I always used to snigger at the self-deprecating prefaces which fifteenth-century authors attached to their poems and other writings. I did not realise until I was well under way with this book that the strongest impulse I would feel at this time would be to offer an apology – an apology that my work is not more exhaustively researched, better organised, more carefully thought-out, more clearly expressed and so on. There have been many times when I have thought seriously about abandoning altogether the scheme of publishing this revised version of my PhD thesis: now that government-inspired changes to the system of research funding have made such reticence impossible, I sincerely hope that this book is not one more thing to be alleged against them. It has been quite a long time in the making, and in that time the debates of historians of the fifteenth century – if not always their written words – have moved on a certain amount. Even so, I think that there is still room for a reevaluation of our assumptions about the operation of fifteenth-century government and, indeed, for an attempt to apply the insights gained in the process to the muddled reign of Henry VI. I should stress, perhaps, that what follows is an attempt, an experiment. I think that, on the whole, I am asking the right questions, but it is difficult to be supremely confident about many of the answers.