Character Analysis
At all times, King Henry VI is a noble and sweet guy. He values peace and hates achieving it through war. He's full of thought-provoking words rather than damning and threatening ones. He even thanks the guards who are keeping him in prison. These are all great attributes to have as a person… but at least in this society, these are not necessarily great attributes to have as a king under threat.
Henry is humble, but this means that he's weak when it comes to defending his throne.
The problem isn't really that Henry is a nice guy; it's that he's a nice guy and he lets his nobles and his wife take advantage of him at every turn. When he makes a plan for his kingdom, everyone else runs it by Margaret first because they know the she's the one actually in charge. Henry's just a figurehead, way before the British monarch was supposed to be just a figurehead.
Unfortunately, we can sum up Henry's path in this play pretty easily. It goes a little something like this: Get kicked off the throne. Be thrown in prison. Flee or escape. Get captured. Repeat.
Let's take a little look at why this happens.
Legacy? What Legacy?
You'd think that if you're born king, people will just accept that you're king, but it's not so easy in this play. Henry constantly has to prove that he is king—in fact, York challenges him to a king-match right in the opening scene, when he says to Henry, "Sure, your dad and granddad were kings, but they stole the crown from my family, so it doesn't count."
Henry, we're sorry to say, doesn't even have a decent defense for that. He just takes it and lets York have a say in who gets the crown next.
It's hard to blame the guy, though. The fact is that Henry's family really did get the crown in some questionable ways. Let's review: Way back in Richard II, Henry's grandpa (Henry IV) pretty much offed King Richard (not the best king imaginable) and helped himself to the crown, which he passed down to his son, Henry V, and then his grandson, Henry VI.
But wait, how does that work? Isn't kingship supposed to be hereditary? How can some guy just walk in and take the crown? If one person can do that, couldn't anyone? What makes a person a king, then? What gives him legitimacy? Those are some big questions—check out Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2 and Henry V to see how they play out—and they're still unresolved by the time we get to the Henry VI trilogy.
Henry VI is tied up in the legacy his family has left him. When the gamekeepers ask if he's a king, he replies, "I was anointed king at nine months old. / My father and my grandfather were kings" (3.1.76-77). Henry's appealing to heredity here, but the problem is that technically, York has a better long-term hereditary claim to the throne. Henry's also drawing on the memory of the past two kings, men who were mighty, courageous, and larger-than-life—everything that Henry himself is not.
But the bigger problem is that the questions about Henry's legitimacy have, at this point, made their way all the way down to commoners like the gamekeepers. When even the commoners are questioning your right to rule, you've got some serious issues. Henry's dad and grandpa dealt with these issues by showing everyone how strong they were; it looks like if you're strong enough, people will probably accept your claim to the throne—for better or for worse.
Is strength the best way to determine who should get the throne? We don't know, but we do know that when it comes to strength, Henry VI just can't compete. It's poetic justice, in a way, that just as Henry's family disrupted the York family legacy when it took the crown from Richard II (another unpopular king), the York family finally ends up disrupting Henry's family's legacy by taking the crown back from Henry.
A Weak King?
A lot of people think Henry is a weak king. After all, he seems too scared to fight, he can't keep his nobles under control, and he ends up losing the crown. It seems like a lot of his problems could be avoided if he were a stronger king—"stronger," in this context, meaning more conniving and more violent.
A lot of scary stuff goes down in the Henry VI trilogy, and Henry manages to survive a lot of it. He's already tried to fight off the French (and lost) in Henry VI, Part 1; he's fought against his own men—and a peasant uprising—in Henry VI, Part 2; and in this play, we see him go head-to-head with the Yorks...and finally lose.
Now, it's clear Henry survives as long as he does partly because he's got some powerful people around him—like Margaret and Warwick—making some big decisions, sometimes behind his back. It's true that he's not really in control of his situation—at this point, he can't even seem to decide if he wants to keep the crown or not. But does this make him a weak king?
That depends on your definition of kingship. In the Henry VI plays, the people who have power—and the people who want it—are pretty nasty (some more than others). Power and politics seem to draw in some the most selfish, scheming, violent people in the kingdom. (Richard, anyone?) In order to win against people like this, Henry would have to be a lot more selfish, scheming, and violent himself. But is this a good thing? Why should a king have to be like that?
If we just see Henry as a weak king, we'll miss part of Shakespeare's message. If good, decent people can't survive in this play's world of politics, then something might be wrong with that world. Sure, we might want Henry to have a little more backbone, but would it really be a good thing if he were just like Margaret or Richard?
The closer we look at this play, the less it seems to be about one supposedly weak king, and the more it seems to be about the scary, complicated world of power and politics. It's not a pretty world, folks.
Private Eye
Henry eventually decides that the king life is not for him and that he wants to live as a private guy. Henry's private life is short-lived: Richard comes in and puts him out of his misery before Henry can get a chance to really enjoy it. Henry still has time to give us two powerful prophecies about what's to come for England, though:
• Henry Richmond will become king and put an end to the Wars of the Roses (4.6).
• Everyone will hate Richard because of the despicable things he'll do (5.6).
Spoiler alert: both of those come true in Richard III. So even though Henry is weak and pathetic in this play, he gets the last laugh by hinting at what's to come. Too bad you can't actually laugh when you're dead.
Is Henry just making educated guesses, or is fate somehow at work here? We can see why he would predict bad things for Richard, but what's up with calling Henry Richmond the future king? Do Henry's correct predictions suggest that everything is somehow predetermined by fate? Shakespeare won't give us an answer, but it's worth considering that as much as these characters think they're in control of their own destinies, they generally turn out not to be.
Timeline