Henry V is much more important than Pride and Mr Men

Telegraph

16-06-2025

Henry V was a man who was used to hardship, but seldom to losing.
As a young prince, he learnt the arts of kingship and warfare battling Owain Glydwr's insurgency in Wales and a rebellion of the kingmaking Percy family. Shot through the face with an arrow at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, he survived a long and painful operation to save his life.
Rebuffed by his sickly father, Henry IV, when he tried to seize the crown of England before his time, he had to regroup and prove his worth as heir.
Henry's Agincourt campaign in 1415 came within a whisker of calamity more than once before he rallied his 'little blessed many' to victory over the more numerous and confident French. After Agincourt, Henry seemed to become unbeatable in the field and a master of political management, so that it was only dysentery that eventually got the better of him, killing him at the age of 35 in 1422.
Now, though, Henry V has taken a rare loss: at the hands of the Royal Mint, whose advisory committee judged him a less 'significant figure in British history' than the collected cast of the Mr Men books.
It was on these grounds that – according to a freedom of information request made by The Telegraph – Henry was passed over for a commemorative coin on the 600 th anniversary of his death in 2022.
The Mr Men and the Pride movement got the coins, while Henry got nothing at all.
If we were able to ask Henry for his feelings regarding this depressing snub, it is likely he would ascribe it to God's plan, and perhaps consider it just punishment for his sins. Even by late medieval standards, Henry was very devout, and he interpreted his setbacks and victories alike to the inscrutable wisdom of the Almighty.
We in our less mystical age may regard this differently.
It is of course up to the Royal Mint whose face(s) they stick on our coins. Henry had his day with his face on the silver penny in the fifteenth century. He has in that sense been ticked off the list.
It is also possible that in 2022 the Mint, like many other public institutions, was in the grip of so severe a woke spasm that its 'subcommittee on the selection of themes' truly believed that public, emerging from the daze of Covid, would be most cheered to find a rainbow flag or the bandaged cranium of Mr Bump adorning the UK's currency, rather than a medieval monarch who managed to commit the quintuple whoopsie of being white, male, straight, militaristic and dead.
It does seem odd, however, for the Mint to have described Henry as insignificant in the course of British history. The proposal to commemorate his death was rejected because the subcommittee thought marking his reign and death would be 'more a celebration of Shakespeare's view of this king' than of the man himself.
Yet Shakespeare wrote a play about Henry V for good reason: because he was, by the standard of his day and for generations thereafter, considered to be the paragon and acme of kingship.
It was not some rogue, hot take of Shakespeare's that Henry was 'this star of England', who won 'the world's best garden' [i.e. France], when he forced on King Charles VI the Treaty of Troyes – the 1420 agreement by which he secured his claim to the Valois crown.
This was a matter of historical fact. The highest goal of the Hundred Years War, which defined England's relationship with half of Europe for more than a century, was to secure in English hands the crown of France.
Henry made this dream a reality. He was comfortably the finest military leader of his age, as well as the most adroit domestic politician. He was a king possessed of the highest personal probity, chastity, piety and morality, in an age where those things still mattered.
He was a winner, but not a boaster; a warrior but also a lover of literature and music. He made a greater contribution to the development of the English language than any king before or after him. He was not exactly fun – a French spy writing early in his reign got him right when he said that in person Henry seemed more like a monk than a king.
But he was regarded, on his untimely death, as the man who had for nine years shown how kingship was supposed to be performed, according to the standards of the day. His achievements in France outlived him for 13 years, and although Henry is often blamed for having sown the seeds of the Wars of the Roses by overextending English military resources in France, that is really to condemn him for having been a hard act to follow.
We today do not need to share every aspect of Henry's worldview or to wish that it had been our own hands that rained down the pitiless hammer blows which killed the prisoners at Agincourt to accept that by the standards of his time, this king was regarded as the best England ever had.
'Throughout his reign, Henry showed much magnanimity, valour, prudence and wisdom: a great sense of justice, judging the mighty as well as the small,' wrote a chronicler at the time of his death. He was feared and respected by all his relatives and subjects and even by those neighbours who were not his subjects.
'No prince of his time seemed more capable than him of subduing and conquering a country, by the wisdom of his government, by his prudence, and by all the other qualities with which he was endowed.'
This was not the opinion of a jingoistic Englishman, but of a French monk writing at the royal abbey of Saint-Denis. Even by his enemies' standards, Henry V was a phenomenon. In the words of the brilliant twentieth century medievalist KB McFarlane, Henry was 'the greatest man who ever ruled England.' If that isn't historically significant, it is hard to understand what is.