Gone Medieval - Henry V with Dan Jones

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

For centuries, one English monarch basked in an almost unblemished, heroic reputation. But more recently questions have been asked about some of his actions. Was Henry V a great warrior king, or a vicious butcher - or both?Matt Lewis is joined by Dan Jones to fill the gap between the Plantagenets and the Wars of the Roses with an examination of the relatively newly divisive figure, Henry V.Clip of Shakespeare's Henry V from the 2013 Globe Theatre production, with Jamie Parker as Henry V.Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Rob Weinberg. The producer is Joseph Knight, the senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ You can take part in our listener survey here > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here.

Find out who we really were. We've gone medieval. Now, I'm all about controversial kings. For centuries, one English monarch basked in an almost unblemished, heroic reputation. Breaks, dear friends, once more, we'll close the wall up with our English dead. More recently, questions have been asked about some of his actions. But are they questions for his time or ours? Was he a great warrior king or a vicious butcher? Or both?

Are they sometimes close to the same thing? Dan Jones needs no introduction. The author of some of the best and most successful medieval nonfiction and now fiction around. He's back with another barnstorming book. It fills the gap between the Plantagenets and the Wars of the Rose's book. and is a much-needed examination of a relatively newly divisive figure. Henry V. Welcome back to God Medieval, Dan.

It's fantastic to have you back with us. Thank you for having me back to vote of confidence. My wife always says you can get invited somewhere twice, wants to do something and wants to apologise, so I'm not quite sure this is your apology. Yeah. Am I right in thinking this is your first kind of biography of a single individual? Yes, I think you are right in saying that.

And that was one of several parts of the interest in writing about Henry VIII, was that I'd written dynastic histories and books about big slabs of the Middle Ages and some historical fiction recently, but I'd never done a biography. So I felt like that would be an interesting writing challenge as well as the subject, Henry V, being, to me, at any rate, personally fascinated. Yeah, I find him fascinating too, so I really enjoyed the book. I thought before we get into some of the detail of the book, a couple of broader questions that I had, why do you think Shakespeare gives us this wild youth of Henry VIII? why does he sort of almost invent that? Because there's not too much evidence that it was a real thing, is there?

No, the evidence for the supposed riotous, untamed, wild youth of Henry V is fragmentary at best. There are a couple of illusions in Chronicles. There are stories that don't really stand up to much scrutiny about street fighting when he's younger. They don't even make much sense, really, when you start to think about the characters involved. but Shakespeare liked to take history and bend it to his own dramatic end. We are always with the 15th century in particular, whether at the end of the 15th century or the beginning of the 15th century, looking through the lens of Shakespeare, because the plays themselves, as well as taking sort of the subject of England

as their historical backdrop are brilliant personal dramatizations. Now, in order to do that, and to do that, particularly with a king like Henry V, you have to have some sense of a transformation. If you take a king like Richard II and the play Richard the Second, it has baked into the history a transformation. The play is about how do you unmake a king? And given that is the story of the end of Richard the Second reign, you don't have to do masses and masses with the history

to make it a great and effective drama, which is why the play Richard the 2nd is relatively close to historical accuracy. With Henry V, you have a great ending to the play, and you have a great underpinning theme, which is how does a king come to be at one with his country? And that's how does he relate to the common man? How does he galvanize a country behind a personal project? The project's so personal as war. But with Henry, the real historical transformation of this person is quite subtle.

And given that Henry, the Prince Howl, it was a recurring character in three plays, Henry Fourth, Part One, Part Two, and Henry Fifth, you need to do something more than that. So if we can imagine Shakespeare sitting with his staff writers in his writer's room, the question is, what do we do with this guy at the beginning? He has to go from somewhere to somewhere else. And the solution is by playing up these fragmentary historical references to a wild, untamed youth, until you build a very different Prince Hal than the one that historical sources attest. I do get the impression, though, that you felt that there was a change in Henry,

more subtle maybe than Shakespeare allows for, but there is a point at which he becomes a king and a sense in which that feels quite performative and that performative kingship is a big part of Henry's brand. Absolutely. I totally agree. And to understand that, again, we have to go to the reign of Richard II. In arguing that Henry V doesn't have the same transformation that Shakespeare says he has, I'm not saying there's no transformation at all. Henry lived to the age of 35, and for 26 of those 35 years, he was not king. For half of that 26 pre-king years, he was the heir to the throne. And so by the time he became king in 1413, he was a known quantity. He'd lived through unbelievably turbulent times.

Henry was born in the beginning of the second great crisis of Richard the second's reign, the first being the peasant revolt, second that became the protest of the appellants and the removal from Richard II of the powers of government. He was on the cusp of his teenage years and into his teenage years at the time of the Lancasterian Revolution, and then he grew up through his father, Henry IV, troubled reign, troubled by the problems innate to being a usurper. He had a serious political career from the age of 13

until the age of 26, largely in Wales, facing down Anglindur, but also taking effective command of his first. father's government when his father became ill. The point was by the time he came to be king himself, he was very well known. He was not as well known, let's say, as Prince Charles was when he became Charles III, but there was a similar sense that this person had been around. Henry also became king at a time in a set of very different circumstances to his father. So he had a lot of natural advantages when he became king. The chief among them was the fact that he was not a usurper.

He came to the throne by right of birth, by right of inheritance. But he did still, but he did still need, I think, to mark this moment of transformation from Prince, had a relatively fractious relationship with his father politically in his father's waning years, to King in his own right. For a Prince of Wales with a kind of private retinue, a close relation to the Duchy of Lancaster and the Lancasterian retainers, he had to merge into kingship in a way that was pronounced and defined. And he did that very effectively at his coronation. At his coronation, he seems to pull down a mask. He's never been a particularly riotous prince. He's been a practical all hands-on, roll your sleeves up and get stuck into the detail and the business of government

type of prince. But when he becomes king, he senses he needs this transformation. And he performs it, to use your word, at his coronation feast. He sits and he seems to assume this incredibly somber, sober, severe persona. And from that moment, he very seldom lets that public persona go. And in fact, at all moments of great political importance during his reign, I'm thinking, for example at the pageants in London when he comes back from the victory at Agincourt, this is the persona he adopts. It's severe. He is undoubtedly in command of his kingdom, but he presents himself as a channel for his kingdom's adulation to go through him to God. He is a very different king from Richard II, who was narcissistic, solipsistic, incredibly theatrical, whilst not

understanding the first thing about the business of actually being a king and what the political role demanded. Henry has a very good idea what the political role of being king is, but he learns, I think, as a child, how to perform kingship or the importance of performing kingship from Richard the second. Yeah. And the book spends a long time with Henry as not king, as you say, you know, the majority of his life, he's not king. I wondered how significant you would say his experiences in Wales are in his formative years, because they seem quite at odds particularly with Shakespeare's idea of the riotous prince. He's busy in some serious work from a very young age. He is and he's created Prince of Wales by his father, Henry IV. And Henry means him to do a

job. This is part of a broader Lancasterian project. Henry VIII assumes the Crown and his business is to be England and France. He has four sons, the eldest three of whom, Henry, his brother Thomas and his brother John, are to be given different parts of the kingdom in which to come their teeth, really, to take on and manage as part of this family. This was something Richard the Second had never had. Richard the second was himself. He had no heir. He had vanishingly few friends and relatives whom he trusted and on whom he could rely. But Henry IV, it determines to be different. So Thomas is sent to Ireland. John is sent to the Scottish border. Henry as Prince of Wales is sent to Wales. And he is therefore in direct competition with O'I and Glendour, who has laid

claim to the title of Prince of Wales for himself. So Henry is sent there to test the justice of Oain's claim by force of arms. He's sent there with a lot of help. He has Hotspur by his side. He has lots of other older and more experienced nobles with him. But ultimately what he's doing is testing the justice of his claim against Oin-Glendardus. Now that as a starting point for a war is strikingly similar to the starting point of Henry when he becomes king, his war in France. He is testing the justice of his claim to the Crown of France against that, partly of King Charles the 6th, but then a succession of dofans. That's the sort of elemental starting point of the two wars. During his time in Wales, Henry has to fight for a long time a guerrilla war, which is not similar to the war he later fights in France.

However, he does learn the sort of basic craft of warfare. and he develops a certain attitude towards warfare. So when I talk about the basic craft of warfare, there are sieges, there's the deployment of cannon, there's experimenting with ratios of dismounted men-at-arms to archers, all of which you can follow through to France. He has this ratio of overwhelming use of force of archers. He learns how to besiege of castle and the war in France put aside the Battle of Agincourt is really a war of sieges, and he deploys cannon, the siege of Aberystwyth,

and then later at Siege of Falfour. So these are basic elements of modern warfare, as it was at the beginning of the 15th century. But I think more than any of that is the attitude he works out to warfare. There's a great letter he writes in French, rather than in the English he'll use as king, but he writes in French to his father from Wales early on in his career there.

