The proof is to be found in the fact that Henry was obliged to consolidate his gains in France with further military campaigns. He possessed, or occupied, the duchy of Normandy together with the area known as Vexin – the region of northwest France on the right bank of the Seine. But there were still provinces ruled by the duke of Burgundy, and others governed by the dauphin. There could be no peace in a divided land.
Henry married Katherine of France, or Katherine of Valois, soon after the treaty with her father; they entered Paris in state and moved into the Louvre Palace. The king of course wished to crown his wife in Westminster, and on 23 February 1421 she was led to the abbey. The Valois and Plantagenet dynasties were united.
Four months later Henry was in France once more, to counter French resistance and insurrection. He was obliged to fight for his gains, but during the siege of the town of Meaux he became ill; he relapsed into a fever and grew steadily weaker. He sensed that death was approaching, and he made a codicil to his will. He now had a son, only eight months old, and the child was given into the protection of one of his brothers. The duke of Gloucester would guide and support the infant Henry. On the last day of August 1422 the king died. The corpse was brought to London, and was buried with due solemnity in the abbey.
No king won such plaudits from his contemporaries as Henry V. The misgivings about his wars in France were forgotten for the sake of celebrating his martial valour. He was devout as well as magnificent, chaste as well as earnest. He was as generous to his friends as he was stern to his enemies; he was prudent and magnanimous, modest and temperate. He was the very model of a medieval king. Yet there are some who have doubted that verdict. Shakespeare’s play Henry V can be interpreted in quite a different spirit as an account of a military tyrant who staked all on vainglorious conquest in France. What did he finally achieve? Once his French conquests were dissipated, and the dream of a dual monarchy dissolved, very little was left to celebrate. All was done for the pride of princes.
One more elusive and unintended consequence, of the revival of the Hundred Years War by Henry V, can be recorded. The language of England was now spoken by all the king’s subjects. The letters of the king were always written in English, and the writer of The Deeds of Henry V invoked Anglia nostra or ‘our England’. The first document of royal administration written in English is dated in 1410. The London Guild of Brewers began to record its proceedings in English from the early 1420s, citing the fact that ‘the greater part of the Lords and the trusty Commons have begun to make their matters be noted down in our mother tongue’.
The archbishops of Canterbury now spoke routinely of ‘the Church of England’ as an identifiable element of the Universal Church, and at a Church council in 1414 it was declared that ‘whether a nation be understood as a people marked off from others by blood relationship and habit of unity, or by peculiarities of language … England is a real nation’. The fact that the matter had to be asserted suggests that in previous periods this nationhood had not been self-evident. In the fifteenth century, too, there were persistent attempts to contrast the prosperous kingdom of England with the parlous state of France. It was a way of escaping from the inheritance of the French-speaking royalty and a French-speaking court that had shaped the governance of the three previous centuries.
The first surviving letter written in English dates from the winter of 1392. A slightly later epistle, also written in English, is of more human interest. It was ‘written at Calais on this side the sea, the first day of June, when every man was gone to his dinner, and the clock smote noon and all our household cried after me and bade me come down. Come down to dinner at once! And what answer I gave them ye know it of old.’ You can hear the voices. Come down! Come down!
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How others saw us
The English were pronounced by other nations to be guilty of the sin of pride; that was their most prominent characteristic. The fourteenth-century French chronicler Jean Froissart described ‘the great haughtiness of the English, who are affable to no other nation than their own’. A German knight, Nicholas von Poppelau, visited the country in 1484 and complained that ‘the English think they are the wisest people in the world’ and that ‘the world does not exist apart from England’. Fifteen years later a Venetian traveller stated that ‘the English are great lovers of themselves and of everything belonging to them’. Whenever they see a handsome stranger, they say that ‘he looks like an Englishman’.
