Abstract
In 1450 England’s king was Henry VI, a young man in his late twenties.1 He was the son of the famous warrior Henry V, a father he had not known for he came to the throne when he was nine months old. He had no memory of being other than king. He had been cossetted and nurtured to step into his father’s martial shoes. He had inherited two kingdoms, being crowned King of England in 1429 and King of France in 1431. From the age of 16 in 1437, he had begun to play an active part in the affairs of the kingdom. By 1439 his minority was at an end. It had been a surprisingly harmonious minority. Rifts, conflicts and factional rivalry had, of course, occurred, but the leading councillors and nobles, inspired by their dedication to the memory of Henry V whom they had served, had been as one in their determination to hand on to his young heir his inheritance in both kingdoms.
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Notes
Unless_otherwise_noted, reference for this narrative should be made to the major political studies of the later fifteenth century. The reign of Henry VI is comprehensively detailed in R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (London: Ernest Benn, 1981).
M. A. Hicks, Warwick the Kingmaker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 64–210.
C. L. Scofield, The Life and Reign of Edward IV, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1923)
C. Ross, Edward IV (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974
C. Ross, Richard III (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981
A. J. Pollard, Richard III and the Princes in the Tower (Stroud: Sutton, 1991)
J. Gillingham (ed.), Richard III: A Medieval Kingship (London: Collins and Brown, 1993).
S. B. Chrimes, Henry VII (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972).
This point is stressed in A. J. Pollard, ‘The Last of the Lancastrians’, Parliamentary History, 2(1983), p. 204.
R. A. Griffiths, ‘The Sense of Dynasty in the Reign of Henry VI’, in C. Ross (ed.), Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1979), pp. 30–1
A. J. Pollard, ‘Lord FitzHugh’s Rising in 1470’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 52(1979), pp. 170–5.
R. A. Griffiths and R. S. Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1985), p. 85.
For the suggestion that Somerset’s loyalty to Henry VI was the key to his behaviour, see M. A. Hicks, ‘Edward IV and Lancastrian Loyalism in the North’, Northern History, 20(1984), pp. 23–37
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© 2001 A. J. Pollard
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Pollard, A.J. (2001). The Course of the Wars. In: The Wars of the Roses. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10515-8_3
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