Henry VI, crowned in infancy king of England and of France, presided helplessly over the loss of the Hundred Years' War and the collapse into the Wars of the Roses; twice deposed, he died in the Tower in 1471.
Henry VI inherited both crowns of the Treaty of Troyes before his first birthday and grew into the gentlest and least capable king medieval England produced. The French kingdom of his childhood coronations was gone by 1453 — Formigny and Castillon ending it — and the debts, defeats, and feuds of that failure ignited the Wars of the Roses.
Twice king and twice deposed, a catatonic invalid at the worst moments and a saintly innocent at the best, he outlived his cause: his son died at Tewkesbury in May 1471, and Henry followed within days in the Tower. Within decades pilgrims sought miracles at his tomb.
Henry was born at Windsor in December 1421 and was king of England at nine months when Henry V died at Vincennes; two months later Charles VI's death made him, by the Treaty of Troyes, king of France as well. His uncles ruled for him — Bedford in France, Gloucester (checked by Cardinal Beaufort) in England.
He was crowned at Westminster in 1429 and, in answer to Charles VII's Reims coronation, at Notre-Dame in Paris in 1431 — the only English king ever crowned king of France. The dual monarchy he embodied was already dying around the ceremony: Joan of Arc had turned the war, and Burgundy abandoned the English alliance in 1435.
Everyone who described Henry agreed on the piety and the simplicity; they differed only in whether it was holiness or incapacity. John Blacman, his chaplain and hagiographer, recorded a king who wore hair shirts under royal robes, recoiled from nudity and profanity, pardoned traitors compulsively, and interrupted state business for prayer. Harsher observers — and the Yorkist propaganda that built on them — saw childish innocence where a realm needed judgment: a king who gave away the same office twice, signed whatever was put before him, and could be possessed by whoever held the pen.
In August 1453, on news of the disaster at Castillon, he fell into a catatonic stupor that lasted seventeen months, unable to speak or recognise his newborn son — an inheritance, contemporaries whispered, from his grandfather Charles VI's madness. Modern writers hesitate over how to name his condition; his own age concluded more simply that the house of Lancaster was under judgment. What no one contested was his personal blamelessness: alone among the era's protagonists, Henry was never accused of cruelty.
Henry's majority government, dominated by Suffolk, staked everything on peace: the truce of Tours in 1444, marriage to Margaret of Anjou in 1445, and the secret, catastrophic surrender of Maine. The bill came due in 1449–1453: Rouen fell, Formigny destroyed the last field army in Normandy, Castillon killed Talbot and took Gascony. Suffolk was murdered at sea, Cade's rebels held London for three days, and the crown's debts passed £370,000.
The king's collapse in 1453 handed government to his cousin Richard of York as Protector — and the recovery of his wits handed it back to Margaret and the Beaufort duke of Somerset, whom York blamed for France. The first blood came at St Albans in 1455, where Somerset died; the full war from 1459. After the carnage at Towton in March 1461, the largest battle ever fought on English soil, York's son reigned as Edward IV, and Henry was a fugitive and then, from 1465, a prisoner in the Tower. Warwick's volte-face restored him as a puppet in October 1470 — the "readeption" — until Edward returned to win Barnet and Tewkesbury within a single spring.
Prince Edward of Lancaster, Henry's only child, was killed at Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471. On the night of 21 May, as Edward IV re-entered London in triumph, Henry died in the Tower — of "pure displeasure and melancholy" said the official chronicle, of a blow to the head said the age and, when his remains were examined in 1910, said his skull.
The body was displayed at St Paul's, where it bled, observers reported, and was buried obscurely at Chertsey Abbey. Richard III moved it to Windsor in 1484 to manage the growing pilgrim traffic.
The failed king became a popular saint. Miracles multiplied at Windsor — over three hundred were collected — and Henry VII petitioned Rome for a canonisation that lapsed only with the Reformation; the cult of "holy King Henry" was among the most vigorous in late medieval England, the people's verdict overturning the political one.
His enduring works are the two great foundations of 1440–41, Eton College and King's College, Cambridge, whose chapels — the latter among the last and greatest statements of English Gothic — outlasted every dynasty concerned. The reign itself became the standing lesson, retold from Fortescue to Shakespeare, that medieval monarchy had no answer to a king who was merely good.