A teenage prince wounded in battle, a king who defied the odds in France, and a ruler whose legacy still shapes how we see the Hundred Years’ War—Henry V was far more complex than the legend suggests. Michael Livingston explores the experiences that forged his character, revealing a leader who combined battlefield brilliance with calculated political ambition.
By Michael Livingston
The future Henry V was only thirteen when his father seized the crown from Richard II and was crowned Henry IV in 1399. The years that followed were punctuated by his family’s attempts to hold the throne against a sequence of threats. The numerous coalitions in France jockeyed to take advantage of England’s instability. The Scots wisely seized their chance to prod at the border. Wales, under the leadership of Owain Glyndŵr, erupted into a perilously dangerous revolt. And even within the small circle of the English court there were threatening plots and schemes.
Lessons In Leadership
Henry V statue at Gower memorial to Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon. Photo by Tanya Dedyukhina / Wikimedia Commons
These years must have taught the young heir important lessons in leadership. After all, as soon as he received the title of Prince of Wales, he was being trained to rule: an education that mixed politics, economics, and military training. William Shakespeare portrays Hal, as he calls the young man, as something of a youthful delinquent in Henry IV, Part 1, but there is little indication that this was truly so.
In March of 1403, for instance, the king tasked his teenaged son to help end the Welsh revolt. In a letter that May, Hal reported the actions taken when he went to Owain’s home in Glyndyfrdwy:
And there we torched a beautiful home in its park, and all the land around it. We camped there all that night, and some of our men issued out into the countryside and seized a significant gentleman of that place who was one of the chief supporters of Owain. He offered five hundred pounds for his ransom, and he promised to pay the full sum within two weeks if we would spare his life. We did not accept, and he was put to death. Many of his companions – taken on that same raid – suffered the same fate.
He never found Owain. No one ever did. Worse, the call of rebellion spread. Less than two months after the killings in Glyndyfrdwy, Hal rode at his father’s side into battle not against rebellious Welsh, but against fellow Englishmen. Henry Percy, the son of the Earl of Northumberland, had raised his banner against the king. Hotspur, as he is better known, had considerable military experience and popular favor.
When he marched his army down from the north, the threat to the kingdom was undeniably real. The king gathered his forces as quickly as possible, and the two armies met just north of Shrewsbury on July 21, 1403. In many respects, it might have been the most consequential day of Hal’s life.
When the royal forces were arrayed, the Earl of Stafford led the wing to the right of the king’s center. Leading the left wing was none other than the teenaged prince. Hotspur held high ground, and he used this to his advantage: the archers he had recruited in Cheshire loosed devastating waves of arrows. Men, it was said, fell like autumn leaves. One of those hurtling shafts struck the Prince of Wales in the face and plunged into his skull – six inches deep, according to the physician who later attended to him.
Remarkably, Hal wasn’t killed on the spot. More remarkable still, he didn’t leave the field.
At nearly the same time that the prince was hit, the Earl of Stafford’s wing of the army collapsed. The king’s center wavered. And Hotspur, sensing his chance to put them all to rout, ordered his men to charge. Somehow, despite the searing agony and mortal fear he must have felt in that moment, the Prince of Wales swung his line around and ordered a counter-charge of its own – right into Hotspur’s flank.
Hotspur was killed. The threat was ended.
A late 15th-century illustration of the Battle of Shrewsbury, fought on 21 July 1403. British Library MS Cotton Julius E. IV, art. 6, fol.4r
For Hal, the victory was the start of his own, personal battle. In the following weeks a surgeon worked to remove the arrowhead from his skull – horrifyingly, he had to widen the entrance wound in his face to extract it – and then oversee his long recovery. It would be months before the prince was back in the field, back to trying to end the rebellion in Wales.
The trauma of what happened to him at Shrewsbury doubtless scarred the young man, whether we count those scars as physical, mental, or spiritual. The experience, at such a formative age, surely did much to forge his singular character, which over the years would prove an almost paradoxical mix of pious spiritual devotion and prideful martial aggression, passionate personal loyalty and deep-seated distrust of others, tenacious tactics and patient strategies.
