King Henry the Saint
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 thebanks 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 thoughtsof 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 truceswhich 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 areprofessionalnurses; it has taken themyears 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.”
“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 whilethe 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.