The official website for BBC History Magazine
England’s forgotten medieval hero: how John, Duke of Bedford carried on Henry V's fight
When the Hundred Years’ War was reaching a climax, one man was fighting tenaciously to secure the English claim to the French crown. So why, asks Joanna Arman, is Henry V’s formidable brother, John, Duke of Bedford, not better known?
As black skies faded to grey, and dawn broke on that fateful day in the early 15th century, an English army gazed across a field in northern France. What their eyes encountered was a vastly superior force: some 15,000 French-led troops glared back – their numbers nearly double those of England’s men-at-arms and archers. The English had faced seemingly insuperable odds before, and emerged victorious. But could they really triumph over this well-armed force bolstered by fearsome international allies? The Hundred Years’ War had been raging for close to a century already, with negotiations between England and France coming and going – but all ultimately failing to decisively end the conflict. The balance of military success had swung one way and then the other in clashes on land and, occasionally, at sea. Read more | Jonathan Sumpton on the Hundred Years’ War: “It was Joan of Arc who persuaded the French that they could win” Many confrontations had ended with English longbowmen proving decisive. But as morning ebbed and the afternoon rolled on, the outcome remained uncertain. Finally, battle commenced – and the English won a great and memorable victory against the odds. Sounds familiar? No, this is not a description of the battle of Agincourt, Henry V’s famous victory of 1415. Instead, it’s the story of the clash fought on 17 August 1424 – nearly nine years after Agincourt, and two after Henry’s death – outside the town of Verneuil-sur-Avre in Normandy. Here, the English army led by Henry’s younger brother John, Duke of Bedford, hammered a combined force of French and Scottish solders plus 2,000 Milanese heavy cavalry, killing perhaps 6,000 enemy troops while suffering minimal losses. Historians refer to the battle of Verneuil as ‘the second Agincourt’ – yet that clash, like John himself, is largely forgotten today. Why has such a heroic victory faded from memory? And what part did John play in that tumultuous period of English and French history? Born to battle We’ll return to the battle later, but to answer those questions, we must first turn the clock back 25 years. In 1399, Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster – better known today as Henry IV – usurped the English throne from his cousin Richard II. John was just 10 years old at the time and, as Henry’s third son, would be unlikely to inherit the throne. Read more | The tyrant and the usurper: Richard II v Henry IV Yet the young man quickly proved himself a highly capable leader during his father’s turbulent reign. In 1403, aged just 14, John was made Warden of the East March, the region on the Scottish border around Berwick-on-Tweed. He soon proved his mettle defending England’s northern borders against Scottish incursions alongside his older cousin Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmoreland. After his brother succeeded to the English throne as Henry V in 1413, John was trusted with the rule of England during his warlike sibling’s many expeditions abroad, and was created Duke of Bedford in May 1414. The new king was closer to John than to any of his other brothers – even Thomas, Duke of Clarence, who was next in line for the throne. Henry was absent from England for almost half of his nine-year reign, and allowed Bedford to act as regent in all but name during most of that time. John appears to have discharged his growing responsibilities with aplomb. Yet nothing could have prepared him for what happened next. In August 1422, Henry V died while on campaign in France, possibly from dysentery. England had lost its indomitable warrior king. It was a perilous moment. With the crown now passing to Henry’s nine-month-old son, Henry VI, and England embroiled in war with the French, the nation urgently needed someone to shepherd it through the dangerous months ahead. Read more | Alternate history: what if Henry V hadn't died in 1422? Luckily, Henry V had realised that Bedford was up to the task, and appointed his brother as regent of France just before he died. For 13 years, Bedford effectively held together the English presence in the country. Ten months after his brother’s death, John married Anne, sister of Phillip, Duke of Burgundy. Unusually for medieval noblemen, a picture of John created during his lifetime survives in the Bedford Hours, a beautifully illuminated manuscript given by John to Anne as a wedding present and containing images of both him and his wife. It reveals that John bore a striking resemblance to his father and brother: tall, with a beaked nose and dark hair cut in a pudding-bowl style. A son’s guerrilla war John’s marriage to Anne cemented England’s alliance with the Duchy of Burgundy – and that alliance was to grow ever more crucial as relations between England and France continued to plumb the depths. In 1420, Henry V had been nominated as the heir of Charles VI of France by the terms of the Treaty of Troyes. This created a ‘dual monarchy’, by which the kings of England were entitled to rule both England and France. The biggest loser from the Treaty of Troyes was Charles VI’s disinherited son, also called Charles – and, in the early 1420s, he waged a sort of guerrilla war against the English, bolstered by aid from Scotland. It was in the younger Charles’s name that, in 1424, the French Count of Aumerle (along with John Stewart, Earl of Buchan and Archibald Douglas, Earl of Douglas) joined battle with the English outside Verneuil, which had recently been taken by trickery. After brutal hand-to-hand fighting, English longbowmen and crossbowmen turned the course of the battle, and the French were routed. John then determinedly finished off the Scottish contingent, reportedly crying out the name of Clarence – an act of vengeance for his brother, who had been killed three years earlier by a largely Scottish army at the battle of Baugé. Read more | What was it like to be a Prisoner of War during the Hundred Years’ War? John took seriously his promise to uphold his nephew Henry VI’s claim to the French throne and continued to defend the English territories in France over the years that followed. The fortunes of his forces oscillated in this war – not helped by the ill-advised marriage of his youngest brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, to Jacqueline of Hainault, cousin of the Duke of Burgundy. This union threw the alliance with Burgundy into jeopardy, as Humphrey clashed with the duke, and John spent valuable time and effort building diplomatic bridges with England’s longstanding ally. Then, in 1429, a French peasant girl named Joan arrived on the scene. John and Joan of Arc’s paths crossed only a few times, and his relationship to the saintly French warrior is much misunderstood. In movies about Joan, John is typically cast as the villain, even the man responsible for her fate. In reality, the two never met, though Joan addressed two irate letters to him. “You, Duke of Bedford who call yourself Regent of France… make satisfaction to the king of Heaven,” she demanded in one missive. “Surrender to the Pucelle [maiden], who has been sent here by God, the king of Heaven, the keys of all the good towns that you have taken and violated in France… I am commander of war, and in whatever place I come upon your men in France, I will make them leave, whether they wish to or not. And if they do not wish to obey, I will have them all killed; I have been sent here… to drive you out of all France.” At first, John wasn’t too troubled by Joan’s declamations. Within five months of her arrival on the scene, however, she had relieved the siege of Orléans, and on 17 July had the younger Charles crowned King Charles VII of France in Reims Cathedral. By summer 1429, then, John was worried and annoyed. Like most of his English contemporaries, he considered Joan a witch – and he wasn’t going to allow her to threaten the dual monarchy. So he devised a plan to stop her in her tracks. First, he sent word to England to have Henry VI crowned king of France (though he’d succeeded his father in 1422, his coronation hadn’t yet taken place). Then, as his next gambit, he lured Joan and Charles to Paris, forcing them to expend time and resources in taking the capital instead of focusing on weak spots such as Orléans. John shored up Paris for a long siege that summer, and set about winning hearts and minds. His plan worked remarkably well. When Joan arrived in August, she was forced to wait outside the city, failing in her attempts to draw her enemies into open battle. John had learned from observation of Joan’s previous engagements not to take the bait, preferring to fight her on his own terms. Following a siege, the French took the small suburb of Saint-Denys, but Paris itself eluded them. Eventually, in frustration, Joan of Arc appeared before the walls, screaming that all inside should surrender – or, she threatened, she would bring down the wrath of God upon them and kill everybody. The defenders of Paris were not impressed: an English soldier reportedly shot her with a crossbow, calling her a “bloody tart”. Joan had to be dragged away from the gate, bleeding and humiliated, and Charles’s army withdrew from Paris. In 1430, Joan was captured – but John wasn’t able to enjoy this moment. As Henry VI was now in France, the council didn’t technically need a regent and so it threatened to fire John. As a result, he spent much of that year in limbo, unable to do much politically or militarily. He did not play a role in determining Joan’s fate; by then, she had been condemned for heresy, so the matter was left almost entirely in the hands of the church. John was not even present in Rouen on 30 May 1431, when Joan was burned at the stake. Instead, he was bringing supplies to Paris, which continued to suffer frequent attacks. Their fortunes at that moment contrasted starkly: while the young woman who became France’s potent and enduring figurehead was being brutally executed in Rouen, John of Bedford was being greeted as a hero in Paris. Yet the situation then was not as clear-cut as it may seem today. Timeline: the remarkable life of John, Duke of Bedford 20 June 1389 Mary de Bohun, wife of Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby, gives birth to her third son, probably at Kenilworth Castle. He is named after his paternal grandfather, John of Gaunt. 