Henry V of England

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry V of England was crowned at Westminster Abbey on the 9th of April 1413, in the middle of a terrible snowstorm. Onlookers could not decide whether the weather was a good omen or a bad one. That uncertainty suited a king whose reputation has always been divided between admiration and unease.

  He reigned only briefly, yet he won a famous victory in France and came close to wearing two crowns at once. What kind of boy grew into this king? How did he hold a divided country together while preparing for war abroad? And why do historians still argue over whether his French conquests were a triumph or a burden?

  The answers begin with the boy he once was.

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• 2. Prince of Monmouth

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  Henry was born on the 16th of September 1386 in the tower above the gatehouse of Monmouth Castle, and the place gave him the name Henry of Monmouth. His father was Henry of Bolingbroke, who later became Henry IV, and his mother was Mary de Bohun. His grandfather was the influential John of Gaunt, a son of Edward III. The reigning king was his father's cousin, Richard II.

  Because the baby stood far from the throne, nobody officially recorded his birth date. For many years scholars argued over 1386 and 1387. Two facts settled the question. His younger brother Thomas was born in the autumn of 1387, and his parents were known to be at Monmouth in 1386 but not in 1387.

  Little survives about his earliest years. A nurse named Joan Waring was paid 40 shillings to look after him. His father was absent and his mother died, so the boy was left with his maternal grandmother, Joan, Countess of Hereford. A governess named Mary Hervy may also have cared for him. He was said to be small at birth, and weakness may have marked his childhood, but it faded once he reached his teens.

  In 1398 a quarrel between Henry's father and the Duke of Norfolk was headed for a chivalric trial by combat. Richard II banished both men before the duel could take place. The king then took the boy into his own charge and treated him kindly. Henry travelled with Richard to Ireland, where he visited Trim Castle in County Meath, the ancient meeting place of the Parliament of Ireland.

  The year 1399 changed everything. John of Gaunt died, Richard II was overthrown in the Lancastrian usurpation, and Henry was recalled from Ireland as heir apparent. He became Prince of Wales at his father's coronation. On the 10th of November 1399 he also became Duke of Lancaster, the third person to hold that title in a single year. His other titles included Duke of Cornwall, Earl of Chester and Duke of Aquitaine.

  His schooling is less certain. He was possibly tutored by his uncle Henry Beaufort, who was Chancellor of the University of Oxford and later Bishop of Winchester. Modern scholars reject the old claim that Henry studied at Queen's College, Oxford under Beaufort. What is secure is that he learned to read and write in French, Latin and English. That made him the first English king educated to write in the English vernacular.

  Before long, that education would give way to campaigning in Wales.

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• 3. Wounds and Quarrels

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  From 1400 to 1404, Henry served as High Sheriff of Cornwall, and during the same years he commanded part of the English forces. He led his own army into Wales against the rebel Owain Glyndŵr. In 1403 he joined his father to face Henry "Hotspur" Percy, a member of the powerful Percy family of Northumberland.

  At the Battle of Shrewsbury on the 21st of July 1403, sixteen-year-old Henry was struck in the face by an arrow. It drove six inches into his skull and lodged near the left cheekbone, narrowly missing the major arteries and the brain. The royal physician John Bradmore took charge. He dressed the wound with honey, which worked as a natural antiseptic, and designed a specialised mechanical screw-tool to draw out the arrowhead without causing more damage.

  Bradmore later described the operation in a Latin manuscript called Philomena. He widened the wound, inserted the instrument, and eased the arrowhead out over several days, flushing the wound with white wine to keep infection away. The operation worked, but it left Henry with permanent scars on his face. He carried them as a mark of his time in battle.

  The Welsh revolt kept Henry busy, and the king's poor health pulled the prince into wider politics. From January 1410 he had practical control of the government, helped by his uncles Henry and Thomas Beaufort, who were legitimised sons of John of Gaunt. Henry disagreed with his father on both foreign and domestic policy. In November 1411 the king dismissed him from the council. The quarrel was political only, although the Beauforts had probably discussed the abdication of Henry IV. His opponents certainly tried to blacken the prince's name.

