The Madness of King Henry

1453 was indeed a year of miracles. On 29 May, two months before Talbot’s defeat at Castillon, Constantinople had fallen to the bronze cannon of the Ottoman Turks, bringing an end to a thousand-year-old civilization and to Christian empire in the East. On 13 October, the feast day of St Edward the Confessor, only a week after the fall of Bordeaux, Henry VI’s queen gave birth to a son, christened Edward. In the same year, a Kentish man named William Caxton, perhaps troubled by the recent disturbances following Cade’s revolt, moved his luxury goods business from London to Bruges. Following the lead of Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, who in 1454 began distributing copies of a Bible, produced on a printing press using moveable metal type, the first great book to have been manufactured in this way and harbinger of a revolution in the distribution of learning that was to transform European intellectual life, Caxton subsequently set himself up as England’s first printer-publisher. His first English book, the Recuyell (or ‘collection’, from the French recueil) of the Historyes of Troye, was printed in 1473, followed almost immediately with the Game of Chess printed the following year. It was to history, followed shortly afterwards by war-inspired board games, that English publishing owed its origins and its earliest profits.

In the meantime, as if in sympathy with the insanity of the times, King Henry VI went mad. As early as 1435, when news had been brought to him of the collapse of the Anglo-Burgundian alliance, the King is said to have wept in public. In the aftermath of Castillon, he entirely lost his reason. For several months he was unable to recognize his own family, or even to acknowledge the birth of his son. A sort of catatonic lethargy descended. It may have been genetic. He was, after all, the grandson of the mad King Charles VI of France. Yet the malady, if inherited, should then also have passed to his Tudor half-brothers, and his Valois cousins, which seems not to have been the case. His other grandfather, Henry IV, had suffered lengthy bouts of illness, though no attempt to prove Henry IV’s insanity has succeeded. Whatever the cause, the King’s madness mirrored the state of England as a whole.