Henry V. was born in the castle of Monmouth, 9th August 1387, the eldest of the six children of Henry IV. by Mary de Bohun, from whom he inherited a certain taste for books. According to a local tradition, he studied for a time at Queen's College, Oxford, perhaps in 1399-1400. From 1401 we find him engaged against Glendower, and in 1403—the year of Shrewsbury, where he was wounded in the forehead by an arrow—he was appointed the king's lieutenant in Wales. Here he remained in command of operations until 1408, and succeeded at least in keeping Glendower behind the barriers of his mountains. In 1409 he became constable of Dover, and in 1410 captain of the town of Calais; and in one of these places, or in London, he resided until his father's death. The story of his committal to prison is a fiction (see GASCOIGNE), and may be traced to a passage in the life of Edward II. when Prince of Wales. There is some evidence that Henry was for a time not on good terms with his father; but the charges of riot and profligacy are at least gross exaggerations of a young soldier's harmless, boisterous frolics. He was crowned on 10th April 1413, and at the outset of his reign liberated the young Earl of March, who was the true heir to the crown, restored the son of Hotspur to the lands and honours which his father had lost by rebellion, and had Richard II.'s body brought up from Langley and buried in Westminster. The great effort of his reign was an attempted conquest of France, now ruled by an imbecile king and distracted by internal factions; and in 1414 Henry formally demanded the French crown, to which he seems to have believed sincerely that he had a valid claim, through his great-grandfather, Edward III. On 11th August 1415 he sailed with an army of 30,000 men, after crushing a conspiracy to carry off the Earl of March; and on 22d September he took Harfleur, after five weeks' siege, at a great cost of life, including 2000 men carried off by dysentery. On 8th October he set out on a march to Calais, and at Agincourt (q.v.), on the 25th, where his way was blocked by a French army, gained a battle against such enormous odds as to make his victory one of the most notable in history. Two years after he again invaded France, and by the end of 1418 Normandy was once more subject to the English crown. Henry's forces had appeared before the walls of Paris, when the murder of the Duke of Burgundy (10th September 1419) aroused the indignation of France against the dauphin, who had to withdraw beyond the Loire; and on 21st May 1420 was concluded the 'perpetual peace' of Troyes, under which Henry was recognised as regent and 'heir of France,' and received the French king's youngest daughter, Catharine, in marriage. In February 1421 he took his young queen to England to be crowned, having shown the same promise of just and vigorous rule as he had already done in Normandy; but in a month he was recalled by news of the defeat at Beaujé of his brother the Duke of Clarence, by a force consisting largely of Scotch, commanded by the Earl of Buchan. Henry returned to France for a third campaign, and his wonted success in arms was attending him, when he was seized with illness, and died at Vincennes on the 31st August 1422, at the age of thirty-five, leaving an infant to succeed him. Henry was a deeply devout prince, temperate, just, and pure of life; yet his religion, though he was free from wanton cruelty, did not make him merciful to a conquered enemy. He followed his father, too, though apparently with reluctance, in his treatment of the Lollards; even his old companion-in-arms, Sir John Oldcastle (q.v.), was sent to the stake. He was a brave soldier, a firm disciplinarian, a brilliant general; and he died when his fame was brightest.
See Stubbs; Gairdner, Lancaster and York; Nicolas,
History of the Battle of Agincourt (1827); and A. J. Church, Henry the Fifth (1889), in the 'English Men of Action' series.