  Henry's friendship with John Oldcastle, who sympathised with the Lollards, may have raised hopes among that movement. The Lollards were a religious movement that the authorities sought to suppress. Henry's opposition to Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, may have fed those hopes. Their disappointment after he became king may explain why churchmen such as Thomas Walsingham wrote that Henry had suddenly turned into a new man at his accession.

  On the 20th of March 1413 Henry IV died, and the son who had been shut out of the council took the throne.

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• 4. A Kingdom United

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  Onlookers at his coronation described a king who was "very tall (6 feet 3 inches), slim, with dark hair cropped in a ring above the ears, and clean-shaven". His face was lean and ruddy, with a prominent, pointed nose. Depending on his mood, his eyes "flashed from the mildness of a dove's to the brilliance of a lion's".

  On the second day of his reign, Henry issued writs summoning Parliament. His biographer Christopher Allmand called this the opening of "a joint enterprise in government". Parliament met eleven times during the reign, and Henry attended six of those sittings. As Prince of Wales he had watched his father struggle to manage the assembly, and he set out to avoid the same trouble.

  Henry Beaufort wrote the addresses to the first six parliaments. They showed a king who upheld the law, defended the Church and stood firm against the national enemy. When Parliament met at Leicester in April 1414, Henry was reminded that he must enforce the law, act justly and seek "bon governance". Allmand reads these speeches as a carefully managed portrait of a ruler who fulfilled every part of his office.

  Much of the legislation dealt with suppressing Lollardy and restoring order. Disturbances in Staffordshire, Cheshire and Northumberland were addressed at the Leicester parliament. Further unrest in Lancashire and Cheshire between 1419 and 1421 appears in seven of the eleven sittings. The Safe Conducts Act 1414, passed at Beaufort's urging, protected English merchants from piracy. New duties on wool, wine and hides supported maritime interests.

  Parliament was also generous with money. In 1413 it granted Henry a four-year subsidy on wool and woolfells, plus tonnage and poundage for one year, which were duties on trade. These terms were better than any given to his father. In February 1415 two more subsidies, calculated at £37,000, were voted to pay for the expedition to France.

  Henry let old grievances fade. Richard II was honourably reburied. The young Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March, was taken into favour, and the heirs of men who had suffered under the previous reign regained their titles and estates. Where he saw real danger, however, he struck hard. The Oldcastle Revolt broke out in January 1414. In 1417 Henry had his old friend Sir John Oldcastle burned, in order to "nip the movement in the bud".

  Starting in August 1417, Henry promoted English in government. His reign saw the appearance of Chancery Standard English and the adoption of English as the language of official record. He was the first king to use English in his personal letters since the Norman Conquest, 350 years earlier. The medievalist John Hurt Fisher argued that the reign was the "turning point in establishing English as the national language of England".

  One serious plot disturbed the calm. In July 1415, Richard of Conisburgh, Henry Scrope and Thomas Grey conspired to depose Henry and crown Edmund Mortimer instead. Mortimer himself revealed the scheme to the king, and the conspirators were swiftly executed. The king sailed from Southampton the following month.

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• 5. The Road to Agincourt

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  By June 1413 Henry was already asking for contributions to a French expedition, and by 1414 cannon were being cast at the Tower of London. The case for war offered several grievances. There were old commercial disputes, and France had helped Owain Glyndŵr. France was also in disorder, because the mentally unstable Charles VI presided over a court split between Armagnac and Burgundian factions.

  A later tradition said that churchmen pushed Henry toward war to distract attention from trouble at home. That version passed through the Tudor chroniclers to Shakespeare. Historians generally doubt it, since Henry's preparations were well advanced before any such pressure could have mattered.

  Underneath the pretexts lay a dynastic claim first pressed by Edward III. Edward descended through his mother Isabella from her father, Philip IV of France. When the direct Capetian line failed in 1328, the French chose Philip VI of the house of Valois instead. They defended the choice with Salic law, which supposedly barred inheritance through the female line. The quarrel opened the Hundred Years' War in 1337.

  Henry's actual demands owed less to the throne claim than to the 1360 Treaty of Brétigny. He and his father had both tried to enforce it. It called for the return of lands granted to England and for the unpaid remainder of the ransom of John II. For over two years Henry negotiated with both French factions while renewing truces with the crown. Embassies to Paris in 1414 and 1415 opened with sweeping territorial claims, retreated to modest ones, and returned empty-handed. Modern historians see this diplomacy as a way to extract concessions and look wronged while preparations went on, not as a real search for peace.

  On the 11th and the 12th of August 1415, Henry sailed from Southampton, and by the 14th he had landed near Harfleur on the Norman coast. His army besieged the fortress and captured it on the 22nd of September. Illness thinned his troops. On the 8th of October, against the warnings of his council, Henry began marching toward Calais.

  A blockade of the ford at Blanchetaque, near Abbeville, forced him inland to find another crossing. On the 19th and the 20th of October the army crossed south of Péronne at Béthencourt and Voyennes, then turned north again. On the 24th of October a French army blocked the road on the plains near the village of Agincourt.

  Early on the morning of the 25th of October, Henry led his exhausted, outnumbered and malnourished men into battle. Heavy rain the night before had turned the field into deep mud. The armoured French men-at-arms bogged down, soaked and slowed, and became easy targets for English archers on the flanks. Most were simply hacked down while stuck fast. The victory ranks with Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356 among the greatest English triumphs of the Hundred Years' War.

  During the fighting, Henry ordered the French prisoners taken so far to be killed. The Gesta Henrici Quinti, written by an eyewitness, explains the order as a response to the threat of a fresh attack by the French rearguard, which had not yet joined the fight. The Burgundian chroniclers Jean Le Fèvre and Jean de Waurin were both present. They record that Henry's men-at-arms were reluctant to obey because they stood to lose large ransoms. No contemporary chronicler explicitly condemned the king. Even a hostile French writer, Jean Juvénal des Ursins, treated the order as a misfortune of war and not a moral outrage.

  Henry marched on to Calais and came home to England in November. London welcomed him with triumphal pageantry, and choirs accompanied his procession to St. Paul's Cathedral. Parliament later granted him tonnage and poundage for life.

  For the French, the defeat did lasting harm. The weakened nobility began quarrelling among themselves.

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• 6. Conquest and Treaty

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  King Sigismund of Hungary, later Holy Roman Emperor, came to England after Agincourt hoping to make peace. He wanted Henry to soften his demands against the French. Henry entertained him lavishly and enrolled him in the Order of the Garter. Sigismund returned the honour by inducting Henry into the Order of the Dragon. Henry intended to crusade for that order once the English and French thrones were united, but he died before he could.

  In March 1416, a raiding force under the Earl of Dorset, Thomas Beaufort, narrowly escaped defeat at the Battle of Valmont after a counterattack by the garrison of Harfleur. A French and Genoese fleet then surrounded the harbour at Harfleur while a French army besieged the town. Henry was occupied with peace negotiations, so he sent his brother John, Duke of Bedford. Bedford raised a fleet and sailed from Beachy Head on the 14th of August. The next day, after seven gruelling hours at the Battle of the Seine, the Franco-Genoese fleet was beaten and Harfleur was relieved. That same August, the Treaty of Canterbury confirmed a short-lived alliance with the Holy Roman Empire.

  Henry renewed the war on a larger scale in 1417, after two years of patient preparation. He took Caen, swiftly conquered Lower Normandy, and besieged Rouen, cutting it off from Paris. The city's leaders could not feed the women and children, so they pushed them out through the gates, hoping Henry would let them pass. He refused. The expelled women and children starved to death in the ditches around the walls. The siege cast a long shadow over his reputation. Meanwhile the French were paralysed by the feud between Burgundians and Armagnacs, and Henry played one side against the other.

  Rouen fell in January 1419. Alain Blanchard, who had hanged English prisoners from the walls, was executed on the spot. Robert de Livet, a canon of Rouen who had excommunicated the English king, was sent to England and imprisoned for five years. By August the English army stood outside Paris.

