The man who became king in the last chapter is the man in this one. His father died telling him to make a quarrel abroad. Henry the Fifth turns toward France.
The claim was inheritance. Churchmen worked through an old law and answered that a share of the French crown was his. The ships were already being made ready before that answer came.
The French prince sent him a box of tennis balls. It meant that they still took him for a prince at play. The king said he would send the balls back as cannon shot.
An Army Getting Smaller
The army crossed and laid siege to a port called Harfleur. The town held out a long time, and the English fell sick. By the time it was taken, about half of them were left.
The king decided to fall back on a port called Calais. A French army stood in the road. The field was called Agincourt.
The French herald Montjoy came to the camp. He said the king should name his ransom now, before the battle. It meant that his defeat was taken for granted. The king answered that his ransom would be his own body, and sent him back.
The Night with a Covered Face
The night before the fighting came. French laughter carried across from their fires. That side was already behaving like men who had won.
The English camp was quiet. The king borrowed a cloak from a lord and covered his face. Then he walked in among his own soldiers.
Men sitting on the ground spoke to the stranger. He told them only that he was a friend of the king’s. They talked about what the king must be thinking now.
The Question a Soldier Asked
A soldier named Bates spoke first. Whatever happened, he said, the king would pay a ransom and go home. A soldier named Williams took the thought further.
He said that if this war was not just, the guilt would be the king’s. The arms and legs cut off in the field would join together at the last day and call for him. These were men who had left wives and children behind, he said.
The stranger gave an answer. Suppose a father sends his son on an errand and the son dies on the road. You cannot call that death the father’s sin, he said. The old wrongs the soldiers carried with them did not become the king’s.
“Every subject’s duty is the king’s; but every subject’s soul is his own.” (Act 4, Scene 1)
Williams accepted that much. But it was not what he had asked. He had asked whether this war was just. That question nobody answered.
The two men fell out over something else instead. They wagered on whether the king would run, and exchanged gloves on it. They would find each other after the battle and settle it.
The Man Left Alone
The soldiers scattered and the king was left by himself. He counted up what a king actually has. Ceremony and forms of address, he said, and nothing more. It did not put him to sleep.
Then he prayed. The prayer was not for himself. He asked that his father’s way of getting the crown be forgotten for this one day. Men were still praying beside Richard the Second’s tomb, he said.
This is the quietest place in the chapter. A son sits up all night counting the price of what he was given.
Fewer Is Better
Morning came. A lord wished aloud for the men who were asleep in England. The king cut him off.
More men means more men to divide the honour among, he said. Anyone with no stomach for the fight could leave now. He would put money in his purse and send him off.
Then he named the date. It was Saint Crispin’s day. Every man who lived would roll up his sleeve each year and show his scars. And the names of this day would be spoken again over those scars.
We are few, he said. Few, and therefore a happy few, a band of brothers. Whoever sheds his blood with him today is his brother. The men asleep in England will think themselves cheated that they were not here.
Montjoy came once more to offer terms. The king sent back the same answer.
Today, Where Does an Unanswered Question Go
There are two night speeches in this chapter. One is an answer given with a covered face, the other a speech given openly. The morning speech moved men. The night answer only moved the question.
Williams’s question does not go away. When one man starts something and many die of it, whose deaths are they? The king talked about each soldier’s own old faults. The share of the man who began was left out of the sum.
Shakespeare puts the question in a soldier’s mouth and leaves it there. He does not make the king answer it, and he does not write down that the soldier is wrong. So readers divide over whether this play honours war or questions it.
In the next chapter the battle ends. And we see what the winner does after.