The bloody rise of Henry V: how his brutal upbringing propelled him to greatness

The procedure Bradmore performed at Kenilworth was a marvel of surgical ingenuity. Over the course of several weeks, the medic widened the entry wound, all the while keeping it clean and free from infection. When the hole in Henry’s face was wide enough, Bradmore used a tool of his own devising to grip and slowly remove the metal arrowhead. Miraculously, during this entire process, the prince hadn’t gone into toxic shock. Bradmore then closed and sewed up the wound. He’d saved Henry’s life.

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The operation had been complex and daring. It was also profoundly important for the dynastic history of England, the political history of Britain, and the military history of western Europe.

What kind of king was Henry V?

In 1413, a decade after Bradmore extracted that arrowhead, his patient succeeded to the English throne as King Henry V. Two years later, he was victorious at the battle of Agincourt. He was the king who realised the Plantagenet claim to the crown of France. He dragged England out of the dire condition into which it had sunk during the tyrannical reign of Richard II and the fractious one of his own father.

He dispensed justice and defended traditional religion. He used the English language as a tool to bind his subjects as a nation. And he projected a stern, unyielding, ultra-pious public image; indeed, one observer thought him more like a priest than a soldier.

Henry V was not the sort of fellow we would choose to govern us today. In recent years, some historians have depicted him as a brutal, stiff-necked prig. But his contemporaries revered and respected him, recognising that – as a medieval monarch – Henry ticked every box. He ruled for only nine years and five months, but he was England’s most accomplished king of the Middle Ages.

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Clearly, the surgery that saved Henry after the battle of Shrewsbury was a sliding doors moment in history – but it was far from the only event in his youth that shaped him and, by extension, the realm he ruled. As William Shakespeare recognised, to understand Henry V we must study his experiences as young ‘Prince Hal’ – beginning with his birth above the gatehouse of Monmouth Castle at 11.22am (reputedly) on 16 September 1386, during the reign of his cousin Richard II.

How important was Richard II to Henry V?

“My God! This is a strange and fickle land, which has exiled, slain, destroyed or ruined so many kings… and which is always tainted and toils with strife and variance and envy!” These words, quoted by the chronicler Adam of Usk, were spoken by Richard II in 1399. He was then in the Tower of London, waiting to be deposed and replaced by Henry Bolingbroke – the future Henry IV.

Richard was no one’s idea of a brilliant king – other than, perhaps, his own. He had spent most of his 22-year reign picking fights with his nobles, ignoring good advice and tyrannisin g his subjects. Yet his influence on the young Henry was powerful, and threefold.

In the first place, Richard had been kind and generous to Henry. When Henry was a boy, one near-contemporary claimed, Richard was fond of telling his courtiers of a prophecy that the lad would one day become king. That prophecy, perhaps just a bit of fun to begin with, looked much more likely after 1398.

On 16 September of that year – Henry’s 12th birthday – Richard sentenced the boy’s father, Bolingbroke, to 10 years in exile following an aborted duel with the Duke of Norfolk. This had its roots in a rebellion against Richard a decade earlier. But it was also the first step towards Richard confiscating the vast duchy of Lancaster, to which Bolingbroke was the heir.

Young Henry did not follow his father into exile. Instead, Richard took him to Ireland on military campaign, effectively held hostage to ensure his father’s good behaviour. During this time, though, Richard treated Henry well, even honourably. He knighted the young lad, and praised his “valiant blood”.

Even when Bolingbroke invaded England to claim back his inheritance, Richard did not penalise Henry for his father’s deeds. True, when Richard sailed back to England to try to secure his crown, he locked his young charge in Trim Castle, north-west of Dublin. But no harm came to Henry there and, from what we can tell, the young man appreciated this point and carried a respectful memory of Richard into his later life.

Indeed, one of Henry’s early acts as king was to visit Kings Langley in Hertfordshire, where Richard had been buried after he was murdered in 1400. Henry ordered that the king’s corpse be exhumed, transported with extraordinary dignity and reburied in the tomb Richard had designed for himself in Westminster Abbey.

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Yet Henry gleaned more from watching his captor than simple human empathy. Richard provided an invaluable counter-example of kingship: he showed exactly how not to do the job. Richard was partisan; Henry exercised impartial justice. Richard was allergic to taking good counsel; Henry put consultation with his realm through parliament at the heart of his kingship. Where Richard was inclined towards pro-French pacifism – never a popular stance during the Hundred Years’ War – Henry was blisteringly aggressive.

The final part of Richard’s legacy to Henry is the most overlooked. Richard had a rare instinct for the performance of majesty that Henry reflected, consciously or unconsciously. The famous Westminster Portrait of Richard captures how he appeared to his courtiers: aloof, terrible and apart.

Yet Henry gleaned more from watching his captor than simple human empathy. Richard provided an invaluable counter-example of kingship: he showed exactly how not to do the job

Henry paid tribute to this at his own coronation in 1413. Observers noticed a transformation come over him, so that all hint of levity left him and his manner henceforth became all “gravity and discretion”. Richard loved to perform majesty, and rarely missed an opportunity to do so. Henry thought just as hard about presenting a striking image of what kingship resembled.

After his military victories at Harfleur and Agincourt in 1415, he appeared at a triumph in London looking sombre and severe, refusing to celebrate his own achievement but giving all thanks to God. Henry’s vision of kingship was austere and pious, whereas Richard’s was flamboyant and self-serving – but they both knew precisely what they wanted their subjects to see.

When did Henry V get his first lessons about warfare?

If Richard shaped Henry’s understanding of how to ‘perform’ kingship, the boy’s father gave him an unusually good apprenticeship in the military and political business of ruling England. Henry was just 13 when he was created Prince of Wales, straight away becoming actively involved in public affairs and, above all, in warfare. This vocational training began in 1400, when his father took him on an expedition to Scotland.

This mission was not a success, and the Scots ran rings around Henry IV’s army. Nevertheless, it gave Prince Henry the chance to see for the first time the immense logistical operation that a military excursion demanded: the tons of flour, salt, wine, beans, fish, cheese and bacon needed to feed the men; the crates of arrows, crossbow bolts, axes, lances, guns and spare pieces of armour required to equip the army; and the transport and support ships involved, sporting such pious names as Trinity of the Tower and Holy Ghost.

From that point onwards, barely a year of Henry’s youth did not involve some form of warmongering. His main training ground was his principality of Wales, where his father gave him a leading role in the struggle to contain the rebellion of Owain Glyndŵr.

That insurrection, which began in 1400 and rumbled on for more than a decade, was a hands-on education covering many aspects of warfare in which Henry would prove a master when he joined the fray of the Hundred Years’ War. In Wales there were castles to be besieged, including the vast fortresses at Harlech, Conwy and Aberystwyth. There were archers and men-at-arms to deploy, and new weapons to play with, including rapidly improving cannons.

The prince had to enforce discipline among his own troops and strike fear into the hearts of his enemies. The first time captives were executed on his command was during the siege of Conwy Castle, when Henry was just 14 years old. Perhaps most vital of all, he had to negotiate constantly with his father’s treasury and with English parliaments to cadge every penny of war funding he could secure in order to keep his soldiers paid. This was never easy.

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How did Henry V take to combat?

Henry clearly had a taste for combat from a young age. In a letter he wrote in May 1403, when the prince was 16, he related with proud glee how he had reacted to reports that Glyndŵr was looking to pick a fight.

“We took our men and went to [Glyndŵr’s] principal house named Sycharth, where we supposed to find him if he wished to fight in the manner he said,” Henry recalled. On arrival, however, “we found no man, and so we set fire to the whole place and several other houses of his tenants around”.

Captives were beheaded. The countryside was burned. This was the way of war in the early 15th century, and the young prince didn’t shy away from the brutal reality. When he became king and set his sights on the French crown, this enthusiasm for hyper-aggressive warfare – along with the practical lessons Henry had earlier learned about fighting and financing campaigns – stood him in excellent stead.

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Even his near-death experience at Shrewsbury was a learning moment of sorts: he had commanded a division in battle and been badly injured but survived. It might be speculation, but surely not wild fantasy, to suggest that Henry may have concluded from this episode that God had saved him for a reason.

Whether or not this was so, one thing was certain: by the time Henry V succeeded his father, he had undergone an unusually long and intense on-the-job training as a warrior king of the Plantagenet dynasty. Not since Edward I nearly 150 years earlier had any English king come to the throne so well versed in the arts of war.

It might be speculation, but surely not wild fantasy, to suggest that Henry may have concluded from his near-death experience at Shrewsbury that God had saved him for a reason

When he inherited his father’s crown, Henry V held many advantages besides experience. One of the most crucial was the fact that, unlike Bolingbroke, he did not usurp the throne – he inherited it. The crown was his by right of blood, not conquest – and he did not have kingmakers such as Henry Percy (the powerful magnate of north-east England who had helped the elder Henry depose Richard in 1399) demanding reward for helping him succeed.

Was Shakespeare's Prince Hal accurate to the real Henry V?

This natural privilege might have inclined some young princes towards a sense of lazy entitlement. Indeed, that is part of the popular image of ‘Prince Hal’. No aspect of Henry V’s career as prince is so well known as Shakespeare’s suggestion, cobbled together from various sources written after Henry’s death, that he had enjoyed a riotous youth, spending his time carousing in taverns with low company rather than attending to the serious matter of learning to govern.

Shakespeare’s Hal is an entertaining, amusing dramatic portrait. It is, though, more or less the opposite of the truth, which is that Prince Henry spent far more time at work than at play.

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In 1405, Henry IV became seriously ill with ailments that have never been satisfactorily diagnosed. Contemporaries believed that he had leprosy; modern scholars think he may have suffered a series of strokes. Whatever the cause was, his health became progressively worse.

As his father’s condition deteriorated, Prince Henry took on greater responsibility for overseeing government. During the crisis years in Wales, he threw himself into suppressing Glyndŵr’s rebellion. Subsequently he took a deep interest in the defence of Calais, at the time an English port. In 1410 and 1411 he was almost working as a prince regent, chairing a royal council whose decisions were made with full royal authority.

In 1412, his father’s health improved and the king demoted Henry, transferring his favour to the prince’s brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence. But that proved to be only a brief dip in the grand scheme of Henry’s career.

The legend of the idle ‘Prince Hal’ derives from a combination of oblique poetic references to his sexual habits as a prince and tenuous stories from later writers. One claimed that Henry enjoyed incognito street fighting, another that he kept low company until after his coronation, when he turfed out the bad influences.

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None of these tales stand up well to scrutiny. There is sounder evidence for Henry’s brothers causing trouble in London’s taverns than there is for the future king doing so. Judging by Henry’s overall career as prince, he was so heavily immersed in war and government that it is hard to see when he would have found much time or energy for larking around.

When Henry was crowned king of England amid blizzards on 9 April 1413, writers indeed detected a change in his personality as he strove physically to embody the heaviness of monarchy through a new piety and severity of expression. This act was, he seemed to think, an essential part of the theatre of his coronation.

Underneath it all, however, there was little that Henry needed to change about himself. All of the hard work had been done in the 26 years that had led up to that fateful moment.

Dan Jones is a historian, broadcaster and author of Henry V: The Astonishing Rise of England’s Greatest Warrior King (Apollo, 2024)

This article was first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine