Dan Jones

It is the view of Henry’s chaplain, perhaps echoing the king’s own, that no besieged people could have prepared themselves “more prudently or with greater security to themselves.” All the same, Henry may reason, in a contest between prudence and cannonballs, the advantage is typically held by the side with the biggest guns.

Henry has known John the Fearless long enough to realize that the Duke, while resourceful and on occasion useful, is not a man to be trusted.

As he grows up, he will shed any inclination to treat his enemies leniently. Toughness and a near-total lack of sentimentality will become hallmarks of his political character.

Broadly speaking, these have remained the two poles of historical opinion ever since. Henry was either what the Edwardian scholar C. L. Kingsford called a “typical medieval hero” or the exemplar of all that was most depressing about the Middle Ages: a time of barbarity dressed up as chivalry, during which of the private ambitions of warlords were cloaked in the humbug of religion and used as the pretext to shed the blood of thousands, for the gain of a town here and a castle there, both of which might well be lost again the following year.

It is undoubtedly a grand conspiracy, but not a very clever one. And as with any complicated scheme, there are more ways for it to go wrong than right.

Above everything, they have been raising huge sums of money. Henry’s career since the age of thirteen has been an applied lesson in the first principles of warmongering: it must be paid for, and it will always cost more than it should. To lose one’s grip on finance risks political crisis. What is more, to Henry’s mind, to be broke is unkingly, even shameful.

Dull, painstaking, technocratic work seldom moves bards and chroniclers in the same way as battlefield victories. Yet the great triumph of Henry’s leadership of the royal council in 1410–11 is that he realizes that nothing can proceed without it.

By our standards, Henry was a cruel zealot, quick to judge and fight, frigid and stiff-necked, impatient, exacting, unforgiving, largely sexless, and mostly humorless. Seen from the perspective of an age that positively embraces vulnerability, Henry can be a hard character to like, or even to admire. Our values are not his. His are not ours. We do not need to pretend otherwise.

Richard has long been determined to reverse the decline of English control over Ireland. To that end, he has already visited, during the winter of 1394–95, when he took several thousand troops on a tour from Waterford to Drogheda, via Dublin. He satisfied himself on the basis of one brief visit that he now understood all Ireland’s problems.‡

In a letter to his council on that occasion Richard explained that there were three types of Irishman: “Irish savages, Irish rebels, and the obedient English.” Solving the Irish question, he had concluded, was simply a matter of reconciling all three to his own command, hearing their promises of fidelity, then sending over the most willing of his English friends to deputize for him in his absence. For some reason this policy has failed; Richard’s return in 1399 is his attempt to reboot it.

‡ This remains a common English delusion.

Henry’s experience of rolling up his sleeves and taking charge of financial administration is a crash course in the unglamorous side of kingship. It is useful, but not always a lot of fun.

Richard was the rightful king, but a fool. Henry’s father is a capable man, but a usurper. Sometimes it is hard to know which of these positions is worse.

History, however, is not a congeniality contest. How we rate Henry for likability today is of little consequence. What matters is what he did in his own time, how he optimized for the standards of his own age, and what the consequences were of his relatively short life and reign.

This is a more straightforward assessment to make. In his day, the weight of opinion was that Henry was somewhere close to the paragon of kingship, measured both by his personal bearing and by his political and military achievements.