Birth of an Heir and Death of the King

It remained only to deal with the last outposts of resistance in France, and to await the death of his father-in-law, Charles VI. In October 1421, Henry lay siege to Meaux. His son and only child by Catherine, the future Henry VI, was born at Windsor on 6 December, during the course of this siege, auspiciously enough at a castle from which it was prophesied that a new King Arthur would one day arise and on the feast day of St Nicholas, the patron saint of children. Meaux fell the following May. But the hardships of that winter, the effects of dysentery and his inability to ride, left Henry prostrate at Vincennes outside Paris where, on 31 August 1422, he died, ironically enough in the same château that, in the twentieth century, was to house the archives and hence the history of the modern French army. Charles VI of France died less than three months later, on 21 October. Had Henry V lived those extra fifty days he would have achieved the ambition of every English king, to be recognized not just as ruler of England but as legitimate heir to the throne of France. Instead, this honour passed to his son, Henry VI, barely ten months old. From an English perspective, defeat had only narrowly been snatched from the jaws of victory.

Henry V was the first English king since Richard I to have died on French soil. Like Richard I’s, the reign of Henry had been brief but glorious: a mere seven years to set against Richard’s ten. Richard had been only forty-one at his death, Henry an even more remarkable thirty-six, dying at the same age as Mozart and, by popular understanding, as Jesus Christ. From the time of Alexander the Great, a mere thirty-three years old at his death, all great heroes were expected to die young. Like Richard I, Henry had transformed his wars into a struggle between good and evil, to all intents as a crusade now fought against the French. As with Richard, the chaos that engulfed Henry’s realm after his death, has tended to cast a roseate glow over his own reign and reputation, the last truly great king of England before the fall of night. Even in Henry’s lifetime, the so-called Gesta Henrici Quinti (‘The Deeds of Henry V’) had sought to portray the King in heroic terms, as propaganda to recruit support for further war in France. By the 1430s, a life of Henry written at the request of his younger brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was fostering a myth of the invincible warrior king. Henry V, like Richard I, had ascended from history into myth.