  On the 10th of September 1419, partisans of the Dauphin Charles, the French heir, assassinated John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. The killing took place during a parley on the bridge of Montereau-Fault-Yonne. It drove John's successor, Philip the Good, to seek revenge and ally himself with Henry. That alliance gave Henry the political strength to press Charles VI into disinheriting the Dauphin and accepting Henry as heir and regent of France.

  After six months of negotiation came the Treaty of Troyes. It also arranged Henry's marriage to Catherine of Valois, Charles's daughter, with a dowry of 600,000 écus. The Estates General ratified the agreement in Paris in July 1420. The Dauphinist territories south of the Loire never accepted it.

  Henry married Catherine on the 2nd of June 1420 at Troyes Cathedral. Only two days later he besieged Sens, which fell in less than a week. The fortress at Montereau-Fault-Yonne capitulated by the 1st of July, and Melun fell by November 1420. Montereau changed hands again later. Charles VII retook it in 1428, the English soon recovered it, and Charles VII finally regained it on the 10th of October 1437. Henry himself returned to England after three and a half years of fighting in France. Catherine bore their son, the future Henry VI, at Windsor Castle on the 6th of December 1421.

  While Henry was in England, his brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence, commanded in France. On the 22nd of March 1421, Thomas led the English to a disastrous defeat against a Franco-Scottish army at Baugé, and he was killed. Henry sailed back on the 10th of June, in what became his last campaign. In July and August his forces besieged and captured Dreux, relieving allied forces at Chartres. On the 6th of October they laid siege to Meaux, which fell on the 10th of May 1422.

  The king fell ill the following month.

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• 7. Death and Inheritance

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  Henry fell ill in June 1422, shortly after the siege of Meaux. Jean de Wavrin claimed the king suffered from smallpox, leprosy or erysipelas, which was known as St. Anthony's fire. Thomas Basin suggested instead that he had caught dysentery at Meaux. Scholars consider dysentery the most probable cause, spread by unsanitary conditions in the English camp.

  In late June he seemed well enough to lead his forces toward Cosne-sur-Loire against troops loyal to the Dauphin. Then he relapsed, possibly from heatstroke or a return of dysentery, and had to be carried in a litter. He was taken to the Château de Vincennes, east of Paris, where he grew worse. In his last days he dictated codicils to his will. They named his brother John, Duke of Bedford, regent of France and appointed a council to govern England during his son's minority. Henry died in the early hours of the 31st of August 1422, aged 35, after reigning for nine years.

  His body was embalmed and carried to England. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on the 7th of November 1422. His tomb carries a 16th-century Latin inscription: "Henry V, hammer of the Gauls, lies here. … Virtue conquers all. … Flee idleness". A few yards away lies Richard Courtenay, his close companion and a member of his council. The two are not buried together, and one grave does not lie on top of the other, despite what some sources claim.

  Charles VI died in October 1422, less than two months after his son-in-law. Henry had been set to rule both realms after Charles's death. Instead, his infant son took the English throne as Henry VI at the age of nine months. A regency under Henry's surviving brothers, John, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, governed England and its French possessions until Henry VI came of age in 1437.

  For a time the regency worked, and England reached its greatest extent in France under Bedford. During the later reign of Henry VI, most of those lands were lost, through reconquest or diplomatic cession. Only the Pale of Calais remained, England's single foothold on the continent until it was lost in 1558. The losses fed civil strife over the succession. It culminated in the Wars of the Roses of 1455-1487, fought between Henry V's descendants, the House of Lancaster, and the House of York.

  Henry's name is also attached to stone. He is credited with commissioning King's College Chapel and Eton College Chapel, and with helping to found Syon Abbey in west London. Some of his building works stopped after his death, while others were continued by his son. Syon Abbey was completed under Henry VI. In the 16th century it was demolished during the English Reformation, in the reign of Henry VIII.