He's 15 or 16. His father has sent him to Wales to go sort out Owen Glendor. It's an amazing letter full of teenage brio. He says, paraphrasing here, He says, Oh, Inglendor has been putting it about that. He's Prince of Wales and he'll take me down in a fight, wherever and whenever. So I want to find him. He literally goes round his house.

I've heard you're talking about me. But O'Inglador is not in. So he says, so I burned his house down, found a bunch of his friends. They often be some money for mercy. I chop their heads off. Now we're riding around. We went somewhere else. We looked for him there.

He wasn't there. So we did some more burning and chopping heads off. Then we came back. It's a gleeful letter. It's look, Dad. Look, what I did. And that's attitude of, it's not heedless and it's not without caution, but it is an attitude that Henry values extreme aggression quickly.

And that sort of attitude, it's not Blitzkrieg warfare, but it's sea fight, walk towards it, punch first, punch hardest. I think it might be Cobra Kai. Strike first, strike hard, no mercy, my children watch. I can't remember. I'm misquoting and probably doing Henry a disservice in the meantime. So it's the elements of warcraft. but really it's the attitude that's the most important.

Yeah, and I got the impression that you felt he learnt some valuable lessons around the logistics of warfare too. So perennially short of money in Wales as a print, he will focus so hard on funding his war with France, building his supply lines. He will put so much focus into that because he understands the problems that not getting that right can cause. You're absolutely right. That's the other element of it. And it's the least glamorous and it is arguably the most important. He understands through bitter experience the war is very expensive. You never have as much money as you need, and there will always be problems you predicted, and you will be back in Parliament asking for more money, whether you like it or not.

And that's the reality of his war with France. It is to Henry's great credit, pun partially intended, that by the time he becomes king, he has a lot of experience with going to hostile parliaments. Maybe hostile is the wrong word, but certainly, It's skeptical parliaments, English parliaments, and saying, we need more money for the war. The very basic thing he understands is that parliaments are more likely to give you money if they think you're going to spend it well. This is all just a big confidence trick that you have to go and seem like you're worth the money. He gets to grips with the sort of dirty business of twisting arms, of politicking, of having people in parliament that you can trust to manage your business, of having a sympathetic speaker.

it's Thomas Chaucer, it's his uncle, Henry Beaufort, later on. He understands the importance of finding extra sources of funds outside Parliament, so you're not asking for absolutely everything from Parliament. You're seen to be spending your own money. You're seen to be borrowing from rich, wealthy individuals who can afford it. He just gets to grips with the boring business, as we might think of it, but the essential business of funding a war. And this is not unique to England and France in the early 15th century. Funding a war is everything. I mean, there would be no war in Ukraine without this exact sort of thing happening at the moment all the time in the West. So this is a sort of eternal historical truth, but Henry really gets the grips with it. And he's not the master of it by the time he becomes king.

And it never ceases to be difficult, even after Agincourt, but he's very good at it. And during his time in Wales as well, he will at 16 have this terrifying experience at the Battle of Shrewsbury. It's a big moment. Going into battle itself is terrifying enough. Try catching an in the face, you know, that can only make it worse, surely. I wondered to what extent you think that leaves a psychological scar as well as the physical one on Henry, because it would be easy to see it turning him away from the idea of battle, making him slightly traumatised and a bit scared. But it almost seems like it cultivates this notion in him that he almost can't die. God doesn't want him to be killed. It does seem that way. And I remember when I was writing this biography

of Henry V, I had several long and very stimulating conversations with Michael's. Livingston, the brilliant American military historian who's such a great student of battle and has written some brilliant books about medieval battles, Cresi and Edward III and Agincourt. The subtitle of Mike's book on Agincourt is Battle of the Scarred King. And I think there's a lot to be said for the thesis, which Mike puts forward in his brilliant book about Agincourt, which is that you have to look to Shrewsbury to understand it. Henry really, he only fights two battles, Shrewsbury and Agincourt, and they are connected. and they're connected through his experience as a 16-year-old in July 1403.

