King Henry V
Image:Wikimedia
His father, Henry Earl of Derby, was nineteen and the son and heir of John, Duke of Lancaster, the eldest surviving son of King Edward III. The baby’s mother, Mary, was sixteen or seventeen, and the co-heiress of the last de Bohun Earl of Hereford, Essex and Northampton.
The newborn was thus part of the extended family of King Edward III, and potentially in the line of succession if King Richard II and Queen Anne were to be childless - as indeed they were to be. King Richard occasionally hinted or indicated who his successor in such an eventuality might be but never formally. Amongst the most likely candidates was Duke John, were he to return from Iberia, and then his son Henry, now with an heir, but nothing was formalised. Nevertheless his prospective wealth as Duke of Lancaster together with the de Bohun inheritance and his Plantagenet blood meant that the new baby was destined, if he survived infancy and childhood, for a place in the elite, at the very centre of national life.
Henry and Mary were a well educated, devout couple who enjoyed music and books. Henry was also becoming an established jouster and on the verge of becoming an active political figure safeguarding his family interests in the increasingly fraught circumstances of his cousin King Richard II’s rule whilst his father Duke John was embarking on an attempt to win the throne of Castile and Leon for himself and Henry’s stepmother.
Tradition claims that the baby Henry was born in a room over the gatehouse of the castle at Monmouth. I am a little skeptical about this, as it seems an unlikely place for a confinement - which took a long time in the medieval age for a woman of noble status - and that surviving rooms in ruins with historic associations to births and deaths are often later attributions.
The baby was probably baptised in the nearby parish church on the day of his birth or very soon after.
Monmouth as shown by John Speed in 1611
The castle and parish church are centre right, the famous bridge gate over the Monnow at the left
Image: etsy.com
Henry and Mary were an uxorious couple and young Henry was to be followed by three more sons and two daughters before Mary died in childbirth in 1394 aged twenty four. Her widower, despite fathering one illegitimate son, did not remarry until 1403.
Henry of Derby was an absent father for a number of years, attending the Saint-Ingelvert jousts on the border south of Calais and then being on crusade with the Teutonic Knights in 1390, and again in 1392 before crossing central Europe to Venice and going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and returning in 1393. When he arrived at Peterborough Derby had a variety of souvenirs from his travels to show his family, including an ostrich and a hunting cheetah given to him by the King of Cyprus. His own father Duke John was also absent in 1394-5 in Gascony.
The baby probably spent his earliest years with his mother at the home at which she and Derby based themselves at Peterborough. Early in life he was assigned a nurse, Joan Waring, to whom he gave an annuity of £20 for life in 1415.
As he grew he spent time with his formidable maternal grandmother, who lived on to 1419, at her residence of Castle Bytham, of which only substantial earthworks remain, in south-west Lincolnshire. Here he may have had a governess called Mary Hervy.
Castle Bytham
Image: picturesofengland.com
There is an account of the castle and its water defences, which misnames the Countess, at Bytham Castle | History & Visiting Information
He also stayed with his paternal grandfather, following his return from Spain in 1389, at Lancastrian castles such as Leicester and Kenilworth. The latter was to become a favourite residence of the future King, where recuperated after his injury at Shrewsbury, and where he was to create a private retreat at the further end of the lake.
A reconstruction of Kenilworth Castle circa 1420
The private retreat built by Kung Henry V can be seen at the top of the image
Image: English Heritage
The precise time of the birth was doubtless recorded so that horoscopes could be cast, but if they were one wonders if they predicted the future as it turned out with young Henry becoming Prince of Wales and heir to the throne in 1399, facing the rising of Owain Glyndŵr which, significantly started on Henry’s birthday in 1400, miraculously surviving the battle of Shrewsbury, succeeding his father as monarch, leading and winning the Agincourt campaign, invading France again two years later, conquering Normandy, negotiating the Treaty of Troyes in 1420 and being recognised as Regent and Heir of France, or that he would die just short of his thirty sixth birthday.
King Henry V
Image: Wikipedia
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