🪴 GoDeep
Search
← University Challenge
Portrait of Henry V of England

Monarchs · Lancaster & York

Henry V of England

1386/87–1422

House of Lancaster — the warrior king of the Hundred Years' War

In office: 1413–1422

Henry of Monmouth inherited a throne his father had usurped and secured it by reviving the English claim to France. Harfleur and Agincourt in 1415 were followed by the methodical conquest of Normandy, and by the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, which made him heir and regent of France and gave him Charles VI's daughter in marriage. He died of dysentery near Paris in 1422, two months before the French king he was to succeed, leaving a son of nine months.

How to spot them

  • ▸Henry of Monmouth: the wild prince turned austere, pious and ruthless king
  • ▸Clue words: 'Harfleur', 'Southampton Plot', 'Troyes 1420', 'Catherine of Valois', 'Bois de Vincennes'
  • ▸Carried an arrow wound in the face from Shrewsbury, sustained at sixteen
  • ▸The first king since the Conquest to write his letters home in English
  • ▸Died at about 35 with the crown of France within reach; Shakespeare made him the model warrior king

In the reign

A conspiracy to kill the king uncovered at Southampton in August 1415 as the invasion fleet lay ready (1415)

The Southampton Plot, aiming to put the Earl of March on the throne; Richard of Conisbrough and Lord Scrope were beheaded.

The commander who, outnumbered and riddled with dysentery, destroyed the French nobility in the mud on 25 October 1415 (1415)

Agincourt, won by longbowmen behind sharpened stakes during the march to Calais.

A Lollard knight and old companion who rebelled in 1414 and was hanged over a fire three years later (1414–1417)

Sir John Oldcastle, the original of Shakespeare's Falstaff before the name had to be changed.

A winter siege of 1418–19 that starved Normandy's capital into surrender, the expelled poor left to die in the ditches (1418–1419)

Rouen; its fall completed the conquest of Normandy.

A treaty of 1420 disinheriting the Dauphin and making an English king heir and regent of France (1420)

The Treaty of Troyes, sealed by marriage to Catherine of Valois on 2 June 1420.

The king who made English the language of his own signet letters, helping fix a written standard (from 1417)

So-called Chancery English; earlier kings had written in French or Latin.

A death from dysentery at Bois de Vincennes in August 1422, weeks before the throne he had been promised fell vacant (1422)

Charles VI died that October; the crown of France passed in name to a nine-month-old baby.

A chantry chapel raised over a tomb in Westminster Abbey, with a saddle, helm and shield hung nearby (1422)

His funeral achievements hung above the tomb for centuries and are now displayed in the Abbey museum.

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born at Monmouth Castle in 1386 or 1387, eldest son of Henry Bolingbroke and Mary de Bohun.
  • •At sixteen he fought at Shrewsbury in 1403 and was struck in the face by an arrow; the surgeon John Bradmore extracted the head with a screw device of his own design.
  • •He succeeded on 20 March 1413 and was crowned on 9 April 1413, in a snowstorm.
  • •He had Richard II reburied in Westminster Abbey in 1413, making amends for his father's usurpation.
  • •He took Harfleur in September 1415 after a five-week siege, then won at Agincourt on 25 October, Saint Crispin's Day.
  • •Charles, Duke of Orléans, captured at Agincourt, spent about twenty-five years a prisoner in England and wrote much of his poetry there.
  • •He married Catherine of Valois in 1420; her later union with Owen Tudor made her the grandmother of Henry VII.
  • •He died on 31 August 1422 at the Château de Vincennes, aged about 35, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.
  • •His only child succeeded at nine months old and lost everything his father had won.
  • •Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of Shakespeare's play was made as wartime propaganda; Kenneth Branagh's 1989 version deliberately muddied the heroics.

Drill it — 8 cards

1 / 8new card

Sources