At the Battle of Shrewsbury, Henry takes off his helmet or lifts his visor, we're not sure which, an arrow ends up in his face, buried deep in his head, and then carries on fighting, but there's this long operation, which all in all lasts about a month. When Henry's on the verge of death, Kenilworth Castle, sort of Lancasterian H.Q, and John Bradmore, his father's brilliant surgeon, is operating on him, millimeter by millimeter opening the wound in his face, using this bespoke tool to draw the arrowhead out, keeping the wound clean. It must have been incredibly painful. Unusually painful even in a world

in which pain is a norm. It's miraculous that he survives, and I use that word advisedly. After he's recovered from the operation, he has some time off. His father gives him some time off from Wales, and he goes to Canterbury, he goes to Walsingham. He gives thanks to God at these shrines. And I think you have to, in any biography, certainly a medieval biography, there's a degree of psychological speculation to be done. But I think it's not mad to speculate that Henry, from this point on, assumes that he must have been chosen to survive for a purpose. And certainly you can divine that in his actions thereafter. He really does behave as though he thinks God wants him to win and that it's his purpose on earth to win.

And it's his purpose on earth to claim justice, have justice of the French. And I think that a lot of that must go back to Shrewsbury. And then eventually when Henry does become king in 1413, it's after a period of slight turmoil and difficulty with his father, as his dad's health fails. He's vying for government and there's a bit of tension there, I think, between the new young buck and the old king who doesn't want to let go. But it feels like Henry is perhaps the most well-prepared heir to the throne

since maybe Edward I, in a very, very long time. We've got someone who has served an apprenticeship. Might not have been born to be king, but he's served a solid apprenticeship. He's contributed in government. And he kind of is ready to hit the ground running. Is that fair? I think that's very fair, Matt. Yeah, I think you've nailed it there.

Edward I is a good comparison because there are kings who serve apprenticeships who don't turn out very well. Edward II, that is an obvious example. But the difficulty of the apprenticeship, the roundness of the test that both Edward I first and Henry the fifth are put to is strikingly similar. Edward I had a long time as the Lord Edward, as his father's heir, and like young Henry, it was a difficult time to be the heir. Henry III and Henry the fourth are not very similar characters, and their reins are wildly different in length, but they both struggle. And just as the Lord Edward is instrumental in the wars against Simon de Montfort, so the young Prince Henry is instrumental in the struggle against our Anglindor, he has to take on

a leading role in government when his father's health fails. He comes to the throne as a worldly tested warrior who also has serious political experience. And then you end up with a warrior king in both cases, who goes in both cases does do remarkable things. Temperamentally, Edward I and Henry V and not very similar. But they do have one thing in common, which is they are both considered the greatest warrior king of their age. And a lot of that goes back to being fully formed as a warrior by the time they become king. And Henry seems on becoming king to be almost immediately obsessed with the idea of invading France.

Why do you think he's driven to do that? France doesn't just rear its head the minute he becomes king. He's been immersed in French politics for several years beforehand. It's a very good time to be an English king in the Hundred Years' War. really in theory any time after 1392 when Charles' 6th, King of France, has a catastrophic psychological episode of some sort and thereafter is intermittently insane. And French politics curdles around him. It forms into murderously hostile camps, the Burgundians and the Armagnac's,

this is the French version of the Wars of the Roses. If you are so minded to go and assert Edward III's longstanding claim to be the actual King of France, now is the time to do it, if you've got the wherewithal and the means politically at home. And Henry the Fifth does. He comes to the throne. As I said, by the problems of the usurpation of his father's reign are behind him. He knows his way about war. He's already shown his hands to an extent in what he thinks about the contest between the Burgundians and the Armeniaks. While he's involved at a high level in government under his father, he throws his lot in pretty much with the Burgundian, whereas his father is much more on the fence about who to back.

And I think it's a sense of now or never, or at least if I'm going to hoik another cliche from my mind, it's strike while the iron is hot and the iron is red hot in 1413, 14, 14, 14, 15. Now is the time. If we believe the story that's also turned into the great tennis balls incident in Shakespeare, it does seem to be that the French are somewhat cocky about Henry V. Don't really take him seriously. Are these tennis balls, sentiment at Kenilworth, maybe. Does word just get to him that they're talking smack about him? Maybe. But there's certainly a sense that he's underestimated. in France, we know for a fact that French intelligence sources are saying,

this guy's not cut out to be king. Because of the nature of his sort of severe, austere, religious kind of transformation on becoming king and his sort of well-known chastity, they're saying this guy is more like a monk than a king, don't worry about him. As events show, that is a fatal apprehension of what Henry is all about. It's just a good time to be king. And added to that, there is this sense, I think, in Henry, that there has been a real injustice done. We could argue that a young, Edward III in claiming the Crown of France is to a degree cynically posturing. The real goals of war against France for Edward III centred on South West France, on Gascany and on securing the

kind of English commercial dominance in the channel, somewhat more pragmatic goals. I think for Henry V, this is the goal. The goal is France and he sees the means to do it and does it. Is there also an element in which war with France is a good way to unite England? He's seen England being ruptured and split by his father's use a patient. and the trouble that Lancasterian rule has had. He's come to the throne as an heir, not as a usurper, as you said. But is there still an element in which war with France is quite a good way to get England together with a common cause?

Up to a point, yes. I think it's a secondary consideration. There are other ways to unite a country than to devote its entire budget to war, but it is a happy consequence if it goes well. And we must remember that in 1415, as Henry was preparing to take ship and go to France and sail, as it turned out Darfleur, the Southampton plot happens. There is this sort of hamfisted attempt to dethrone him early in his reign.

And the thing that I think wounds him most about the Southampton plot is that his friend, Henry Lord Scroop, aside from knowing about the details of the plot and not reporting them to him, is also said to have been putting it about that Henry's done for, whether he goes on this French campaign or doesn't go on this French campaign. And this is one of Henry's best friends. He doesn't really have great faith in this whole French project. It's really personal to Henry. I think as the rain goes on, or certainly up to the Treaty of Troyes and 1420,

by which time Henry wins his English stage of the war and it transforms into him taking sides in the French Civil War. Between 1415 and 1420, this is a brilliant way to unite the country, and it really does unite the country. 1413 to 1415, when the war is in the planning stage, it's a big gamble. And 1420 to 1422, when the war, in the eyes of the English parliament, certainly, political community, arguably, the war should have been done and they shouldn't be there anymore, then it becomes less united and actually more divisive. And having compared Henry to Edward I, how do you think he compares to Edward III in that, again, they're very different characters personally, but to me they both seem like men who were able to inspire those around them, who were able to place their trust

in other people, and who men were willing to follow. Yeah, that's the similarity between them. I'm writing at the moment about young earshed Edward III. I'm back in fiction. and I'm writing about 1350 just after the establishment of the Order of the Garter. And when you go through the records of Edward III's reign, it's incredibly striking how different a character he was from his great-grandson, Henry V. Edward is all party when he's at home. It's incredibly sort of showy and glamorous. He's clubbable.

Everyone likes the guy. He is not the sort of austere, buttoned-up, severe, ultra-pious figure that Henry V is. but what they do have in common is that men are prepared to follow them. I think for different reasons, but they both have a sort of personal magnetism, a self-assurance and a certainty of purpose in war at any rate. The job description of being a medieval king is simple. It's not necessarily easy, but it's simple. You're a warrior and you're a lawgiver.

Those are the two sides of the Great Seal, right? And Edward III and Henry V, both understand that, and they both keep the job pretty simple. You go and fight and you win, and when you come home, you make sure that justice is either done or at least seen to be done and that you listen to the complaints of the political community, you don't take them personally and you realize that remedying grievance, listening to parliaments, fostering positive relationships with the nobility and not seeing them as rivals, that is the job. Richard the second, as the counter-example,

understands nothing of that. He doesn't like fighting. He doesn't want to go to war and he sees any political complaint domestically as a personal attack. And you set Henry 5th and Edward III against that counter-example, you start to see that they understand the job pretty well. And so eventually we will get Henry to France. Siege of Haarfleur goes fairly well, and then he goes off on this weird march that seems like a bad idea to everyone but Henry towards Calais.

Did he want to fight Agincourt? Was he goading the French into a battle? No, Agincourt is not in the plan. Halfler is in the plan. Huffler goes very well. But then there's this moment of what do we do? Everyone about Henry is unanimous. We've got to go home.

No. Henry's not for going home. He wants something else out of this campaign. He doesn't want to go home having, quote unquote, just won Huffler. But what is that something else? There's no time to take another city, no time for another siege on the scale of Huffler, and not the resources either.

Provoking the French to battle is a non-year. a good idea, having gone through rampant sickness and food supplies are running low. So what is the thing? It's a bit of a case of a naughty kid running down an entire street, knocking on everyone's door and legging it. That's what this is about. This is about, okay, we're not far from Calais. If I just pelt it up to Calais, we can still go home and it's only really going to take us a week more. But we are going to make fools of the French and show just how powerless this French government is to defend its people. And remember, that's often the aim in English war in France. The chevreches of of Edward III, but also this kind of smash and grab run, as it's supposed to be, of Henry V, is you weaken

the morale of the population by showing their own government can't defend them. That's what this is supposed to be about. But they don't run quite fast enough. It's the kid who's running down the street, he's knocked on eight of the ten doors, and that he trips over his own shoelaces, and, oh, no, there's a whole gang of other kids ready to give him a pasting. That's what happens at Agincourt. And so he's got to fight. There are similarities with Edward III's Battle of Croissie, a chevichet that turns into a sort of foot race

and the English lose and have to stand and fight and somehow miraculously win. Very similar types of campaign, although they started in somewhat different ways. So no, he didn't want to fight Agincourt at all. And so having been caught by the French, confronted by this massive army, and won a victory that would have seemed to every,

