A rare portrait of King Henry V of England painted in the early 16th century shows him in profile. This unusual angle may have served two purposes. One was as a rather outdated emulation of Italian profile portraiture, with its blunt references to the might of imperial Rome; the other was to hide a disfiguring scar from a dangerous wound suffered at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403.
Henry was only 16 at the time of the battle, and it was a brutal way to earn his spurs. An arrow had penetrated his cheek six inches and lodged at the back of his skull. He was lucky to have survived both the wound and its treatment. But Henry was on the winning side; the defeated forces of Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy were cut down ruthlessly.
When Henry was 16, an arrow penetrated his cheek six inches and lodged at the back of his skull
Dan Jones begins, ends and frequently refers to this occasion in his adrenalin-fuelled biography of Henry V – understandably. This was a decisive moment in the young Henry’s extraordinary life, in which his future mercilessness matched his achievements. Indeed, a unique feature of this account is that half of it is devoted to Henry’s formative years.
Written in the historic present, it is a labour of love – not necessarily for Henry’s character, but for his fascinating life and deeds. Jones’s Henry is the king of popular renown, an unsurpassed soldier and general, but also someone prone to contradictions, and misjudgments of those closest to him. This makes him all the more interesting as a ruler and a high-achieving, if flawed, man.
There is an element of insecurity, too, in this most resolute of characters. His Lancastrian father, Henry IV, was a usurper, who almost certainly had the Yorkist King Richard II murdered, thus creating the origins of the Wars of the Roses. Henry V had to secure the Lancastrian dynasty and put down various plots against it. His phenomenal military exploits in France – conquering Normandy and winning the French crown for his son – were in no small part motivated by the need to provide a unifying distraction from political divisions at home. As Jones makes clear, Henry overcame numerous setbacks and errors to succeed spectacularly in the end. He countered his insecurity with personal courage, obsessiveness and a manic fear of indolence (his tomb is inscribed with the command ‘Flee idleness’).
Modern sensibilities may recoil at Henry’s belligerence, but medieval ones did not. The first duty of a ruler in the Middle Ages (or in any age, it might be argued) was to protect his subjects – an absolute priority in time of war and violent unrest. Of the medieval king’s three vital roles – miles (knight), iudex (judge) and sacerdos (priest) – that of miles was the most important. Jones is therefore justified in emphasising this; in fact his deep understanding of the medieval world demands a martial approach.
As Jones shows, Henry could boast exceptional competence in all three areas. He really was the all-round monarch, doing the job exactly as it was supposed to be done. In religion, Henry’s ultra-orthodoxy ensured Church support for the new Lancastrian regime. His father had overseen the introduction of the 1401 Act, De heretico comburendo (‘On the burning of heretics’). In 1414, the son crushed the heretically tinged Oldcastle rebellion, ordering its protagonists to be strung up in Saint Giles’s Field. ‘The sight will remain lodged in folk memory for generations,’ writes Jones.
Administratively, as in his campaign planning, Henry displayed signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder. And then, of course, there is Agincourt in 1415: the most famous English victory of the Middle Ages. Jones delights in unleashing the full drama of the battle, in which ‘an axe to the head of Henry nearly spells the end of the 29-year-old king’. But he does not overplay the engagement, and eschews the long-accepted four-to-one disparity in army sizes, which greatly enhanced the scale of Henry’s victory. He opts instead for recent – if contested – research that substantially reduces the strength of the French force that took to the field that day.
Nonetheless, it is clear why Henry is, for the author, England’s greatest warrior king. The most significant initial outcome of this devastating defeat for the French, accompanied by Henry’s battlefield massacre of prisoners, was actually quite mundane: it persuaded parliament to grant Henry the taxation to fund his Normandy campaign. Its subsequent conquest and the winning of the French crown at the Treaty of Troyes in 1420 was Henry’s apogee.
But two years later Henry was dead, at the age of only 35. His achievements were short-lived, unlike his much-hyped reputation. England was booted out of Normandy in 1450 under his grossly incompetent son, who was all sacerdos and little else, and England was consumed by the Wars of the Roses. But, as Jones reminds us, there is no doubting the military genius of this single-minded monarch.
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