Henry V of England: The Warrior King
Henry V (1386–1422) was King of England from 1413 to 1422 and the English king who reopened the Hundred Years’ War with a campaign that briefly seemed to make the English conquest of France inevitable. He won the most famous English victory of the entire conflict at Agincourt (25 October 1415), conquered Normandy 1417–1419, and by the Treaty of Troyes (21 May 1420) was recognised as regent and heir of France. His early death at the Château de Vincennes on 31 August 1422, of dysentery contracted at the siege of Meaux, deprived the English cause of the one ruler who might have completed the conquest. He was thirty-six years old. His infant son, Henry VI, was proclaimed King of England and France, but the Dauphin, the future Charles VII, refused the disinheritance and held the centre and south. Within a generation the Lancastrian empire in France had been lost.
The standard modern biography is Christopher Allmand’s Henry V (1992), the most useful single-volume account. The most detailed treatment of the reign in the context of the war is Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War, vol. III (2009). Anne Curry’s Agincourt: A New History (2005) and Henry V: Play, Prince, Pirate and King (2022) reset the most-studied elements of the reign.
Early life and the Shrewsbury wound
Henry was born on 16 September 1386 at Monmouth Castle, the eldest surviving son of Henry IV and Mary de Bohun. His father had come to the throne in 1399 by deposing his cousin Richard II, an act of usurpation that cast a long shadow over the legitimacy of the Lancastrian dynasty. Henry was made Prince of Wales in 1399, and he served as the effective governor of Wales and the Welsh Marches.
In 1403, when he was sixteen, Henry commanded part of the English army at the Battle of Shrewsbury, a major engagement against the rebellious Percy family. He was wounded in the face by an arrow, an injury that left a permanent scar. The experience of Shrewsbury, where he was forced to fight against the heirs of the man his father had deposed, gave Henry a lifelong appreciation of the importance of legitimacy and the need to win the support of the English political class.
Henry took an active role in the administration of the kingdom during his father’s reign. He was a member of his father’s council, and he served as the effective head of the royal government during the king’s bouts of illness in 1411–1412. By the time of his accession in March 1413, Henry was a serious, capable, and politically astute ruler, very different from the chivalric figure that Shakespeare would later portray.
The invasion of 1415
Henry reopened the war with France in August 1415, ostensibly to enforce his family’s ancient claim to the French throne. The immediate pretext was the disputed succession to the duchy of Aquitaine and the long-running French support of Welsh and Scottish rebels. The deeper reasons were more pragmatic: Henry needed a foreign war to legitimise his dynasty, to satisfy the war-hungry English aristocracy, and to unite the kingdom behind a common cause.
Henry assembled a substantial army in the summer of 1415 and crossed to France. The campaign opened with the long siege of Harfleur, which surrendered in September 1415 after a five-week resistance. The English army, however, was exhausted and sick from the siege, and Henry decided to march his army overland to Calais. The march gave the French time to assemble a large army under the constable Charles d’Albret, and the two forces came into contact near the village of Agincourt on 25 October 1415.
The battle is treated in detail in its own cluster article. The result, however, is the key to the rest of the reign: the destruction of a French army two to four times the size of the English, the deaths of the Constable d’Albret, the Dukes of Alençon and Brabant, the Count of Nevers, and a substantial proportion of the French chivalric class. English losses were perhaps 400–600, French losses perhaps 1,500–4,000 of all ranks. Shakespeare, working from Holinshed and Hall, fixed the image in English memory.
The conquest of Normandy, 1417–1419
Henry followed up Agincourt with a methodical conquest of Normandy. The campaign, conducted over several years, was marked by a series of sieges: Caen (1417), Cherbourg (1417), Rouen (1419), and a string of smaller places. The Norman nobility, divided by the French civil war and weakened by the loss of their leaders at Agincourt, were unable to mount an effective resistance. By 1419 Henry controlled most of Normandy and was in a position to dictate terms to the French.
The conquest of Normandy was a major strategic achievement. The duchy had been lost by the English in 1204, and its recovery by Henry was a remarkable reversal. The English would hold Normandy until 1449, when Charles VII finally expelled them.
The Treaty of Troyes, 21 May 1420
The Treaty of Troyes, signed on 21 May 1420, was the most ambitious diplomatic instrument of the war. The mad King Charles VI, under the influence of Queen Isabeau and the Burgundian faction, recognised Henry as regent and heir of France and contracted Henry to marry Catherine of Valois. The Dauphin, the future Charles VII, was disinherited. The treaty seemed to settle the fate of France in favour of the English, and was celebrated throughout England as the validation of the Lancastrian claim to the French throne.
The treaty depended on the survival of the two principals. Henry died of dysentery at the Château de Vincennes on 31 August 1422, seven weeks before Charles VI (who died on 21 October 1422). The infant Henry VI was proclaimed King of France and England, but the Dauphin refused the disinheritance and held the centre and south. The Lancastrian settlement was, in effect, void from the moment of Henry’s death.
Henry’s character and the Shakespearean image
Henry was a strict, pious, and highly capable ruler, the embodiment of the medieval warrior-king. He was an effective military commander, a shrewd diplomat, and a determined administrator. He was also, by the standards of the time, a man of great personal courage, as he had demonstrated at Shrewsbury and at Agincourt.
Henry’s reputation has been shaped by Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599), but the historical Henry was rather different from Shakespeare’s idealised portrait. The historical Henry was a serious and calculating ruler, more interested in the practical business of government than in the chivalric ideals of the age. He was, however, capable of inspiring the men who served him, and the loyalty of his soldiers was a major factor in his military success. The most useful single treatment of the historical Henry is Allmand (1992); the question of how accurate Shakespeare’s play is as a source for the historical king is treated in a separate long-tail article.
The death at Vincennes
Henry died on 31 August 1422 at the Château de Vincennes, of dysentery contracted during the siege of Meaux. He was thirty-six years old. The cause of death was a particular cruelty: Henry had been the most successful English king of the war, and the one ruler who might have completed the conquest. The infant Henry VI was crowned King of England at Westminster in 1429 and King of France at Notre-Dame in 1431, but the boy was unable to maintain the conquests his father had made. The war would turn against the English within a decade, and the last English possession in France, Bordeaux, would fall in 1453.
The legacy
Henry V’s legacy is, in the long view, paradoxical. On the one hand, his reign saw the most spectacular English victories of the entire war, and the Treaty of Troyes seemed to make the English conquest of France inevitable. On the other hand, the long-term consequences of his policies were disastrous: the war he reopened in 1415 would eventually lead to the loss of all English possessions in France, and the political instability of the next generation would contribute to the Wars of the Roses.
The conventional reading, set out by Allmand, is that Henry’s achievement was to win the most concentrated series of English victories of the entire war, and that the loss of the war was the consequence of his early death, the incapacity of his infant heir, and the structural problems of the Lancastrian state. The conventional reading, however, is not unanimous. The more critical view, set out by some contributors to the Oxford Handbook of Medieval Warfare and developed in some of the modern literature on the Lancastrian phase, is that Henry’s strategy was always going to fail: the English could not occupy so much French territory indefinitely, and the war was unwinnable in the long run. The debate is part of the larger debate about the strategic logic of the Lancastrian war.