#honestly the image of henry as a hapless puppet and margaret as his puppet master is based very much in

[une-sanz-pluis]

I don't know Henry VI very well, so he really does nothing? Margaret of Anjou took the place of the king, and her husband was just a puppet?

The answer to this is somewhat complicated because there's a split between the historians (K. B. MacFarlane, John Watts) who see Henry VI as incapable of ever ruling in his own right and the country was governed by others (the minority council, Suffolk, Somerset, Margaret and ultimately York) and the historians (Bertram Woolf, Ralph A. Griffiths) who see Henry VI as ruling in his own right for a stretch of time, albeit as a king who was lacking in judgement though they disagree on when he began ruling on his own. Personally, I think the arguments put forward by Griffiths and Woolf are the most convincing - that there was a stretch of time where Henry was ruling in his own right.

There's also the problem of looking back at Margaret of Anjou through the layers of Yorkist and Tudor narratives that sought to denigrate Margaret and portrayed her as an ambitious woman who subverted the natural order and would not submit to her husband as she ought to, often depicting Henry as a hapless puppet or long-suffering saint. We also know that Margaret remained at liberty when Richard, Duke of York and, later, Edward IV had custody of Henry VI, and was the active threat to their regimes. It was to their benefit to present Margaret as an agent of her own will, not Henry's - especially York, who was presenting himself as a loyal subject forced to rebel to save England from the evils of Henry's bad advisors and later had probably forced Henry disinherit his son and name York and his sons as his heirs. There is some evidence that Henry and Margaret were working together. Apparently there was a special token that only she and Henry knew so she would know if the messages came from Henry himself or were an attempt by the Yorkists to trick her into returning and placing herself and their son into Yorkist hands. This hardly suggests Henry was a hapless puppet who was controlled by his wife or whoever had custody of him, but rather supported Margaret's actions and resisted Yorkist rule in one of a few ways open to him.