The Erpyngham Retinue King Henry V

Henry V (1413-1422)

Henry V

The reign of Lancastrian hero Henry V was not a long one. It could have been a glorious one, certainly if we think of him solely as a warrior-king, fearless in leading his troops into battle and winning his military victories against seemingly impossible odds. His conquest of Normandy and his acquisition of the throne of France made him a legend in his own time. Who can find fault with his dream of ultimately uniting all of Christian Europe against the infidel?

Henry's brief reign, however, did not get off to a good start at home. Two rebellions had to be dealt with, one led by Sir John Oldcastle, of a prominent Welsh border family, who was disgruntled by his excommunication and imprisonment for heresy. The other was led by Richard, Earl of Cambridge, husband of Anne Mortimer, sister of Edmund Mortimer the nearest legitimate claimant to the throne by descent from Edward lll, and younger brother of the Duke of York. The first one owed a great deal to the earlier attempts of English monarchs to make their country more independent of Rome; the second to the continuing claims of the heirs of Richard ll to the Crown of England.

The Catholic Church had been steadily increasing its demands upon the English treasury, but it had been meeting with increasing resistance. During the reign of Edward lll, reformer John Wycliffe, had declared that the Bible, and not the Church, was the true guide to faith. The English king could welcome this novel idea as long as it didn't lead to attacks on his own prerogative. After all, it needed a representative of Rome at Canterbury to sanction the accession to power of the English monarch.

There was also the matter of the Papal Schism, with rival popes in Rome and Avignon. This was hardly a situation that created confidence in the Holy Catholic Church. Wycliffe went so far as having the Bible translated into English, making it accessible to all who could read, and not just the classically educated clergy. His ideas were then preached with great zeal by the Lollards, all of who condemned many practices of the established Church. Their demands were premature, for religious dissent also constituted a grave threat to the stability of the realm, and King Henry lV, with the able assistance of ultra-conservative Archbishop Arundel had undertaken stern measures to combat their ideas, including burning Lollards at the stake.

Oldcastle, a boyhood friend of Henry V, after escaping from the Tower of London, was accused of organizing a Lollard rebellion. After years in hiding, he was eventually betrayed, captured and executed and his followers dispersed. The rebellion of Richard, Earl of Cambridge, against the Royal House of Lancaster, also suffered the same fate. Both plots were foiled by the decisive action of the king's supporters and Henry, supported by an effective, disciplined royal council, was thus free to embark on his French adventures.

Contemporary events in France greatly favored the implementation of Henry's claims in that country, especially the incompetence of Charles V's son and heir Charles Vl, who also suffered from bouts of insanity. Bitter rivalries tore asunder the French Court, one headed by the king's younger brother, Louis of Orleans and the other by the king's uncle, Philip of Burgundy. The latter had designs on complete control of the government of France, a cause aided by the assassination of Orleans in 1407. The resulting outbreak of civil war paralyzed France for a generation. In the meantime, the King of England took immediate advantage and took his army across the Channel.

Forgetting anything or everything they had learned at Crecy in the previous century, the French army attacked the motley crew that made up the English forces at Agincourt using the same tactics that failed them in the earlier slaughter. The result was an even bigger disaster for the over-confident French with appalling losses among their heavily armed, mounted knights completely unable to maneuver in the marshy lands and cut down by the skill of Henry's mercenary archers, many recruited in Wales.

Following Agincourt, the way was open for Henry to take possession of Normandy. The Dauphin fled Paris, leaving Queen Isabella (during one of her husband fits of insanity) to come to term with the victorious English king. The powerful Duke of Burgundy, whose support had been crucial for Henry, was fatally stabbed by a former supporter of the murdered Orleans while arranging the negotiations, but the English king had no serious rivals in France to thwart his ambition.

By the Treaty of Troyes of 1420, it was declared that on the death of Charles Vl his throne should be given to "his only true son," Henry V of England, now married to the Princess Catherine. We can only surmise what the political future of both France and England might have been had Henry not died during one of his French campaigns in 1422, leaving the Duke of Gloucester as regent in England and the Duke of Bedford as regent in France. The heir to the English throne was less than one year old.