The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [43]
Henry V never saw his son, and when the Prince was six months old Katherine left him behind in England in the care of his uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, Henry V’s youngest brother, and went to join her husband.
Henry V did not live to become King of France. The stresses of war and endless campaigning had prematurely aged him. In later life he grew a beard and let his curly hair grow long. A stone effigy of him in York Minster, executed around 1425 and recently identified as a true likeness, portrays him thus, as does the obverse of his great seal. He looks careworn and tired, and, indeed, he was intermittently ill from 1419 onwards.
In June 1422 Henry was at Senlis with the King and Queen of France when the Duke of Burgundy requested his aid in relieving a garrison on the Loire from attack by the Dauphin’s men. Although he was unwell, having contracted a ‘lengthy illness as a result of long and excessive labours’ during the siege of Meaux, which had ended in May, Henry set off on yet another expedition, having said what was to prove a final farewell to his wife. He tried resolutely to ignore his illness, which took the form of high fever with violent dysentery, but at length he became so incapacitated that he could not sit astride a horse and had to be carried in a litter. Even this caused him terrible agony, and he had to be taken by boat along the Seine to the castle of Bois-de-Vincennes, near Paris, having resigned his command to his brother Bedford.
On arrival at Vincennes, he insisted on riding on horseback to the castle, but could endure no more than a few steps. His attendants lifted him, half fainting, into a litter, where he lay wild with pain. The illness had so consumed his strength that the doctors dared not give him any medicines, and it was clear that he was dying.
On 31 August the King demanded to know the truth about his condition. His physicians told him he had at best two hours to live. Bedford had come to say farewell, as had his other captains, Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter, and Richard de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. Queen Katherine was still at Senlis with her parents. As the evening of 31 August wore on, the dying King’s sufferings increased. His intestines, genitalia and lungs were already in a state of putrefaction. Shortly before two o’clock in the morning of 1 September 1422, Henry whispered that his constant desire had been to recapture Jerusalem from the Turks. Then, clutching a crucifix, he murmured, ‘In manuas tuas, Domine, ipsum terminum redemisti,’ and died.
His death, says Walsingham, ‘was deservedly mourned’ for ‘it left no one like him among Christian kings or princes. Thinking of his memorable deeds, people felt awe at his sudden and terrible removal,’ which in years to come proved to have been a greater tragedy than anyone then living could have foreseen.
When Henry died his body was so skeletal that there was little flesh left to decompose, and his corpse was prepared for burial in the usual way, with even the intestines left inside. So that it should not stink during the journey back to England, it was embalmed with aromatic herbs, wrapped in waxed linen, lead and silken cloth, and placed in a coffin. This was laid on a black-draped bier surmounted by an effigy wearing royal robes and a crown, and escorted by a mighty host of mourners in doleful procession through France, across the sea, and home to its final resting place. The Queen was chief mourner, and it was she who commissioned the fine tomb of Purbeck marble which was raised to Henry’s memory in a new chantry next to the shrine of St Edward the Confessor in