30 September 1399 John’s father is proclaimed King Henry IV after deposing his cousin Richard II. 1403 In the aftermath of the battle of Shrewsbury on 21 July, John is appointed Warden of the East March, aged just 14, marking the beginning of his military training. 1414 At the second parliament of his oldest brother, Henry V, John is made Duke of Bedford and Earl of Kendal. October 1422 Just weeks after Henry V’s death, John takes up the office of regent of France. May 1423 John marries Anne, younger sister of Philip, Duke of Burgundy, one of England’s most important allies. 17 August 1424 John leads an English army to victory against combined Franco-Scottish forces near Verneuil-sur-Avre, Normandy. The battle becomes known as the ‘Second Agincourt’. August – September 1429 In response to a challenge by John, Joan of Arc and Charles VII of France attempt to take Paris, starting a fruitless siege. Bedford’s careful preparations ensure that the city does not fall. 13 November 1432 Anne of Burgundy dies in Paris, possibly of plague. John marries Jacquetta of Luxembourg the following April. 14 September 1435 John dies in Rouen, aged 46, one week before the Congress of Arras ends the alliance between England and Burgundy. A family at war Henry VI crossed the channel to France in the summer of 1430, and for the next 18 months rivalry simmered between John and various members of the council, especially his paternal uncle, Cardinal Beaufort, who was determined to assert his own primacy. These tensions resulted in the regency being removed from John, and for a time Henry’s council took charge of the war effort in France. Yet John had always had a good relationship with the young king. He had been in England when his nephew was born in late 1421, while Henry V was away in France. And his campaigns in France had been undertaken, it seems, not only to preserve his brother’s legacy but also to advance the interests of the young English monarch. Read more | How Henry VI's love of peace cost him the throne – and his life He must, then, have looked on with some satisfaction when – on 16 December 1431, at the tender age of 10 – Henry VI was crowned King of France at Notre Dame de Paris. The coronation proved something of a turning point for both Henry and John. The king would soon depart for England, never to set foot on French soil again. As for John, he was immediately reinstated as regent – reflecting overwhelming trust in his abilities, even if some in the English court didn’t want to admit it. He immediately set about reversing some of the policies Henry VI’s council had put into place. Then, in 1432, John lost the love of his life and his greatest ally: his wife, Anne. She was only in her late 20s, possibly succumbing to an outbreak of plague in Paris. Though John remarried the following year, he never produced any legitimate children. Anne’s death proved the final nail in the coffin for the alliance between England and Burgundy, though John managed to hold it together for almost three more years. During this time he had to return to England because he was the only person considered trustworthy enough to mediate between the rival factions forming in Henry VI’s government. His brother Humphrey and uncle Cardinal Beaufort were at odds – not for the first time – and the division was tearing the government apart. John had another problem: the continuing conflict in France was becoming increasingly unpopular in England. In the words of medieval historian Jonathan Sumption, John was “the only statesman who truly understood the demands of the dual monarchy and in the end truly believed in it”. That belief was stretched to breaking point in the summer of 1435 at the Congress of Arras. This summit saw Charles VII and Philip, Duke of Burgundy embarking on a series of negotiations that threatened to conclude with both of them rejecting English claims to the French throne. A young and healthy John, Duke of Bedford might have better represented English interests at the summit. But John, who hosted the English delegation at the congress, was not young and healthy. He was in his mid-forties, exhausted and on the edge of death. In fact, John died before the summit reached its end, breathing his last in Rouen Castle on 14 September 1435. One week later, Philip and Charles came to terms, ending the alliance between Burgundy and England that had endured for almost 15 years. John was buried not in England but in Rouen Cathedral. Today, nothing remains of his tomb nor any other memorial. Though England clung on to control of Normandy for 15 years after John’s death, the nation had been deprived of its most loyal, capable and dedicated leader. After his demise, commitment to the war in France waned, and the divisions in Henry VI’s government became increasingly virulent. By 1453, England had lost almost all of its remaining French possessions. In death, as in life, John’s reputation remained untarnished. The English would look back on the days of his regency as a golden age. He was even respected and admired in France. Read more | The miraculous afterlife of Henry VI One cannot help but think that if he had lived longer, the course of Henry VI’s reign might have run differently. Would the king’s famous and beloved uncle have helped to heal divisions – perhaps even persuading his nephew to go to France and fight? If John had produced a legitimate heir, would Henry have had a loyal cousin by his side when the House of York rose to challenge his throne? We can only guess at the answers to those conundrums. But we can, at least, remember and honour the valour and loyalty of this long-forgotten prince. This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The bloody rise of Henry V: how his brutal upbringing propelled him to greatness
Held hostage at 12. Deciding the fate of captives at 14. Maimed in battle at 16. The future King Henry V learned a series of violent but valuable leadership lessons during his youth. Dan Jones traces the evolution of ‘Prince Hal’ into one of medieval England's most revered warrior monarchs and the victor of Agincourt
Summer 1403 saw surgeon John Bradmore rush to Kenilworth Castle to attend to a famous patient. Henry, the 16-year-old Prince of Wales and heir to the English throne, was in a critical condition. On 21 July, he had fought alongside his father, King Henry IV, at the battle of Shrewsbury against rebels led by Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy. The royal army had won – but the cost of victory had been high. During the battle, an arrow had pierced Prince Henry’s cheek and lodged deep in his head. He’d been lucky to survive; without urgent medical attention, he would surely soon die. 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. Read more | Why is Henry V's portrait in profile? 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. Read more | Alternate history: what if Henry V hadn't died in 1422? 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. Read more | Why are British monarchs traditionally crowned in Westminster Abbey? 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. 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. Apprentice princes: 3 other royal heirs who learned the family trade Richard I Richard the Lionheart was 31 when he succeeded his father, Henry II, in 1189. By then he was one of the most experienced knights and generals in Europe, and had already established a tempestuous relationship with the French king, Philip II Augustus. On inheriting the throne, Richard had a single obsession: he wished to direct all of the resources of the Plantagenet empire towards the fight against Saladin on the Third Crusade. Richard proved to be a famous crusader, but his war – and the vast ransom paid for his release following capture by Duke Leopold of Austria on his way home from the Holy Land – nearly bankrupted his realm. Edward I When Edward was a young man, England was engulfed by a vicious civil war between his father, Henry III, and reformers led by Simon de Montfort. Edward was captured at the battle of Lewes in 1264, but escaped – and took bloody revenge on de Montfort at the battle of Evesham the next year. Edward then travelled to the Holy Land, where he narrowly escaped assassination. When he became king in 1272, at the age of 33, he was hardened by experience to become one of the fiercest warriors in medieval history. Henry VI Ironically, the English monarch with perhaps the worst apprenticeship was Henry V’s son, who became king of England – and, theoretically, of France – in 1422, before his first birthday. Compelled to learn every aspect of kingship ‘on the job’, Henry VI shrank from the task. He was dominated by his relatives and ministers, and had no appetite at all for warfare. His mental health collapsed in the 1450s, and the Wars of the Roses erupted as his reign spiralled into chaos. Read more | Why Henry VI’s reign was such a disaster 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. Read more | 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about Henry V and the battle of Agincourt 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. 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. Read more | A wayward prince? King Henry V's misspent youth 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. Read more | Henry V’s greatest victory (and it wasn't at the battle of Agincourt) 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
How King John helped bring about a political miracle in medieval England
From the historic moment that 'bad' King John was made to put his seal to Magna Carta to parliament, taxation and the law courts, the 13th and 14th centuries heralded many changes in England. In fact, Caroline Burt and Richard Partington explore how these changes laid the foundations for the modern British state
