distracted country, had driven him “melancholy,” and he developed
well-marked melancholia.[2] While the king lay helpless and silly, unable
even to take cognisance of his new-born son when Margaret held it up to
him, Margaret took the leadership of England into her own strong hands.
One cannot help wondering how Margaret got on with the nursing. As she
was just about to become a mother herself she could not have been very
strong; certainly not strong enough to nurse a great big helpless baby as
well as her own tiny pink little new-born. Probably she got the duchess
of this or the countess of that to do the bulk of the work—for nursing is
hard work. There is far more in it than merely fanning a fevered brow and
talking romantic nonsense to a helpless man. One often sees two little
energetic women go to a bedside, grasp a sick man where it will not hurt
him, and then in the twinkling of an eye, he, a mass of incarnate pain,
has been moved to an entirely new position with never a twinge. But—they
are _professional_ nurses; it has taken them years to learn the little
trick. It does not come to woman by a special gift of God. The most
fervent wifely devotion does not compensate for its absence. We saw a
great deal of these aristocratic amateur nurses during the war; there
was a certain royal lady who sometimes used to help me at operations
in London, and a great big kind-hearted smiling woman she was, though
not very intelligent. But if she made a blunder—and it was never very
serious—she always passed it off with so happy a smile that we always
overlooked it.
If my reading of Queen Margaret’s character is correct she was a very
determined though not very wise young woman, and if her assistant made a
bad break doubtless she felt the rough edge of the queen’s tongue. But
the main thing was that poor silly young Henry recovered and his wife was
able to get on with her war without being worried by anything worse than
the normal troubles of a nursing mother.
If she had been a woman before, nursing her saintly husband as if he had
been her son, she became a tigress now that she had a real son of her own
to fight for; and we have a vivid picture of her raising an army for the
House of Lancaster:
“Many assembled for love they bare to the king, but more for
the fear they had for the queen, whose countenance was so
terrible and whose look was so fearful that to all men against
whom she took a small displeasure her frouning was their
undoing and her indignation was their death.”
Could this furious mænad have been the same as the pretty girl who
landed, eager, seasick, and ready for chicken-pox, just before her
wedding?
We need not go through the whole melancholy history of the Wars of the
Roses, which were really just the fifteenth-century murderous way of
holding a general election, but without even our modern profession of
principles. Everybody knows how Edward IV became king in one of the
temporary lulls, how Henry VI, after another attack of melancholia, was
captured in spite of the efforts of his strenuous wife; and how, at the
battle of Bosworth Henry VII killed his rival Richard of Gloucester, and
at last began modern history with the iron rule of the Tudors. Many of us
have been to St. Albans, and will be interested in the two particularly
savage elections that were held in that city; by a strange misnomer they
have been called battles. The wounded used to run into the vast old
cathedral for shelter while the election raged furiously up and down the
pleasant streets of that dear old town. Of all the houses that looked
down upon the fighting and resounded to the roar of the newly invented
cannon I suppose that the only ones still standing are the cathedral
itself and the ancient hostelry at which so many of us have had afternoon
tea.
Edward IV imprisoned poor hapless Henry for years; but at last the
redoubtable Warwick the Kingmaker restored the rightful—and by that time
melancholic and imbecile—monarch to the throne, amid general rejoicings.
His second reign lasted only ten months, terminating in the Tower. There
can be little doubt that Richard of Gloucester murdered him privily
therein. In 1910 his remains were dug up, and his thin light skull was
found with its remnants of hair still plastered with blood.
It would appear that King Henry took to religion as a means of escape
from the miseries of his youth. Probably he felt that in the Church only
could he see the slightest sign of sympathy for little overthrashed boys.
He was the gentlest and most virtuous of men. The most violent oath
that even his worst sufferings ever wrung from his lips was “Forsoothe
and forsoothe,” sometimes varied by “Fie for shame.” Queen Margaret
could have done better. Once he fled from a ball because the clothes of
the ladies displayed more than he thought proper. But even the fury of
Margaret could not protect him when Richard Hunchback found him in the
way.
Henry’s obsessions took the form of impulsive and senseless generosity
to his supposed friends, and of singing unduly loudly in church. Though
he was meek enough, Richard of Gloucester showed him that he could not
inherit the earth, and according to some religions Margaret, being a
woman, would never have been allowed to show him the way past the golden
gate into the kingdom of heaven.
Poor, gentle, virtuous Henry; so well-meaning, yet so overwhelmed by the
sense of his sin!
And poor tigerish Margaret of Anjou! If she had had sense enough to “come
in out of the wet” we might now be saying “Good Queen Peggy” instead
of “Good Queen Bess.” But how can you expect a woman to show common
sense and self-restraint when she knows they are attacking her only
son? They killed him at last at Tewkesbury almost before her eyes, and
thenceforward Margaret became a very tigress and was always intriguing
with Louis XI to avenge herself upon the Yorkists.