HENRY VI (1421–1471), king of England, the only son of Henry V and Catherine of France, was born at Windsor on St. Nicholas day, 6 Dec. 1421. He was baptised by Archbishop Chichele, his godparents being his uncle John, duke of Bedford; his great-uncle Henry Beaufort [q. v.], bishop of Winchester; and Jacqueline, countess of Holland (Walsingham, Hist. Anglicana, ii. 342). His father's death on 31 Aug. 1422 made him king of England when only nine months old. His reign was reckoned as beginning on 1 Sept. (Ordinances of P. C. iii. 3; Nicolas, Chronology of History, pp. 284, 323). On 21 Oct. his grandfather, Charles VI, died, and he was at once proclaimed king of France.
Henry V's last directions were ignored, and parliament granted the protectorship of the little king to his eldest uncle, John, duke of Bedford, and, during John's absence in France, to his younger brother, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester (Rot. Parl. iv. 174). But the real government rested with the council, and all writs and proceedings were issued in Henry's name. Sir Walter Hungerford [q. v.], who had been appointed by Henry V to attend on his son, was on 18 Feb. 1423 excused from his office (Ord. P. C. iii. 37), and Henry remained under his mother's care. On 18 Nov. 1423 he was brought from Windsor and shown to the assembled parliament at Westminster. On 16 Jan. 1424 Joan, wife of Thomas Astley, was appointed his nurse, with a salary of 40l. a year, as large as that of a privy councillor (ib. iii. 131). On 21 Feb. Dame Alice Butler was selected to attend his person, with license ‘to chastise us reasonably from time to time’ (ib. iii. 143), and with the same salary as Joan Astley (ib. iii. 191), afterwards increased by forty marks. In June 1425 the council ordered that the heirs of all baronies and higher dignities then in the crown's wardship should be brought up at court about the king's person, each one being provided with a master at the state's charge (ib. iii. 170), so that the palace henceforth became an ‘academy for the young nobility’ (cf. Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliæ, in Works, i. 373, ed. Lord Clermont).
The council forced the king to take a personal part in public functions before he was four years old. In April 1425 he appeared at St. Paul's, ‘led upon his feet between the lord protector and the Duke of Exeter unto the choir, whence he was borne to the high altar.’ Afterwards he was ‘set upon a fair courser and so conveyed through Chepe and the other streets of the city’ (Fabyan, Concordance of Histories, p. 594, ed. 1811). During the parliament that then assembled Henry was ‘sundry times conveyed to Westminster, and within the parliament chamber kept his royal state’ (ib. p. 594; Waurin, Chroniques, 1422–31, p. 198; Rot. Parl. iv. 261). In February 1426 he opened the ‘parliament of bats’ at Leicester, where Bedford sought to appease the fierce dissensions between Gloucester and Bishop Beaufort. On Whitsunday 1426 Bedford dubbed his nephew a knight, a number of young nobles afterwards receiving knighthood from the ‘gracious hands’ of the little king (Ord. P. C. iii. 225; Gregory, p. 160). He kept his Christmas and New-year's court in 1426–7 at Eltham, receiving among his presents some coral beads that had once belonged to King Edward, and was amused by the games and interludes of Jack Travaill and his companions and by ‘portable organs’ (Fœdera, x. 387–8).
In May 1428 Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick [q. v.], is described as the king's ‘master’ (Ord. P. C. iii. 294), a post for which he had perhaps been nominated by Henry V himself (Stubbs, Const. Hist. iii. 92, adopts this view from Waurin, Chroniques, 1399–1422, p. 423; and Monstrelet, Chroniques, iv. 110; Gesta Hen. Quinti, p. 159, joins Warwick with the two Beauforts; but cf. for a different view Elmham, p. 333, ed. Hearne; and Hardyng, pp. 387, 394, who says that Exeter acted first and Warwick after his death in 1427, see Beaufort, Thomas). A body of knights and squires was appointed to reside about the king, and the castles of Wallingford and Hertford were fixed for his summer habitation, and Windsor and Berkhampstead for his residence in winter (Ord. P. C. iii. 295). On 1 June Warwick was ordered ‘to be about the king's person,’ and directed to ‘teach him to love, worship, and dread God, draw him to virtue by ways and means convenable, lying before him examples of God's grace to virtuous kings and the contrary fortune of kings of the contrary disposition, teach him nurture, literature, language, and other manner of cunning, to chastise him when he doth amiss, and to remove persons not behovefull nor expedient from his presence’ (ib. iii. 296–300; cf. Fœdera, x. 399).
The exploits of the Maid of Orleans now prepared the downfall of the Anglo-Burgundian power in France. The French council pressed for the coronation of Henry as a counter-move
