Henry was born on 16 September 1386 at Monmouth Castle in Wales, the eldest son of Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV) and Mary de Bohun. His childhood was shaped by the dynastic turbulence of the 1390s: his father overthrew Richard II in 1399 and the boy became Prince of Wales overnight, inheriting an active Welsh rebellion led by Owain Glyndwr. Between 1400 and 1408 Henry fought Glyndwr's forces across the mountains of Wales, commanding English armies from the age of fourteen. At the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 — fought against the Percy family who had turned against his father — he was struck in the face by an arrow and survived only through the skill of the court physician John Bradmore, who designed a special instrument to extract the arrowhead from a wound nearly six inches deep. Henry became king on 20 March 1413, inheriting a throne that his father had seized by force and that remained contested by Mortimer claimants. He moved swiftly to heal the Lancastrian dynasty's legitimacy deficit: he reinterred Richard II with due ceremony at Westminster Abbey, made a public peace with the Percy family, and crushed the Lollard rising of Sir John Oldcastle in January 1414 with prompt, legally grounded severity. Then he turned to France. The French kingdom was paralysed by the civil war between the Armagnac and Burgundian factions, and the mad king Charles VI was incapable of governing. Henry revived the Plantagenet claim to the French crown and opened negotiations that were designed to fail. He invaded in August 1415 with an army of roughly 12,000, besieging Harfleur until it fell on 22 September. His force, reduced by dysentery to perhaps 6,000, then began a march north toward Calais along the same route Edward III had taken in 1346. On 25 October 1415, near the village of Agincourt, it was intercepted by a French army of some 12,000–15,000. What followed over several hours on a rain-soaked field, flanked by thick woods that channelled the French cavalry, was the most decisive English military victory in France since Crécy. Henry's longbowmen, positioned at the flanks and on the slightly elevated ground, unleashed storms of arrows into the tightly packed French knights advancing through mud. By noon the battle was over; French casualties ran to thousands of knights and nobles, English losses to hundreds at most. The English chronicles and later Shakespeare's Henry V (1598) shaped the battle's memory into a near-mythic image of yeoman courage against aristocratic arrogance. The Treaty of Troyes on 21 May 1420 was Henry's diplomatic masterpiece: Charles VI recognised him as heir to France and gave him his daughter Catherine of Valois in marriage. Henry was effectively king of both realms simultaneously. He died on 31 August 1422 at the Château de Vincennes near Paris, probably from dysentery contracted during the siege of Meaux. He was thirty-five, and had reigned for just nine years. His son Henry VI, born in December 1421, was nine months old. The dual monarchy lasted a further thirty years before it collapsed entirely under the combined pressure of Joan of Arc's campaigns, French nationalism, and Lancastrian civil war — but for a single, incandescent decade, Henry V had come closer than any English king to making the Plantagenet claim on France a reality.
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King of England · Heir to France · Victor of Agincourt
Henry V
1,386 CE – 1,422 CE
The English king who transformed a ragged army of longbowmen at Agincourt into the most celebrated military triumph of the Middle Ages, then forged the Treaty of Troyes to claim the French throne — and died at thirty-five before he could wear it.
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