Henry V: pocket GIANTS (eBook)

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‘So blest a son’: Childhood
and Youth, 1386–14062

Henry V was born at Monmouth on 16 September 1386. He was not expected to become king. But he was in direct line of succession to the throne, as great-grandson of King Edward III, grandson of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and eldest son of Henry of Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby. The house of Lancaster was the most powerful in England under the throne and ‘Time-honoured’ Gaunt was the mightiest of magnates, a European prince and by far the king’s richest subject, with hundreds of lords and knights retained in his service throughout the realm. Bolingbroke, Henry’s father, was a great noble in his own right and a young man of chivalric renown. He became embroiled in the factional politics of King Richard II’s court during Gaunt’s absence overseas in the years 1386–89. He then set out himself on foreign ventures, first on crusade to Prussia and then on pilgrimage to the Holy Land between 1390 and 1393.

The boy Henry saw little of his father, but this was not unusual: until the age of 7 noble children were usually cared for in their mother’s household. When he later became king, he remembered his nurse, Joan Waryn, to whom he granted an annuity of £20. His mother, Mary Bohun, the joint heiress to the Earldom of Hereford, died in June 1394. What impact her death had on the 7-year-old we do not know, although he commissioned an image for her tomb in the church of St Mary de Castro in Leicester on his accession to the throne. Throughout his life he remained close to his maternal grandmother, Joan, the dowager countess who almost certainly influenced his religious development.

He may already have moved, when he was 7, to the household of his grandfather for the customary next stage of his upbringing. Here, as well as military training (he attended his first tournament when he was 10) and schooling in the arts of hunting and falconry, he received a liberal education. His tutor was his young uncle Henry Beaufort, later the Cardinal Bishop of Winchester, one of Gaunt’s sons by Katherine Swynford. Young Henry was supplied with grammar books and learnt to play the harp. When he was still only 12 he joined the household of King Richard himself – at which point his childhood was dramatically and prematurely brought to an end.

In normal times, entering the royal household would have been unexceptional. But times were far from normal. In 1398 Henry’s father, Bolingbroke, had clashed with the king and had been exiled for ten years. Gaunt had secured an undertaking that, should he die, his heir, now Duke of Hereford, would be able to enter his vast Lancastrian inheritance. After Gaunt’s death in 1399, the king broke his promise and took the estates into his own hands. Bolingbroke, in Paris, made immediate plans to return to England to recover his right. Richard II, who must surely have anticipated such a reaction, nevertheless pressed on with an expedition to Ireland. With him he took young Henry of Monmouth, to whom he had granted an annuity of £500. Later it was said that a personal bond developed between man and boy, Richard taking the emotional place left vacant by an absent and distant father.

Richard II left the kingdom in charge of his uncle, the Duke of York. He was still in Ireland when Bolingbroke landed at Ravenspur on the coast of Yorkshire. Bolingbroke claimed that he had returned only to recover his rightful inheritance and reform the misgovernnment of the realm. In this he received considerable support, not only from his own and his late father’s numerous Lancastrian followers, but also from neutrals such as the powerful Earl of Northumberland. When, a week or two later, Richard II hurriedly returned to North Wales, Henry was already, in effect, in command of the kingdom. The Duke of York had defected; Bristol had fallen; and Chester, the heartland of Ricardian loyalty, had been secured against the king. The Earl of Northumberland was sent to meet the outnumbered monarch at Conwy and Richard was taken into custody.

Bolingbroke and his advisers judged that it was better to hazard usurpation than face the certainty of eventual failure if he forced his rule on a vengeful king. Thus, on 30 September 1399, Richard II ‘abdicated’ and a new king, calling himself Henry IV, assumed the throne. Despite repeated assurances that Bolingbroke only wished to see reform of the government and that the imprisoned former king would come to no harm, he was dead shortly afterwards.

