The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - March 01, 2026


PREVIEW： Epochs #252 ｜ Henry VI - Part 1


Episode Stats

Length

21 minutes

Words per Minute

179.8243

Word Count

3,848

Sentence Count

258

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

5


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome back to Epochs. This episode I thought what I shall do is continue on with
00:00:25.300 my series all about the British monarchy. Return to that I feel like it's Epochs bread and butter
00:00:30.800 why not return to it it's been a while now. So let's just pick up the story if you remember last
00:00:35.440 time we left off I did a very long series all about the life and career of Henry V. Got all the
00:00:40.860 way up to Henry V's death so we'll carry on the story from there. So his son the next king is
00:00:47.000 Henry VI. You've got Henry IV, V and VI all one after the other. Now I'll have to recap a bit on
00:00:53.720 Henry V and how the whole story was left because if you remember Henry V was a great
00:00:59.840 martial king, a great warrior king, arguably one of the very very best we ever had and he died
00:01:05.160 suddenly. Not a suicide but he died really quite suddenly. He was in the middle of fighting campaigns
00:01:11.400 in France doing very very well. He'd got himself a deal with the king of France to disinherit the
00:01:18.660 Dauphin, the French, the French prince and that when the old French king, he wasn't long for this
00:01:23.860 world anyway, when he died the crown of France would pass to him, Henry. Henry would then be, him
00:01:29.400 the V, would then be king of France and England. Finally probably you would have thought hopefully
00:01:34.380 ending the hundred years war, which was longer than a hundred years ultimately, but ending that
00:01:39.480 whole war and just uniting the two crowns in one person. And so everything was set for that
00:01:45.440 really. And Henry had a son, a baby heir, and he was only like what nine months old, ten months old,
00:01:51.500 tiny little baby in a crib still. And then Henry V out of nowhere gets dysentery and dies. Falls ill
00:01:57.800 when within a few weeks of catching something, almost certainly dysentery, a bloody flux as they
00:02:03.040 called it, dies of that. He just died of it. Now this is a massive turning point in history, at least in
00:02:08.720 Western European history, Northwestern European history, French and English history. Massive turning point
00:02:14.160 because it was a really inopportune moment to die. Really inopportune because it leaves, as I said,
00:02:21.380 a tiny baby as the next king. Not ideal whatsoever. And so it's difficult, isn't it, to see history in
00:02:29.600 any other way that that was, that was a turning point. And we go from the age of Henry V and
00:02:34.400 everything that came before to just a new world, a new beginning, a new chapter. A page has turned
00:02:40.440 in the story. The career of Henry V is cut short and now we're into the age of Henry VI. Now this
00:02:48.160 story, the story of Henry VI, is a little bit more complicated than many of the other stories that
00:02:53.820 come before it and after it because his whole reign, his whole life, his whole story, if you like, is
00:03:01.200 bound up with the end of the Hundred Years' War and the Wars of the Roses. So we're getting into the age
00:03:07.160 of the Wars of the Roses. And it's complicated. It's much more complicated than the life of, say,
00:03:13.040 Henry V, Edward III, Edward I. It's more complicated than that. For example, I hope it's not too much of a
00:03:19.020 spoiler alert. Towards the end of his life, Henry VI, the baby, I'm going to start talking about here,
00:03:24.660 when he's grown up, he gets deposed and then reinstated and then deposed again. So it becomes
00:03:31.420 complicated. It's not just a straightforward, linear story from start to finish. You can just go through
00:03:35.120 it all chronologically and it's all nice and neat, effectively. No, it's not. It's not nice and
00:03:39.780 neat. Sometimes if you look at a king list, the king list of the kings of England, it will just say
00:03:44.500 Henry V, Henry VI, Edward IV and then onwards. No, no, no. There's a whole Wars of the Roses there
00:03:50.960 where it's a back and forth, a real ding dong back and forth. So the life of Henry VI and the life of
00:03:57.720 the next king, if you like, Edward IV, it's all entwined and mixed up and a mess. It's a mess.
00:04:05.640 So this story will definitely be, if not a miniseries, a relatively long series. I don't know
00:04:10.800 how much detail I'm going to do it in, but it will certainly be more than one episode. And so the