A Crown and War With France
Map by Aliesin / Wikimedia Commons
In 1413, the prince took the throne as Henry V, and even from his earliest acts it seems he was setting his kingdom on a course to war with France.
On August 13, 1415, after months of careful preparations, the army he had raised crossed the Channel and set siege to Harfleur. The town held out heroically against what ought to have been an overwhelming display of English might, and with Henry’s army fixed in place, week after week, its numbers were turned against it. Dysentery burned through his encampment. By the time Harfleur finally fell on September 22, Henry had sustained heavy losses.
His fighting strength greatly diminished, he had little chance of seizing another urban target, so he opted to march what remained of his army north across France to Calais. The journey was meant to take a mere eight days, but the French sniffed out his plans and blocked his route, forcing the English into a dogged march deeper into enemy territory. These tiring weeks were a perilous test of Henry’s ability to maintain the army’s cohesion and capabilities – a test of his ability to survive – and he passed.
Agincourt: Fact vs Fiction
The battle that would come at Battle of Agincourt on October 25 earned him laud as a tactician and a fighter, but his greater accomplishment might well have been the leadership necessary to get his men there at all.
A lot can be (and has been) said about Henry at Agincourt. Some of it, like the Shakespearean conceit that he was a man of the common people, is tough to square: Henry had brought 60 horses for his personal use in France, and no matter what the Bard might claim about him viewing the men who fought for him as a “band of brothers,” he probably was not inviting them to dinner.
Likewise, Henry did not really beat the whole of the French army. The jockeying of rival factions within the court of Charles VI of France meant that the powers that ought to have been unified against him were disastrously split. France was effectively fighting with one hand tied behind its back.
Other parts of the Agincourt myth remain true, however. There is little question that, despite its lack of full strength, the French army was still larger than Henry’s, and it was fighting on its own turf. It was truly remarkable that the king of England had so successfully held his forces together under difficult conditions. And yes, when they reached a field just outside the modern village of Azincourt, his tired men did more than just beat the French army that first entrapped and then attacked them. They destroyed it.
The Shrewd Politician
King Henry V portrait from the National Portrait Gallery
The killings at Agincourt were hardly the only time that the pious warrior-king of England acted in ways likely to make us uneasy today. During his nearly six-month siege of Rouen at the end of 1418, huge numbers of its French citizens were starving to death. City leaders, believing that Henry would allow these poor non-combatants to pass through his lines, expelled them from the gates, but the king of England would not let them depart. In wretched agony, most starved to death in the city’s ditches, caught between the army of their countrymen inside the city and the army of the invader outside of it.
Did this display of callous disregard for human life help convince the people of Rouen to surrender in January 1419? We can’t know for sure – any more than we can say whether the third line at Agincourt would have departed regardless of Henry’s actions. Much is justified in war that cannot be called just.
Beyond question, though, is the effective pairing of Henry’s martial accomplishments with political instincts. He hardly started the Armagnac–Burgundian feud that for years had torn France apart, but he ceaselessly maneuvered to take advantage of it. After the Dauphin managed the September 1419 assassination of the Duke of Burgundy, Henry wasted no time in convincing the duke’s heir to join Burgundy’s future to England’s. By the following summer, Henry had a treaty in place giving him the hand of Catherine of Valois, daughter of the king of France, and the plan that their son would be heir to both England and France.
Henry’s ‘Golden Age’ Legacy
It wasn’t to be, of course. When Henry took ill and died in 1422, his last breaths were the last gasps of English ambition in France. No one knew it yet, as the end would take many years – and a remarkable French girl named Joan of Arc – but Henry’s infant son would lose much of his political inheritance and ignite the internal squabbling of English magnates that was the Wars of the Roses.
By a strange logic, the fact that England lost the Hundred Years’ War has itself heightened the reputation of Henry. His reign was the final high-water mark, soon recast into a golden age. The unavoidable grime of his life was washed away, and what remained became the gilded, frozen treasures that they are today.
