Henry V of England

Henry was born on September 16, 1386, at Monmouth Castle in the Welsh Marches, which earned him the nickname Henry of Monmouth ^[1]. His father was Henry Bolingbroke, earl of Derby and later duke of Hereford, and his mother was Mary de Bohun, co-heiress of one of England's wealthiest noble families. Mary died in 1394, when the boy was seven, and his grandmother Joan de Bohun took a hand in his upbringing ^[2].

At his birth no one expected him to wear a crown. His grandfather John of Gaunt was merely the uncle of the reigning king, Richard II, and the family's prospects turned on court politics rather than succession. That changed abruptly in 1398, when Richard exiled Bolingbroke after a quarrel with Thomas Mowbray. Richard kept the young Henry at court, partly as a hostage for his father's good behaviour, and even took him on campaign to Ireland in 1399 ^[1].

While they were in Ireland, Bolingbroke landed in Yorkshire, raised the northern lords, and seized the throne as Henry IV. Richard was deposed and died in captivity at Pontefract early in 1400. The twelve-year-old Henry of Monmouth was suddenly heir apparent to a usurped crown, created Prince of Wales, duke of Cornwall, and earl of Chester in October 1399 ^[2]. Anyone asking who was Henry V of England has to begin here: he was a king's son only by revolution, and the insecurity of that inheritance shaped his whole career.

The prince learned war early and learned it the hard way. From 1400 the revolt of Owain Glyndwr set Wales alight, and Henry, still a teenager, was given nominal and then real command of English forces there ^[3]. The Welsh campaigns were grinding, expensive, and often humiliating, but they taught him siegecraft, logistics, and the patience that later marked his French wars.

In July 1403 the Percy family of Northumberland rose against Henry IV. At the battle of Shrewsbury the sixteen-year-old prince fought in the front line and was struck in the face by an arrow that lodged deep beside his nose. The royal surgeon John Bradmore extracted the barb with a specially made instrument and treated the wound over several weeks, a procedure he described in his own treatise ^[4]. Henry carried the scar for life, and the survival itself became part of his reputation for toughness.

As Henry IV's health collapsed after 1405, the prince moved into national politics. He dominated the royal council between 1410 and 1411 with the support of his Beaufort relatives, pursuing his own line on finance and on intervention in the French civil war between the Burgundian and Armagnac factions ^[3]. The old king resented being managed and dismissed his son from the council late in 1411. Contemporary rumours of a wild, dissolute youth, later magnified by Tudor writers and by Shakespeare's Prince Hal, rest on thin evidence; the documented record shows an overworked military administrator rather than a tavern rake ^[1]. Henry IV died on March 20, 1413, and the prince was crowned at Westminster on April 9 during a freak spring snowstorm ^[2].

Any list of Henry V of England achievements begins with France, but his first successes were domestic. He restored crown finances, buried Richard II honourably in Westminster Abbey to close old wounds, and rode out two early threats: the Lollard rising associated with his former companion Sir John Oldcastle in January 1414, and the Southampton Plot of 1415, in which Richard, earl of Cambridge, planned to replace him with Edmund Mortimer ^[3]. Both were crushed quickly, and England behind him stayed remarkably quiet for the rest of the reign.

He then revived the English claim to the French throne. After negotiations with the government of the intermittently insane Charles VI broke down, Henry sailed in August 1415 with an army of roughly 10,500 men and besieged Harfleur, which fell in late September after a costly five-week siege in which dysentery thinned his ranks ^[5]. Marching his reduced force toward Calais, he was intercepted near the village of Azincourt on October 25, 1415. There his tired army, anchored by massed longbowmen fighting on muddy ground that swallowed the French cavalry and men at arms, destroyed a substantially larger French force. The French dead included three dukes and numerous counts and knights, while English losses were strikingly light ^[5]. Agincourt made Henry's name across Europe and remains the fact most people reach for first among Henry V of England facts.

The follow-up mattered more than the battle. In 1416 he secured the alliance of the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund by the Treaty of Canterbury, and his brother John, duke of Bedford, broke a Franco-Genoese blockade of Harfleur at sea ^[3]. From 1417 to 1419 Henry conducted a methodical conquest of Normandy, taking Caen in 1417 and starving Rouen into surrender in January 1419 after a siege of nearly six months ^[6]. When the murder of Duke John the Fearless of Burgundy at Montereau in September 1419 drove the Burgundians into his arms, the road to Paris opened.