00:04:14.680 reign and life and career of Henry VI and the next king, Edward IV, are all mixed up into one. I may
00:04:20.520 even, you know, start calling this series the life of Henry VI and Edward IV because it's so mixed up.
00:04:27.180 And there's loads of other characters that are really, really important. Loads of other characters.
00:04:31.120 Warwick, the kingmaker, to name but one. There are loads and loads of other characters. It's really
00:04:36.040 the story, certainly the Wars of the Roses part of it, which I may not even get to in this episode.
00:04:40.720 It's a story of the battle, the fight between the House of York and the House of Lancaster,
00:04:45.820 two entirely different families, and by extension, two entirely different factions in the whole
00:04:51.820 country. It's a civil war. It's basically a civil war. So it gets messy. But at least to begin with,
00:04:58.540 at least the early part of Henry's life, we can just talk about Henry VI for a while, at least.
00:05:05.020 So while it's still nice and neat, we'll keep it that way. But there's loads of other characters to
00:05:09.960 get into, people's wives and other family. I mean, like the Duke of York, Edward IV,
00:05:16.140 father, who never became king himself. He's like really, really important, you see. So there's
00:05:21.060 many, many characters to introduce here. And to do it any justice, you need to go into a fair bit
00:05:26.120 of detail. And so I shall do that. I'll be reading largely from, almost entirely from, Sir Charles
00:05:32.940 Oman, Professor Sir Charles Oman, a late 19th century, early 20th century Oxford historian, one of the best
00:05:39.200 to ever do it. And Sir Winston Churchill, the History of the English-speaking Peoples. So I'll be reading
00:05:44.680 from those. You know, both date long before Wokeism. So we don't have to worry about any
00:05:49.700 of that nonsense revisionism. It's just straight up normal history. I hope you enjoy it. I will,
00:05:54.080 I know I will enjoy talking about this and reading about it. It's one of my favourite periods.
00:05:59.540 And one other spoiler alert to let you know, to sort of keep this in mind, that ultimately,
00:06:05.460 absolutely ultimately, at the end of the Wars of the Roses, long after Henry VI, or a while
00:06:11.260 after Henry VI is dead, we finally end up with Richard III versus Henry VII at the Battle of
00:06:18.040 Bosworth Field in 1485. And Henry VII, Henry Tudor, ends up winning that, of course. And then
00:06:25.060 we've got the Tudor period. So this whole era of Henry VI through Edward IV onto, well, there's a very
00:06:34.460 brief period of Edward V, the little boy, one of the princes in the Tower, and then Richard III,
00:06:40.180 and then Henry Tudor. So this whole story really is, in a way, setting up how the Tudors become
00:06:48.400 the royal family. But we'll get into all of that. We've got to talk about Catherine Valois, Catherine
00:06:53.420 of France, in all of that. Okay, well, let's actually start there. Let's say a word or two about that
00:06:57.040 before we dive into the baby Henry VI. Henry V, Henry VI's mother, was Catherine, Catherine of
00:07:04.340 France. She was the daughter of the old King of France, Catherine of Valois. And she becomes really
00:07:09.680 important in the end for the Tudor story. I'll just cut ahead a bit and tell you about all of this so
00:07:14.760 you can kind of keep it in the back of your mind, I suppose. So she's married to Henry V, a pure
00:07:19.960 political marriage, and has a little baby, of course. And she wasn't married to him for all that long
00:07:25.900 before he dies of dysentery. And, you know, her little baby is only sort of nine months old,
00:07:31.060 ten months old or so, when that happens. And you might think, as is often the case, her part in
00:07:35.880 history, you know, medieval times, her part in history is done now. She's simply the King Mother,
00:07:41.940 a King Mother figure. And she won't have an important role to play beyond that now, right? She,
00:07:47.600 as a character, as a figure in history, will just rescind into the darkness and not really play it anymore
00:07:53.360 in the key events. But she does, because what happens is, you know, she is effectively sidelined.
00:07:58.620 She's not that important for sort of power politics and the running of government and wars and things.
00:08:03.880 Okay, she's not important in all that. What she does, she's allowed to go effectively, go off and
00:08:09.660 sort of live her own life to a degree. And the low resolution version of it is, is because she's still
00:08:15.500 quite young, very young, really. So she's still got decades and decades to live. What she goes on to do in
00:08:20.480 years after this, many years after this, she falls in love with sort of a nobody. Well, he's not a
