Henry V

We must beware taking our view of Henry V from William Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier or the music of Sir William Walton. In all probability, the last years of the old King were nothing like so gloomy, nor the breach with his eldest son anything like so serious, as Shakespeare’s history plays suggest. When Henry IV died in 1413, Henry V nonetheless chose to look to other role models than his father. Those that he selected not only set the tone for a renewal of warfare in France but for his own much vaunted orthodoxy in all matters relating to the Church. There were to be no Lollard knights at Henry V’s court, as revealed, almost immediately after his succession, by the disgrace and flight of Sir John Oldcastle and his fellow conspirators. The wounds of the past were, in so far as was possible, to be healed. In 1413, the year of his accession, Henry V removed the body of Richard II from its exile at King’s Langley and had it reinterred in the royal mausoleum at Westminster where it had originally been intended to lie.