The starting-point of this book was a desire to look more closely at the workings of political society in fifteenth-century England, and, in particular, to explore the framework of expectations and beliefs which governed the operations of Lancastrian kingship. It will now, I hope, be clearer than ever that the nobility of later medieval England moved in a world shaped as much by common principles and structures as by individual interests and relationships. Under Henry VI, their behaviour and their fate were in almost every case determined by the workings of their system of government. If this has not always been sufficiently emphasised before, it is surely because that system was – in theory, as well as in practice – rather different from how it has traditionally been presented. The real centrepiece of public life for these men was not, as the Victorians imagined, parliament; nor, as has been implicit since, was it the formal agencies of the royal administration. It was the king, and the king in person. There was, in fifteenth-century England, no necessary antithesis between the public and the personal: the virtuous lord – be he king or magnate – was, in his person, the normal, ideal and in fact single bearer of the essentially public function of government. Men certainly placed a premium on counsel, because this was one key ingredient in the process of representation, which was what lordship was for – and, to a large extent, what it was. But they did not willingly promote councils, because these disrupted the exercise of will on which the efficacy of counsel and the preservation of order and unity finally depended.