Henry of Monmouth, who had been left in safekeeping by Richard II in Ireland, returned to England and was reunited with his father, a comparative stranger, in time for the coronation which took place on 13 October. At the ceremony he carried the sword of justice. Two days later he was created Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Earl of Chester and Duke of Aquitaine – and shortly afterwards granted the additional title of Duke of Lancaster. Over the next year an independent household was established for him, financed by the revenues from Wales, Cornwall and Chester (Henry held only the titles of the other two duchies). By the time of his fourteenth birthday in September 1400 he was treated as a young adult. But of course he was under his father’s tutelage.

Henry’s military education and training were completed in the field. He had already, in 1399, campaigned under Richard II’s wing in Ireland. Now he joined his father with a retinue of over a hundred men under his nominal command on an abortive invasion of Scotland in the summer of 1400. That autumn, a revolt by a leading Welsh landowner, Owain Glyn Dwr, drew the king, with his son still in his company, into a punitive raid into North Wales. He then installed the English prince in Chester, supported by a council under the leadership of Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy, the heir to the Earl of Northumberland. In the spring of 1401, the Welsh rebellion burst into life again. Hotspur, with the prince in his company, secured the important castle town of Conwy, but was unable to prevent the rising against English rule from spreading.

In the autumn of 1402, from his northern mountain sanctuary, Owain was co-ordinating raids throughout the whole of Wales, having declared himself to be the true prince of that land. King Henry IV responded by mounting a three-pronged invasion, with Prince Harry nominally leading an army from Chester. This achieved little other than the relief and revictualling of the North Welsh castles. To add to royal woes, friction developed within the English camp. Hotspur, whose brother-in-law Sir Edmund Mortimer had been captured by the Welsh, was in favour of negotiation and compromise; Henry IV was adamantly against. After a blazing row, Hotspur resigned (or was removed from) his post. On 7 March 1403, the prince was formally sworn in as his father’s lieutenant in Wales. He was now in full independent command. His first action was to raid and sack Glyn Dwr’s home at Sycharth. Still only 16, the precocious youth was already a veteran of six campaigns. His grandfather Gaunt had not gone on his first campaign until he was that age; his father not until he was 18.

Henry was shortly to be blooded in a horrific way, in the most ferocious battle fought for decades on English soil. He had been in the saddle frequently since 1399, and had learnt first hand about the rigours of forced marches, the routine revictualling of remote strongholds, the cruelty of plundering raids and the taking of reprisals. But he had yet to fight in a set-piece battle. Now he was pitched into bloody combat against Hotspur, the flower of chivalry. Knowing that Henry IV was marching north on a second Scottish campaign, Percy had hoped to surprise the adolescent prince, link up with Glyn Dwr and turn on the king. But Henry IV had rapidly diverted and marched back to join his son outside Shrewsbury – just in time to confront Hotspur.

The 16-year-old led the advance against the fearsome Cheshire archers whom Hotspur had recruited to his cause. As he marched forward, Prince Henry was struck by an arrow in his cheek. He broke off the shaft and pressed on without hesitation to engage in the hand-to-hand melee that was a medieval battle. In the end he and his father won the day. The arrow that hit Hotspur killed him; that which hit the prince entered 6 inches into the back of his lower skull – but he survived. The arrow had to be removed by an agonising operation which involved the surgeon devising a special tool to insert and clamp on the head embedded in the bone. Thereafter Henry carried a scar close to his nose. It is not clear how disfigured he was, as it was never referred to publicly, but the scar may explain why, uniquely among English monarchs, his official portrait was made in profile (see appendix). After Shrewsbury no one ever doubted his courage and few dared cross the man carrying this mark of honour. His military apprenticeship was complete. War and all that it entailed was etched on his face.

It took Henry well over nine months to recover from his wound; he did not return to active duty until the summer of 1404. By then the whole of Wales was under rebel control and English strategy was restricted to containment. The prince and his household now spent most of their time across the border in Herefordshire. His lieutenants garrisoned the Marcher castles and began slowly to wrest back the initiative. In the early summer of 1405 he was given a renewed command in North Wales as his father’s lieutenant, a commission that was regularly extended. But he was beginning to spend time away from the Marches, delegating conduct of the war to deputies. He did not entirely abandon his command; indeed, he had a pressing personal need to recover the principality...