Henry V of England

Henry V of England: The King Who Nearly Fused Two Crowns

An arrow struck the sixteen-year-old prince in the face at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, driving six inches into his skull. Royal surgeon John Bradmore extracted it with a purpose-built screw tool and dressed the wound with honey, leaving Henry scarred for life and, historians argue, marked with an early education in the physical cost of the wars he would later choose to fight himself. Thirteen years after that arrow, Henry V would stand over a waterlogged field near Agincourt commanding an exhausted, outnumbered army to the most lopsided victory of the Hundred Years' War, and four years after that he would sign a treaty that made an English king heir to the throne of France. Few medieval reigns compress so much decisive action into so short a span — nine and a half years, ended by dysentery at thirty-five.

A Kingdom Built on a Usurpation

Henry was born September 16, 1386, at Monmouth Castle, the son of Henry Bolingbroke, who seized the throne from Richard II in 1399 to become Henry IV. The new prince inherited an unprecedented stack of titles — Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Aquitaine, Duke of Lancaster — and, by his teens, practical command against the Welsh revolt of Owain Glyndŵr. He was educated well enough to become, in the judgment of modern historians, the first English king literate with ease in the vernacular, and by 1410 he had effectively taken over government from his ailing father, a period of friction that saw Henry IV strip him of his council seat in 1411. When Henry IV died in March 1413, the twenty-six-year-old who succeeded him moved immediately to heal his father's usurpation, reburying the deposed Richard II with honor at Westminster and restoring disinherited noble houses.

An Engaged, Efficient Government

Henry ran Parliament with unusual discipline: eleven sessions met during his reign, each lasting roughly four weeks against the nine weeks typical under his father, yet a higher proportion of Commons petitions became statute. Historian Christopher Allmand described king and Parliament as engaged in "a joint enterprise in government." Henry promoted English as the language of the crown from 1417 — the Chancery Standard that shaped modern written English traces partly to his reign — and he crushed the Lollard heresy, sending his former friend John Oldcastle to the gallows in 1417 after Oldcastle led an abortive rising.

Agincourt

Henry revived England's dynastic claim to the French throne and, after two years of diplomacy historians now read as theater for a war already decided, sailed from Southampton in August 1415 with roughly 1,500 ships. He took the port of Harfleur after a costly siege, then marched a disease-thinned army toward Calais against his own council's advice. On October 25, 1415, a much larger French force intercepted him near Agincourt. Overnight rain had turned the field to mud; French men-at-arms, weighed down by armor, bogged down within range of English longbowmen stationed on the flanks, and the battle broke in England's favor within about three hours. Henry's order to kill French prisoners when a renewed attack seemed imminent has divided commentators ever since — contemporary chroniclers, even hostile French ones, largely treated it as a wartime necessity rather than an atrocity. He returned to London for a triumph he staged with calculated humility, entering the city in a plain gown and crediting the victory to God rather than himself.

The Systematic Conquest of Normandy

Where the 1415 campaign was a raid, Henry's return to France in 1417 was an occupation. He landed with roughly 10,000 men and took Normandy town by town — Caen, Falaise, and, after a five-month siege that ended in January 1419, Rouen, where the starving garrison expelled the old, sick, and poor into the ditches beneath the walls and Henry, by his own choice, initially fed none of them. The tactic worked and the reputational cost has "weighed on his reputation since," in one historian's phrase. English naval victories, including the Battle of the Seine in 1416 under Henry's brother John of Bedford, secured the Channel crossing that made the whole campaign possible.

Troyes and the Dual Monarchy

The assassination of the Burgundian duke John the Fearless in September 1419 handed Henry the alliance he needed: Burgundy turned against the French crown's own faction, the Dauphinists, and against them Henry negotiated the Treaty of Troyes, signed May 21, 1420. Rather than ceding territory in the traditional pattern of Anglo-French peace-making, the treaty diverted the French succession itself, disinheriting the Dauphin and naming Henry heir and regent of France, sealed by his marriage to Charles VI's daughter Catherine of Valois. It was, in Allmand's words, a settlement that broke with the entire prior tradition of the war.

Death Before the Prize

Henry never lived to wear the second crown. Besieging Meaux through a miserable winter, he fell ill in June 1422, probably with dysentery, and was carried by litter to the Château de Vincennes, where he died on August 31, 1422, aged thirty-five, having reigned nine and a half years. He died seven weeks before Charles VI, so his nine-month-old son, Henry VI, briefly became nominal king of both France and England — what historian Malcolm Vale calls "the nearest the two kingdoms came to a workable union." It did not last: Burgundy abandoned the English alliance at the Congress of Arras in 1435, and by 1453 every French conquest Henry had won was lost, leaving only Calais in English hands until 1558.

Why Henry Is Called a Genius

The praise for Henry V is overwhelmingly military and administrative rather than intellectual in the abstract sense. Historian K. B. McFarlane called him "the greatest man that ever ruled England," a judgment echoed by Anne Curry, who labels him fifteenth-century England's "golden boy," and Britannica credits his "strategic genius" not to any single battlefield stroke but to the patient, systematic reduction of French fortresses town by town — logistics, siege engineering, and disciplined use of the longbow and early cannon, deployed at the precise moment before French fortification could adapt to gunpowder. That is a genius of organization and timing, not of ideas. The counter-case is equally well documented: historian A. J. Pollard calls him a "warmonger" whose "over-reaching ambition left his realm bankrupt," and Ian Mortimer argues he was "deeply flawed," proof that "a man may be a hero and yet a monster," citing Rouen's starved civilians and the killing of Agincourt's prisoners. Even sympathetic historians now frame his conquest as a "damnosa hereditas" — a harmful inheritance his infant son could not sustain. Henry's competence at war and government was real and widely attested by contemporaries; whether it deserves the word genius, or merely ruthless, well-timed skill, remains genuinely contested among historians rather than settled.

Legacy

Shakespeare's Henriad fixed Henry in popular memory as the reformed prodigal turned warrior-king, a version with little basis in contemporary evidence of a riotous youth. The historical Henry left more durable marks at home than abroad: a more orderly Parliament, an English-language monarchy, and a domestic settlement that outlasted the French empire he assembled and his heirs immediately lost.

Achievements

• Knight of the Garter — 1399
• Educated at The Queen's College
• Worked as politician