Henry V’s body was returned to England in solemn state. Having been embalmed and placed inside a double coffin (wood encased in lead), it was carried in funeral process to St Denis, where a Requiem Mass was sung. It was then transported by water to Rouen, where the dead king lay in state for two weeks. The cortège left Rouen on 5 October 1422 and moved slowly north to Calais, passing close by the scene of his greatest triumph. (En route, news arrived of the death on 21 October of Charles VI.) Not until 5 November did Henry’s body arrive in London, where it was received by a carefully orchestrated display of collective mourning in which each member of every guild wore a black hood and provided candles for the processional route. The last of many Requiem Masses was celebrated in Westminster Abbey where the coffin was finally interred on 7 November. Had he lived seven weeks longer, Henry V of England would have become Henri II of France.
Before he died Henry had made dispositions for his body, soul and kingdom, adding codicils to his will. He ordered the singing of a large number of Masses for his soul and for the forgiveness of his sins. He made lavish bequests to his newly founded religious houses and provided for a chantry chapel to be built near the tomb of St Edward in Westminster Abbey. Gifts were distributed to his closest servants. The tutelage of his heir, now Henry VI, was entrusted to Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter. It would take his executors, including the now fully restored Bishop of Winchester, twenty years to settle all his debts, and longer to fulfil all the terms of the will.
Henry’s tomb in Westminster Abbey was constructed of finest Purbeck marble. It took until 1431 to complete his effigy. The chantry chapel – the mausoleum built to Henry’s own design – was not finished until 1450. Elaborately carved in the perpendicular style, it resembled a fortified gateway about to be stormed – the gateway to Heaven, no doubt. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, Masses were to be sung for the success of this, his final campaign. It became a shrine to his memory, and the focus also for an annual celebration to which the monks invited the great and good of the land. For a while Henry’s memory was also honoured in celebrations of Agincourt Day, and, more lastingly, on the feast of St George, which he had made a two-day national celebration. St George had emerged as one of the pre-eminent national saints in the fourteenth century; however, by his emphasis and use of the familiar red cross on a white background in his banners and on his uniforms, it was Henry who turned him into the patron saint of England.
Henry V’s dispositions for the ruling of the kingdom were not followed to the letter. He had declared in his will that the elder of his surviving brothers, John, Duke of Bedford, should become Regent of France, on the accession of Henry VI as heir to the thrones of England and France. His brother Gloucester was nominated Regent of England. There was no issue over France, but once the dead king had been buried, the new ruling council, backed by Bedford, determined that it was unconstitutional for there to be a regent in England. Thus Gloucester was made Protector of the Realm and president of a standing council which would rule England with collective responsibility.
At first, devotion to the late monarch’s memory ensured the smooth running of the kingdom, but by 1424 tensions began to emerge – especially in an increasingly bitter rivalry between Gloucester and Henry Beaufort, who finally gained his cardinal’s hat in 1426. Personal animosities notwithstanding, the council kept faith with the memory of the dead king so as to pass on his inheritance to his son when he came of age. Henry VI was educated by two of the noblest exemplars of chivalry and most renowned of Henry V’s captains, Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter, and, following his death in 1426, Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. Their intention was the forging of another Christian warrior. Unfortunately, Henry VI absorbed only the Christian part: he rejected war. Once he had come of age, after 1437, his slack rule permitted descent into faction and ultimately his own deposition in 1461.
In France, under Bedford’s vigorous and fresh leadership, English fortunes revived. Two significant victories were won in the field: at Cravant in 1423, when a dauphinist advance on Burgundy was checked by the Earl of Salisbury, and, more emphatically, at Verneuil in 1424, when Bedford decisively rebuffed a major assault by the dauphin’s army on Normandy. Thereafter the English conquest was extended, particularly to the south. It was, however, impossible to sustain the war effort in the longer term and to make a reality of Henry VI’s throne in France. Following the dramatic intervention of Joan of Arc in 1429, Charles VIII was crowned King of France at Rheims. His position was further strengthened in 1435 when he came to terms with Philip, Duke of Burgundy, who abandoned the English alliance.
It was then only a matter of time before the English either accepted a humiliating peace or were expelled completely from the land in which Henry V had made his conquests. In the end, no peace treaty agreeable to both sides could be found. The English tenaciously held on to Normandy for a further fifteen years but had to concede defeat eventually. More disastrous still, Aquitaine was also lost. The year was 1453. All that Henry V had won a generation earlier, all that the English Crown had held in France for 300 years – everything bar Calais – was lost. Eight years later England too was lost to the house of Lancaster.
At its first formal meeting in November 1422, the minority council of Henry VI minuted an epitaph for its dead hero: ‘The most Christian warrior of the Church, the sun of prudence, the exemplar of justice, the most invincible King, and the flower of Chivalry.’20 These were the conventional virtues of the ideal monarch – those upon which Henry V had fashioned himself. This image dominated the representations of him for years to come, becoming ever more embedded as his kingdoms fell apart.