Michael Livingston teaches at The Citadel and is the author of numerous books on medieval history as well as fiction novels. You can learn more about Michael on his website, or follow him on Twitter @medievalguy
Michael’s latest book is Bloody Crowns: A New History of the Hundred Years War – you can get it on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk
A teenage prince wounded in battle, a king who defied the odds in France, and a ruler whose legacy still shapes how we see the Hundred Years’ War—Henry V was far more complex than the legend suggests. Michael Livingston explores the experiences that forged his character, revealing a leader who combined battlefield brilliance with calculated political ambition.
By Michael Livingston
The future Henry V was only thirteen when his father seized the crown from Richard II and was crowned Henry IV in 1399. The years that followed were punctuated by his family’s attempts to hold the throne against a sequence of threats. The numerous coalitions in France jockeyed to take advantage of England’s instability. The Scots wisely seized their chance to prod at the border. Wales, under the leadership of Owain Glyndŵr, erupted into a perilously dangerous revolt. And even within the small circle of the English court there were threatening plots and schemes.
Lessons In Leadership
These years must have taught the young heir important lessons in leadership. After all, as soon as he received the title of Prince of Wales, he was being trained to rule: an education that mixed politics, economics, and military training. William Shakespeare portrays Hal, as he calls the young man, as something of a youthful delinquent in Henry IV, Part 1, but there is little indication that this was truly so.
In March of 1403, for instance, the king tasked his teenaged son to help end the Welsh revolt. In a letter that May, Hal reported the actions taken when he went to Owain’s home in Glyndyfrdwy:
And there we torched a beautiful home in its park, and all the land around it. We camped there all that night, and some of our men issued out into the countryside and seized a significant gentleman of that place who was one of the chief supporters of Owain. He offered five hundred pounds for his ransom, and he promised to pay the full sum within two weeks if we would spare his life. We did not accept, and he was put to death. Many of his companions – taken on that same raid – suffered the same fate.
He never found Owain. No one ever did. Worse, the call of rebellion spread. Less than two months after the killings in Glyndyfrdwy, Hal rode at his father’s side into battle not against rebellious Welsh, but against fellow Englishmen. Henry Percy, the son of the Earl of Northumberland, had raised his banner against the king. Hotspur, as he is better known, had considerable military experience and popular favor.
When he marched his army down from the north, the threat to the kingdom was undeniably real. The king gathered his forces as quickly as possible, and the two armies met just north of Shrewsbury on July 21, 1403. In many respects, it might have been the most consequential day of Hal’s life.
When the royal forces were arrayed, the Earl of Stafford led the wing to the right of the king’s center. Leading the left wing was none other than the teenaged prince. Hotspur held high ground, and he used this to his advantage: the archers he had recruited in Cheshire loosed devastating waves of arrows. Men, it was said, fell like autumn leaves. One of those hurtling shafts struck the Prince of Wales in the face and plunged into his skull – six inches deep, according to the physician who later attended to him.
Remarkably, Hal wasn’t killed on the spot. More remarkable still, he didn’t leave the field.
At nearly the same time that the prince was hit, the Earl of Stafford’s wing of the army collapsed. The king’s center wavered. And Hotspur, sensing his chance to put them all to rout, ordered his men to charge. Somehow, despite the searing agony and mortal fear he must have felt in that moment, the Prince of Wales swung his line around and ordered a counter-charge of its own – right into Hotspur’s flank.
Hotspur was killed. The threat was ended.
For Hal, the victory was the start of his own, personal battle. In the following weeks a surgeon worked to remove the arrowhead from his skull – horrifyingly, he had to widen the entrance wound in his face to extract it – and then oversee his long recovery. It would be months before the prince was back in the field, back to trying to end the rebellion in Wales.
The trauma of what happened to him at Shrewsbury doubtless scarred the young man, whether we count those scars as physical, mental, or spiritual. The experience, at such a formative age, surely did much to forge his singular character, which over the years would prove an almost paradoxical mix of pious spiritual devotion and prideful martial aggression, passionate personal loyalty and deep-seated distrust of others, tenacious tactics and patient strategies.
A Crown and War With France
In 1413, the prince took the throne as Henry V, and even from his earliest acts it seems he was setting his kingdom on a course to war with France.
On August 13, 1415, after months of careful preparations, the army he had raised crossed the Channel and set siege to Harfleur. The town held out heroically against what ought to have been an overwhelming display of English might, and with Henry’s army fixed in place, week after week, its numbers were turned against it. Dysentery burned through his encampment. By the time Harfleur finally fell on September 22, Henry had sustained heavy losses.
His fighting strength greatly diminished, he had little chance of seizing another urban target, so he opted to march what remained of his army north across France to Calais. The journey was meant to take a mere eight days, but the French sniffed out his plans and blocked his route, forcing the English into a dogged march deeper into enemy territory. These tiring weeks were a perilous test of Henry’s ability to maintain the army’s cohesion and capabilities – a test of his ability to survive – and he passed.
Agincourt: Fact vs Fiction
The battle that would come at Battle of Agincourt on October 25 earned him laud as a tactician and a fighter, but his greater accomplishment might well have been the leadership necessary to get his men there at all.
A lot can be (and has been) said about Henry at Agincourt. Some of it, like the Shakespearean conceit that he was a man of the common people, is tough to square: Henry had brought 60 horses for his personal use in France, and no matter what the Bard might claim about him viewing the men who fought for him as a “band of brothers,” he probably was not inviting them to dinner.
Likewise, Henry did not really beat the whole of the French army. The jockeying of rival factions within the court of Charles VI of France meant that the powers that ought to have been unified against him were disastrously split. France was effectively fighting with one hand tied behind its back.
Other parts of the Agincourt myth remain true, however. There is little question that, despite its lack of full strength, the French army was still larger than Henry’s, and it was fighting on its own turf. It was truly remarkable that the king of England had so successfully held his forces together under difficult conditions. And yes, when they reached a field just outside the modern village of Azincourt, his tired men did more than just beat the French army that first entrapped and then attacked them. They destroyed it.
The Shrewd Politician
The killings at Agincourt were hardly the only time that the pious warrior-king of England acted in ways likely to make us uneasy today. During his nearly six-month siege of Rouen at the end of 1418, huge numbers of its French citizens were starving to death. City leaders, believing that Henry would allow these poor non-combatants to pass through his lines, expelled them from the gates, but the king of England would not let them depart. In wretched agony, most starved to death in the city’s ditches, caught between the army of their countrymen inside the city and the army of the invader outside of it.
Did this display of callous disregard for human life help convince the people of Rouen to surrender in January 1419? We can’t know for sure – any more than we can say whether the third line at Agincourt would have departed regardless of Henry’s actions. Much is justified in war that cannot be called just.
Beyond question, though, is the effective pairing of Henry’s martial accomplishments with political instincts. He hardly started the Armagnac–Burgundian feud that for years had torn France apart, but he ceaselessly maneuvered to take advantage of it. After the Dauphin managed the September 1419 assassination of the Duke of Burgundy, Henry wasted no time in convincing the duke’s heir to join Burgundy’s future to England’s. By the following summer, Henry had a treaty in place giving him the hand of Catherine of Valois, daughter of the king of France, and the plan that their son would be heir to both England and France.
Henry’s ‘Golden Age’ Legacy
It wasn’t to be, of course. When Henry took ill and died in 1422, his last breaths were the last gasps of English ambition in France. No one knew it yet, as the end would take many years – and a remarkable French girl named Joan of Arc – but Henry’s infant son would lose much of his political inheritance and ignite the internal squabbling of English magnates that was the Wars of the Roses.
By a strange logic, the fact that England lost the Hundred Years’ War has itself heightened the reputation of Henry. His reign was the final high-water mark, soon recast into a golden age. The unavoidable grime of his life was washed away, and what remained became the gilded, frozen treasures that they are today.
Michael Livingston teaches at The Citadel and is the author of numerous books on medieval history as well as fiction novels. You can learn more about Michael on his website, or follow him on Twitter @medievalguy
Michael’s latest book is Bloody Crowns: A New History of the Hundred Years War – you can get it on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk
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