Good. But could do better. That was the message that the English people conveyed to their all-conquering monarch at the height of the Hundred Years’ War. In 1358, England’s great warrior-king Edward III asked parliament if he should accept a peace treaty he’d negotiated with the French, following a series of dramatic military victories. Parliament emphatically advised the king to fight again. Too much blood had been shed and too much treasure expended. The French, MPs declared, were not offering enough. For Edward’s distant predecessor King John, such a scenario would have been unthinkable. Then, at the dawn of the 13th century, there was no notion of shared national enterprise around foreign policy. The English king’s lands in France were a matter for the king alone – not for the community of the realm expressing its will through parliament. The people, if they had been courageous enough to venture their opinions to John, would have been told – not so politely – to keep their noses out. It was also unimaginable during John’s reign that other matters that parliament routinely considered in Edward III’s day – issues such as how much tax people paid, and the way in which law and justice was dispensed to the masses – might be a matter of nationwide debate. English state transformed Yet the 150 or so years between John’s reign and Edward’s victories over the French witnessed the utter transformation of the English state. This extraordinary period saw the introduction of a system of national taxation by consent, and the advent of the forum that approved that tax: parliament. It saw the legal system grow exponentially and a network of royal officers being appointed across the land. It saw striking advances in military organisation, including the professionalisation of the army. And, of course, it saw the introduction of Magna Carta, which established the much-cherished principle that the king was subject to the same law as his subjects. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/07/2PNNK27-b49fb23-e1721910912835.jpg" width="620" height="414" alt="Edward III, shown in a 15th-century miniature, sought parliament’s agreement before striking a treaty with the French (Photo by incamerastock/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Edward III, shown in a 15th-century miniature, sought parliament’s agreement before striking a treaty with the French (Photo by incamerastock/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Today we think of the 13th and 14th centuries as a period of protracted warfare and plague. It was undoubtedly both those things. But it was also the period that laid the foundations for many elements of the English, and by extension British, state as we know it today. So why did this transformation happen? And who were the main drivers behind this change? When John became king in 1199, it is doubtful that he gave any thought to these grand questions of statehood. That’s partly because the concept of the state as we know it did not exist. But it’s mainly because John had far more urgent concerns occupying his in-tray. He had to fend off a rival claim to the throne of England from his nephew Arthur, and he had to get to grips with a major assault launched by his great French rival, King Philip II. English losses in France Philip was determined to assert himself, and that meant seizing lands held in France by John. Those English possessions stretched far across France, from Normandy in the north to Aquitaine in the south-west – a block much larger than the territory directly controlled by the French king. Unfortunately for John, Philip was not only hugely ambitious but also vastly capable, and in 1204 the French king seized the jewel in the English crown, Normandy, shortly followed by many of the other English territories in France. The key moment in this English debacle was the loss of Château Gaillard, Richard the Lionheart’s extraordinary defensive system on the cliffs of the Seine at Les Andelys. Richard had declared that the walls of this mighty castle could hold out against the French even had they been made of butter. John’s manifold deficiencies as both a king and a military commander proved his older brother decisively wrong. The loss of Normandy in 1204 was a shattering blow. But it was also a turning point in English history: for it prompted a chain reaction that would lead to Magna Carta. Determined to regain his territories, John returned to England to regroup. Over the following decade, he raised vastly more money in England than any of his predecessors, money he used to build continental alliances and fund a new military expedition to France. Read more | Was King John really that bad? Yes! Funds flowed into the royal coffers through fines levied by the king on members of the nobility. These were extorted with threats, violence and the sale of justice to the highest bidder – and triggered a wave of resentment across the realm. John is rightly seen as one of England’s cruellest kings. According to one chronicler, he violated the wives and daughters of his nobles; in the words of another, he roasted French prisoners of war on tripods and gridirons. The unfairness and brutality of all this was not lost on England’s barons, who, as the wealthiest subjects, bore the brunt of John’s impositions. King John and Magna Carta If the common law – which since 1166 had offered all men and women cheap access to royal justice – dictated that the barons could not abuse, bribe and extort their fellow countrymen without facing legal action, then why, they asked, should the king be allowed to do it? And so, when John’s ambitions to regain lost territory came crashing down with military defeat in 1214, his opponents in England lost no time in demanding change. In Magna Carta, literally the ‘Great Charter’, they attempted to put an end, one by one, to all the questionable practices of their king. While John fought the rebels with all his might, his death in 1216, and the accession of his son as Henry III during a civil war that showed little sign of leading to any lasting settlement, meant that no government could hope to move forward in peace without compromise. Read more | Alternate history: what if Magna Carta hadn’t been written? That compromise was the confirmation of Magna Carta. By placing kings under the same law as their subjects, Magna Carta made it impossible for future monarchs to raise money for war arbitrarily. Doing so would bring political crisis, as Henry III discovered when, in an echo of his father, he began to threaten the landed property of his barons. It soon became abundantly clear that if the king wanted to defend his lands, he would have to find a new way of raising the money he required – one that involved accessing his subjects’ wealth in a legitimate manner. It was this imperative that led to the introduction of a national system of taxation by consent – and, in the 1230s, the emergence of the body that would grant (or refuse) such consent: parliament. Birth of the English parliament Parliament took its name from the French Parlement, ‘the place of discussion’, and true to that name, it soon became an arena for national debate on all areas of public policy. It was initially the exclusive domain of the very rich and powerful. But, by the end of the 13th century, a wider cross-section of the population was contributing to that debate. In 1258, when political crisis erupted in the face of Henry III’s unpopular foreign and financial policies, demands were made that angry knights, as well as disaffected barons, should be represented. This broader social representation was extended again during the reign of Edward I. In the 14th century, parliament came to consist of Lords and Commons, just as it does today – the latter elected to represent all the localities in the country. Read more | “He was not a great king but he was respected as a most Christian one”: David Carpenter on Henry III Under Edward, a partnership was established with parliament that led to repeated grants of taxation to support the king in wars in Wales, Scotland and France. This practice – of the crown co-opting the resources of the realm to royal military imperatives – led to a developing sense that foreign policy was not merely dynastic but national, in the interests of the entire country. By the time Edward I’s grandson Edward III was striding across Europe with aplomb in the mid-14th century, his subjects in parliament were fully engaged in consultation with the king, his ministers and judges on all aspects of national government. National taxation, approved by parliament, produced predictable and reliable war finance that enabled England to professionalise its army under Edward I and particularly Edward III. This enabled England to punch well above its weight internationally until the mid-15th century, most especially in the first half of the Hundred Years’ War with France. The battle of Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356 respectively saw the English destroy the French field army and capture the French king, John II. At the naval battle of Sluys in 1340, thousands of French soldiers drowned, fleeing English men-at-arms and archers charging across their decks. This was the English realm in its military pomp, producing arguably the country’s most significant naval triumph until the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. “How do we know that French knights are braver than English knights?” asked a jester of his master, the French king Philip VI, in the aftermath of Sluys. When Philip failed to provide an answer, the jester gave the sardonic reply: “Because English knights are afraid to jump into the sea.” Read more | 9 things you didn’t know about the history of parliament England's legal system Government, too, was growing increasingly sophisticated. The common law was in such demand that the courts struggled to keep up with the volume of business. The people of England were clearly hungry for the impartial, enforceable and centrally recorded justice provided by this ever-growing national legal system. Kings added to the pressure themselves because they regularly commissioned nationwide enquiries into crime and corruption. Edward I created so much legislation during his 35-year-reign that he was later called the English Justinian, after the famous law-giving Roman emperor. Such extensive legislating required a new professional cadre of judges, attorneys and justices of the peace. Government co-opted so many of the king’s subjects into its work that it is estimated that, by the mid-14th century, some 40 per cent of male house-holders were involved in some way – as sheriffs, jurors, constables, military recruiters, purveyors of supplies and tax collectors. England was hardly alone in all of this. Rapidly evolving ideas about the authority of the king as lawgiver were mirrored across Europe. Monarchs from Louis IX of France to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II embarked upon vast legislative programmes. In Iberia, Alfonso X of Castile ordered the compilation of law codes into a document, La Siete Partidas, that remains celebrated today. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/07/GettyImages-1768235900-ccfea11-e1721910986494.jpg" width="620" height="414" alt="Charles III and Queen Camilla at the state opening of parliament, 2023. The seat of British democracy grew into a force to be reckoned with in the late Middle Ages (Photo by Arthur Edwards - WPA Pool/Getty Images)" title="Charles III and Queen Camilla at the state opening of parliament, 2023. The seat of British democracy grew into a force to be reckoned with in the late Middle Ages (Photo by Arthur Edwards - WPA Pool/Getty Images)" /> The 13th-century rediscovery in Europe of Aristotle’s work added another flavour to this. Influenced by the ancient Greek philosopher’s ideas, writers began to see government as a force for good, not simply a necessary evil. Kings and their subjects eagerly embraced these ideas, both to claim power and to demand accountability. Yet not all nations experienced this thirst for power and accountability in the same way. In England, the quest for the common good was put under intense pressure by conflict and mass death. War in France and across the British Isles drove political change – and brought with it significant disorder. In the early 14th century, during a break in hostilities, demobbed soldiers formed armed bands that marauded across England, leaving a trail of outrages in their wake. That prompted one of the biggest enquiries into crime that had yet taken place in England – the so-called ‘trailbaston’ commissions. Black Death and Peasants’ Revolt Pandemic also shattered society’s sense of security. The Black Death, which first hit England in 1348 and re-appeared in several waves, killed at least 40 per cent of the population, forcing government to intervene to regulate the labour market. The Statute of Labourers of 1351 sought to constrain wage growth and labour mobility, as workers exploited their scarcity to demand higher pay and move to better paid jobs. Those in the upper echelons of society were clearly disturbed by this new thirst for social mobility. We can see this in the Sumptuary Law of 1363, which stipulated that the lower orders should not dress in clothes above their station. Such enforced restraint was hugely controversial, and the combination of a surprisingly buoyant economy and fierce opposition meant that the laws were widely ignored. What no one could ignore, however, was the crisis that struck the economy in the early 1370s. The fall-out from the financial downturn – caused by a collapse in prices, for reasons historians do not fully understand – was long and ultimately bloody. In the immediate aftermath, peasants experienced a double whammy of the sudden enforcement of earlier labouring legislation and the imposition of the first poll tax. Anger and resentment simmered away until, in 1381, they exploded in the popular uprising known as the Peasants’ Revolt. It took the authorities just a few months to put down the revolt, but not before the rebels had chopped off the heads of two of the most powerful men in the land – the archbishop of Canterbury and the lord high treasurer – and reduced the Savoy Palace, John of Gaunt’s opulent residence on the Thames, to a smouldering ruin. At the height of the uprising, the king himself – Richard II – felt compelled to ride out to Smithfield to listen to the rebels’ demands. Read more | The Peasants’ Revolt: did Richard II side with the rebels? Richard II survived his encounter with the peasants but it was a mere stay of execution. Like John before him, Richard was a weak, negligent and ultimately tyrannical ruler. And like John, his reign ended in ignominy, deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke in 1399. Yet there was a crucial difference – one that signals just how far the tectonic plates of the English state had shifted over the two centuries between the reigns of these hapless rulers. John’s downfall occurred in the midst of a chaotic war in which a tiny cadre of the most powerful men in the land sought to limit the power of the king on behalf of ‘the community of the realm’. When Bolingbroke ousted Richard II, he presented deposition articles for the approval of a packed parliament of Lords and Commons gathered from across the kingdom. Where John had failed his dynasty, Richard had failed the entire English nation. Caroline Burt and Richard Partington are medieval historians at the University of Cambridge, and the authors of Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State (Faber & Faber, 2024) This article was first published in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
War and military history podcast episodes
Browse our archive of HistoryExtra podcasts on war and military history, from Nelson’s demise at Trafalgar to the role of Indian soldiers in World War One...
Medieval Stalingrad: why the siege of Calais was so critical in the Hundred Years' War
Edward III’s siege of Calais was a pivotal moment in the Hundred Years’ War. Dan Jones argues that it bears comparison with one of the most brutal clashes of the modern era
One August morning in 1346, an English army led by King Edward III slumped, exhausted, on a bloody battlefield in northern France, near the forest of Crécy. During the previous two days, the English had destroyed a larger, fresher army commanded by the French king Philip VI. The fighting had been vicious: at least 1,500 French knights lay dead, along with thousands more ordinary soldiers. “Never since the destruction of great Troy had there been such mourning,” wrote one poet. Edward had pulled off a near-miraculous victory. It was several years since he had first claimed to be king of France as well as England, fuelling the struggle that today we call the Hundred Years’ War. Now his cause was vindicated: Philip VI was on the ropes, and Edward just had to decide how to strike his next blow. Or rather, where. The road to the battle of Crécy had been hard. On 12 July, Edward – accompanied by his 16-year-old eldest son, the ‘Black Prince’ – had landed 15,000 troops on the beaches of Normandy. For six weeks this vast army had marched through France. At first they had rampaged: burning their way through the Norman countryside in a campaign of terror known as a chevauchée. Then they had gone on the run, chased by Philip’s army, who were determined to drive them out of France for good. So although at Crécy the English had won a famous victory, the king had a tough decision to make. He wrote back to England in triumph, declaring that “our expedition has been very long and continuous. But we do not expect to depart the kingdom of France until we have made an end of our war.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/10/GettyImages-587494258web-717fbcb.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A 16th-century depiction of French king Philip VI who, despite defeat at Crécy, was determined to drive the English out of France. (Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)" title="A 16th-century depiction of French king Philip VI who, despite defeat at Crécy, was determined to drive the English out of France. (Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)" /> Exactly what that meant, though, was left open. In truth, Edward’s men were underfed, over-marched, diseased and depleted. They were in no state to head to Paris and capture Philip’s crown. “The end of our war” had to be achievable and, ideally, to lie close at hand. Thus, at the end of August, Edward turned his army north and set out for Calais. Calais was an attractive target for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it was the closest French port to the south-east coast of England and had good commercial ties with the Cinque Ports (the most important towns, militarily and economically, on England’s south-east coast). It was also highly defensible for whoever held it, equipped with a circuit of high stone walls, a castle and a set of double moats. Calais was protected by the sea on one side and an expanse of marshland cut through with streams on the other. One chronicler called it “one of the strongest cities in the world”. On the podcast | Medieval Stalingrad: the siege of Calais What’s more, Calais had long been a haven for pirates who preyed on English sea-traffic in the Channel; its capture would please the English merchants who had contributed large sums to Edward’s war chest. Finally, Calais was near the cities of Flanders. Edward had gone to great expense courting the independent-minded urban oligarchs who controlled these cities, positioning himself as the only man who could save them from absorption into the kingdom of France. Edward was eager to reassure the Flemish that he was a worthy ally – taking Calais would be a fine show of his commitment to their cause. So it was that on 4 September 1346, Edward brought his army up to the Calais marshes and arrayed them before the city’s soaring walls. According to the chronicler Jean le Bel, the king declared that “winter or summer, he wouldn’t leave until [Calais] was in his hands”. In the end, he was true to his word – but it really would take both a winter and a summer. The siege of Calais was a cruel, painful 11-month slog: a sort of medieval Stalingrad, during which the awful human and material cost of the Hundred Years’ War was laid bare. Calais: six centuries of conflict 1350 French plot foiled A French force, led by the experienced knight Geoffrey de Charny and abetted by an Italian spy within the garrison, planned to recapture Calais from the English on New Year’s Day. The plot was betrayed. Edward III and the Black Prince rushed to Calais, fought in disguise alongside the English defenders, and captured or killed all of the attackers. 1459 Yorkist refuge During the Wars of the Roses, Calais served as a Yorkist centre of power, overseen by the family’s sometime ally Richard Neville, known as Warwick the Kingmaker, who was captain of the town. When Edward, Earl of March fled England in 1459 he took refuge in Calais, and began plotting his return, which saw him seize the crown as King Edward IV. 1520 A seat of diplomacy Henry VIII’s spectacular diplomatic parley with Francis I of France, known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, was held between Henry’s bolt-hole in Calais and the nearby French town of Ardres. Twelve years later Henry visited Calais again, this time with his mistress Anne Boleyn, whom he presented to the French court as though she were already his queen. 1558 Calamitous news for England The last English stronghold in France was lost when Francis, Duke of Guise, led a lightning attack, crossing frozen marshes and seizing the town in less than a week, though it was provisioned to hold out for three months. The shock was said to have hastened Mary I of England’s death: she reputedly said on her deathbed that Calais would be inscribed on her heart. 