Henry V(1386–1422)

Henry of Monmouth was born at Monmouth Castle on the Welsh Marches in the autumn of 1386, the eldest son of Henry Bolingbroke, who in 1399 seized the English crown from Richard II to become Henry IV. The boy was thrown young into the wars of his unsettled inheritance: by sixteen he was commanding in the field against the great Welsh rising of Owain Glyndwr, and at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 he fought on through the day with an arrow lodged in his face, a wound a royal surgeon removed only after weeks of careful work. He learned soldiering and government together, in a hard school, and came to the throne in 1413 a disciplined, austere, intensely capable man of twenty-six.

He revived the old English claim to the crown of France and in 1415 crossed the Channel with an army to make it good. He took the port of Harfleur after a costly siege, but disease ran through his ranks and the season turned, and he set off to march his weakened, dysentery-ridden force overland to the safety of Calais. A great French army, many times his strength and fresh, moved to cut him off, and on 25 October 1415, the feast of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, the two forces met on a narrow, rain-soaked, newly ploughed field between the woods of Agincourt and Tramecourt.

The ground was Henry's ally and he used it. The French men-at-arms, packed into the funnel between the woods and weighed down in deep mud, were channelled onto the stakes and the massed arrow-storm of the English and Welsh longbowmen, and as the front ranks foundered the press behind them turned the field into a trap. By the end of the afternoon several thousand of the French nobility lay dead or taken for the loss of a small fraction of his own men. It was one of the most lopsided victories in the history of arms, and it made Henry, overnight, the most renowned soldier in Christendom.

He did not let the fame stand idle. Over the next years he returned and methodically conquered Normandy, town by fortified town, in a campaign of patient siegecraft that showed he was as formidable in the slow work of war as in the sudden glory of a pitched battle. By the Treaty of Troyes in 1420 the French king recognised him as heir to the throne of France and regent of the kingdom, and he married Catherine of Valois, the French king's daughter. At thirty-three he had achieved what no English king before or since came close to: recognition as the next king of France.

He never wore that second crown. In the late summer of 1422, on campaign once more in France, he was struck down not by an enemy but by dysentery, the same camp sickness that had thinned his army before Agincourt, and he died at the castle of Vincennes near Paris on 31 August 1422, still only thirty-five. His body was carried home in great state and buried at Westminster Abbey. The Plantagenet name carries his memory as the king of Monmouth who, with a sick and outnumbered army on a muddy field at Agincourt, won the most famous victory the English crown ever knew.