00:08:25.600 nobody, but he's just a knight. He's not a prince. He's not a duke. He's not a great earl. He's a
00:08:31.860 Welsh knight, a Welsh knight who went by the name of Owen Tudor, or Owen Aptudor. Let's just call him
00:08:39.420 Owen Tudor. So he's sort of a nobody and it's sort of scandalous. To begin with, no one really cares.
00:08:45.160 It's like, ultimately, she doesn't really matter. So, you know, let her have her affair. It seems
00:08:50.620 like that's what, in the first instance, what happened. And she has a son by him, Edmund Tudor,
00:08:55.420 an Edmund Tudor. Okay. And although he's the son of the, of the king mother, so a half brother to the
00:09:02.160 king, Henry VI, we're about to talk about here. He's this half brother. He's not in the royal line.
00:09:08.500 Well, not really. There were many, many other people, many, many other branches of the house
00:09:12.700 of your gang Lancaster, who would have a better claim. And anyway, this, but, but Henry VI
00:09:17.800 doesn't despise his half brother, Edmund Tudor. He doesn't sort of exile him or put him in prison
00:09:23.500 or have him killed or try and pretend he doesn't exist or any of that. He's married. He's part of the
00:09:27.820 royal family, basically, right? And he's married off to some noble woman, Margaret Beaufort. The Beaufort
00:09:32.960 family are extremely rich and powerful and important. He's married off to her and they have a baby.
00:09:37.860 In the end, she's very young, Margaret Beaufort. Very, very young. I think she's like 14 or something
00:09:42.060 or 13 or something when she has a baby by Edmund Tudor. And they call that son, Henry. He is Henry
00:09:48.800 VII. Okay. So bear all that in mind. The, the, the king's mother, Catherine of Valois, um, is sort of
00:09:55.660 very, very important, even though probably won't mention her all that, all that much in this episode.
00:10:00.300 Okay. We'll just jump straight in. Then I'll start reading from Charles Oman, Professor Sir Charles
00:10:04.160 Zoman. And he says this quote, England had never yet had a sovereign of such tender age as the
00:10:09.520 infant king who succeeded to the heritage of Henry V. It was under the rule of a child of less than 12
00:10:15.620 months old that the long and wearisome French war had to be continued. As I said, Henry V was right in
00:10:22.360 the middle of campaigns in France, right in the middle of it. He's got two brothers, Gloucester and
00:10:28.100 Bedford, who will play important roles. But nonetheless, the actual crown passes to a baby.
00:10:33.560 Yet, yet at first, the prospects of the rain did not look very dark. They are, they do get dark.
00:10:39.460 But Oman says at first, they, it looks okay. The struggle in France was not going ill. The
00:10:45.300 threat, the English was still winning. Joan of Arc hadn't happened yet. And seldom had any orphan had
00:10:50.040 so zealous and capable a guardian by his cradle as John of Bedford, the little king's eldest uncle.
00:10:56.500 He had, moreover, no domestic intrigues to fear. Edmund, Earl of March. As I said, there were many
00:11:02.480 other families or branches of the family which might have claimed to be the rightful king.
00:11:07.740 Remember, Henry IV, that's Henry V's father, this little baby Henry VI's grandfather, had been
00:11:13.140 basically a usurper, hadn't he? He'd had Richard II put in prison and then he mysteriously died.
00:11:19.360 Many people said that this House of Lancaster are simply the wrong family to rule. So all that's
00:11:24.780 still going on. Everything was okay whilst Henry V lived because nobody could really
00:11:29.020 challenge him for the crown because he's so powerful and successful on the battlefield.
00:11:33.660 But now there's a little baby in charge. Perhaps these families, well, it will all come to a
00:11:39.140 head, but not right away. Oman tells us, Edmund, Earl of March, one of the, he says, the legitimate
00:11:44.500 heir of Richard II, was the most unenterprising and loyal of men and never gave any trouble.
00:11:50.240 On his deathbed, Henry V had not appointed his eldest and most capable brother, John,
00:11:56.080 Duke of Bedford, to be the regent in England as might have been expected. His ruling passion
00:12:01.140 was strong in death and he thought above all things of the maintenance of the English ascendancy
00:12:06.320 in France. Therefore, he named Duke John to take charge of the government in that country,
00:12:12.380 i.e. France. As regent of England, he designated his younger brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester,
00:12:18.060 a man of far less worth and weight. The parliament, however, the parliament of England, held that the
