- [Narrator] In 1420, something bizarre happened.
Two bitter enemies, the Kings of England
and France, went to pray at Notredame together.
They were consecrating a treaty that ended almost a century
of warfare between their two nations.
A treaty that's still kind of shocking,
because it gave France, all of France, to the English king.
But what makes this story even more unlikely
is that the guy who pulled it off,
King Henry V, wasn't even supposed
to be the King of England.
Here's how it happened.
(inquisitive music)
In The King,
there's this scene where the French princess
is trying to provoke the victorious Henry.
She says:
- [Narrator] It's a pretty good insult,
because Henry truly had no legitimate claim
to the English throne.
When Henry was born on the Welsh border in 1386 or '87,
we don't even know the year,
maybe because no one was paying much attention to his birth.
He was just Henry of Monmouth, no "Prince."
True, he was descended from King Edward III,
but only through Edward's lesser-ranked third son.
The term you sometimes see
about this branch of the family
is "collateral line."
Under the traditional rules of succession,
which are totally confusing, by the way,
up to five family members would have had to die
before Henry could become king.
But his father, Henry Bolingbroke, didn't play by the rules.
Bolingbroke disliked his cousin,
King Richard II,
and when the unpopular Richard banished him,
and took away all his lands,
Henry B used it as an excuse to mount a coup,
which actually worked.
He forced Richard to hand over the crown,
and then possibly had him murdered,
although maybe not this dramatically.
So Henry's dad became the usurper King Henry IV,
but that still didn't mean that the now Prince Henry
had a sure path to the throne.
See, Henry had a...testy relationship with his father.
- The King often favored Prince Henry's
younger brother Thomas,
who got a prestigious military command in France,
and a marriage to an archbishop's niece.
Meanwhile, in just one month in 1411,
the King arrested six members
of Prince Henry's personal entourage.
In 1412, the father-son rivalry got so bad
that Prince Henry, who wanted political reform,
and was sick of waiting for his father to die to get it,
marched on London with an intimidating gang of men.
He just ended up publicly apologizing to his father,
but clearly the prince wanted to make a statement.
In fact, scholars still debate
the meaning of his outfit that day,
which was a blue robe full of eyelet holes,
each with a needle hanging from it.
It was Gaga-esque.
But there's something even more basic
that Henry had to overcome
in his unlikely ascent to the throne.
He had to actually survive long enough.
And given how easy it was to die in the 1400s,
that's a huge accomplishment.
Like any respectable nobleman,
Henry grew up on the battlefield.
The King knighted him when he was around age 13,
and he commanded thousands of men
possibly before even hitting puberty.
- On me!
- [Narrator] And it wasn't ceremonial.
He seems to have fought a lot,
which nearly cost him at the battle Shrewsbury in 1403.
While Henry was leading a charge,
he got shot in the face with an arrow.
The arrow had lodged itself in the back of his skull.
He kept fighting, by the way.
Eventually, a surgeon/amateur blacksmith
named John Bradmore invented this tool
to reach inside Henry's face, and grab the arrowhead
before blood poisoning could set in, which, ouch.
So, with all the obstacles posed by succession, family strife,
and brutal living conditions,
it's pretty astounding that at the age of 26,
Henry was crowned King of England.
But if you had to guess,
how much bigger was France than Henry's kingdom?
The answer is that it was about twice as big,
and in 1400, at least five times as populated.
How Henry managed to take over a country,
much bigger than his own,
is through his own very real skill,
and also the very real ineptitude
of the French leadership.
You sometimes see Henry referred to as a "Warrior King"
because in the decade, or so,
he sat on the English throne,
he was fighting the French the whole time.
Henry's most famous victory over them was at a place called
Agincourt in 1415,
and one reason it's so famous is,
because Henry probably should have lost.
Sources vary wildly,
but the French forces may have numbered up to 20,000.
Henry, on the other hand, probably only had about 8,500 men,
and they were exhausted from a long march.
Some almost certainly had dysentery.
But the English army had one advantage.
Henry always brought along three longbowmen
for every other soldier.
For the French, it was probably more like a
one-to-one ratio, which mattered,
because the longbow
was the medieval equivalent of the machine gun.
In fact, arrows were so important
to the English side that there was a three-feather tax
levied on every goose in some English counties.
Henry's longbowmen absolutely tore through
the French knights at Agincourt.
More than that,
the battle revealed how Henry did his homework,
although in this case, in a violent sort of way,
he imported the tactic that the Ottomans
had pioneered during the crusades:
sharpened stakes in front of his archers
skewered the French horses as their knights charged in.
But it wasn't all bloody battles,
Henry also showed an ability
to win the favor of the conquered.
He rejected his great-grandfather's strategy of chevauchée,
which literally translates to "horse charge,"
but is probably more accurately "strategic pillaging."
That relative restraint allowed Henry to capture
and hold Normandy by 1419,
getting him ever so close
to Paris and the throne.
But what were the French doing while this
young English upstart was camping
outside their cities, flinging projectiles at them?
Well, basically they were either crazy,
or killing each other.
The crown prince, the Dauphin,
led a faction called the Armagnacs,
who were in perpetual conflict with their rival Burgundians.
The culmination of their really,
really bloody feud came
in 1419 at a peace summit
where they were to discuss
ways to defeat Henry.
There, and they're at a peace summit, remember,
one of the Dauphin's lieutenants
axed the Duke of Burgundy in the face.
As you might imagine,
it drove the Burgundians to the English side.
Meanwhile, the poor French King,
unfortunately, but accurately known as Charles The Mad,
suffered from a whole host of mental illnesses.
At times he believed he was made of glass,
so he would sit motionless under thick blankets for hours
to prevent himself from shattering.
But even with all the blood,
and madness going around,
the French side somehow managed to act
kind of like a bully in a high school movie.
The tennis ball incident where the previous Dauphin, Louie,
sends a tennis ball to Henry,
and taunts him about either being a boy,
or playing with boys, almost certainly happened
in real life in 1414,
which makes the eventual comeuppance that much sweeter.
In that huge tree I mentioned in the beginning,
Charles The Mad effectively disinherited his own son,
the Dauphin, in favor of Henry,
who was to marry the French princess, Catherine.
Upon Charles's death, King Henry of England,
or his heirs, were next in line to be King of France.
But the united kingdoms of England and France didn't last.
Henry died just a few years later,
and the son he had with Catherine was too young
to hold on in the face of French resistance.
We can only speculate on what would have happened
had Henry V lived.
Still, even though his unlikely reign was short,
his accomplishments were big.
This sentiment probably isn't that far off.
- I would say you have proven yourself
to be one of England's great kings.