Henry V

Jones presents this biography with a central premise: Henry V's effectiveness as king cannot be understood through a single battle. Jones argues that the 26 years Henry spent as prince, receiving an unusually intense apprenticeship in warfare, finance, and governance, matter as much as the nine years he wore the crown.

Henry was born on September 16, 1386, at Monmouth Castle, the firstborn son of Henry Bolingbroke and Mary de Bohun. His grandfather John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, was the richest nobleman in England. Henry grew up in a musical household managed by his mother, who played the harp and guitar and composed music. Mary died in 1394 from childbirth complications. Her love of music, piety, and learning left a permanent mark on her eldest son.

Richard II's reign provided Henry's earliest political education. In 1396, the 10-year-old traveled to Calais, where Richard married the six-year-old daughter of French king Charles VI to seal a truce in the Hundred Years War between England and France. The following year, Henry witnessed Richard's Revenge Parliament, in which the king destroyed a group of noblemen called the Appellants who had challenged his authority. Henry's father had been among them but survived by cooperating. In 1398, Bolingbroke was banished after a dispute with Thomas Mowbray, another former Appellant who had also survived by siding with Richard. When Gaunt died in 1399 and Richard confiscated the Lancaster estates, Bolingbroke returned from exile, captured the king, and forced his abdication. He was crowned Henry IV in October 1399. Richard was starved to death at Pontefract Castle the following year.

At 13, Henry became Prince of Wales and heir to a throne seized by force. The new Lancastrian dynasty, named for the family's duchy of Lancaster, faced immediate threats. That autumn, a Welsh nobleman named Owain Glyndŵr launched a rebellion, proclaiming himself the true Prince of Wales. Henry IV sent his teenage son to suppress the revolt, supported by Henry Percy, known as Hotspur, a powerful northern lord whose family had helped Henry IV seize the throne. The Welsh war became Henry's training ground: He ordered his first executions at 14, burned Glyndŵr's estates at 16, and learned military logistics under constant financial strain.

In July 1403, the Percy family turned against the crown. During the battle of Shrewsbury, an arrow struck Henry below the right eye and lodged six inches in his skull. The royal surgeon John Bradmore extracted the arrowhead using a custom-designed tool. Henry's survival seemed miraculous, and he marked it with pilgrimages to Canterbury and Walsingham, deepening a pattern of religious devotion that persisted throughout his life.

By 1408, the major Welsh rebel strongholds of Aberystwyth and Harlech had fallen after prolonged sieges. Meanwhile, Henry IV's health deteriorated sharply from 1405 onward, possibly worsened by his execution of the archbishop of York for rebellion. A formal council was established to govern during the king's incapacity, and Henry took a seat. By 1409, he had effectively taken control, installing allies such as his uncle Thomas Beaufort as chancellor and pursuing an assertive policy toward France, where civil war between the Burgundians, supporters of the duke of Burgundy, and the Armagnacs, their rivals, created opportunities for English advantage. Henry's overreach in 1411, when he and his allies lobbied for his father's abdication, brought a sharp reversal: Henry IV dismissed his son's council and sidelined the prince until his own death on March 20, 1413.

Jones argues that Henry's coronation on April 9, 1413, did not mark a Shakespearean conversion from riotous youth to sober king but the deliberate hardening of traits already central to his character into a permanent public persona. His first acts balanced reconciliation with firmness: He knighted the Mortimer brothers, whose family held rival claims to the throne, and allowed the prosecution of his friend John Oldcastle, a veteran of the Welsh wars who had become an outspoken Lollard, or follower of the religious reformer John Wyclif. Oldcastle escaped the Tower of London and organized a failed uprising in January 1414, which Henry crushed preemptively.

From 1414, Henry directed his energy toward war with France. He made deliberately extreme territorial demands, secured generous parliamentary taxation, and pawned royal treasures to finance an invasion. The Southampton Plot, a conspiracy to overthrow him, was betrayed on the eve of departure. Henry executed the ringleaders, including his trusted friend Lord Scrope, then sailed for France on August 11, 1415, with roughly 12,000 men.

The siege of Harfleur, at the mouth of the Seine, lasted five weeks. Henry invoked the laws of Deuteronomy, a book of the Hebrew Bible prescribing rules of warfare, offering mercy if the town surrendered and threatening destruction if it resisted. Harfleur fell on September 22, but dysentery had killed or incapacitated thousands of his troops. Against his council's advice, Henry marched his depleted army toward the English-held port of Calais.

On October 25, 1415, the feast of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, Henry's roughly 6,000 men faced a French army of 12,000 to 14,000 near the village of Azincourt. He deployed longbowmen on the flanks and in wedges between men-at-arms, each archer planting a sharpened stake before him. French cavalry charged into devastating arrow fire and bogged down in thick mud. When a fresh French force appeared, Henry ordered the killing of prisoners, a decision condemned by later generations but understood by contemporaries as militarily rational. English casualties were minimal; the French lost more than 3,000 noblemen.

Henry returned to a jubilant London and a parliament that granted him lifetime customs revenues. Landing in Normandy in August 1417, he systematically conquered the duchy through cannon bombardment, blockade, and terror. The siege of Rouen lasted from July 1418 to January 1419; Henry starved the population into submission, refusing to allow expelled noncombatants through his lines.

The assassination of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, by agents of the French dauphin, the heir apparent Prince Charles, in September 1419 transformed the political landscape. On May 21, 1420, the Treaty of Troyes disinherited the dauphin, appointed Henry as regent and heir of France, and provided for his marriage to Charles VI's daughter Catherine. The couple wed on June 2.

Henry spent his remaining years prosecuting the war. His brother Thomas, duke of Clarence, was killed at the battle of Baugé in March 1421, the first major English defeat. Henry sailed back to France in June 1421 and never returned. The seven-month siege of Meaux, through a brutal winter of floods and disease, ended in May 1422. Catherine gave birth to a son, Henry, at Windsor Castle in December 1421.

By summer 1422, Henry was gravely ill with dysentery. Too weak to ride, he was carried to Bois de Vincennes outside Paris. From his deathbed he provided for his infant son's governance. During the reading of the penitential psalms, he paused at a verse about building "the walls of Jerusalem" and declared he had intended to lead a crusade. He died on August 31, 1422, weeks before his 36th birthday.

His funeral procession took nearly three months to reach Westminster Abbey, where he was buried near the shrine of Edward the Confessor. Charles VI died just six weeks later. Henry's brother John, duke of Bedford, maintained the English kingdom of France as regent until his death in 1435, but the Burgundian-Armagnac reconciliation that year began a steady reversal. By 1453, England had lost everything Henry won except Calais. Jones concludes that Henry optimized for the standards of his own age, earning the repeated trust of a political community experienced in resisting unsatisfactory kings, and that his achievements represent a rare and genuine greatness.