00:12:23.560 king could not dispose of the regency by will. Henry V, he couldn't just say that, he couldn't
00:12:28.580 just do that. And though they named Gloucester Protector, a type of Lord Protector, or a type
00:12:33.400 of regent, they placed many limitations on his power. Unfortunately, they could not remedy his
00:12:39.240 reckless and flighty disposition. During the whole long minority of Henry VI, his childhood,
00:12:44.920 that's the way of saying childhood, his long minority, of Henry VI, the varying fortunes
00:12:49.480 of the French War were almost the only topic that stirred the interest of the nation. The
00:12:54.920 internal history of England is well nigh a blank. No period since the conquest of William
00:13:00.880 the Conqueror, you know, well over 400 years ago, well 400 odd years ago, is left so bare
00:13:06.540 by the chroniclers, who seem to have no eyes or ears for anything save the fate of our armies
00:13:11.680 across the channel. The quarrels of Duke Humphrey with his colleagues in the regency are the
00:13:16.860 only other topic on which they touch. The council carried out the policy of the late king so far
00:13:22.440 as any body of statesmen of average ability can continue the work of a single man of high
00:13:28.360 military and political genius. They strained every nerve to keep up the war in France and
00:13:33.220 subordinated every other end to that purpose. Their wisest act was the release of the young
00:13:38.760 king of Scots after 17 years of captivity. Seeing that his kinsman Albany was helping the French,
00:13:44.860 they set James I free and sent him home. He married, ere he departed, Joan Beaufort,
00:13:51.200 daughter of the Earl of Somerset and granddaughter of John of Gaunt, a lady for whom he had formed a
00:13:57.120 romantic attachment in the days of his captivity. See, the Beaufort family are very, very important and
00:14:02.020 close to the throne. By her influence, it was hoped that he would be kept firm in the English
00:14:07.140 alliance. In some degree, this hope was fulfilled. James promptly slew his cousins of Albany and
00:14:13.580 devoted himself to pacifying and bringing back into order the country from which he had been so long
00:14:18.380 exiled. We must now turn to the aspect of affairs beyond the channel, the subject which seemed all
00:14:23.980 important to the English nation at this time. The old mad king of France had died only two months after
00:14:29.760 his son-in-law, Henry V. Yeah, had Henry V lived just a few months longer, he would have been the king of
00:14:36.360 both England and France. Yeah, it was a really inopportune moment, almost the worst possible
00:14:42.000 moment for Henry V to have contracted dysentery and died. And we're told that the old king of
00:14:46.300 France died in October 1422. Bedford had, therefore, to proclaim his little nephew as king at Paris
00:14:53.540 and to rule in his name, no longer in that of the unhappy Charles VI. That's the old mad king.
00:14:59.700 The Dauphin, i.e. the legitimate, until very recently disinherited, the legitimate heir to the
00:15:06.440 kingdom of France. The Dauphin also assumed the title of king of France. Okay, so straight away,
00:15:12.640 two people are claiming to be the king of France. Both the English claiming this little baby, Henry VI,
00:15:17.640 is, and the grown-up heir, legit heir to be honest, the Dauphin, was also claiming it. And he was
00:15:24.140 acknowledged as monarch in all the lands south of the Loire, i.e. most of France stood behind him,
00:15:29.900 as you can expect. But he was an indolent and apathetic young man, governed entirely by his
00:15:34.840 favourites, and wholly unskilled and averse to military enterprises. He did so little for himself,
00:15:41.360 and seemed so contented with his unsatisfactory position, that men called him in scorn the king
00:15:47.340 of Bruges, his residence for the time, rather than the king of France. End quote. Okay, so let me switch
00:15:53.100 over now to Churchill, and he has a bit more of a sweeping introduction to his segment about Henry
00:16:00.660 VI, and I think it's very interesting. One section here is particularly very good, I think, but let me
00:16:05.600 just read from this. Churchill tells us, quote, as Henry VI grew up, his virtues and simpleness became
00:16:11.600 equally apparent. He was not entirely docile. In 1431, when he was 10 years old, Warwick, his preceptor,
00:16:19.980 reported that he was grown in years in stature of his person, and also in conceit and knowledge of
00:16:26.560 his royal estate, and causes him to grudge any chastising. So Churchill jumped straight in with an
00:16:32.060 overall assessment of Henry. The council had, in his childhood, made a great show of him, brought him
00:16:38.160 to ceremonies, and crowned him with somnity, both in London and Paris. As time passed, they became
00:16:43.660 naturally inclined to keep him under stricter control. His consequence was maintained by the rivalry
00:16:49.740 of the nobles, i.e. when you've got a little boy that's a king or an emperor. The real power lies with
00:16:55.200 whoever controls him, right? Whoever brings him up. When he's still an infant, or even just a boy,
00:17:00.840 can't really wield any power or authority of his own. The people that control him do. So that's the
00:17:06.620 key. And so you'd fight over that. You could have civil wars over just that. A body of knights and squires
00:17:12.400 had for some years been appointed to dwell with him and to be his servants. As the disastrous years
00:17:17.860 in France unfolded, he was pressed continually to assert himself. At 15, he was already regularly
00:17:24.360 attending council meetings. He was allowed to exercise a measure of prerogative in pardons and
00:17:29.640 rewards. When the council differed, it was agreed he should decide. He often played the part of mediator
00:17:36.120 by compromise. Before he was 18, he had absorbed himself in the foundation of his colleges at Eton
00:17:42.980 and at Cambridge. He was thought by the high nobles to take a precocious and unhealthy interest in public
00:17:49.020 affairs, which neither his wisdom nor experience could sustain. So here's the question of whether he was
00:17:55.360 clever and wise or an idiot. I'll let Churchill continue. He says this. He showed a feebleness of mind
00:18:02.360 and spirit and a gentleness of nature, which were little suited to the fierce rivalries of a martial
00:18:08.520 age. Opinion and also interests were divided upon him. Flattering accounts of his remarkable intelligence
00:18:15.100 were matched by other equally biased tales that he was an idiot almost incapable of distinguishing
00:18:21.580 between right and wrong. Modern historians confirm the less complimentary view. At the hour when a strong
00:18:28.580 king alone could recreate the balance between the nation and the nobility, when all demanded the
00:18:33.560 restraint of faction at home and the waging of victorious war without undue expense abroad, the
00:18:40.480 throne was known to be occupied by a devout simpleton suited alike by his qualities and defects to be a
00:18:47.500 puppet." So Churchill, and as Churchill says there, most historians agree that he was, you know, I suppose in
00:18:54.680 modern days you might say he had learning difficulties. I'm not sure if it went that far. He was
00:18:58.980 literate. He could read and write. He wasn't a true simpleton, you know. I mean, do we even use that
00:19:04.160 word anymore, simpleton? But whatever it was, it seems that he wasn't massively quick-witted. He was
00:19:10.340 sort of apparently slow of speech, slow of thought in some way. Well, in fact, as he gets older, we'll get to
00:19:18.020 this in time. In adulthood, definitely suffered, definitely, 100%, suffered from mental illness,
00:19:25.480 severe, kind of severe mental illness later in life. So there was a real imbalance, sort of a chemical
00:19:32.620 imbalance in his mind. That sort of must have been very, very difficult to tell what diseases people
00:19:38.480 had in history. And it's even more difficult to diagnose any sort of mental illness, exactly what
00:19:44.460 it was. Impossible, really. But if the accounts were to be believed, Henry VI certainly had suffered from
00:19:50.820 a mental illness, even a severe mental illness. And it seems he would have got that from his mother.
00:19:56.380 Remember, his mother was Catherine of Valois, Catherine of France, and her father, so Henry VI's
00:20:02.680 maternal grandfather, was the Mad King, the Mad King of France, who also definitely suffered from some
00:20:10.500 sort of mental illness. So it seems that passed down through the family. Okay, Churchill goes on
00:20:16.140 saying, there were evil days ahead for England. The crown was beggaredly, the nobles rich. The people
00:20:22.680 were unhappy and unrestful, rather than unprosperous. The religious issues of an earlier century were now
00:20:29.080 dominated by more practical politics. The empire, so swiftly gained upon the continent, by what Henry V
00:20:36.280 did just one in the last generation, was being cast away by an incompetent and self-enriching oligarchy.
00:20:41.920 And the revenues, which might have sent irresistible armies to beat the French, were engrossed by the
00:20:47.920 church. We hope you enjoyed that video. And if you did, please head over to lotusseaters.com for the full
00:20:54.820 unabridged video.
00:21:06.280 Thank you.