Henry V of England

Henry V reigned over England for little more than nine years, from 1413 to 1422, yet in that time he reopened the Hundred Years' War, won at Agincourt, reconquered Normandy and was recognised as heir to the French crown. At home he was an active, businesslike ruler who restored order and enforced religious orthodoxy. His early death left his gains to an infant son who would lose them.

Henry was born on 16 September 1386 at Monmouth Castle, the eldest son of Henry of Bolingbroke and Mary de Bohun. Because he was far from the throne at birth, the date was not formally recorded and was long debated. In 1399 his father deposed Richard II and became Henry IV, making the boy heir and Prince of Wales. Aged sixteen he fought at the Battle of Shrewsbury in July 1403, where an arrow struck him in the face; the royal surgeon John Bradmore extracted it with a specially made tool. He spent the following years fighting the Welsh rising of Owain Glyndŵr, and during his father's illness of 1410–11 he effectively ran the government until a political quarrel led to his removal from the council.

Henry became king on his father's death in March 1413 and soon prepared for war, exploiting the division of France between Armagnac and Burgundian factions under the mentally ill Charles VI. He revived Edward III's claim to the French throne, though his practical demands centred on lands promised to England in 1360. After a plot against him was uncovered at Southampton, he crossed to Normandy in August 1415 with an army that Anne Curry puts at 10,000–12,000, most of them archers. Harfleur fell on 22 September. Marching towards Calais with a weakened force, he was intercepted near Agincourt and on 25 October won a crushing victory over a larger French army slowed by mud and exposed to English archery. During the battle he ordered the killing of French prisoners, a decision contemporaries explained by fear of a renewed attack.

Henry returned in August 1417 with around 10,000 men, this time to occupy Normandy town by town. Caen and Falaise fell, then Rouen after a long siege in which civilians expelled by the garrison were left starving in the ditch outside the walls, an episode that has shadowed his reputation. Rouen surrendered on 19 January 1419, and by August Henry's army was outside Paris.

The murder of Duke John the Fearless of Burgundy by the Dauphin's supporters in September 1419 pushed the Burgundians into alliance with England. The Treaty of Troyes, signed on 21 May 1420, made Henry regent and heir of France, disinherited the Dauphin and arranged his marriage to Catherine of Valois, which took place on 2 June. The lands south of the Loire never accepted it. Henry returned to France in 1421 after his brother Thomas was killed at Baugé, and took Meaux in May 1422.

Henry governed closely even while abroad and worked smoothly with Parliament, which met eleven times in his reign. He suppressed disorder and piracy, crushed the Lollard rising of 1414, made heresy a crime for the royal courts and helped end the papal schism at the Council of Constance. He also promoted English in royal records and wrote his own letters in it, though his wars left the crown heavily in debt.

Henry fell ill, probably with dysentery, and died at Vincennes on 31 August 1422, aged thirty-five, weeks before Charles VI. His nine-month-old son Henry VI inherited both crowns, but the English position collapsed after the Burgundians changed sides in 1435, and the losses fed into the Wars of the Roses. William Shakespeare later fixed his image as the model warrior king.

Our 1400 map shows England, France and the English foothold around Calais and Gascony on the eve of Henry's reign, before his conquests and their later loss.