Henry V

For what he does not know—what no one can possibly know, including the patient himself—is that if this sixteen-year-old lying stricken at Kenilworth lives, he will grow up to be someone very special. He will be the king regarded by most generations after him as the greatest medieval ruler England ever had. •   •   • This teenage boy will one day be Henry V. Henry will be the general who wins the battle of Agincourt; the conqueror who achieves the long-standing Plantagenet dream of seizing the crown of France. He will be the politician who understands better than any other of his time how to assert himself as a statesman on the foreign stage while still maintaining harmony in domestic politics. He will be the monarch who does the most to promote the English language as the preferred tongue of poets and patriots. He will be the king who is lionized by the generation who knew him, idolized by those who followed, and eventually mythologized by William Shakespeare. Although Henry V will reign for only nine years and four months, dying at the age of just thirty-five, he will loom over the historical landscape of the later Middle Ages and beyond, remembered as the acme of kingship: the man who did the job exactly as it was supposed to be done. He will be considered the closest thing his age ever produced to one of the Nine Worthies. A titan. An English Alexander.

Ref. ABBB-A

More often than not, those who appreciate what a medieval king was supposed to be and do will echo the judgment made in 1972, by one of the finest, most levelheaded, and most influential medievalists of the modern age, who told an audience that he considered Henry “the greatest man who ever ruled England.”

Ref. D8D9-B

Henry lived a short life, and was king for only a quarter of it. What made him such an extraordinary and effective figure (putting aside luck, which like all great historical figures he exploited when it came along) lies as much in the twenty-six years that preceded his coronation as in the subsequent nine. Many historians have praised Henry for what he managed to do as king—noting that he dragged England out of the doldrums into which it had sunk during the baleful reign of his cousin Richard II (1377–1399) and the turbulent one of his father, Henry IV (1399–1413), balancing astonishing military achievements with stable and consensual domestic government.

Ref. E195-C

He was a hardened warrior, a dyed-in-the-wool soldier who exercised the power of life and death over his enemies from his early teens, and (notoriously) gave the order for a mass slaughter of prisoners of war at Agincourt. Yet he was also creative, artistic, and literary, with a bookish temperament and a talent for composing music and playing a number of instruments, including the harp. He was a leader who made his share of mistakes, misjudged his friends and family members, and took gambles that brought him and others to the edge of ruin. Yet he always seemed to triumph when it mattered.

Ref. 8364-D