1940 Holding the Line In late May, during the Nazi invasion of France, British and French troops held Calais for several days against the advancing German 10th Panzer division, helping to buy time for the evacuation of Dunkirk. Heavily fortified by the Germans, Calais was later bombed to ruins before and during the Allied invasion and liberation of France. Starvation awaits The Hundred Years’ War, which lasted from 1337 to 1453, produced many dramatic sieges. In 1415, Henry V blasted the walls of Harfleur with cannon during the Agincourt campaign. In 1429, Joan of Arc appeared at Orléans to help the French drive the English away. The siege of Calais in 1346–47 is not as famous as these encounters, but it was every bit as important. From the moment the English arrived outside Calais, military operations were divided into three spheres of activity. The first of these was Calais itself. The scale and variety of the defences made it obvious that the city could not be stormed. English chronicler Geoffrey le Baker summed up the problem: “The king put Calais under a strong siege, but he realised his army could not fight without danger because of its high walls and ditches [ie, moats]. Neither did he want to erect siege engines... since there was an absence of firm ground to set up the machines.” Edward did have gunpowder-fired cannon in his armoury – he had used them at Crécy. But these primitive guns were useless for bringing down walls. It was clear that the only way to take Calais would be by starving the inhabitants out. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/10/BAL1746803web-74ee75b.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An illustration of the siege of Calais showing cannons and soldiers outside the city walls." title="Cannon were largely ineffectual during the siege of Calais – the main weapon was hunger. This depiction of the siege comes from Jean de Wavrin’s 15th-century Chroniques d’Angleterre. (Photo by Alamy)" /> A campaign of attrition, almost certain to take months rather than weeks, was not an ideal prospect for a battle-drained army. To make the experience more bearable, Edward built on the marshes a semi-permanent siege town of wooden dwellings, shops and civic buildings. The English called it Villeneuve-la-Hardie, meaning ‘bold new town’, and at its height it had a population a third the size of London’s. A memorable pensketch of this extraordinary settlement was recorded by the chronicler Jean Froissart, who said it contained “houses of wood, laid out in streets, and thatched with straw or broom; and in this town... was everything necessary for an army... butcher’s meat and all other sorts of merchandise, cloth and bread... might be had there for money, as well as all comforts.” There were regular market days, with produce brought for sale from England and Flanders. Villeneuve was even fitted with spectator stands from which skirmishes could be watched by the non-combatant nobility, including Edward’s wife, Queen Philippa, who arrived in time to hold a grand Christmas court at the end of 1346. This was about as comfortable as a military camp could be. Its population was maintained through repeated summons to England for fresh troops, many of them criminals serving at their own expense in return for a pardon for all their offences against the crown. Nevertheless, once winter set in, disease ripped around Villeneuve and men deserted in droves. The Flemish front The second sphere of operations during the siege comprised the towns around Calais that were held by the French but coveted by Flanders. Here, Flemish and English interests intertwined. Indeed, there had already been fighting here during the Crécy campaign, as an Anglo-Flemish army commanded by the larger-than-life Norfolk knight Sir Hugh Hastings – who wore a wig made of orange cow-hair, and who is immortalised in a large monumental brass in St Mary’s church in Elsing, Norfolk – had attacked settlements including Béthune. In 1346–47, the English made further sallies against the towns of Lille and St Omer in Artois. One of the most notorious encounters took place at Thérouanne in mid-September 1346, when English troops fell upon the city during market day. They plundered the market, put the bishop commanding the resistance to flight and captured a French knight called Sir Arnoul d’Audrehem, who would later go on to play a leading role in the Hundred Years’ War, rising to the rank of marshal of France. According to one chronicle, the English committed some disgraceful acts in Thérouanne. While the battle for the city was under way an English archer ran into the cathedral, and shot the head off a statue of the Virgin Mary. Another individual desecrated the high altar by using it as a toilet. Escapades like these continued throughout the siege of Calais. But arguably the most famous episode in the ‘Flemish’ theatre involved the count of Flanders, a young man called Louis de Male. Louis’ father had been killed at Crécy, and Louis was now to be married to Edward’s daughter Princess Isabel. Yet he was a very unwilling groom and determined to wriggle out of the arrangement. In the spring of 1347, as his wedding day approached, Louis absconded from his guards while out hunting, escaped to Philip VI’s court and never came back. The war at sea The final arena of combat around Calais was the sea. Calais was a port with connections to others up and down the French coast. It was therefore obvious that in order to starve the city, Edward would have to enforce a strict naval blockade. But this was easier said than done. The English had enjoyed a naval advantage in the Channel since defeating the French fleet at the battle of Sluys in 1340. Nevertheless, for the first six months of the siege of Calais, they lacked the ships to enforce a full stranglehold on the harbour. The citizens of Calais, meanwhile, could call upon the support of a gang of pirates led by one Marant, a ruthless privateer from Boulogne. Marant and his associates were dangerous but enterprising characters who frequented a tavern near Calais known as the Pot d’Etain (The Tin Jar). Although usually to be found on the wrong side of the law, in 1347 they were hired by the French crown to run a Berlin airlift-style supply operation into Calais, shipping in food and supplies from the ports of Dieppe and St Valery. It took the English many months to stop the pirate convoys. Only in spring 1347, when a surge of ships and troops arrived from England, did they shut down Marant’s operations, by scuttling a large ship in the mouth of Calais’ harbour, then seizing and fortifying a spit of land called the Risbank, which guarded the city’s seaward approach. This tightening of the naval blockade marked the real turning point of the siege. Over the cold, miserable winter of 1346–47, the English army’s numbers had dwindled to just a few thousand. But by Easter they had bounced back to more than 20,000. From this point, only two fates were possible for Calais: either Philip VI would bring an army to relieve the city, or the citizens would starve. They starved. At least twice during the siege, Calais’ leader, a resourceful soldier called Jean de Vienne, tried to reduce the number of hungry mouths in the city by expelling women and children, but this provided only temporary respite. Relief would have to come from outside: from Paris. Yet in the aftermath of Crécy, King Philip had panicked and disbanded his army, then dithered about summoning another one. By the time the French king was fit to fight again, in the high summer of 1347, the citizens of Calais were in a terrible way. It was too late. In July, Philip marched his troops to within a few miles of Calais, planning to launch an attack on the English camp. Seeing the king arrive, Jean de Vienne lit a signal fire above one of the city’s towers, letting Philip know the citizens were still alive. He also sent out a letter describing the desperate conditions inside the walls. The horses, dogs and rats had all been devoured, wrote Vienne. “There is nothing left here which has not been eaten, unless we eat the flesh of men.” Sadly for Vienne, the French king lost his nerve. When he saw the size of the English forces billeted in Villeneuve, he burned his army’s tents and beat a hasty retreat. Thus was Calais’ fate sealed. Half-mad with hunger, the citizens gave up the ghost, and sent word to Edward that they were ready to open their gates. A queen’s pity A famous sculpture by Auguste Rodin, which today stands in front of the Calais town hall, depicts the best known historical vignette from the siege of Calais’ conclusion. It shows six ‘burghers’ (wealthy merchants) coming out of the city to surrender its keys and their lives to Edward. They are dressed in their undershirts, with nooses around their necks. Edward made these burghers plead for their lives, and those of their fellow citizens. At first he insisted they should all die, but – so the story goes – his heart was softened by the tender pleas of Queen Philippa, now heavily pregnant, who fell to her knees and begged for mercy. Whether this was a genuine moment of high peril and historical melodrama, or a stage-managed display of royal mercy, is for historians to debate – my own feeling is that it was likely to be the latter. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/10/BAL1153193web-751b857.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture, started in the 1880s, depicting burghers of Calais. (Photo by Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, PA, USA/Bridgeman Images)" title="Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture, started in the 1880s, depicting burghers of Calais. (Photo by Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, PA, USA/Bridgeman Images)" /> Either way, Calais’ fall in August 1347 was a boon for the English. Calais’ merchants were expelled and English settlers (including many businessmen who had underwritten Edward’s campaigns) were summoned to set up shop in their place. An English garrison was installed, and the city would remain English for more than 200 years – a commercial powerhouse and military outpost that gave Plantagenet and Tudor monarchs a precious foothold in northern France. Yet seen another way, of course, the capture of Calais was crucial in allowing the Hundred Years’ War to rumble on so long. So, although Edward did eventually “depart the kingdom of France”, he never had an end to his war. On the podcast | Medieval Masterclass with Dan Jones This article was first published in the November 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Jonathan Sumpton on the Hundred Years’ War: “It was Joan of Arc who persuaded the French that they could win”
Jonathan Sumpton speaks to Rob Attar about the final volume in his epic history of the Hundred Years’ War, which reveals how the French turned the tide against the English monarchy.
Your book is titled Triumph and Illusion. Whose was the triumph, and what was the illusion? It’s deliberately ambiguous. The English were on top at the beginning of the period [1422], but they quickly declined and lost everything they’d gained over the previous decade. They then deceived themselves into thinking that there was some way in which they could conserve at least part of what they’d conquered. There were triumphs and illusions on the other side, too. Eventually, the French did triumph: they excluded England from every part of France except Calais. But they had their own illusions. They felt that the English had no support in France except from traitors, but the striking thing is that the English had a lot of support in the areas that they occupied until they started losing, particularly in Normandy. This was a very early example of a military occupation, and the English absolutely grasped the fact that they had to win the hearts and minds of the subjects in order to survive. They did that, initially, simply by providing an effective government and a working system of law. This had been completely missing in previous decades because France was in the middle of a civil war, and neither party to that war could supply that effective government. As you alluded to there, when we’re talking about the Hundred Years’ War, France was not united, was it? That’s absolutely right. The English only ever got a secure foothold in France when it was divided by civil war. The 15th century witnessed the most serious civil war that France had ever experienced – between supporters of the Duke of Burgundy and supporters of the monarchy [led by Charles VII, still known as the Dauphin] – and the English got into France under the cover of that war. The Hundred Years’ War continued until, in the 1450s, the French were able to suppress domestic rebellions. They firstly detached the Burgundians from the English cause in the 1430s, then they progressively reduced the aristocracy to powerlessness. By the beginning of the 16th century, the English could no longer get a foothold because they could never find any domestic support. This volume begins in the aftermath of Henry V’s death. How decisive a moment was this? It was crucial because Henry V had been a remarkable ruler. Not only had he been an extremely efficient soldier and administrator, but his rather austere sense of justice and rectitude had been very attractive in a country that had experienced a decade of civil war and anarchy. So his death was a misfortune; what turned it into a disaster was the fact his heir was a baby [Henry VI], incapable of ruling. The English were able to recover some ground because [Henry V’s brother] John, Duke of Bedford was ruling as regent in the English-occupied parts of France. He was one of the most remarkable figures of the late Middle Ages: a very rare example of a good uncle. Medieval history is full of bad uncles, but the duke was an outstanding patriot who devoted his entire life to the service of his infant nephew. Unfortunately, the duke died in 1435. Things were already going badly at that point because of the extraordinary eruption onto the scene of Joan of Arc, but it got even worse after Bedford died. As you say, in the 1420s the English were actually doing fairly well in military terms. Do you think we sometimes neglect this period in favour of more famous episodes like Agincourt? We undoubtedly do. In the first two years after Henry V’s death, the Duke of Bedford and his generals succeeded in winning two major battles. One at Cravant, in northern Burgundy, and one at Verneuil, in southern Normandy. The main significance of Cravant was that it destroyed the Scottish army operating in France which had, for four years, made life very difficult for the English. But the decisive moment was the battle of Verneuil in 1424, when the English defeated the largest army that the Dauphin had succeeded in assembling so far, including a whole new army recently arrived from Scotland. It destroyed the morale of the French, it boosted the reputation of the English in the territories that they occupied, and for the next five years, until Joan of Arc’s appearance, the English had it almost entirely their own way. Joan of Arc is, of course, a pivotal figure in this story. A lot has been written about her over the years, but what’s your take? The fashion in recent years has been to belittle the contribution that Joan made to the war, but I think it was fundamental. She came onto the scene at a time when morale in the French government and its army was at rock bottom. They were, as they saw it, on the verge of losing the city of Orléans, which would have been a major disaster. There was even talk within the French government of abandoning large parts of western France to the English. What Joan did was to persuade the French that they could win. Napoleon once said war is three-quarters morale, and that is very much borne out by the story of Joan of Arc. She did not command armies, she rarely determined strategy and she did not even wield a sword in anger. So what did she do? She persuaded French soldiers that God was bound to give them victory because they were the virtuous side. In addition, because she believed so totally in her visions and her guiding saints, she was completely impervious to danger and perfectly happy to place herself in a position where there was a high risk of being killed. Yet she survived. People who saw this realised that they were in the presence of somebody remarkable. The Count of Dunois, the chief French commander, later said that before Joan came along, 200 Englishmen could defeat 1,000 Frenchmen. Whereas afterwards, the story was reversed: relatively small forces of French could defeat whole English armies. And that wasn’t just a French point of view: the Duke of Bedford said that everything had been going fine until this “witch” came along who had deprived the English of their courage and boosted the self-confidence of the French. So you have a complete consensus that Joan was a critical figure. One thing is clear: the march on Reims, to crown the dauphin as Charles VII [in 1429], was her strategy. All the experienced soldiers in the Dauphin’s court advised against it, but by that time she had achieved such a hold on the Dauphin’s mind that she made him do it. The coronation was a seminal event because it conferred a measure of legitimacy on the Dauphin, which he hadn’t had before. Although he had been proclaimed king in 1422, he was normally referred to as the Dauphin – not just by the English but by many French leaders and even Joan herself. After the coronation, he was referred to as the king and a great majority of people, including many of the English and the French in English service, now regarded him as king and the English as interlopers. That was a very big psychological change – and psychology matters in war. Your book also covers Joan’s trial and execution. As a former judge, what’s your view on the legal proceedings against her? It’s difficult for modern people to get into the mentality of her judges, because she was charged with offences – heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft and so on – which nowadays we regard as absurd and fanciful. But you have to remember that, at the time, both sides viewed her as a miracle worker. The French regarded her as having achieved miracles because she was the instrument of God for the salvation of France. The English tried to blunt the moral effect of the French victories by portraying them as the work of Satan. Her judges, who were pro-Burgundian French, could not accept that her visions and achievements were inspired by God. It was always clear that once she was accused of blasphemy, of misusing the name of God, she was going to be condemned, because the alternative would have been to accept that she had a God-given mission to expel the English from France. The procedures themselves strike most of us as extremely unfair because they pitted a 19-year-old, uneducated girl against trained theologians, philosophers and academics, who were trying to fit her into established categories of heretical belief and behaviour. But although the trial was a very unequal battle, she acquitted herself with extraordinary skill. Reading the transcripts is a remarkable experience because we have an almost verbatim record of the many days of cross-examination that she endured at the hands of hostile judges. And she was articulate; she understood what was going on. She would say things like: “That question is irrelevant to your inquiry.” Or: “I already answered that five minutes ago,” or sometimes she would simply say: “Next question please.” This kind of conduct coming from an uneducated but very self-confident woman was extremely disconcerting to the judges. When Joan was executed in 1431, the war still had more than 20 years to run, but had the tide decisively turned? Yes it had. Before Joan came along, the English controlled more or less the whole territory north of the Loire. The result of the march on Reims was that the French were able to take control of the bridge towns over the Marne, east of Paris, and to seize the territory north of Normandy. So, for the first time in many years, the French were in control of the territory north and south of Normandy and north and south of the Paris area. The English had to fight in Normandy on two fronts; sooner or later, that was a situation in which they were bound to lose. The English were on the defensive, and they didn’t have the resources to clear the French from the territories that they had conquered in the time of Joan of Arc. The inevitable result was that their territory would be nibbled away until they were left with nothing. The traditional end of the Hundred Years’ War is 1453. What happened then? That was the year in which the French, having already conquered Normandy three years earlier, finally completed the conquest of Gascony. The English kings had controlled this territory in south-western France since the 12th century. It was their oldest possession in France and, in fact, the English had held it for longer than any of their subsequent colonies, other than the island of Jamaica. The conquest of Gascony meant that, with the exception of Calais, England no longer had a foothold in France. In England, the Wars of the Roses followed hot on the heels of the Hundred Years’ War. Did one beget the other? The common cause in both cases was the incapacity of Henry VI. But there was also rage and disappointment and a desire for scapegoats for the loss of Normandy and Gascony. The English looked back at the victories of Henry V, and could not believe that such a dramatic reversal of their fortunes could have happened without treachery on the part of Henry VI’s ministers. Conversely, had there been popular support for the French campaigns in England when things had been going well? English sentiment was ambivalent. There was popular support for the war, provided that they did not have to pay for it through their taxes. For years they