The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [108]
Of England’s former possessions in France only Calais remained, and even that was only saved from the French because they had agreed not to cross territory owned by the Duke of Burgundy, and his dominions surrounded Calais on the landward side. Even Calais’ economic importance was fading with the decline of the wool trade. Strategically, however, it remained an important military base, and would continue to be so throughout the Wars of the Roses, when it was used as a springboard, not for the invasion of France, but of England itself.
There was no avoiding the fact that the King himself was to blame for the defeat. His subjects felt that, had he shown something of the martial spirit of his father, France might not have been entirely lost. Instead England stood humiliated and disgraced. No one was more incensed than York, who had striven so hard and invested so much money in order to maintain Henry V’s conquests. And to add insult to injury, Parliament failed to vote any compensation to those loyal inhabitants of the former English territories who had lost everything, nor was there any pay awaiting returning soldiers stunned by defeat.
It was no coincidence that the end of the Hundred Years War should coincide with the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses. The one was one of the chief causes of the other.
12
‘A Sudden and Thoughtless Fright’
During the first days of August 1453, it became clear that Henry VI was unwell. He had been under severe strain in recent months and this was beginning to take its toll. On 15 August the King was at his hunting lodge at Clarendon, near Salisbury in Wiltshire, when he complained of feeling unnaturally sleepy at dinner. The next morning, he appeared to have completely lost his senses: his head was lolling, and he was unable to move or communicate with anyone. He had, state the Paston Letters, taken a ‘sudden and thoughtless fright’ that utterly baffled his contemporaries. It is possible that the immediate contributory factor was the shocking news of the defeat of Castillon.
The Queen and Council were extremely alarmed by this turn of events, especially as Henry’s condition showed no signs of improvement as days, and then weeks, went past. Margaret took him back to Westminster and made every effort to conceal his incapacity from his subjects for as long as possible. If York, in particular, were to hear of it, she feared he would almost certainly try to seize power.
Margaret now found herself, at seven months pregnant, completely responsible for the government of England. At first she hoped to remain with her husband at Westminster, but it soon became clear that his illness could only be concealed by removing him to Windsor.
What Henry VI suffered in 1453 was a complete mental breakdown, which is hardly surprising given his character and the stress engendered by the catastrophes and tensions of his reign. Whethamstead says that ‘a disease and disorder of such a sort overcame the King that he lost his wits and memory for a time, and nearly all his body was so unco-ordinated and out of control that he could neither walk nor hold his head up, nor easily move from where he sat’. Henry later said that he had been totally unaware of what was going on around him, and that all his senses were in a state of prolonged suspension. He was ‘as mute as a calf’, spending his days in a chair, looked after by attendants. Some medical historians have diagnosed his condition, on the evidence available, as catatonic schizophrenia – complete mental withdrawal from normal life. Other modern experts have described the illness as a depressive stupor. Henry’s contemporaries had only one word for it: madness.
The genetic components that predisposed to Henry VI’s mental instability were almost certainly transmitted through his mother, Katherine of