The Minority of Henry VI

“Henry the Sixth,” said Mr Pettigrew, “was born at Windsor Castle on the sixth of December 1421, and on the thirty-first of August 1422 his father died of a flux in France, and he became King of England.”

He held the card up to the light, and then put it down, because he did not need it.

“He was nine months old. He could not walk. He could not talk. He could not, I am told by the chroniclers, who were very interested in this sort of thing, hold his own spoon. He had four teeth. And he was King of England, and, as soon as his grandfather in France died seven weeks later, King of France as well, or so the English said, and the French did not agree, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the Hundred Years War in a sentence, and you may have it for nothing.”

He wrote HENRY VI on the board, at the far end from the corrected sentence, in his large leaning capitals.

“Now. What happens? A King who can’t hold a spoon. Who governs England?”

“A Regent,” said June.

“Some of it, Miss…”

“Okonkwo.”

“Miss Okonkwo. Some of it a Regent. His uncle, the Duke of Bedford, in France. His other uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, at home, who wanted to be Regent and was told he could be Protector, which is a smaller word, and he never forgave them for it. And a council, of bishops and lords, who did the actual work, and quarrelled about it, and did it.” He drew three lines going out from HENRY VI, like the spokes of a wheel. “And here is the thing, the thing I want you to write down, the thing that is the whole point of the story and the reason it’s the best card in my box.”

He tapped HENRY VI with the pointer.

“Every single thing they did, they did in his name.”

---

Frederick wrote it down.

In his name.

“Every writ,” said Mr Pettigrew. “Every law. Every order to every sheriff in every county in England. Every treaty. Every appointment of every bishop. Every single piece of paper that the government of England produced for fifteen years began Henry, by the grace of God, King of England and of France. A baby. A toddler. A small boy learning his letters. Every penny of tax in England was raised in the name of a child who could not count it.” He looked round the room. “And nobody, not one person in England, not even the Duke of Gloucester, who would have liked to, not one person ever said that he was not the King.”

He paused.

“Why not?”

Silence.

“Hanover,” said Mr Pettigrew. “You’ve been right once this afternoon. Try for twice.”

Frederick thought about it.

“Because if he wasn’t King,” he said slowly, “then nobody was. And then none of it counted. The writs and the taxes and the bishops. They were all in his name. If he wasn’t really King, they were all in the name of nobody. So he had to be. Or the whole thing fell over.”

Mr Pettigrew looked at him over the card for a long moment.

“That,” he said, “is exactly right. And that is why you write it down. A King under age is not a King in waiting. He is the King. He is the most important King there is, because everything hangs on his name and he can’t do a single thing to hold it up. He is the King precisely because other people do the work, and they can only do it because he is.” He put the card down. “Twice, Hanover. You’re getting a taste for it.”

At the back of the room, by the magnolia tin, Mr Stroud wrote something down, and did not look up, and did not write it for long.

---

“Now,” said Mr Pettigrew, cheerfully, “the best bit. Hartigan.”

Theo looked up from the planner.

“Sir.”

“You’ve a big voice, I should think. Read this.” Mr Pettigrew held out an index card. “Stand up. Read it to the room. It’s from a chronicle. It’s about the King going to open Parliament in 1423, aged two. Read it as if you were the chronicler and you’d seen it with your own eyes.”

Theo stood up and took the card. He looked at it, and then at Frederick, and then at the card again, and Frederick saw the corner of his mouth go, and saw him put it back, the way Castellanos did, and saw him take a breath.

Then he read it, in the voice he had used on the bench in the corridor, the deep rolling herald’s voice, hear ye.

“On the Saturday the King was brought from Windsor towards London, to open his Parliament, and was carried by his mother the Queen in her lap in the chariot. And when they came to Staines, on the Sunday morning, the King would go no further, but shrieked and cried and sprang and would not be carried, and so they were fain to bring him back to the inn, and there he abode all that Sunday. And on the Monday he was borne to the chariot, glad and merry of cheer, and so came to Kingston, and on the Tuesday to Kennington, and on the Wednesday to London, and there he was showed to the people, and opened his Parliament sitting in his mother’s lap.”

