How Did Henry V Die?
Henry V died of dysentery at the Château de Vincennes, east of Paris, on 31 August 1422. He was 36 years old. His death, seven weeks before that of Charles VI on 21 October 1422, destroyed the political architecture of the Treaty of Troyes and left the infant Henry VI the heir to a conquest that the English crown could not, in the end, hold. The war, which the victor of Agincourt had seemed on the verge of ending, was about to enter its longest and most disastrous phase.
The siege of Meaux
The disease that killed Henry V was almost certainly contracted during the siege of Meaux, a French-held town on the Marne east of Paris that had been in revolt against the Anglo-Burgundian regime since 1421. The siege opened in October 1421 and dragged on through the winter. The garrison, under the Bastard of Vaurus, was reinforced by French regular troops under the Vidame de Laon and by armed townsmen, and the operations to take the town involved substantial flooding of the surrounding country. The conditions — cold, wet, and crowded — were ideal for bacterial dysentery. Henry, who was present throughout the siege in person, came down with the disease in the spring of 1422.
The disease
Dysentery in 1422 was overwhelmingly a bacterial infection, transmitted by contaminated water and by the faecal-oral route. Without rehydration therapy the disease could kill a fit adult man within a few weeks. The royal physicians, who were in attendance from May 1422 onwards, would have used the conventional late-medieval armamentarium — purging, bleeding, herbal infusions, and prayers to saints — none of which was effective against the underlying infection. Henry’s case appears to have been a particularly severe bacillary dysentery, with the bloody stools that medieval physicians called the dysenteria of Galen. The king’s condition worsened through the summer. By the second week of August he was clearly dying, and on 27 August he received the last rites.
The last days
Henry was moved from Paris to the more salubrious air of the Château de Vincennes on 27 August 1422. He died there in the early hours of 31 August 1422. The contemporary English Gesta Henrici Quinti records the death in some detail; the French Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denis notes it with the satisfaction of a man who had expected it. The king was lucid until close to the end. He appointed his uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, as Protector of England and his brother, John, Duke of Bedford, as regent of France; he enjoined both to maintain the alliance with Philip, Duke of Burgundy; and he asked to be buried in the chapel of the Confessor at Westminster Abbey. The funeral took place on 7 November 1422, with the king laid to rest in the magnificent tomb that still stands in the Abbey.
The consequences
The death, by itself, would have been a serious blow. The death in its specific political context was a catastrophe. The Treaty of Troyes (21 May 1420) had been a personal instrument: Henry V, regent of France, married to Catherine of Valois, and acknowledged as heir to the French throne on the death of Charles VI. The English position in France rested on the personal union of the two kingdoms in Henry’s heirs. The infant Henry VI, born 6 December 1421, became King of England on 31 August 1422 and King of France on 21 October 1422, when Charles VI died; the dukes of Bedford and Gloucester struggled to maintain a settlement that required a generation of careful diplomacy and an adult king. The French, meanwhile, rallied to the disinherited Dauphin, the future Charles VII, at Bourges. The dual monarchy survived in theory until 1453, but it had lost its political substance the day Henry V died.
The conspiracy theories
Modern historians have not, in general, given credit to the various poisoning theories that circulated in the 15th and 16th centuries. The most famous of these, the French claim that the Duke of Bedford had Henry poisoned to clear the way for his own advancement, has no basis in the contemporary English or French sources. The duke of Bedford, the English regent of France, had every motive to keep his brother alive and no obvious access to the royal food. The simpler explanation — that a fit but stressed ruler, campaigning in unsanitary conditions through a wet winter, contracted a near-always-fatal bacterial infection — is also the better one. Anne Curry’s reading of the Gesta Henrici Quinti in Agincourt: A New History (2005) is the most useful modern treatment of the king’s final years.
The historiographical argument
A live scholarly question, treated by Jonathan Sumption in volume II of The Hundred Years’ War, is whether Henry V’s conquest of France was viable at all, even without the dysentery. The treaty of Troyes depended on Burgundian cooperation, on the continued incapacity of Charles VI, and on Henry’s own personal energy in the management of the dual monarchy. Burgundy broke with the English at the Congress of Arras in September 1435. Charles VI died in October 1422, seven weeks after Henry, and the regency was left in the hands of Bedford, who was an excellent soldier and a mediocre politician. The dysentery at Meaux was a contingent event, but the underlying structural fragility of the Anglo-Burgundian regime was not. The war, in this reading, was lost in the decade before Henry died.
Legacy
Henry V was buried at Westminster Abbey on 7 November 1422. The elaborate tomb, with its effigy in oak and its painted chestnut head, was a deliberate piece of Lancastrian political theatre: the king of France and England, the second Charlemagne, the victor of Agincourt, laid to rest beside the Confessor. It was, in the event, the tomb of an empire. Within a generation Normandy was lost, Gascony was lost, and the long English presence in France — three centuries of it, from Henry II onward — was finished.