Other nations were sure that the English had tails. The Greeks of Sicily, who were obliged to entertain the presence of English crusaders in 1190, referred to them as ‘the tailed Englishmen’. At the end of the thirteenth century the Scottish forces, besieged in Dunbar Castle, shouted from the battlements, ‘You English dogs with long tails! We will kill you all and cut off your tails!’ It is possible that the offence was originally that of long hair, worn down the back like a tail, and gradually became a term of general opprobrium.
The French accused the English of being drunken and perfidious; the notion of la perfide Albion, current in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, has a long history. They were aloof; they were phlegmatic; they were insensitive to their own suffering, and to the sufferings of others. They were not afraid of death. That is why they quarrelled with so much ferocity; they robbed and murdered one another quite openly. Sometimes they even killed their king. So they were known for their violence.
The English themselves admitted many faults. The author of Vita Edwardi Secundi, writing early in the fourteenth century, maintained that his countrymen excelled ‘in pride, in craft and in perjury’. Ranulf Higden of Chester, in the same period, described his compatriots as drunken, greedy and dishonest. Their drunkenness was a common cause of complaint, so often described and condemned that it became almost a caricature. A papal envoy to England wrote in 1473 that ‘in the morning they are as devout as angels, but after dinner they are like devils’. Certain national characteristics may never change.
31
A simple man
If Henry’s son had been declared king immediately on the death of his father, he would have been crowned in his swaddling clothes. It was deemed prudent, therefore, to wait until he had reached the age of understanding before he was anointed. Nothing spells disaster so much as a child king, however, surrounded by magnates who consult no interest but their own. Indeed in the course of his long reign, lasting for almost forty years, the fortunes of the ruling houses of England went through so many bewildering vicissitudes – so many reversals and surprises, so many victories and defeats – that the nineteenth-century critic, William Hazlitt, described the country as a ‘perfect beargarden’. This was the era in which were fought the series of battles that have become known as the Wars of the Roses.
Three brothers supervised the minority of the infant king. They can be introduced as the dramatis personae. The first of them, the duke of Gloucester, was his younger uncle; it was he to whom Henry V had entrusted the life and safety of his son. His older uncle, the duke of Bedford, had been chosen by the dying king to protect and enlarge the conquered territories of France; the war continued as before. Henry Beaufort, the child of John of Gaunt and therefore the king’s great-uncle, was bishop of Winchester; he became chancellor of England and therefore its principal officer. He had been born illegitimate but the subsequent marriage of John of Gaunt to his mother, Katherine Swynford, rendered him legitimate.
Brothers, legitimate or illegitimate, may fall out. Gloucester wished to be given the title of ‘regent’, effectively assuming control of the country. Instead at Bedford’s request he was only named as ‘protector’, obliged to yield precedence whenever his elder brother returned from France to England. Gloucester also quarrelled with Beaufort over the direction of the kingdom, and their rivalry reached such a pitch that in 1425 it precipitated them almost into internecine war. Beaufort gathered his army of retainers in Southwark, where his palace lay, and Gloucester ordered the mayor of London to close London Bridge against them. Bedford had to come over from France in order to arrange a compromise between them. They were dogs fighting over the bone of power.
The new king, Henry VI, was formally crowned in the winter of 1429. The eight-year-old boy was carried into the abbey in the arms of his tutor; this suggests that he was a little frail, but he managed to survive the strain of the lengthy ceremony and walked down the aisle unaided at its conclusion. It has been said that he remained a child all his life. At the end of 1431 he was taken to France, according to the treaty agreed by his father, where he was crowned in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. On the head of this young boy the lines of Valois and Plantagenet royalty had come together. At barely the age of ten he was the only male monarch ever to be king both of England and of France.
