Young Prince Henry and the French Crisis

This in turn helps to explain why Henry IV’s eldest son and heir, Henry V, was so anxious to prove both his legitimacy and his close relationship with God. If not the closest heir to Edward III, then Henry V could at least prove himself the claimant whom the Almighty was keenest to promote. Trained up in the wars against Glyn Dwr, wounded in the face at the Battle of Shrewsbury, Henry was already an experienced commander by the time that his father fell ill in 1405. Perhaps not the favourite amongst his father’s sons, he nonetheless stepped forwards to play a significant role in the council that over the next few years attempted to reform royal finance, to deal with the situation that arose when the heir to the throne of Scotland, the future James I, was fortuitously captured by English sailors at sea, and to consider the options in France that opened up as the result of the emergence of serious factional fighting between supporters of the Duke of Burgundy and the Armagnac party that had previously gathered around the Duke of Orléans. These disputes themselves reflected the fact that the King of France, Charles VI, was incapable of governing himself let alone his realm. First seized with the symptoms of madness in the early 1390s, Charles had since suffered episodes in which he believed himself to be made of glass, fearful of sitting down for fear of breaking, able to recognize no one and capable of no serious work save for looking at picture books.

As early as 1411, Prince Henry was proposing to lead an English expedition to France in support of the Burgundian faction. To this end, and so that Henry IV might himself join his son, ‘an old streamer of worsted worked with the arms of the King, St Edward and St George’ was prepared for the King’s sailing to Calais, a sailing which in the event did not take place. In the same year, spurred on by his uncle, Henry Beaufort, the Prince may even have suggested that Henry IV abdicate in his favour. If so, this was a suggestion that merely fuelled discord between father and son, with Henry IV’s last years perhaps dominated by his rivalry with the Prince.