One might be inclined to laugh at footnote references on an early page of this deeply scholarly work to the Journal of the Society of Archer Antiquaries and the Henry North History of Dentistry Research Group Publication. But by so quickly dropping readers into such esoteric corners of published scholarship, Malcolm Vale signals an earnestly serious intent—that of rescuing Henry V, son of the Lancastrian usurper Henry IV, from the beloved fictions of William Shakespeare. Not that others haven’t tried. But it’s hard to imagine that anyone has gone further than Vale in the effort to make this monarch more than the warrior king he’s usually left to be.
Shakespeare’s roistering Prince Harry, Falstaff’s Hal, is not the man you find here; nothing about the Hundred Years’ War or Agincourt, no “band of brothers,” no “vasty fields of France.” Of course, these are the settings in which Henry entered English culture, where, unlike many other large historical figures, we first learned to know and admire him. But this book is about “another Henry V,” the unknown one kept offstage, the man hard at work, one of deep religious faith, a patron of art and learning, and like that other king, Frederick the Great, a composer of music. No Laurence Olivier to play him, no music of William Walton to surround him, no Kenneth Branagh.
If the book opens with Henry’s grievous war wound (and hence the footnotes to recondite scholarship on archery and dentistry), and if Malcolm Vale puts Henry with Marlborough, Wellington, Churchill, and Montgomery as “one of the nation’s greatest commanders and war leaders,” he quickly moves us onto more irenic terrain. Here, Henry is a man of peace, not battle, at home as much in France as in England—”the ‘real’ historical figure,” in Vale’s words, rather than a stage character. This is “a study of rule at its most personal” of “an extraordinarily capable and successful king,” of “that remarkable individual” who was “rarely, if ever, to be seen again in the history of English rulership.” Here, Henry gets top billing for gifts Shakespeare never gave him.
The life of a British monarch in our day is usually the stuff of fashion sections and gossip sheets. What does Queen Elizabeth carry in her pocketbook? What does she really think of her eldest son? What does she do with the state papers delivered to her when she has no say over their contents? It may take another 700 years for our heirs to find out. That’s how long it has taken historians—the latest of them being Vale, an emeritus research scholar at St. John’s College, Oxford—to get around to sniffing out such information about this medieval monarch.
The resulting book is not a biography. Rather, it’s a composite of themes from Henry’s life: work, worship, language, writing, and the pleasures of art. None is the stuff of conventional Henrican life portraits. Nor, as we can deduce from an aside in Vale’s acknowledgments, is it what Yale University Press expected from the author, or what he anticipated when he started out. Despite its thick scholarly apparatus, the book has the feel of an adventure—of someone following his own interests where they lead and not those dictated by custom or other scholars’ concerns, a work as personal as any work of exquisitely detailed scholarship can be. What we get, in thickly footnoted pages that will daunt not a few readers, are glimpses of a king’s days, of medieval administrative life, of tensions in the church, of the realities of kingly patronage. It’s not unlike an exhibit of decorative art, which gives tantalizing, but imperfect and incomplete, entry into a vanished civilization.
Vale opens with “the everyday business of kingship,” especially Henry’s handling of the countless petitions that it fell to his duty to answer. This is Vale at work with his longest shovel into the deepest archives, and the book slows for the excavation. You get lost, for example, in the niceties of different kinds of wax seals. Yet such detail allows Vale to reveal Henry’s “authentic voice” as he directs his court officials how to respond to his often humble subjects’ pleas for relief. At some point along the spectrum of English history, a king’s personal self had to emerge from the court’s formal rituals and the stilted Latinate expression of law and diplomacy to put an individual stamp on his rule. Vale makes a good case that Henry’s voice was the first to do so: The king knew the particulars of distinct cases; he wrote orders in his own hand or dictated them in French and English; he personally applied his seal to documents. Here’s Henry, the first “bureaucrat-king,” ruling, not reigning, over his kingdom, exercising direct superintendence over a wide range of issues.
For those interested in the history of the English language, Vale’s book also opens new vistas. The late 14th century may have been the Age of Chaucer, but English hadn’t yet replaced Latin and French as the language of government and administration. Vale argues that just as in the previous generation Chaucer’s Middle English had become the language of literature, so no later than 1417 in Henry’s reign (two years after Agincourt) it became the language of politics. The king himself played a “formative role” in that development. He drove the vernacular adoption of his birth tongue, rather than the conventional Anglo-Norman French, to greatly widened use. One reason he did so, Vale cleverly argues, is to prove to his English subjects that while he was resident in France to establish his rule there, he remained England’s king, too. As has never failed to be the case in the history of language, geopolitics played a central role in the spread of the English tongue.
A contemporary of Henry wrote that the king was “better suited to be a man of the Church than a soldier.” Vale shows why. Piety was as common as breathing in medieval England, but not all monarchs led exemplary devotional lives, even if they had greater means than the ordinary churchgoing person of publicizing their faith. Henry’s was never disingenuous. He founded religious houses, appointed officials of religious establishments and hospitals, and set and applied penalties for impiety in conquered Normandy as well as back home. As Vale concludes, “Henry’s efforts to bring about institutional reform and spiritual reawakening [in the church] were persistent and untiring.” And while he never went as far as the French kings in gaining and maintaining independence from papal authority, Henry nevertheless set limits to the pope’s authority in his realm. That didn’t keep him from resolutely going after dissent and maintaining strict, orthodox faith among members of the clergy and worshippers. His independence from Rome was tactical only and nothing like the strategic distance that Henry VIII would force upon church and state in the 1530s. Vale is at his subtle best in laying all this out.
His Henry is also a man of the book and of music. The king read widely. And as Vale shows in a stunning display of scholarship, Henry was a master of polyphony and wrote music for the Ordinary of the Latin Mass. He was also a patron of secular and religious architecture. If Vale’s portrait makes Henry V seem like some sort of multitalented paragon, it remains for all those who doubt the historian’s interpretation to challenge the picture he has drawn. For the time being, Vale’s Henry is surely the one that will take the place of others.
But in what spirit, with what expectations, should someone read a book like this? There’s no question that it’s a superb example of scholarship. Examined simply as a work of modern research method, a work whose author has burrowed as far into archives (and archives in many languages) as one can go, it’s unsurpassable for what it reveals of what scholars can bring to light. Too many popular works of history display their authors’ easy use of others’ exhausting, protracted labors. Vale’s history is the kind of erudite building block upon which often-lazy, unventuresome narrative writers depend. There can be no wide, public knowledge of any historical figure, event, or development without histories like this one.
But that doesn’t mean that Henry V is easy going. It isn’t. So what’s to be gained by reading such a demanding work instead of yet another popular rendering of the hero of Agincourt? You’ll learn more about medieval England and France, the 15th-century church, the rise of hands-on personal kingship, the emergence of the English language to wide use north of the Channel, and the contemporary peaceful arts. That is to say, you’ll go more deeply than was previously possible into this phase of the history of England, this particular reign, and a king even greater than the one given voice by William Shakespeare.
James M. Banner Jr. is a historian in Washington.
