King Henry V

1386 – 1422 · Generation XIX · King of England (r. 1413–1422) · House of Plantagenet

Henry V was born in the gatehouse tower of Monmouth Castle, most probably on 16 September 1386, the eldest son of Henry of Bolingbroke and Mary de Bohun. Nobody expected him to be king. His father was a cousin of the reigning Richard II, and the birth was not even formally recorded, which is why the date was long disputed and many older accounts give 1387. His mother died in 1394, when he was still a small boy. In 1398 Richard banished Bolingbroke and took the boy into his own household, treating him kindly and knighting him on campaign in Ireland the following year. While they were there Bolingbroke returned, deposed Richard and took the crown as Henry IV, and his son, then about thirteen, became Prince of Wales.

The prince learned war young. At the Battle of Shrewsbury in July 1403, aged about sixteen, he fought beside his father against the rebel Henry “Hotspur” Percy and was hit in the face by an arrow that lodged deep beside his cheekbone. The royal physician John Bradmore designed a special instrument to draw it out and recorded the operation. Henry spent much of the next several years fighting Owain Glyndŵr’s revolt in Wales. As his father’s health failed he took a leading part in the council, held effective control of government in 1410 and 1411, and was then dismissed from it after the two disagreed over policy. The wild youth of Shakespeare’s Prince Hal has little contemporary evidence behind it.

He became king on 20 March 1413 and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 9 April, in a snowstorm. He began with gestures of reconciliation, reburying Richard II with honour at Westminster and restoring the heirs of families ruined under his father. An old friend, the Lollard knight Sir John Oldcastle, led a rising in January 1414 that was quickly crushed, and a statute of that year made heresy a crime for the king’s courts as well as the Church’s. He made the restoration of order his early business, worked closely and briskly with Parliament, founded the Charterhouse at Sheen and the Bridgettine house of Syon, and from 1417 promoted English as a language of government, using it in his own letters.

From the outset he meant to revive the English claim to the French crown, first pressed by his great-grandfather Edward III. France was weak, its king Charles VI subject to bouts of madness and its nobility split between Armagnac and Burgundian factions. After two years of embassies that modern historians read as cover for preparation, Henry sailed from Southampton in August 1415, having first executed the leaders of a plot to replace him. He took Harfleur after a siege that left his army thinned by disease, then marched for Calais. A larger French army blocked his road near Agincourt, and the two sides fought on 25 October. The night’s rain had turned the ground to mud, the French men-at-arms floundered in it within range of the English archers, and in about three hours of fighting thousands of them were killed or captured. During the fighting Henry ordered the killing of prisoners, fearing a fresh attack.

Agincourt secured his dynasty at home. In 1417 he returned for a different kind of war, the systematic conquest of Normandy, a duchy lost to the English crown in 1204. Caen and Falaise fell, and Rouen surrendered in January 1419 after a siege in which the garrison drove the city’s poor out of the gates and Henry, until Christmas, would neither feed them nor let them through his lines. The murder of Duke John of Burgundy by the Dauphin’s men that September drove the Burgundians into alliance with England, and by the Treaty of Troyes of May 1420 Charles VI disinherited his own son and recognised Henry as regent and heir of France. On 2 June Henry married Charles’s daughter Catherine of Valois at Troyes. Their only child, the future Henry VI, was born at Windsor in December 1421.

Henry never saw him. He was back in France besieging Meaux, and in the summer of 1422 he fell ill, most probably with dysentery. He died at the castle of Vincennes on 31 August 1422, aged about thirty-five, seven weeks before the father-in-law whose crown he was to inherit. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on 7 November, and the chantry chapel he had asked for was later built over his tomb. The union of two kingdoms passed to a baby, and within a generation the French conquests were gone. Historians still divide over him. Some see a warmonger who overreached, while K. B. McFarlane called him the greatest man who ever ruled England. Almost no one, then or since, has disputed his ability as a commander.

Place in the family

• King Henry V was a first cousin 3 times removed of King Henry VIII.

Images

• The Battle of Agincourt in a fifteenth-century miniature from a manuscript of the St Albans Chronicle (Lambeth Palace Library) (Unknown illuminator, public domain)
• The marriage of Henry V and Catherine of Valois, from a manuscript of Jean Chartier’s chronicle made before 1494 (British Library) (Unknown illuminator, public domain)
• Henry V’s tomb effigy in Westminster Abbey, with the head and hands remade in 1971 (VCR Giulio19, CC BY-SA 4.0)

One of 26 people of House of Plantagenet (1126–1485) in this archive. The longest-reigning English house, counting its Angevin beginning and the rival Lancaster and York branches that fought the Wars of the Roses.

Line of descent: King William I The Conqueror → King Henry I → Matilda the Empress → King Henry II → King John → King Henry III → King Edward I Longshanks → King Edward II → King Edward III → John of Gaunt → King Henry IV → King Henry V.

Read more on Wikipedia

Parents

• King Henry IV (1367 – 1413)
• Mary de Bohun (1368 – 1394)

Partners

• Married Catherine of Valois (1401 – 1437) in 1420 — one child together

Children

• King Henry VI (1421 – 1471)

Life

• 1386 — Born
• 1413 — Henry accedes to the throne at the age of 25 upon the death of his father, Henry IV
• 1414 — Henry adopts the claims of Edward III to the French crown
• 1415 — Henry thwarts the Cambridge plot, an attempt by a group of nobles to replace him on the throne with his cousin, Edmund Mortisner, Earl of March.
• 1415 — Henry renews the war against France in order to win back territories lost by his ancestors. After a five-week siege, he captures Harfleur the leading port in north-west France.
• 1420 — Married Catherine of Valois
• 1420 — Henry marries Catherine, daughter of Charles VI. Under the treaty of Troyes, Henry will become King of France on the death of Charles VI.
• 1421 — Birth of Prince Henry, later Henry VI.
• 1422 — Died
• 1422 — Henry V dies in France of dysentery before he can succeed to the French throne. King Charles VI of France dies the following month, leaving Henry VI, Henry’s 10-month-old son, as King of France and England.

Sources

1. Henry V of England · Wikipedia
2. Henry V and Catherine de Valois · Westminster Abbey
3. Henry V (r. 1413–1422) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
4. Henry V of England · World History Encyclopedia