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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.

A man may be as much a fool from the want of sensibility as the want of sense.

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.

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.

The true purpose of education is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us; to develop, to their fullest extent, the capacities of every kind with which the God who made us has endowed us.

As the rolling stone gathers no moss, so the roving heart gathers no affections.

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

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.

Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into it forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small comer of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway.