Dan Jones

So the parliament, which represents the seventeen-year-old Prince Henry’s return to political life, is hardly a resounding success. Yet in its failures, there are lessons for Henry. One is that no war can proceed without taxation, and no taxation can be collected without a happy parliament. Another is that a king can rule successfully only when his legitimacy is beyond doubt. This, perhaps, is the most positive lesson the parliament has to offer. Although his father’s demand for an oath of obedience to Prince Henry and his brothers speaks to desperation in the moment, it holds promise for the future.

The task of the delegates at the Council of Constance is to wheedle or force the resignations of all three men who currently claim to be pope: Benedict XIII in Avignon, Gregory XII in Rome, and a piratical gangster from southern Italy who rules as John XXIII from Pisa.

Henry has demonstrated a reliable lesson of warfare: often as not, extortion works.

It means grossly inflating the traditional fees the Crown charges to noble men and women for buying royal pardons or licenses to marry. It means threatening, flattering, cajoling, and bribing anyone who seems that they might be parted from their wealth: convincing them by whatever means possible to believe in him and share in his vision of a righteous war.

For much of 1415, therefore, Henry is a king with a begging bowl and a menacing stare.

Sigismund has become obsessed with reconciling Christendom’s divided peoples, so that a united international army might one day be raised once more and sent to chastise the Turks. Three critical steps toward achieving this are to heal the papal schism that has wrenched Europe apart since 1378, to stop the Burgundian-Armagnac civil war, and to make peace between England and France.

Thus it is possible that Henry can be judged as hero and monster on the basis of the same evidence. To the influential and generally level-headed medievalist K. B. McFarlane, Henry V was the “greatest man that ever ruled England.” Yet in the view of a more recent historian, Henry was “a deeply flawed individual,” a misogynist, a religious fundamentalist, a reckless spender of other people’s money, and a second-rate military commander. In this view, Henry was “one of the cruelest and most cold hearted kings that England has had,” breathtakingly arrogant, autocratic, heedless of the needs of those who served in his armies. His golden reputation is based on nothing more than the inconvenient fact that people at the time seemed to like that sort of thing.

Henry’s father is ill, but he is not ready to die. This is a problem for the king himself. It is an even more serious problem for everyone else. A semifunctioning king is far worse for the realm than a dead one.

They have heard enough about Ireland to know what they need to acquire for the journey. Ireland is going to be cold, and wet.