When Richard, Duke of York, laid claim to the English throne in 1460, he presented himself as a physician, sent to heal the ills of the kingdom. In partnership with his apothecaries, the faithful Commons, he would probe 'the root and bottom of this long-festered canker' and separate 'the clean and pure stuff from the old, corrupt and putrefied dregs'. Such medical imagery came easily to a political class confounded by two decades of dissension at home and defeat abroad. In seeking an explanation for the ills that afflicted the body politic, contemporaries looked naturally to the health of its head, the King. At the time York spoke, Henry VI's physical and mental state had already been causing concern for many years: always abstracted and silent, Henry had lapsed into a deeper state of withdrawal in 1453 that rendered the long-maintained pretence of personal rule impossible to sustain. Doctors were summoned to the King's bedside and diagnosed an excess of phlegm, prescribing a rigorous regime of laxatives to rebalance the humours of the royal body.

LRB 10 July 2003 | PDF Download