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• 8. Reputation

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  John Lydgate's Troy Book, commissioned by Henry himself in 1412 and finished in 1420, placed the king "in the highest place of the hous of fame". Lydgate's verses on the Kings of England, written around 1426, ranked Henry among the Nine Worthies. Thomas Hoccleve, a clerk of the Privy Seal, hailed Henry after the Treaty of Troyes as the "Swerd of knyghthode" and a "worthy Conqueror." An English verse account of the siege of Rouen, attributed to a "John Page", also called him a "conquerowre". The historical reliability of that account is debated.

  Several Latin biographies written during and shortly after the reign carried the image further. They are the Gesta Henrici Quinti, Thomas Elmham's Liber Metricus, the Vita et Gesta Henrici Quinti and Tito Livio Frulovisi's Vita Henrici Quinti. The historians Roskell and Taylor argue that the Gesta was political propaganda, meant to support the English delegation at the Council of Constance. Modern historians read all four works as products of Lancastrian commemoration, or as adjuncts to it.

  Across the Channel, the judgments were divided. The Saint-Denis chronicler Michel Pintouin credited Henry with "magnanimity, prudence and wisdom". The Burgundian chroniclers Jean de Wavrin and Jean Le Fèvre praised the strict discipline of his armies. Enguerrand de Monstrelet reported widespread fear of Henry in France. Georges Chastellain portrayed a tyrant driven by vainglory, and the Norman writer Robert Blondel read his early death as divine punishment for his brutality.

  Raphael Holinshed was the culmination of the Tudor chronicle tradition, and he shaped Henry into something "more like a moral stereotype than a historical figure of flesh and blood". Shakespeare drew on Holinshed for his play Henry V, which has since dominated popular perception of the king. Together with Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2 and Richard II, it forms the Henriad. These plays follow a reckless youth who keeps bad company until he becomes a virtuous ruler.

  The tale of the riotous youth may partly come from political enmity. The famous quarrel with the chief justice has no contemporary authority, and Sir Thomas Elyot first told it in 1531. The nearest contemporary evidence is Richard Courtenay, then Bishop of Norwich, who said the king had given up youthful pursuits and become chaste. As a longtime friend, however, he is a suspect source.

  Falstaff grew out of Henry's early friendship with Sir John Oldcastle. Shakespeare's character was originally named Oldcastle, following his main source, The Famous Victories of Henry V. Oldcastle's descendants objected, and the name was changed. The character became a composite of several real people, including Sir John Fastolf.

  On screen, Laurence Olivier played the king in his 1944 film Henry V and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Kenneth Branagh took the role in 1989 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, the Academy Award for Best Director, and a BAFTA Award for Best Actor. Timothée Chalamet played Henry in the 2019 Netflix film The King. Tom Hiddleston played him in the BBC series The Hollow Crown. In the video game Age of Empires II: The Conquerors, Henry appears as a paladin.

  Modern scholars judge his political legacy in France with more scepticism. Following E. F. Jacob, Allmand called Henry's bequest to his son a damnosa hereditas, meaning a harmful inheritance. He concluded that within a generation the French enterprise had become "an ever increasing political and financial liability". John Matusiak disagrees. He argues that the English collapse was not inevitable but turned on chance events after Henry's death. Normandy was held for a decade, and by 1429 the siege of Orléans came close to giving England a decisive victory.

  Malcolm Vale argues that the image of a "warmongering monarch" hides Henry's more durable achievements. These include restoring relations between crown and nobility, working productively with Parliament, and re-establishing political unity after his father's reign. Matusiak goes further. He says domestic governance, diplomacy and martial prowess were "part of an integrated whole" in Henry's own eyes. On this view, the wars were coordinated with diplomatic initiatives and not pursued for their own sake.

  The historian Dan Jones sees a man of contrasts. Henry had a reputation for being "austere to the point of desiccation", yet he was also "theatrical and astonishingly adept at the art of public spectacle". He was a hardened warrior who was also creative, artistic and literary, with a bookish temperament and a talent for composing music and playing several instruments. Jones concludes that Henry V was "the greatest man who ever ruled England."

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