The wild and headstrong prince of William Shakespeare's Henry IV blossoms, in Henry V, into a veritable hero-king: an epic embodiment of military valour, serious-minded and, above all, an archetypal man of action.
Such a portrayal reflected not only Shakespeare's Tudor sources but contemporary estimates of Henry V. For his earliest English biographer, a royal chaplain and well-informed insider, he was a model Christian prince, clearly carrying out God's wishes both at home and abroad; the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, writing soon after the king's death in 1422, judged him a pious, prudent, distinguished and warlike ruler; and, for the humanist Tito Livio in about 1437, he was an energetic, just and shrewd military commander who, at Agincourt, fought 'like an unvanquished lion'.
Yet even William Shakespeare's Henry V could be callous, unbending and ruthless in his pursuit of military glory and fine conquest; Burgundian chroniclers lamented his fercious spilling of so much French blood; and modern historians have brought in far from unanimous verdicts.