He lowered the card.

There was a short silence.

“Shrieked and cried and sprang,” said Mr Pettigrew, with enormous satisfaction. “The chronicler thought, you see, and so did all of England, that the King would not travel on a Sunday, because it was the Lord’s day. A two-year-old. They thought he had principles.” He took the card back from Theo. “Thank you, Hartigan. You have the voice of a herald and the face of a man trying not to laugh.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Don’t be. It’s a very funny story. It’s meant to be. It was funny in 1423 and it’s funny now. A King of England, opening Parliament from his mother’s lap, having refused the day before to go past Staines.” He put the card in the box. “Sit down.”

---

The rain changed.

It did not stop. It got lighter, and then lighter still, so that the noise on the glass wall of room fourteen went from a drum to a whisper, and the drips into the three buckets slowed, red and blue and magnolia, until each one was a separate small sound you could count.

And in the quiet, on the windowsill, very slowly, Mr Pettigrew’s rain hat slid off the head of the bust of Benjamin Franklin, where it had been all day, and dropped onto the sill beside him with a soft wet pat.

Everybody looked at it.

Benjamin Franklin looked out at the yard, bareheaded, as though nothing had happened.

“Ah,” said Mr Pettigrew. “Thank you, Doctor Franklin.” He did not go and pick it up. “He never liked hats, you know. He wore a fur one in Paris, to be thought a backwoodsman, and the French thought him a philosopher instead.”

---

“So,” said Mr Pettigrew. “Henry the Sixth. King at nine months. Opened Parliament at two from his mother’s lap. Crowned in England at seven and in France at ten, in Paris, which the English held at the time and very shortly didn’t. And then, at about sixteen, the council began, slowly, carefully, a little at a time, to let him do it himself. To sign. To choose. To rule, as the lawyers say, in his own right.” He looked across the room at the H’s. “Sixteen. You’ll notice the number.”

Frederick noticed the number.

“He wasn’t very good at it, as it turned out,” said Mr Pettigrew. “That’s another card, and a sadder one, and we’ll not do it today. But that isn’t the point. The point is that for fifteen years he was King, entirely and completely King, without lifting a finger, and nobody in England ever doubted it. Not the council, not the uncles, not the sheriffs, not the people at Staines who watched him shriek. Everybody knew he was King. It was the one thing everybody knew.” He smiled. “Write that down too.”

Frederick wrote it down.

It was the one thing everybody knew.

He looked at it. It was what the lecturer on the radio had said, at lunch, in her bored voice. I’d have thought that was the one thing everybody knew. Two people had said it to him today, one on the radio and one in room fourteen, five hundred and some years apart, about two different Kings who could not do anything yet, and both of them had said it as though it were obvious.

It was obvious. That was the worst of it. It was the most obvious thing in the world, and he had sat on top of it since October like a boy sitting on a box who wants to know where the box has gone.

---

“And here,” said Mr Pettigrew, “is the question I always ask at the end of this card, and I’ve asked it every year since 1974, and I’ll ask it now.”

He put the card down on the desk, square, and folded his hands on it, and looked round the room, at the H’s and the P’s and the C’s, at June and Felix and Lucía and Devon and Marcus with his trombone case and Priya at the back looking at the rain, and Theo, and Frederick.

“We’ve had a King under age,” he said. “We’ve had Henry. We’ve had the best story in my box. And we’ve corrected, with young Hanover’s help, a very bad sentence on my board.” He looked at the board, at CAN, small and upright, in the gap where CANNOT had been. “So. Let’s bring it home. Let’s bring it to the Realm, to today, to Tuesday the sixth of February. Who is King now, then? Here?”

---

Nobody moved.

It was a different stillness from all the others that day. It was not the stillness of a class that does not know the answer, or the stillness of a class that is not looking at somebody. It was the stillness of twenty-six people who all know the answer at once, all perfectly, all at the same moment, and are all sitting on it, very carefully, the way you sit on a lid.

