On 2 December 1420, the Chancellor of England, Thomas Langley, Bishop of Durham, addressed the assembled Lords and Commons at the opening of Parliament at Westminster. ‘We people of England,’ he began, ‘have very special reason to honour and thank Almighty God.’ The reason, as nobody present would have needed reminding, was the ‘high grace, victory and achievement’ that God had granted to England’s king, Henry V. Langley enumerated these achievements: ‘the suppression of the Welsh rebellion in his youth’, and later, when king, ‘the destruction of heresies and Lollardy within the kingdom’. But Henry V’s crowning glory, sealed by the Treaty of Troyes some eight months before, on 21 May, was
the recovery of ancient rights pertaining to his crown of England in France and in the blessed conclusion of peace and unity between him … and his former adversary of France … to the glorious pleasure of God and to the undoubted advantage and happiness of all this kingdom of England.1
At the eastern French city of Troyes, Charles VI of France had recognized Henry V of England as his rightful heir. By the treaty terms, on Charles’s death Henry would become King of France – and in doing so he would turn the dream of English kings, ever since Edward III declared himself King of France in 1340, into reality. In the meantime, Henry would be regent for the mentally and physically ailing Charles, whose daughter Catherine he married two weeks after the signing of the treaty, on 2 June. Once Henry succeeded his father-in-law, and for all time to come, the two thrones of England and France would be united under the same ruler. The treaty ordered an immediate end to all animosity between the two realms and their peoples, a remarkable outcome when the last two centuries had been dominated by war between England and France.
Then, the unexpected happened. On 31 August 1422, just twenty-one months after Langley’s encomium to Parliament, Henry V, aged almost thirty-six, died from ‘the bloody flux’ at the great fortress of Vincennes, east of Paris. Predeceasing Charles by six weeks, he was the first English king to die overseas since Richard I over two centuries earlier. His nine-month-old son by Catherine, Henry VI, was recognized as King of France following Charles’s death, but Henry VI would prove as ineffective as his father had been assertive: within thirty years the English had been removed from French soil, save for a toehold at Calais. Henry V’s double monarchy had failed.
Even so, in the popular imagination, Henry V remains as much a success story today as when Bishop Langley addressed Parliament in 1420. Indeed, he is often considered destined for greatness from the moment he came to the throne on 21 March 1413. His victory at Agincourt on 25 October 1415, still one of the most iconic English victories against a foreign enemy, achieved in the face of allegedly overwhelming odds, is viewed as the consequence of his astute leadership and personal bravery. What’s more, this view of Henry as a successful warrior-king, inspired and supported by God and beloved of his people, has been constant throughout history. It inspired two Latin prose lives of the king in the late 1430s. The first was the anonymous Vita et Gesta Henrici Quinti (‘The Life and Deeds of Henry the Fifth’), commonly known as the Pseudo-Elmham since it was once thought, erroneously, to be the work of Thomas Elmham, a monk of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, who wrote a verse account of the opening years of the reign. The Pseudo-Elmham appears to have drawn information from Sir (later Lord) Walter Hungerford, much trusted by Henry as councillor and commander, and chosen by the king as one of the executors of his will and guardians of his infant son. The second Latin life of the 1430s was Tito Livio Frulovisi’s Vita Henrici Quinti (‘The Life of Henry V’), written while the Italian was in the employment of Henry’s youngest brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. This work was dedicated by its author to Henry VI in the hope that he might emulate his father. In 1513–14, a First English Life of King Henry the Fifth was written, drawing on Tito Livio’s Vita and on collected reminiscences from the 4th Earl of Ormond (1392–1452), who had known Henry V, but dedicated this time to Henry VIII as a potentially worthy successor of his illustrious namesake.
The Tudor chronicler-historian Edward Hall echoed earlier positive portrayals in his Union of the Two Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1542), applauding the ‘victorious acts of Henry V’ in a work which otherwise demonstrated how the ‘unquiet time’ of the usurper Henry IV (1399–1413) had initiated a century of upheaval not resolved until the ‘triumphant reign’ of Henry VII. The great collaborative work known as Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577, 1587), which was Shakespeare’s main source, made extensive use of Hall’s text. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the same eulogistic tone was reflected in Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599). The popularity of the play from the mid eighteenth century onwards, fanned by recurrent wars with France, and its stirring speeches (so memorable that even today some want to believe they are Henry’s actual words) have made Henry V one of, if not the best-known and most admired of all medieval English kings. Even academics have succumbed: the great twentieth-century historian K. B. McFarlane, not known for his breathless admiration of monarchs, concluded that ‘all round’, Henry V ‘was, I think, the greatest man that ever ruled England’.2
Yet Henry was not born to be king at all. His life was a series of transformations. His father Henry of Bolingbroke’s usurpation of the English crown as Henry IV in 1399 transformed him from ‘the young Lord Henry’, a member of a collateral line of the English royal family, into the Prince of Wales. In his portrayal as heir to the throne, the popular image is again that of Shakespeare. Hal in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 (1597–8) is all that a prince should not be – disrespectful, pleasure-seeking, indolent – but on becoming king at his father’s death, he consciously casts aside his former life and friends and reveals himself transformed into the perfect king. The real Henry can also be shown to have changed fundamentally at his accession, at his own choosing, into an overtly religious, celibate and unbending ruler. He sought to redeem his poor personal reputation and expiate his troubled relationship with his father. He also sought to rebuild his political and military standing at home and abroad.
The Agincourt campaign of 1415 was part of this process of conscious rebranding. It was also a point of transformation which set Henry on course for further achievements as a warrior-king. In 1420 these successes generated his final metamorphosis into the effective ruler of France. Yet this last achievement brought with it new problems of kingship in both England and France. Was it really feasible for one man to rule both kingdoms in this age of personal monarchy?