What I Intend

Here he is, my inspiration, my example of mediocrity, madness, and suffering in the wrong job.

I have long wished to delve into his story, as a medieval misfit, a constrained civil servant, and a henpecked husband.

The desire to tell his story is central to this my little life. I am in recovery, and look to historical figures in turmoil, and find him to be important, with a history most poignant. There are so many elements, a forceful queen, a horribly timed bout of madness, the signal oddity of being deposed twice...

Shakespeare's Henry is wistful and self-pitying, totally ineffectual. With a power vacuum, upon his marriage to Margaret of Anjou he seemed only too content to hand over the fact of power.

My interest in Henry began 20 years ago. As events in my life often became hard to handle, I thought of him and his predicament. What king sits under a tree during a key battle? One with a painful ambivalence and willingness to let others rule his destiny. There was a time in my life that I let things go, handed my being over to others, sat under that tree.