I think against all of the odds. How much of the credit for that victory ought to go to Henry? Almost all of it. In terms of Battleville command, almost all of it. He gets them into the mess, but to be fair to the guy, he gets them out of the mess as well. Nobody is surprised by the other side's tactics. The French are always going to try and use superior cavalry strength against the English. The English are always going to use their longbows to try and negate that. The French think they have a cunning plan to destroy the English longbow capability, but Henry deploys his longbows smartly. It's like a game of European soccer. But these days, both sides note the other side's tactics. They know what to expect. It's just who can execute their

game plan the better. And Henry, for a number of different reasons, executes his game plan better. One of those reasons is that he's in charge. And in a sense, that is partly because he got them into this mess. He is in charge and no one else is in charge. The French army, who knows who's in charge? Is Boussico in charge? Eh, a bit. Are about half a dozen other French nobles? Yeah, they think they are.

Is the dauphin? No, because he's not there. Is the king? No, because he's not there. Some other nobles who don't make it on time? No, but they're on their way. It's chaos in the French, get everything wrong. And Henry, who only really has one option.

They've one leader, one tactic, one option. And they do it right. And then the famous moment at Agincourt where Henry executes the prisoners of war, one of the major cases for the prosecution, if we're saying he's not really a great king at all. In my view, again, he only has one option. One of the great virtues Henry V has is great clarity. He understands what he faces at any given moment, and he makes decisions fast, and he sees them through, and that's what gets him through Agincourt.

By the way, I'm not downplaying the personal bravery of any of the... the ordinary people fighting on either side, and that is back to the matter of Shakespeare here, the incredible resilience and personal fortitude of particularly the ordinary English and Welsh archers at Agincourt is extraordinary to have been put through this forced march by Henry and then to stand and fight and win. Okay, that's something special as well. But if we're talking about tactics, strategy command, this is all Henry. I mean, Henry has enjoyed centuries of a kind of almost unblemished record as a hero until relatively recently when there's talk of the war crimes at Agincourt, maybe his cruelty at the siege of Ruan when he sandwiches those people

between his army and the walls. I wonder what your take on that was. I think in a way it says more about our own age than about Henry's. I say this relatively frequently. I'm not talking daily. When asked, we're really weird. We're one of the weirdest ages ever to live in the whole of history. And our values are massively out of whack. I'm not saying they're bad, but we have to recognize how totally out of kilter our moral values, our ethical judgments are with most other ages of human history. So remember we're the weird ones, okay? One, I wonder why for so long nobody was demanding that Henry V be hauled up on charges of war crimes after Agencourt. I wonder why even the French chroniclers at the time didn't really see much of a problem with what had done

because it was the sensible, normal thing to do and it didn't really strike anybody as agreed. religiously terrible. Henry was in peril of losing the battle he'd just won. There was a choice to be made, and he made it. He thought the French were coming for another go. The people who complained the most about killing the prisoners were the people who thought they'd just got a lot of money for them as ransom and they were annoyed to have taken that financial hit. This is medieval war. There are such things as war crimes, but this is bad manners. And that's about it. if even that really because it strikes me that in medieval war everybody knows the rules particularly siege everybody knows precisely what the rules are the points at which you're risking your life if you

don't play the game properly on a battlefield if as henry believed there was another force coming and that prisoners might be rearmed he's kind of within his rights under the rules of war to prevent the danger that that would cause to his men and i think it is striking that the French reserve most of their criticism for the French, for their lack of organisation and their inability to beat this tiny army. They don't criticise Henry for what he does. No. And the French are taking the oriflam. No quarter given. They're going to kill everybody. They let hands on. Henry was nearly killed. The Duke of York was killed. His brother Humphrey was nearly killed. This isn't like the 12th century. Battles don't really happen. Scirmishes. When they do happen, it's all about

ransom taking and everyone's polite to each other. Those days were gone. Those days died in the middle of the 13th century. And if you want to locate where they exactly died, they probably died at the Battle of Evesham when Simon DeMontford was hacked to bits and his genitals were stuffed in his mouth. That was the end of chivalry, whatever the parties of Edward III seemed to claim. This is war. The orroflam has been taken. You can't be surprised, it's still less outraged if you die. To now, from our distance of 600-odd years, sit there and say, Oh, the terrible Henry, what a bad man. What a wicked person.

He'd have been no good at the Democratic convention. Forget it. It's just the wrong set of values to judge him by. I'm not taking massive purpose on the front or thinking this is unique to Henry V's studies. This is happening right across all historical studies, medieval studies included. We're just making massive category errors

and using totally the wrong value systems to make historical judgments and then making these sort of sweeping moral judgments on top of it. It's bizarre to me. Yeah. The book then takes us through after Ajin Kaur, up until May the Treaty of Twy and 1420 is all positive, all victory, all great. And then as you mentioned before, 1420 to 1422, it feels a little bit like there's mission creep. No one's quite sure what the end game really is now, except maybe Henry. He seems to understand what he's doing, but nobody is quite sure what the goal is anymore. And then obviously

Henry will die unexpectedly and early. Do you think if he'd survived, and maybe if he'd survived a few more weeks until Charles I 6th died, could he have pulled off the dual monarchy? Was it ever something that could have worked? That's the 64 million chilling question, isn't it? If anyone could have made it work, Henry V could have made it work, but I don't know if anyone could have made it work. 1420 presents a serious problem because English victory in the Hundred Years' War, as we know it, was not really anything I think anyone seriously expected. And the consequences, let's just to stick with the consequences for England for a second, are pretty bad. Because now, as I've intimated already, this is no longer a fight for justice, for the sort of king's justice

in terms of laying his claim to his lands in France. This now transforms the entire nature of the war. Henry's no longer going back to take what's his. He is now one party in a French civil war. That's fine. In a sense, the dual monarchy exists from that point onwards. He has to take the lead in French government while still being the King of England. And immediately he runs into the grave problem of who's going to pay for this. He goes back to England after 1420. And compared to the wild celebrations that followed Agincourt, there's a kind of muted horror. which he manages to get around by having Catherine de Valois crowned and then there's an airborne. This is serious.

English Parliament and English noble do not want to pay to support one side in the French Civil War. The whole point of everything that's just happened was the French Civil War is completely devastating to a realm. We don't want to have that. So I think he could probably just about have coped with compartmentalizing himself. He was a man of extraordinary personal resourcefulness, great energy and incredible clarity of thought and determination, as I've already suggested. But the political challenges, well, you see them played out. That being said, it's not an impossible job,

particularly when he was surrounded with as capable of family as he had. And very possibly, what would have happened in France had Henry lived a little longer was what sort of did happen anyway, which is that John Duke of Bedford goes to France and takes over as the regent in the name of Henry VI slash Henry I. Humphrey Duke of Gloucester stays in England with the bowfits on hand. They don't really rub along too well together. And then you would have had Henry himself at the top. Now, what does he say on his deathbed? He says, had I lived longer, I would have rebuilt the wars of Jerusalem. What would

have had to happen for him to rebuild the wars of Jerusalem was, I would be one of two things in France. He'd have either had to win the war totally, which would have meant getting rid of the Dofans, taking charge of the entire kingdom of France. That's pie in the sky. But then again, Henry was a bit of a pie in the sky specialist. I think more realistically, more practically, France would have been partitioned somewhere roughly along L'Iloire. You'd have had the Kingdom of Bouges, run by the Dofan, and you'd have had the English kingdom of France in the north.

As I say, overseen probably by Bedford, England run by Gloucester and the Beauforts, and Henry wanted to go on crusade. Or he may have gone where Edward III very nearly went, and Richard II wanted to go, which was to become the Holy Roman Emperor. That's the most plausible counterfactual. But of course, we'll never know.

Yeah, I was quite struck by how committed Henry appeared to be to the idea of going on Crusade, almost like he felt like the French job was done and he was already thinking ahead to heading off on Crusade as the next big challenge, the next big mission. Yeah, he's thinking about it. When he goes back to France after coming home, presenting the Treaty of Troyes to the English, having it effectively ratternors, in an English parliament. When he goes back to France, we know some of the books that he takes with him. And he's reading chronicles of the First Crusade. He's thinking about crusading. Because the sort of the quote-unquote golden age of crusading is the end of the 11th century through to, let's say, the middle of the 13th century, we tend to forget that it was front

and center of the minds of the statesmen well up to Henry the 8th age, maybe even longer. we tend to not figure crusading into this mindset, but his father was a crusader. Henry IV was a very successful crusader. He'd been off to the Baltic. He'd call it one and a half tours with the Teutonic Knights. Henry IV had set foot in Jerusalem. Even Richard the Lionheart didn't do that. Henry IV went as a pilgrim.