The result was the Treaty of Troyes, sealed on May 21, 1420. Charles VI recognised Henry as his heir and as regent of France, disinheriting the Dauphin Charles, and gave him his daughter Catherine in marriage ^[6]. No English king before or after came closer to uniting the two crowns.

Henry married Catherine of Valois, youngest daughter of Charles VI and Isabeau of Bavaria, at Troyes on June 2, 1420, twelve days after the treaty was sealed ^[6]. She was crowned queen of England at Westminster in February 1421. Their only child, the future Henry VI, was born at Windsor on December 6, 1421, while his father was besieging Meaux; Henry V never saw his son ^[2].

The king's private character was austere. Chroniclers close to the court describe a man of conventional but intense piety who heard mass daily, founded the religious houses of Syon and Sheen, and supposedly renounced the looser habits of his youth on the day of his coronation ^[1]. He was also literate and musical: he is among the earliest English kings whose surviving letters were written in English rather than French or Latin, a deliberate choice that helped push English into official use ^[3].

There was a harder edge. He ordered the killing of most of the French prisoners at Agincourt when he feared a renewed attack, a decision debated by historians ever since, and he let the population of besieged Rouen starve in the ditch between the lines rather than let them pass ^[5]. Discipline in his armies was famously strict, protecting non-combatants on paper while the wars themselves devastated Normandy. Admirers and critics alike agree that he was single-minded to the point of coldness ^[7].

Troyes did not end the war, because the disinherited Dauphin still held France south of the Loire. In March 1421 Henry's brother Thomas, duke of Clarence, was killed at Baugé by a Franco-Scottish army, the first serious English defeat of the reign ^[3]. Henry returned to France in June 1421 to steady the situation and undertook the siege of Meaux, a strongly fortified Dauphinist town east of Paris, through the winter of 1421 to 1422.

Meaux surrendered in May 1422, but the eight-month siege broke the king's health. He contracted what contemporaries described as a flux, generally identified by modern historians as dysentery, and grew steadily weaker through the summer ^[6]. Too ill to ride, he was carried by litter and by boat to the royal castle of Vincennes outside Paris.

Henry V died at the Château de Vincennes on August 31, 1422, a fortnight short of his thirty-sixth birthday ^[1]. On his deathbed he arranged the government of both realms, assigning France to his brother Bedford and a leading role in England to his brother Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and reportedly said he had hoped to go on crusade to Jerusalem. Charles VI died on October 21, 1422, so Henry missed the French crown he had negotiated by less than two months. His nine-month-old son succeeded to both thrones. The king's body was boiled and embalmed, escorted home in a grand funeral procession, and buried in a chantry chapel at Westminster Abbey in November 1422 ^[2].

The empire Henry built began unravelling within a generation. Bedford defended the dual monarchy ably until his death in 1435, but Joan of Arc's intervention, the Burgundian defection, and the weakness of Henry VI led to the loss of everything except Calais by 1453 ^[7]. Judged by permanence, the conquest failed. Judged by what one ruler extracted from a medium-sized kingdom in nine years, it has few medieval parallels.

His reputation among historians has stayed unusually high. K. B. McFarlane, the most influential twentieth-century scholar of Lancastrian England, called him the greatest man who ever ruled England, while later biographers such as Christopher Allmand have offered more measured portraits that still credit his administrative grip, his financial competence, and his ability to command loyalty ^[3]. Others weigh the cost: a war of conquest that mortgaged English finances, ravaged northern France, and left a child king holding claims that guaranteed decades more fighting ^[7].

Popular memory runs through Shakespeare. The play Henry V, written around 1599, fixed the image of the reformed prince and the band of brothers at Agincourt, and film versions by Laurence Olivier in 1944 and Kenneth Branagh in 1989 renewed it for modern audiences ^[8]. Every Henry V of England biography now has to negotiate that theatrical afterlife, separating the documented commander from the stage hero. The documented man is arresting enough: a usurper's son who made his dynasty look inevitable, if only for a moment.