Titans of History

Increasingly paranoid, Richard kept an armed guard of Cheshire bowmen. In 1399 he unwisely exiled his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke, duke of Lancaster, subsequently seizing his lands. When Richard departed for a military campaign in Ireland, the popular Bolingbroke, who claimed that “the realm was on the point of being undone for default of governance and undoing of the good laws,” landed with a small force in Yorkshire, triggering a widespread rebellion. By the time Richard had arrived back on the Welsh coast, most of the influential nobles of the realm had turned against him. Following his capture, Richard was taken to London and paraded through the streets, where large crowds mocked him and pelted him with rotten fruit. Deposed and humiliated, he was starved to death by his captors in Pontefract Castle in February 1400. His nemesis ruled as Henry IV, father of the victor of Agincourt

HENRY V

1387–1422

Too famous to live long

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Duke of Bedford

On August 31, 1422, at Bois de Vincennes outside Paris, Henry V of England succumbed to the grim fate of so many of his soldiers and died of “camp fever”—most likely dysentery. Shakespeare’s Young Prince Hal was just thirty-four years old and had succeeded his father to the English throne only nine years earlier. Yet Henry was young in years, not in experience. Indeed, such were the accomplishments of his brief life that he has been described by one modern historian as “the greatest man that ever ruled England.”

When Henry came to the throne in 1413, the country had been riven for decades by dynastic warfare: his father Henry IV—Henry Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt—had seized the throne in 1399 from his cousin, Richard II. Henry IV spent the early years of his reign at war and on the defensive, suppressing rebellions by the Percy family and the Welsh. His son was given independent commands in these campaigns and soon distinguished himself. In one battle, the young prince was grievously wounded with an arrow that penetrated and broke off deep in his face. He was miraculously saved by an ingenious surgeon who invented a contraption that pulled the arrow out, not through its entry wound but through the neck. Henry recovered.

During the last years of his father’s reign, king and prince competed for power and almost came to conflict. On succeeding in 1413 it became clear how exceptional the new young king was: he was profoundly pious and religious, believing in his sacred mission, but also generous-spirited, energetic, highly intelligent, brave and gifted as a military planner as well as a general. Young Henry V, offering hope of a clean break with the past, rapidly set about doing his all to unite the country. A “very English Englishman” himself, he aimed to nurture a sense of nationhood and national identity, abandoning the usual practices of his predecessors and reading and writing in English rather than in French. Like his predecessors in the Hundred Year War, he believed himself to be the rightful king of France.

Just before he set off for France, he uncovered an aristocratic conspiracy against himself: he ruthlessly crushed the so-called Southampton Plot, executing Henry, Baron Scrope and his cousin the earl of Cambridge. Nothing could interfere with Henry’s solemn war.

Henry set sail for France in August 1415 with a plan to capture a number of strategically placed towns in northern France that could be garrisoned and used as footholds for further conquests. By the end of September he had succeeded in taking the port of Harfleur, but as his army had already been severely depleted by disease, he decided to return to England to regroup. On October 25 the English army of around 6000 found its path to Calais blocked near Agincourt by a far superior French force. Outnumbered by at least three to one, the thin English line was drawn up in a strong defensive position, forming a funnel with trees on either flank and several large groups of archers positioned along the line. When the French knights, on horseback and wearing heavy armor, finally advanced, they found themselves increasingly constricted and caught in a deadly hail of arrows. Laying down their bows after the initial volleys, the English longbowmen then piled into the French, now hopelessly crushed together and in total confusion, and inflicted horrendous casualties. Henry’s great victory was thus also the triumph of the powerful longbow of the English archers (many of them from Cheshire), whose sustained barrage of arrows was, in its terrifying and murderous way, the medieval equivalent of the machine gun.