Frederick sat in the H’s with his pen on the page, under It was the one thing everybody knew, and did not move.

He could not answer it. He knew that. If he answered it, Mr Pettigrew would look at him, and then at the brackets, and then he would know, and it would not be a history lesson any more. It would be something else. And it was ten past three on Tuesday afternoon in room fourteen and he wanted, more than he had wanted anything all day, for it to go on being a history lesson for five more minutes.

Mr Pettigrew waited, kettle-patient.

“Come along,” he said. “This one isn’t a trick. This one’s on the front of every newspaper in the Realm, I should think. It’s the one thing everybody knows. Somebody.”

The drips went into the buckets. Red. Blue. Magnolia.

Theo put his hand up.

---

“Hartigan.”

Theo stood up. He did not need to stand up; nobody had stood up to answer all day except Frederick. He stood up anyway, very tall, in the H’s, among the pipes, with his planner closed in one hand, and Frederick looked up at him and could not tell, for the first time in three and a half years, what Theo was going to say.

“Sir,” said Theo, in his ordinary voice, quite gently, “there’s been some news since October.”

Mr Pettigrew looked at him.

“There usually is, Hartigan,” he said. “There usually is.” He sighed, and smiled, and looked at the rain, which had nearly stopped. “I’ve been among the geese. I know. I should have read a newspaper on the train. My daughter-in-law said I should. She said, Dad, there’s been a lot going on, and I said, there’s always a lot going on, it’s what the world does while I’m not looking.” He shook his head. “Very well. I won’t embarrass myself by guessing. I’ll find out tonight, I expect, from somebody. Sit down, Hartigan.”

Theo sat down.

“But I’ll say this,” said Mr Pettigrew, gathering up his cards, “and then I’ll let you go, because it’s nearly the bell and you’ve had a long day, I can see it on your faces, you’ve all got the faces of people who’ve had a very long day, which I find hard to understand, since it’s been a very quiet one.” He tapped the cards on the desk to straighten them. “Whoever he is, the King, wherever he is, however old, I hope somebody’s told him. That he is. King. Properly. Now, and not in a while. Because it seems to me, from Henry, and from forty years of boys, that it’s the sort of thing a boy ought to know.”

---

Nobody laughed.

That was the extraordinary thing, Frederick thought afterwards. It was the funniest thing anybody had said all day, funnier than Gary and the boy with the sixteen and the clipboard on fire and the Prime Minister on hold, and twenty-six people sat in room fourteen and heard it and nobody laughed. Not Theo. Not Marcus. Nobody. They sat in the alphabet, very still, and looked at their desks, all of them, at the same time, the way the whole of the math wing had sat in its rooms at two o’clock on the thirty-first of October in a silence that had a shape to it, because they had been asked to.

He did not look at any of them.

He looked at what he had written. It was the one thing everybody knew. He looked at the board. A PERSON UNDER SIXTEEN CAN BE KING, AND REIGN. At the back, by the magnolia tin, the inspector, who did not listen to the radio in working hours, was looking at the board too, and had stopped writing, and had his pen in the air above the clipboard, as though he had been about to write something and could not, for the first time all day, think of the word.

“Somebody’s told him, sir,” said Frederick.

He said it without putting his hand up. He said it to the page, not loudly.

Mr Pettigrew looked up from the cards.

“Has somebody?”

“Yes, sir. Today.”

“Good,” said Mr Pettigrew. “Good. I’m very glad to hear it. Better late than never, as they said to Henry.” He put the cards in the box. “Who told him?”

Frederick thought about it. Mr Abernathy with the tray. Señora Ruiz with somos and no question mark. Mr Kaminski and the sides. Mrs Tolliver and the radio and the corner crust. Lord Whitlock square to the edge of the table. Dr Brooks in the green chair. Priya in gold. Theo on a bench among the pipes. His mother, in Swedish, through Castellanos, phonetically, by the trophy case.

“Everybody, sir,” he said.

And the bell went.