took the view that English taxpayers ought not have to pay for wars that their king was fighting in his capacity as king of France. After 1428, they became more realistic, but would never fund the war on the scale required. The people most affected by the war were those living in the battleground regions of France. What was life like for them? It was terrible. The physical destruction is difficult to imagine. The problem was not just the size of the armies, which by modern standards were quite small. But each army was followed by numerous camp followers and people who were non-combatants but pretty violent all the same. In addition, in areas where the army passed through, law and order broke down completely. The land was taken over by roaming bands of brigands. The symptoms could be seen in the landscape. There were large tracts of northern France where you couldn’t see any sign of human habitation – just domestic animals left roaming free in areas that had been totally depopulated. You could also see it in the towns and villages. During the 13th century the towns had expanded beyond their walls and developed large suburbs. Many of these had to be demolished so as not to give cover to an attacking army. This left people crammed inside the walls of towns, in accommodation that was only sufficient for about a third of them, and very large numbers fled these areas for other parts of France. There were the knock-on effects, too. Often, food could not be moved by river or road, so even in times of plenty some regions starved. When there was a bad harvest, it was much worse. Undernourished people were vulnerable to disease and there were major epidemics in the towns and countryside. We know from reports of travellers after the English left that France was a picture of desolation. English judge Sir John Fortescue, who was forced into exile during the Wars of the Roses, said that it was depressing travelling through northern France, because here was one of the richest countries in the world and yet peasants were starving in their villages. This is the final volume in a series you’ve been working on for over 30 years. Taken as a whole, why do you think the Hundred Years’ War is such an important event? It is important because it separated England and France after four centuries in which their fortunes had been closely intertwined, and set them on divergent paths – France an aggressive absolute monarchy, England a chastened parliamentary state. Taking a broader view, from the origins of our species until the 19th century, the two principal collective activities of mankind were religion and war. Religion and war have created the state as we know it. In the late Middle Ages the English and French were beginning to have governments that can be recognised as essentially the same in their objectives, and often their methods, as the modern state. It was the pressure of war – increasingly war, rather than religion – that created the state and built it into the great tax-collecting, money-spending and aggressive institution that it remained until recently. That’s why the Hundred Years’ War is so interesting. William Pitt once observed that the principal weapon of war is money, and many people have pointed out that war is won at least as much by administrators as it is by soldiers. The Hundred Years’ War exemplifies this. It was a complete war, in the sense that we’re not just looking at armies, but the efforts of entire populations. Your books are often held up as paragons of narrative history. Is this form of history writing as important today as when you began the series? There was a period when narrative history was despised by serious academics. That period has ended, and there are now major works of narrative history by professional academic historians. But I’m not suggesting that analytical and thematic history has become less important. I think what people have realised is that to understand a society, the first building block has to be a deep understanding of what actually happened. What I have tried to do is to mix a narrative of what happened with an explanation of why it happened, based on a study of how people lived, how they thought, how they governed and how they conducted themselves in one of the great crises of the two major countries of western Europe. So it’s not just narrative history – at least that has been my objective. And will it be the Thirty Years’ War next for you? I’m not confident enough in my longevity! This article was first published in the October 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Bestselling historical author Alison Weir shares the dramatic stories of five 14th-century queen consorts – from Marguerite of France to Isabella of Valois
The 14th century was an era of high drama in England – from the toppling of two kings and the Hundred Years’ War to the Black Death and Peasants’ Revolt. Speaking with Emily Briffett, bestselling historical author Alison Weir charts the dramatic lives and tangled legacies of five queen consorts during the turbulent ‘Age of Chivalry’. Alison Weir is the author of Queens of the Age of Chivalry (Vintage, 2022) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
Why Henry VI’s reign was such a disaster
King Henry VI fell foul of the French, his soldiers, his own advisors, and centuries of historians. Yet, writes Lauren Johnson, perhaps his greatest enemy was the revered warrior-king who is commonly lauded as one of England's greatest monarchs and left him the throne 600 years ago, his own father...
In Westminster Abbey, the tomb of Henry V is hard to miss. Towering above the mosaic-encrusted tomb of St Edward the Confessor and his royal successors, for centuries Henry’s final resting place was topped by a shield, helm and warhorse’s saddle. All are symbols of the martial glory of a man many still consider to be the best English king of the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, in the Lady Chapel behind, tucked away and noticed by almost no one, is a small wooden pew-end representing Henry V’s successor, and only child, Henry VI. Can anything more aptly demonstrate the reputations of this father and son? Henry V loomed over his offspring from the grave, and in his father’s shadow Henry VI grew up stunted, emotionally and politically. Read more | Henry V's reputation: 5 facts you might not know about the king's softer side On the 600th anniversary of his death, Henry V’s triumphs are still rehearsed in productions of the eponymous Shakespeare play. His appears to be the ultimate underdog success story. Eldest son of a Lancastrian usurper, Henry V united England to claim the French throne, overcame substantial odds to win the battle of Agincourt in 1415, and was rewarded at the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, where he was named heir to the French kingdom and married Princess Catherine of Valois. Revered as “the flower in his time of Christian chivalry”, he died on campaign, aged 35 in 1422, leaving a nine-month-old son who shortly after was proclaimed King Henry VI, of England and France. Henry VI’s life also gained Shakespeare’s attention, but in the three plays bearing his name he is an insubstantial figure with few lines, completely overshadowed by more dynamic characters, chief among them his queen, Margaret of Anjou. Where Henry V’s reign is a litany of triumphs, his son’s reads like a top trumps of failure: he lost the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses, was twice imprisoned by his Yorkist rivals and died, almost certainly murdered, in the Tower of London shortly after his only child had been hacked to death in battle. But if we peer beyond the lustre of the father and misfortune of the son, a more complicated image emerges: there is much to praise in the character and priorities of Henry VI, and a good deal reprehensible in the actions of Henry V. Most damningly of all, many of the failings of Henry VI can be traced back to his father. Although Henry VI reaped a bitter harvest for his people, it was Henry V who sowed the seed. Read more | Why is Henry V's portrait in profile? Lover and fighter The defining difference between Henrys V and VI can be summed up in a single word: warfare. Henry V was first and foremost a soldier, witness to military campaigns from the time he was 11 and left with a disfiguring scar when struck in the face by an arrow in his first battle, aged 16. The primary focus of his energies was gaining the French throne by military force. Henry VI, by contrast, was an out and out pacifist. In the cause of peace, he chose his queen, sacrificed bellicose advisers and surrendered vital bargaining chips to the French. Although Henry VI was willing to don armour and ride to battle, he never once raised his sword against an enemy, and his first experience of military violence came in his 34th year, when he watched impotently as his leading supporters were butchered in the streets of St Albans. Henry V’s military activity provided common experience and a focus for loyalty with his peers and subjects. It made them, to quote Shakespeare, a “band of brothers”, winning Henry fame and his subjects glory. Read more | A wayward prince? King Henry V's misspent youth Henry VI was trained for warfare by a military veteran and kitted out with weapons and armour as a child. He even rode a courser (warhorse) from the age of three. Yet the only time he visited France was for his coronation as a 10-year-old. Military leadership was always deputised to a noble kinsman. Why, then, did the son not become a formidable military leader in the mould of the father? After all, the Hundred Years’ War was far from over. The answer is a question of nature but also, importantly, of nurture. Henry V was extraordinarily fortunate in his upbringing, and in many ways his formative years and ultimate monarchical successes mirror those of Henry VI’s Yorkist rival and successor, Edward IV. Both Henry V and Edward hailed from families with many sons. This meant they were expendable, and therefore benefited from being allowed to witness lordship and warfare first hand. By contrast, Henry VI was an only child in the utterly unprecedented position of governing two realms, as a baby. His life was so precious that it could not be endangered by proximity to war. Henry VI’s insecurity was exacerbated by biological factors beyond his control: despite marrying and producing illegitimate children, none of his Lancastrian uncles had legitimate offspring, which meant that until 1447 his closest heir was the 50-something Duke of Gloucester, and after that, his distant cousin Richard, Duke of York. If Henry died fighting in France, as his father had done, the Lancastrian line would die with him. Nonetheless, if Henry VI had really wished to lead an army, he could have done so. The teenage king Henry VIII insisted on riding to war early in his reign, despite lacking brothers or an heir. Indeed, more than once in the reign of Henry VI, preparations were made for him to cross the Channel in force before royal command was delegated elsewhere, and