despite his best efforts to win acceptance as the legitimate ruler of the realm and of the
duchy.
Henry’s premature death of dysentery at Vincennes in 1422 ended a life of unfulfilled
promise. However illusory his goals and ephemeral his achievements, he remains a
legendary figure in French as well as English history. Neither as cruel as the French
remember nor as chivalrous as the English imagine, he was a talented commander who
seized a tragic moment in French history to become the most heroic of English monarchs.
It would take the Valois a generation to reverse his magnificent accomplishments.
Paul D.Solon
[See also: AGINCOURT; ARMAGNACS; CATHERINE OF FRANCE; CHARLES
VI; NORMANDY; ROUEN]
Harriss, G.L., ed. Henry V: The Practice of Kingship. London: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Jacob, Ernest Fraser. Henry V and the Invasion of France. New York: Macmillan, 1950.
Labarge, Margaret Wade. Henry V: The Cautious Conqueror. London: Secker and Warburg, 1975.
Newhall, Richard A. The English Conquest of Normandy, 1416—1424. New York: Russell and
Russell, 1971.
Wylie, James Hamilton. The Reign of Henry the Fifth. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1914–29. [Vol. 3 with W.T.Waugh.]
HENRY VI
(1421–1471). The son of Henry V of England and Catherine of France, Henry VI of
England was the unfortunate heir to his father’s kingdom and conquests. He was born in
fufillment of the hopes of the Treaty of Troyes. Within nine months, the deaths of his
father and his grandfather made him the only Plantagenêt ever to be widely recognized as
king of France. His uncle John, duke of Bedford, regent in France, could not preserve his
throne despite Henry’s belated coronation in Paris in the aftermath of that of Charles VII
in Reims. By 1436, the reconciliation of Charles with the duke of Burgundy left Henry
only the duchies of Normandy and Aquitaine as he came of age.
Henry’s reign was marked by an admirable devotion to charity, factionalism in
England, and a hopeless entanglement in a France he could neither govern nor abandon.
Henry sought to reinforce his French position by releasing the duke of Orléans and by
negotiating for an Armagnac marriage during the Praguerie, but his greatest success came
later with his marriage in 1445 to Margaret of Anjou. The policy of reconciliation it
represented having failed, Henry’s reign as king of France ended in the disastrous
campaigns of 1449–53, when he lost both his father’s Norman conquests and his
ancestors’ duchy of Guyenne.
Henry’s incapacity for government became unmistakable when he went insane in
autumn 1453. Thereafter, he was little more than a tool in the hands of others. His
formidable wife worked ceaselessly for their desperate cause, but Henry was deposed by
Edward of York in 1461. Ironically, Margaret then won support from Louis XI, who felt
that any prolongation of the Wars of the Roses would preclude English activity in France.
However, neither Louis’s diplomacy nor French military assistance under Pierre de Brezé
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