Henry was fortunate in his early historians. They wrote in the euphoria of his victories. Unusually among late medieval kings of England, he was, with the notable exception of Adam of Usk, beloved of clerical writers. The household chaplain who wrote the Gesta Henrici Quinti in 1417 established the image of the Christian warrior waging a holy war, with divine providence on his side. Other monastic authors, including Walsingham, were deeply impressed by his austere, ascetic lifestyle. Henry’s youngest brother Humphrey, who idolised him, commissioned a life in about 1438 by the Italian humanist Tito Livio, which reinforced the notion of a chivalric hero, while also urging Gloucester’s countrymen to keep up the good fight. This portrait entered the mainstream of historical writing, carried in both the London chronicles and the popular history of England known as The Brut (so called because it begins with the legendary Brutus, founder of Britain).
Henry’s enemies respected (as well as feared) him as an exemplar of chivalry. The historian of the royal abbey of St Denis in Paris, Walsingham’s French counterpart, noted that the king was courteous, behaved entirely properly with his noble prisoners, was pitiless to those who defied him, but fair to those who obeyed him. If he had a sin, the commentator averred, it was pride. Later French historians, writing in the mid-fifteenth century, likewise stressed Henry’s chivalric credentials, but they introduced a sharper tone. He had ruled by fear, they said, and his wrath was dreaded by English and French alike. As Jean de Waurin wrote, ‘he punished with death without any mercy those who disobeyed or infringed his commands’.21
The Yorkist kings, though they disparaged the Lancastrian dynasty as usurpers, made an exception of Henry because of his triumphs overseas and did nothing to diminish his standing. When he came to the throne on 1509, the young Henry VIII hoped to emulate his namesake and predecessor by winning glory in France. And although history repeated itself as farce, he sponsored a new edition and translation of Tito Livio’s Vita. All sixteenth-century historians followed along the established lines, culminating in Shakespeare’s plays (though Henry V, for all its jingoism, does not hesitate to reveal the horrors of war). And so it continued through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into the nineteenth. There was one fixed view of Henry as the great warrior and quintessential English hero.
In the nineteenth century, essayists and antiquaries, perhaps reflecting war weariness after the defeat of Napoleon, began for the first time to introduce a new critical tone. William Hazlitt tartly commented in 1817 (Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays) that Henry might have been a hero for his willingness to sacrifice his own life for the pleasure of destroying thousands of others. Others took up the theme that Henry’s wars were wanton acts of aggression. Debate was joined by William Stubbs in 1878, who reasserted the traditional view, but adding an imperial gloss: his Henry was a true Englishman, who ‘made England the first power in Europe’,22 a theme followed by C.L. Kingsford in the first modern, research-based biography, published in 1901. This work also reflected the revival of Victorian chivalry, in picturing him as the true type of medieval hero king in pursuit of a great ideal.
Thus were the foundations laid for the debate which has run through all writings on Henry V over the last hundred years. On one side he has been characterised as the greatest of England’s monarchs; a national hero; the exemplification of the chivalric ideal; the man who came closer than any other to embodying the contemporary vision of the just king; a ruler who possessed all the characteristics expected of a medieval monarch and more – a charismatic leader, a brilliant soldier and a gifted administrator. On the other hand, he has been described as a fanatic, cruel – sadistic even – sanctimonious, priggish, overbearingly proud, a hypocrite and a ruthless war criminal whose conquests were futile and whose legacy was divisive. Perhaps, not surprisingly, modern French historians have tended to concur with this second version.
The lines of debate are clear. Historians who admire Henry V tend to stress that he should be seen only in the terms of his own world, of his own culture of Christian chivalry and of the codes by which he and his contemporaries lived: it is no part of the historian’s craft to apply modern criteria and values. Critics tend to be sceptical of the construction of the king as the model monarch, seeing in it the work of a skilled mythmaker. They are also more willing to apply modern attitudes to war and peace, justice and religion.
In this respect, it is worth remembering that history is an ever-moving dialogue between past and present. No one can avoid approaching the past from the point of view of their own age and its values. In the late nineteenth century, Henry V was envisaged as an exemplar of muscular Christianity, the model for youths about to embark on imperial service. Some of the most enthusiastic words in his praise in the twentieth century were written during or shortly after the First and Second World Wars. His appeal as a national hero endures for those who delight in the martial deeds of charismatic leaders, who regret the passing of imperial might and who yearn for the ‘Great’ to be put back in Britain.
Productions of Shakespeare’s totemic play reflect this constantly shifting discourse about England’s greatness, just war, aggression and atrocity. Laurence Olivier’s renowned film, made as part of the British war effort, cut out the passage in which the king swears to let loose his soldiers on Harfleur’s ‘fresh fair virgins’ and ‘flowering infants’, for ‘hot and forcing violation’.23 In 1944 only Nazis did that sort of thing. Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 version stressed the grim reality of war, setting Agincourt in the mud rather than on a sunny plain. Nicholas Hytner’s modern-dress production at the National Theatre in 2003 provided a no-holds-barred anti-war reading, complete with massacres of innocent civilians, executions of prisoners and ‘dodgy dossiers’. Productions of Shakespeare’s play may reflect more overtly the modern political agenda, but historical studies inevitably engage with the same themes.