when the Lancastrian throne was threatened by internal rivals it would have greatly bolstered Henry’s cause if he had personally fought alongside his men. Henry V knew the power that the presence of the king in the field could hold. At Agincourt, the French noblemen were numerous but their king, Charles VI, was too mentally unwell to attend. By contrast, Henry V was, according to a contemporary English chronicler, “the first to charge the enemy… giving his men in his own person brave examples of daring as he scattered the enemy ranks with his ready axe”. Read more | Henry V’s greatest victory (and it wasn't Agincourt) Henry V’s dominant leadership was a major factor in English victory, but there was a dark side to warfare that never sat well with the pious Henry VI. He never forgot that his father’s “glorious” French wars had unleashed suffering on both sides of the Channel. Indeed, by modern standards some of Henry V’s military choices rank as atrocities. After Agincourt, he ordered that prisoners of war be murdered. And it was not merely enemy combatants who suffered. Innocent women and children were starved to death during Henry V’s five-month siege of Rouen in 1418 and 1419. Even his direct contemporaries found some of the king’s actions excessive. An English eyewitness at Rouen described with pity: “A child of two years or three going about to beg its bread, [as] father and mother both were dead… And women holding in their arms dead children… and the children sucking in their pap within a dead woman’s lap.” Read more | Henry V: the cruel king Two years after Agincourt, another (anonymous) Englishman commemorated Henry’s victory in ambiguous terms: “Our England, therefore, has reason to rejoice and reason to grieve. Reason to rejoice [in] the victory gained and the deliverance of her men, reason to grieve for the suffering and destruction wrought in the deaths of Christians.” This was the true face of medieval war, and it was a reality that Henry VI could not stomach. In this, he was far from alone. By the time his father died, the English were sick of conflict, being already 85 years into the Hundred Years’ War. It was increasingly difficult to extract taxes to pay for military campaigns from a parliament that felt the war offered little advantage to Englishmen. The sheer scale of the bloodshed was starting to be questioned. By 1439 it was claimed that more men had died in the century of warfare than were alive now in both kingdoms. As a member of Henry VI’s council (or the king himself) observed: “So much Christian blood shed that it is [both] a sorrow and a horror to think or hear it.” In 1440, aged 18, Henry VI marked his accession to adult rule – which had been slowly proceeding since 1437 – with two statements of intent. He founded Eton College and shortly thereafter another at Cambridge, becoming the first king to create his own educational establishments. And he took the first step towards peace with France, defying his father’s last wishes by freeing the French prisoner of war, Charles, Duke of Orléans. Orléans had been pulled from a pile of corpses on the battlefield at Agincourt 25 years earlier – and his release had been expressly forbidden by Henry V. Flouting the late king’s will yet further, Henry VI suggested to one of his negotiators with France that in return for an alliance, he would surrender the French crown. Henry’s peace policy was so audacious that it divided public opinion and alienated his closest advisors. His uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, declared it was “the greatest sign of infamy that ever fell to [the king]… or to [his] noble progenitors”, and that he “would rather die” than accept it. Henry VI was at pains to emphasise that his new peace policy was the natural continuation of his ancestors’ wars. They, too, had ultimately negotiated peace – Henry V’s Treaty at Troyes was a case in point. But his subjects were not appeased. And worse was to follow. Ceding territory Henry VI was right that a grand gesture was required to end the Hundred Years’ War – but his judgment was poor on exactly what that gesture should be. Having freed Orléans, he then married the impoverished French noblewoman Margaret of Anjou to please her uncle, Charles VII of France, and ceded the hard-won territory of Maine in the process. He lost control of his disgruntled garrisons in France, giving the wily Charles VII justification for military vengeance. The result, ultimately, was the loss of all Henry’s French territories, including some that had been held by the kings of England for centuries. This was one of several instances in which Henry’s good intentions, but poor judgment, proved his undoing. He was honest to a fault, politically naïve, generous in the extreme. In a king, such virtues became vices. He failed to match his rivals for guile and was horrified by what he considered their treachery in abandoning alliances with England. In his own realm, Henry rewarded servants and overlooked wrongdoing in his supporters. When asked for favour, he invariably showed it, without considering the consequences. In the most notorious instance of his absent-minded liberality, he gave the same West Country title to two men at once, inciting a decades-long civil war. His constant desire was to avoid conflict. Where he had a choice between something right but difficult, or wrong but easy, he always chose the latter. On the podcast | Lauren Johnson discusses the life and reign of Henry VI, whose decades on the throne coincided with the disaster of the Wars of the Roses The cause of this character fault is to be found in his childhood. It had taken an extraordinary collective effort by the ruling elite of England to ensure Henry V’s son inherited England peacefully. There had been boy kings before – the last, Richard II, was crowned at the age of 10 half a century earlier. But there had never been a baby king of England. While who should rule was never in question, how they should rule was, and the resulting factionalism dividing Henry’s council was to blight his childhood. Henry VI had a superfluity of uncles and mentors, each with their own ideal of government. His great uncle, Archbishop (later Cardinal) Henry Beaufort, led a band of noblemen and bishops who favoured a royal council; his eldest uncle John, Duke of Bedford, sought to rule France and act as protector over a council in England; and his youngest surviving uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, craved the regency of England solely for himself. Read more | The miraculous afterlife of Henry VI These were powerful men, the wealthiest and most influential of the realm, and reconciling their conflicting demands would have been challenging for an adult king. It proved insurmountable for Henry. Time and again during his childhood he was called upon to witness public peace-making between his uncles, only for cohesion to collapse in private. Bedford was often abroad fighting Henry’s wars, leaving Cardinal Beaufort and the Duke of Gloucester to scrap things out between them: in parliament, palaces and even the streets of London, where tensions once escalated to such an extent that armed men faced off across London Bridge. Gloucester was the first to realise that Henry’s essentially pliable nature made him susceptible to coercion, and tried to motivate his nephew into assuming power early so he could rule through him. This led to a bewildering face-off between king and council, where the adolescent monarch was told, with all possible respect, that he simply wasn’t up to the job of ruling yet. The encounter compounded the sensitive Henry’s mistrust of his own judgment, encouraging his instinct to delegate authority to one leading courtier after another: first Gloucester, then the generally despised Duke of Suffolk, the unfortunate Duke of Somerset under whom France was lost, and eventually his queen, Margaret of Anjou. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/11/BAL3264578smlwebready-0054cef.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A miniature showing English troops attempting to storm a French camp outside Castillon in 1453. Their failure cost Henry VI the Hundred Years’ War (Photo by British Library Board)" title="A miniature showing English troops attempting to storm a French camp outside Castillon in 1453. Their failure cost Henry VI the Hundred Years’ War (Photo by British Library Board)" /> The fatal flaw But Henry V must share some of the blame for the problems of his son’s reign. In 1422, as he lay dying in France, physically wasted by camp sickness but still mentally acute, Henry V added codicils to his will that dictated how his successor should fight the French war. Those deathbed directions held his successor hostage for 20 years, leaving no room for his son and his advisors to manoeuvre, even as circumstances changed beyond the late king’s foresight. Had Henry V lived, he almost certainly would have adapted his policy, as Henry VI was forced to do. But leaving no latitude in his directions, Henry V effectively stymied Lancastrian government. Henry V’s decision to lead his armies in person at the sickness-ravaged siege of Meaux was also disastrous to his regime. It directly caused his death, and left his infant son without kingly example or paternal protection. This proved to be Henry VI’s fatal flaw. Because he never met his father – who departed to France during Queen Catherine’s pregnancy – Henry VI never witnessed kingship in action. He never even saw true leadership first hand, since those ruling on his behalf took pains to defer to him in public. His exempla were biblical figures and historical kings, but he never learned how to temper the ideals of kingship with the realpolitik of medieval rule. Read more | The miracle of Henry VI: how the weak medieval king became a 'saint' If Henry V had lived to have more sons, and to offer an example to his heir, things could have been different. He would have been beset by the same troubles as his son. Charles VII would have raised an army against him. Continental intrigues and English infighting would have bedevilled attempts at peace. The English treasury would have been drained to breaking point. Henry V was lucky, then, to die at the height of his powers, ensuring his lasting fame. Had Henry VI died in spring 1453, when his wife was pregnant, French lands being reclaimed, talk of a fresh invasion led by the king himself on the wind, and parliament pliable, we would remember him considerably more kindly. Instead, he died a prisoner of Edward IV, aged 49, shabby and bearded, teeth ground down by years of anxiety, having lost almost everyone he cared about – most of them violently. As William Shakespeare recognised, Henry V’s life story is a glorious history because of how it ended, just as Henry VI’s life was a tragedy. Lauren Johnson is a historian and writer. Her books include Shadow King: The Life and Death of Henry VI (Head of Zeus, 2019) This article was first published in the September 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine