In 1446, Henry appointed Somerset to serve as Lieutenant of France, replacing York. The only child of Henry V and Catherine Valois, Henry lacked his father’s sharp mental faculties and his martial abilities, and he had to depend on others to help him retain England’s possessions in France, which consisted of Normandy in the north and Gascony in the south. These factors were fertile ground for an explosive rivalry that developed between Richard Plantagenet, the third Duke of York, the most powerful and wealthy noble in the realm, and Edmund Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset, the king’s favorite minister. Military defeat in France, civil unrest, and royal favoritism had been the shameful hallmarks of his nearly two-decade-long reign.
Indolent, weak-willed, and prone to periodic fits of madness, King Henry VI had let England slide downhill since coming of age in 1437.
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