Henry V: the victor of Agincourt

Henry V was the warrior king of English legend, immortalized by Shakespeare, who led a small, sick and hungry army deep into France and won one of the most astonishing victories of the age. On a muddy field at Agincourt in 1415, his outnumbered soldiers and their longbows destroyed the flower of French chivalry. Yet the battle was only one episode in a methodical war of conquest that made him, within five years, the heir to the throne of France.¹

Early life: the prince with the scar

Henry was born at Monmouth Castle, the eldest son of Henry Bolingbroke, then earl of Derby, and Mary de Bohun. Even the year is uncertain: Westminster Abbey gives 16 September 1386, the date it says historians now accept, while Britannica gives 16 September 1387 with a question mark and Kingsford preferred 9 August 1387. He grew up in a family on the edge of the throne. When his father was exiled in 1398, Richard II took the boy into his own household, treated him kindly and knighted him during his Irish expedition of 1399. Within months the tables had turned: Bolingbroke came back, deposed Richard and became Henry IV, and on 15 October 1399 the boy was created prince of Wales.²

Britannica's biographer C.D. Ross credits his uncle Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, with much of his education, and calls him the first English king who could read and write with ease in the English tongue. He loved music and books. He also learned war very young. On 21 July 1403, at the Battle of Shrewsbury, the teenage prince fought against the rebel Henry “Hotspur” Percy and Hotspur's uncle Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester, who until that summer had been the prince's own governor; the historians James Hamilton Wylie, James Ramsay and C.L. Kingsford all give Worcester that role. In the battle Henry was struck in the face by an arrow. The head lodged about six inches deep. The royal surgeon John Bradmore treated him at Kenilworth with an extractor of his own design, which fitted into the socket of the arrowhead, opened to grip it and drew it out. Henry survived with a scar.³

Rise: Wales, the council and the throne

From October 1400 the government of Wales ran in the prince's name, and from 1403 he took command of the war against the Welsh rising of Owain Glyn Dŵr, a grinding struggle of sieges and raids that absorbed him until about 1408. The recovery of Harlech Castle in February 1409 broke the back of the rebellion. The young commander learned there what he would apply in France: wars are won by taking and holding strong places, not only by battles.⁴

From about 1408 he demanded a voice in government and a seat on the council, against his ailing father and Archbishop Thomas Arundel. The tales of a wild, tavern-haunting youth that Shakespeare made famous go back to within twenty years of his death, and Ross does not dismiss them entirely, though he reads them as the restlessness of a young man without enough to do. The most famous story, his quarrel with the chief justice, was a Tudor invention first told in 1531.⁵

Henry IV died on 20 March 1413 and his son succeeded him the next day. The new reign was soon tested. A Lollard rising in January 1414 was crushed, and in July 1415 the king learned of a plot by Richard, earl of Cambridge, Henry, Lord Scrope of Masham, and Sir Thomas Grey to put Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, on the throne. Mortimer himself gave them away, and all three were executed in early August, days before the fleet sailed.⁶

Campaigns

Henry's claims in France went far beyond the lands promised to England in 1360. He demanded Normandy, Touraine and Maine as well, and when the government of the mentally ill Charles VI, torn between the Burgundian and Armagnac factions, refused, he turned to what he called “the way of force.” He prepared the war carefully: loans and generous parliamentary taxes paid for it, and diplomacy kept John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, at least neutral.⁷

Harfleur and the march to Calais, 1415. He sailed in August 1415 and landed at Chef-de-Caux, at the mouth of the Seine near Harfleur, with an army of about 12,000 men, the figure Britannica gives and close to the total Kingsford reached from the muster rolls and the account of the king's chaplain. Harfleur held out longer than he expected and only surrendered on 22 September; disease, casualties and desertions had cut his force badly. On 8 October he set out for English-held Calais with about 1,000 men-at-arms and 5,000 archers. French troops held the crossings of the Somme, and the long detour upstream let a large French army under the constable Charles d'Albret and Marshal Boucicaut get across his road near the village of Agincourt.⁸

Agincourt, 25 October 1415. The English had marched more than 200 miles and many were sick with dysentery. The size of the French army is disputed: Britannica gives the common estimate of 20,000 to 30,000 against about 6,000 English, while noting that one scholar puts the French at no more than 12,000. Henry drew up on a freshly plowed field between two woods, men-at-arms in the center and archers on the wings behind sharpened stakes. A week of rain had turned the ground to mud. The French advanced into a funnel, slowed by the mud and shot down by the longbows, and the later lines piled into the first so tightly that the knights could barely use their weapons. The archers dropped their bows and joined in with swords and axes.⁹

Then came the darkest moment of Henry's career. As prisoners were being gathered, a band of local men raided the English baggage behind the lines, and with a French line still on the field Henry ordered the prisoners killed; the killing had begun when the last French troops drew off. When it was over, the French dead ran into thousands, many of them nobles: Britannica estimates about 6,000, while Ramsay notes that the chroniclers' figures range from 4,000 to 11,000. English losses were small, about 400 by Britannica's estimate and fewer still in the chronicles. Charles, duke of Orléans, was among the prisoners.¹⁰ › Battle of Agincourt, 1415

Diplomacy and the sea, 1416. Britannica judges the battle in no way strategically decisive, but it made Henry the arbiter of Europe. The emperor-elect Sigismund visited England in 1416, recognized his claim to France and made an alliance with him at Canterbury, and John the Fearless offered homage. In August 1416 an English fleet won the Battle of the Seine, and from then on English control of the Channel was not seriously challenged, an awareness of sea power that Ross calls unusual in a medieval king.¹¹

The conquest of Normandy, 1417 to 1419. Henry came back in 1417 to do what he had always planned: reduce northern France town by town and garrison each one, with officials and tax collectors following the soldiers. Caen was stormed in September 1417 and sacked, then Alençon and Évreux fell. Rouen, the Norman capital, was besieged from the end of July 1418 and surrendered on 19 January 1419. Then the murder of John the Fearless on the bridge of Montereau in September 1419, by men of the dauphin, drove his son Philip the Good into Henry's arms.¹²

Troyes and the last campaigns, 1420 to 1422. By the Treaty of Troyes of 21 May 1420 the dauphin was disinherited, and Henry became regent and heir of France; on 2 June he married Charles VI's daughter Catherine of Valois. The dual monarchy existed mostly on parchment. France split three ways, between Henry in Normandy and Paris, Burgundy, and the dauphin south of the Loire. Henry took Melun in November 1420 after a long siege and spent the first months of 1421 in England, where Catherine was crowned in February. In his absence, on 22 March 1421, his brother Thomas, duke of Clarence, rode ahead of most of his army to attack a Franco-Scottish force at Baugé and was killed with the men around him. Henry sailed back in June and in October laid siege to Meaux, which held out until May 1422.¹³

Character and command style

Henry's true talent, in Ross's view, lay less in winning battles than in planning wars. His strategy of permanent garrisons in captured towns, paid for by the conquered land, stands in sharp contrast with the destructive raids of the previous century. He took care over money, ships and allies before he moved an army, and he kept discipline hard: on the march to Agincourt he had a soldier hanged for stealing a pyx from a church.¹⁴

He was not a gentle man. Ross calls him hard, domineering and intolerant of opposition, ruthless and cruel when his policy demanded it, too lacking in chivalry to be a “typical medieval hero.” Yet his contemporaries, French writers among them, praised his justice, courage and honesty. As king he lived austerely and his piety was real; on his deathbed he said he wished he might live to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. He led from the front, and he could make men follow him.¹⁵

Death and legacy

The sieges of Melun and Meaux broke his health. Henry died at the château of Vincennes, near Paris, on 31 August 1422, in his mid-thirties. Britannica calls the illness camp fever; Kingsford thought it probably dysentery, made worse by the hardships of war. Charles VI died on 21 October, less than two months later, so Henry never wore the French crown. His infant son became Henry VI; by Henry's dying wishes his brother John, duke of Bedford, was to be regent of France, and another brother, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, was to keep the regency of England.¹⁶ › Battle of Verneuil, 1424

His embalmed body lay for a time in Rouen Cathedral, then crossed to Dover and was carried in procession to London; he was buried in Westminster Abbey on 7 November 1422. He had asked for a chantry chapel above his tomb, built between 1437 and 1450, whose Latin inscription calls him the “hammer of the Gauls.” The silver head of his funeral effigy was stolen in 1546. His saddle, shield and helm hung above the tomb for centuries; the Abbey notes that the helm is a tilting helm, so it is not the one he wore in battle.¹⁷

That judgment, quoted by Ross, is only half the story. Ross also calls the tragedy of the reign the use of great gifts for a dubious foreign war rather than reform at home, and his early death left England with a long royal minority. The conquest did not outlast the next generation: Joan of Arc relieved Orléans in 1429, and by the 1450s the English had lost all their lands in France except Calais and Guînes. Agincourt, though, stayed in the national memory, sharpened by Shakespeare's play of 1599 and its “band of brothers.”¹⁸ › Joan of Arc

Agincourt came after the English victories at Crécy and Poitiers; read the full story of the Battle of Agincourt, what else happened on 25 October, or explore the greatest battles of the Middle Ages.