He didn't go as a crusader, but he went. And he came back with the stories. Henry V, the 5th was extremely pious, and there was no upper limit to his ambition. I don't see any reason why rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. Muslim shouldn't have been on his mind. He seems like someone who was never, ever going to stop. Whatever the next challenge was, he was going to find it. I wonder just to finish on, what you would consider to be Henry V's legacy,

perhaps in the short term and in the long term? Only partly through his own design, he's become one of those kings that advanced the sense of the English nation. and some of that is through the language. His use of English and his newsletters back to London, his doubling down on Edward III's use of the iconography of St George, his real setting up as photographic positive and negative Frenchness and Englishness, the nature of the victory at Agincourt,

the sort of plucky little English versus the grand and decadent French. I think he's left his mark one way, or another on the sort of root parts of the traditional sense of Englishness in a European context. He is, through probably no fault of or design of his own, responsible for one of the central paradoxes in the English imagination and psychological relationship with the continent, which is we want it, but we hate it. But of course, to turn this conversation full circle, it's so hard to tease apart the legacy of Henry as Henry from the legacy of Henry as the Shakespearean character.

And that brings us to Richard the third. No, this is, and this is true. This is the genius of Shakespeare and the curse of Shakespeare for we late medievalists. The lens is there and it's so hard, even when you take it away not to be mentally framed by Shakespeare. We're lucky. Otherwise, who would care about this stuff? Absolutely.

You and me? Yeah. I mean, I'd written down English nationalism as one of my. thought about Henry's legacy. I'd also written down kind of a thought about whether he becomes this almost an Arthurian figure and that he guys, maybe at the height of his powers, that he represents this dominance over somebody else, this idea that that could be brought back. You know, he's wheeled out around the time of the Second World War as this great patriotic hero, a symbol that we can all get behind and follow. Shakespeare has given him all of those fantastic

speeches and everything else. There's almost maybe a world in which he sits alongside Arthur as this figure of almost mythology in the English psyche, in the English consciousness? Yeah, I think you're right, Matt. I think you're right. And I think he sets a very high bar as well. You're absolutely right about the Second World War. Look at the young Henry VIII. This sort of golden boy comes to the throne at the right age. Everything seeming to line up in his favour. What does he want? What's top of his list? It's not just, I want to go and fight France. It's I want to go and fight France just like Henry the 5th did. That's the thing. He just epitomises a hundred years later. This is what being a king is all about. And then as history goes on and the myths and the legends start to accrue around

Henry just becomes a sort of semi-mythical figure. Why not mention him in the same breath as Arthur? They certainly touch similar spots. They sort of do jobs, don't they? They perform roles. I talk all day about Henry the 8th's efforts to pretend that he's Henry V. You know, his invasion of France. The son of a usurper, desperate to do it. But everybody's cosplaying somebody. Do you know what I mean? Henry V is, to a degree, cosplaying his great-grandfather.

We are humans, and one of the things we do is we imitate. That's how we learn. It's normal. Who else is Henry the 8th going to look at? Yeah. Of course. It just amuses me that he gets, it doesn't amuse me, but he gets all the big bits wrong and the little bits right.

You know, he'll even execute a member of the House of York on his way over the sea, as if that helps him be like Henry, executing Connersborough when he goes. That was spiteful. And he's kind of almost trying to copy it word for word, except that he lacks all of the things that made Henry V good at it. But we're not here to slag off Henry Gates because I can do that all day long. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dan. It's been absolutely fantastic to talk to you again.

And I thoroughly recommend the book. I really, really enjoyed it. It fills that gap between your Plantagenets and the Wars of the Roses book perfectly and gives us a new window, I think, on someone who everybody thinks they know, but maybe we didn't know him as well as we should have. Thank you, Matt. It's been great talking to you, as always. Dan's latest book, Henry V,

The astonishing rise of England's greatest warrior king, is out now from Head of Zeus. If you've enjoyed this episode, you can hear more from Dan in our back catalogue on his novel Essex Dogs, all about the Cressy campaign earlier in the Hundred Years' War. And we also had a fantastic episode with Jonathan Sumption on the completion of his magisterial Tour de Force

through the entire 100 years. war. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts add free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. As a special gift, you can also get 50% off your first three months when you use the code medieval at checkout. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.