For a while the siblings of Henry V thought they could succeed where he had left off, so young and vibrant his vaunted capabilities shining as an exemplar of personal rule by personal courage. The rules of engagement, a professional army, courtly love, national religion, diplomacy as commercial aim, were all aspects of this important policy step change that a worthy king was to consider. The right to govern was determined by warfare, and conduct of it was critical, written down often in a contrived and rigid literature, much of which was mythical in its origins. Preceding these upheavals was the cataclysmic confrontations in Normandy, the heart of a dynastic dispute over effective modes of kingship. To achieve a new breed of men would have to emerge in the noblesse de robe whose loyalty to the king was put before the nobility. The so-called new monarchy arose out of the required perception for control and centralization placing superior demands on the king and court to deliver for powerful rulers the money needed to govern efficiently. The king's enfeeblement, although typical of this exceptionally violent, brutal and bloody era of English history, its fact crippled the state of affairs in government, causing directly a revolutionary step change in the way financial matters would be handled in post-renaissance Europe. When he died at Chatillon in July 1453, it was said that King Henry VI had his first of several nervous breakdowns. Historians have adjudged that he missed being a great general but was in the final analysis the stalwart of the Lancastrian monarchy, and their last best defence. This is an attempt to put in a local context the widely varied life and activities of this later medieval noble: warrior, diplomat, noble-friend, ambassador, courtier, and soldier.
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