The GORY greatness of Henry V: The King burned his friends alive and political rivals were hung, drawn and quartered. But historian Dan Jones says he wasn’t cruel … just pragmatic

Henry V by Dan Jones (Apollo £25, 464pp)

We have Shakespeare to thank for turning Henry V into England’s unofficial patron saint. Who can forget ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends’, delivered by Laurence Olivier in glistening armour and a bowl-cut hairdo? 

That 1944 film version of Shakespeare’s history play raised the spirits of war-weary audiences and bagged Olivier his first Oscar.

In this romp of a book, historian Dan Jones goes behind the theatrical jingoism to explore the real-life achievements of the man who ruled England and various chunks of France from 1413 to 1422. 

Ever since the Norman Conquest of 1066, the English had held land on the other side of the Channel, a fact that inevitably led to ferocious bad feeling. In Shakespeare’s play, Henry V’s speech that culminates in ‘Cry “God for Harry, England and Saint George!”‘ is delivered at 1415’s Battle of Agincourt, in which the real-life Henry and his raggle-taggle troops defended themselves against France’s larger, slicker army. In the end, England’s fearsome longbow archers won the day.

This towering achievement was doubly impressive given that Henry had started out in comparative obscurity. True, his father, Henry Bolingbroke, was cousin to King Richard II, but he had been banished from England for ten years for his part in an attempted coup. Henry, his eldest son, was allowed to remain behind in England but the most the boy might reasonably have hoped for was life as a dutiful but undistinguished knight, minding his own business in a far-flung corner of England.

 All that changed in 1399 when Bolingbroke stormed back from exile, seized the throne from the increasingly unpopular Richard, and had himself crowned Henry IV.

This meant that young Henry was now Prince of Wales. He may have been only 13 but it was never too early to learn his trade. Within a year he was leading an army into Wales against the rebel leader Owain Glyndwr. 

Far from observing from the sidelines, Henry personally hacked off the heads of Glyndwr’s henchmen and then, teenager that he was, bragged about it. He also issued his first order for a beheading. 

From here he joined his father’s army in fighting another troublemaker, Sir Henry Percy, who appears in Shakespeare as ‘Hotspur’. At the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, Prince Henry received the injury that should have killed him but instead marked him for life. An arrow pierced his cheek and thrust six inches into his skull. 

It was only thanks to state-of-the-art doctoring, involving antiseptic honey and alcohol, plus some deft surgery with medieval pliers, that the teenager survived. It left him with a lifelong scar that reminded everyone that, though young in years, he was battle-hardened.

When Henry succeeded his father as king in 1413, the early signs suggested that he would be a mild and moderate ruler. He went out of his way to bring former dissidents into the courtly fold, even restoring their confiscated land and fortunes.

 There were limits, though. One of Henry’s most vexatious opponents was a man called John Oldcastle, a radical religious reformer who decried the excessive pomposity and wealth of the Catholic Church. Henry V and Oldcastle had been friends, but Oldcastle, who may be the model for Shakespeare’s much loved Falstaff, mounted a rebellion.

Henry’s vengeance was swift and terrible: he condemned Oldcastle to be hanged and burned at the same time, a double punishment to match the betrayal of Henry as friend and king.

There is a Horrible Histories element to Dan Jones’s book. I lost count of the number of times Henry V ordered people – women as well as men – to be put to death in beastly ways. Political and military opponents were dragged through the streets before being hung, drawn and quartered. 

Heads were routinely stuck on spikes as a warning. Henry lived by the rule of ‘take no prisoners’ and, at Agincourt, ordered his men to slit the throats of the captive French. 

In his defence, he believed that he had God on his side, not to mention St George. One of the best gifts he ever received was from the King of Germany, who presented him with the pickled heart of England’s warrior patron saint.

Was Henry’s brutality excessive? Dan Jones reminds us that life in the medieval period was nasty, brutish and short, and argues that Henry was not so much gratuitously cruel as coldly pragmatic. 

And there was no denying that his methods worked. In 1420 he extracted a formal statement from Charles VI of France that he was to be his heir. From now on, Henry proudly signed his official correspondence ‘King of England, Heir and Regent of the Realm of France, and Lord of Ireland’.

Theatrical: Lawrence Olivier as Henry V in the 1944 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V

In the end it was all hypothetical. Henry died in 1422, two months before Charles. He was only 35 and it was not war but far-from heroic dysentery that carried him off. Some contemporary chroniclers declared it was punishment for his twin sins of ambition and cruelty.

For others it was a tragedy, the snuffing out of the best king that England would ever have. As far as Henry was concerned, it was down to the will of God.

Dan Jones is a novelist as well as a popular historian and he tells Henry V’s story with great narrative dash. Using the present tense lets him plunge his readers into the middle of the action but also, he explains, allows them to experience an entirely alien world, one in which ‘Our values are not his. His are not ours.’ Quite so. 

Yet the fact remains that, in 1944, when Britain was fighting for its life against the threat of invasion from the continent, the hero the nation turned to was Henry V, in his funny bowl-cut hairdo, shouting, ‘Cry “God for Harry, England and Saint George!”‘