The King: Falstaff

Tags

David Michôd, Falstaff, Henry V, John Edgerton, Kings and Queens, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Shakespeare, The King, Timothée Chalamont

Last night I watched The King (2019, dir. David Michôd), which is loosely based on Shakespeare’s Henriad cycle about Henry IV and Henry V. It’s a gloomy, dreary film in which color wasn’t invented until long after Henry V’s reign was over. Even the cloudless sky seems dreary on the rare occasions it appears. In case you can’t tell, I didn’t love it. So let’s get into why.

The Henriad

The King isn’t really based on historical fact. It’s based on the Henriad. Joel Edgerton and David Michôd decided that they wanted to tell a story that was based on Shakespeare but without being Shakespeare. Basically, they wanted to show that they could do Shakespeare better than he did. And they failed.

For those who haven’t seen the plays of the Henriad cycle, Henry IV Part 1 introduces us to Henry IV and his dissolute son Prince Hal, who has a circle of wastrel friends centered on Sir John Falstaff. Henry and Hal have to deal with the revolt of the Earl of Northumberland and his hot-headed son Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy. The play culminates in a fight in the battlefield between Hal and Hotspur, in which Hal kills his opponent.

Henry IV Part 2 picks up where the previous play ends and follows the revolt against Henry, which gets put down. Falstaff spends the play in various misadventures and dealing with his worsening health. Hal reconciles with his father as his father dies, and when Falstaff comes to Hal, expecting rewards from the now king, Hal disavows him.

Henry V deals with the early phase of Henry’s reign. Falstaff dies off-stage, Henry puts down a conspiracy against him, and then embarks on the conquest of France, culminating in his victory at the battle of Agincourt, after which he ‘woos’ Katherine, the daughter of King Charles VI of France.

The King manages to fit all of this into a single movie, although it sharply compresses the material from Part 2. The result is a movie that tries to be a character study of the young Henry. But it’s not the historical Henry they are studying; it’s the literary Henry, but they’ve made changes, so that the film isn’t really based on either the historical Henry or the literary Hal, but is actually a weird sort of What If scenario. What if Hal had reconciled with Falstaff instead of his father but had still managed to realize his potential as a leader and had managed to rehabilitate Falstaff? Oh, and What If Falstaff had been a real person?

Prince Hal’s Youth

 The film starts roughly where Part 1 starts, with Young Henry (Timothée Chalamont) being estranged from his father Henry (Ben Mendelsohn) and close friends with Falstaff (Joel Edgerton). He is first seen lying unconscious in a bed after a wild bender the night before, setting up the idea that Henry was a party guy in his youth.

There is, however, no real factual basis in this; Hal’s wild and dissolute youth is best known from Shakespeare, who drawing off a slightly earlier anonymous play called The Famous Victories of Henry V, in which Prince Hal is basically depicted as a thug before becoming king. The historical Henry was already playing an important role in government by the time he was 14, when he started acting as the Sheriff of Cornwall, an essentially administrative office in which he would have had underlings to help him. He got the office in 1400, soon after his father deposed Richard II and made himself king. In 1402 young Henry joined the Great Council, one of the most important organs of royal government.

Chalamont as King Henry. At least the haircut is kinda accurate.

In 1403, young Henry led an army into Wales to help put down the revolt of Owain Glyndwr. Shortly after that, he met up with his father’s forces at Shrewsbury and helped put down Hotspur’s Rebellion. Exactly what happened to Hotspur is not clear; he was either killed by an unknown opponent or by an arrow when he opened his visor to get a better view of the battlefield. He was almost certainly not killed by Prince Hal, because Hal had gotten himself horrifically injured; he had been struck in the face by an arrow, the head of which had lodged under the skin below his left eye close to the nose to the depth of 5-6 inches, miraculously without hitting either the brain or any of the arteries. John Bradmore, the court physician, was able to devise a special tool to remove the arrowhead several days later and managed to prevent infection by flushing the wound with alcohol. The result was that Henry survived but with a horrible scar (which no cinematic Henry has ever sported).

Henry spent the next decade fighting Glendwr in Wales, and was recognized as basically being in charge of Wales and the effort to pacify it. Records show that was he very interested in the details of sieges, for example writing letters demanding shipments of wood for siege weapons. By 1408, his father’s illness (which involved skin infections and attacks that left him incapacitated for long periods) was making it harder and harder for him to run the kingdom. As a result, between 1408 and 1411, Young Henry was playing an increasingly central role in government via the Great Council, which was taking on a larger and larger role in decision-making. In 1411, he had a falling-out with his father over policy issues and was dismissed from government. There were rumors that he was trying to depose his father, but the evidence for that is weak, although the matter was serious enough that it provoked a meeting between father and son at which Young Henry handed his father a knife, say that if his father wished to kill him, he would not stop it. But there was never any serious question of him not succeeding his father, which he did in 1413 when the older Henry finally died.

Claims that he had a riotous youth rest on very shaky foundations. His brothers were involved in a brawl in an Eastcheap tavern in this period, but Henry himself was not a party to it. Contemporary chronicles say vaguely that he was devoted to “Mars and Venus” (violence and sex), but give no real specifics. The chronicles also remark that he had a dramatic conversion of personality when he was became king, but medieval chronicles were inclined to exaggerate such things to make better stories, and in the lack of any specific details, it’s unwise to suggest that Henry was a hellion.

Oldcastle and Falstaff

From an historical standpoint, the biggest problem with the film is Falstaff, who plays a much larger role in The King than he does in the Henriad. As I already noted, in Part 2, the new king Henry repudiates Falstaff, whose health is in decline. He dies off-stage very early in Henry V. But in The King, not only does Henry not repudiate Falstaff, he relies on him because he knows that Falstaff is going to be honest with him and not just flatter him. That’s a pretty sharp difference from Shakespeare’s Falstaff, who is absolutely the kind of man who would flatter and suck up to Henry to advance himself.

Edgerton as Falstaff

Henry trusts Falstaff so much that by the end of the film, Falstaff is rising to the occasion. When Henry’s forces encounter the French at Agincourt, it’s Falstaff who councils Henry to fight the battle and lays out a strategy that basically involves suckering the French into an ambush. To make the trick work, Falstaff volunteers to lead a small force of Henry’s knights into battle, tricking the French into thinking that they have a much greater numerical advantage than they do. Falstaff does this knowing that there’s a good chance he will be killed, and in fact he does die in the battle. So rather than an unheroic off-stage death that is merited by Falstaff’s essentially parasitical nature, Edgerton’s Falstaff dies a profoundly heroic death, having been redeemed by Henry’s faith in him.

That obviously differs dramatically from Shakespeare, but an even bigger problem is that Falstaff is a fictitious character and therefore cannot have played any role in the historical battle of Agincourt.

Shakespeare’s Falstaff is very loosely inspired by the historical Sir John Oldcastle. Oldcastle had served Henry IV and eventually became involved in the fight against Glendwr, which brought him into contact with Young Henry. This proved to be a very advantage connection for Oldcastle; he was brought into the prince’s household and began receiving various marks of royal favor, eventually being able to marry a very wealthy widow of the high nobility.

But by 1410, Oldcastle had become quite sympathetic to the Lollards, a heretical movement that argued against the need for priests (to be very simplistic about it). Archbishop Arundel of Canterbury, who was extremely concerned about the threat of Lollardy, found hard evidence that Oldcastle was a supporter of the movement. Arundel showed the evidence to Young Henry, who summoned Oldcastle to meet with him. Initially Oldcastle was able to persuade Henry that he was innocent, but then he fled and ignored Arundel’s attempts to force him to appear in court. Oldcastle finally appeared, was convicted as a heretic, and sent to the Tower of London.

Oldcastle escaped from the Tower and plotted a coup in which the monarchy would be replaced with some other sort of government, the monasteries would be dissolved, and a few other improbably things were planned. A group of Lollards actually tried to put the plan into motion, but Prince Henry got word of it and they were all arrested, except Oldcastle, who managed to elude capture for four years. He was captured and executed in 1417.

A 16th century illustration of Oldcastle’s execution

Notice that Oldcastle and Falstaff are quite different. They’re both knights and friends of Prince Henry, and they both wind up getting repudiated by him eventually. But Falstaff is not a heretic or a rebel the way Oldcastle was.

However, the scandal around Oldcastle remained famous. In the 1580s, an anonymous London playwright published The Famous Victories of Henry V, in which Henry and ‘Jocky’ Oldcastle are basically robbing people until Henry learns that his father is dying, which causes Henry to mend his ways and banish his old friends, including Jocky. It’s not a great play, but it gave Shakespeare the raw material for the Henriad.

And it’s pretty clear that Shakespeare was thinking of Oldcastle when he wrote the Henriad. In Part 1, Hal refers to Falstaff as “my old lad of the castle,” a pun that would only work if Shakespeare felt the name Oldcastle was still relatively well-known. The epilogue of Part 2, however, contains an explicit statement that Falstaff is not Oldcastle, “for Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man.” While all the surviving copies of Part 1 call the character Falstaff, there is reason to think that in its first performances, he was explicitly named Oldcastle. In one of the oldest copies of the text, one of Falstaff’s speeches is accidentally labelled ‘Old.’ rather than ‘Falst.’ and one line of dialog scans improperly with the current reading ‘Falstaff’ but properly if it’s read as ‘Oldcastle’.

It appears that Shakespeare originally used Oldcastle, but then ran into the problem that Oldcastle’s living descendants, the Cobhams, were powerful people who held government office and enjoyed the ear of Queen Elizabeth. So after Henry IV, Part 1 premiered, the Cobhams complained either directly to Shakespeare or to some royal official who made it clear that Shakespeare had to change the play, which he prudently did, and then threw in a disclaimer on Part 2 that any resemblance of Falstaff to anyone living or dead was entirely coincidental. And he capped it by positioning Oldcastle as a Protestant martyr to show he was really serious that Oldcastle was a good guy.

The Worst Part of The King

While the film’s revision of Falstaff as a character is weird and honestly not very interesting, the worst part of the film is the end, because Edgerton or Michôd decided that the film needed a twist ending, because apparently neither history nor Shakespeare got it right the first time. In Henry V, a big part of Henry’s motivation to invade France comes when the king of France insults him by sending him a box of tennis balls, basically suggesting that Henry is just playing a game. In the film, it’s just one tennis ball, but the message is basically the same.

But then his chief justice Gascoigne (Sean Harris) tells Henry that he’s caught an assassin sent by King Charles of France. And then Henry discovers that Lords Cambridge and Grey have been bribed by the French to overthrow Henry. Gascoigne advises Henry to make a show of strength and so Henry executes the two nobles and decides to invade France. In history and in Henry V, the order of events are inverted; the decision to declare war came first.

Harris as Gascoigne

After Agincourt, Henry returned to England with his new bride Princess Catherine (Lily-Rose Depp, demonstrating that nepotism is alive and well in Hollywood). Catherine challenges his motives for invading France and persuades him on no evidence whatsoever that her father would never have sent an insulting gift, or sent an assassin, or orchestrated a coup against him. So Henry questions Gascoigne in a scene that reads like CSI: Eastcheap with Gascoigne proving remarkably inept at covering up his tracks. Gascoigne finally admits that he faked the insult and the assassin and the plot as a way to force Henry to demonstrate his strength, because Gascoigne feels that the only way Henry can achieve unity in England is by proving he can be a strong ruler. Henry stabs him to death and all is well.

This is bad. Way bad. Baaaaad. It views the past like a murder mystery, in which there is a plot to uncover and the story ends once the plot has been revealed and resolved. It positions an entire phase of the Hundred Years’ War as being caused by one man’s decision that Henry needs to show he’s a big boy now. It’s like writing a film in which Octavian tricks Brutus into assassinating Julius Caesar so that Octavian can seize power in Rome. It’s like writing a film in which Ulysses S. Grant tricks the South into seceding as a way to save Grant’s career. It’s like writing a film in which Thomas Cromwell throws Anne Boleyn at Henry VIII in order to trigger the Protestant Reformation (oh, wait, that’s kinda sorta what happened).

Ugh. I cannot easily describe just how shitty the ending of this movie is.

Want to Know More?

Don’t watch The King on Netflix. It’s really not worth it. Watch Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Henry V, which is a vastly superior film in all respects.

If you want to know more about Henry V, check out Christopher Allmand’s Henry V.

Henry V: A Tale of Two Henries, part 2

Tags

Henry V, Kenneth Branagh, Medieval Europe, Military Stuff, Shakespeare, Sir Laurence Olivier

The historian who goes to the movies is going to his wedding tomorrow, so this post is shorter than usual and getting put up a day earlier than normal. In my previous post, I looked at Sir Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. In this second part, I consider Kenneth Branagh’s treatment of the same material.

Kenneth Branagh as Henry V

Branagh’s Agincourt

Branagh’s take on Henry V is so far removed from Olivier’s that they almost seem to be different plays (and in a sense they are; Branagh kept much more of Shakespeare’s text than Olivier did). In 1988, Branagh was making his film in a drastically different political context. The Vietnam War had drastically changed attitudes toward war in many parts of Western society including England. More directly relevant to England, in 1982, Britain got into the Falklands War with Argentina. It was a brief conflict, lasting only 10 weeks, but it had a definite impact on Britain. It helped bolster the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, who was re-elected as Prime Minister the following year. The British press resisted the Royal Navy’s expectations of patriotic coverage, instead opting for a more neutral tone, and there was much more debate about the justification for the war. While World War II could be viewed as a “good war”, the Falklands was seen by many as needless war.

Branagh’s take on Henry V must therefore be seen in a very different context. There was no pressing need for the patriotic tone of Olivier’s version, no need to rally the British to continue with a great struggle. Instead, there was a much wider appreciation of the unpleasantness of war, the moral compromises it requires, and the suffering it produces.

Branagh restored the moral and psychological complexity of Shakespeare’s Henry V. We see Branagh’s Henry as a deeply conflicted man, a man keenly aware of the moral dimensions of his decision-making and not entirely convinced of his right to risk the lives of his men.

Branagh’s treatment of Agincourt fully reflects this. The battlefield is much murkier than Olivier’s; the sky is grey, the ground muddy, and the mistiness of the field suggests that it might be raining (which, in reality, would have ruined the strings of the English longbowmen, resulting in a drastically different battle). Whereas Olivier chose to focus on the French cavalry charge, Branagh focuses attention on the English as they wait to receive the charge. We see the men praying and crossing themselves. Then we watch them prepare their bows and arrows. The French cavalry begins its charge, but then the camera switches immediately to the English. We hear the sound of the charge and watch the tension and fear build in the English faces. These are men who know they are facing death if they fail.

The English launch their first volley of arrows, and then the English men-at-arms engage the French. Branagh makes no attempt to depict the French falling back and running into their own second wave. For much of the rest of the scene, we see a chaotic struggle between the two sides. We repeatedly see the archers loosing arrows and hear the sound of arrows whistling through the air and watch men falling dead. This, of course, is entirely wrong. The English would not have been able to continue firing once their troops had joined the battle, because they would have been killing their own men. Nor do the longbowmen ever enter the melee.

As the scene progresses, we witness the brutality of fighting. Many are covered with blood. We see men having their throats slit, men falling down, men being stabbed, corpses being looted, and one man being held face first in muddy water until he drowns. The Constable is unhorsed, and at this point, the music turns more mournful, as his men struggle to rescue him. The duke of York is mobbed and stabbed to death and we see him vomit blood. The Constable and the Dauphin bemoan the shame of their defeat.

Branagh’s Agincourt is a horrible, bloody conflict in which both sides suffer terribly. The English, although they win, find themselves lamenting their dead. When Henry receives news of the French casualties, he seems appalled at what he has done. The scene ends with Henry and the English walking across the corpse-filled battlefield as “Non Nobis Domine” is sung. For much of this sequence, Henry is seen carrying the corpse of a young boy, and the viewer can see the psychological weight of the body as much as its physical weight.

From a strictly historical standpoint, Branagh’s Agincourt is just as wrong as Olivier’s, both for what he omits (the confusion of the French charges) and for the errors he shows (the archers firing after the melee has started). But the different times in which these films were made led these two actor-directors to adopt very different visions of the climactic battle. Olivier’s Agincourt is a metaphor for British victory over the Nazis, whereas Branagh’s Agincourt is a meditation on the horrors of war, horrors that his audience can contemplate precisely because war is not on their horizon.

Want to Know More?

Branagh’s Henry Vis available on Amazon.

Henry V has been the subject of a lot of popular biographies. One of my rules is that I won’t read historical works by journalists or ‘popular’ historians like Desmond Seward or Alison Weir because they tend to really irritate me with their superficial readings of the documents and facts. I haven’t seen a bio of Henry that I thought was really excellent yet, but John Matusiak’s Henry V (Routledge Historical Biographies)is fairly solid.

There are a variety of books on the battle of Agincourt, some of rather dubious value. It’s such a famous battle that it attracts a lot of writing by military enthusiasts, who are often former soldiers who think that because they know what modern warfare is like, they automatically can generalize to medieval warfare. Probably the best recent book is Anne Curry’s Agincourt: A New History. Curry is arguably the world’s expert on Agincourt and she makes good use of administrative records as well as the traditional narratives of the battle.

Henry V: A Tale of Two Henries, Part 1

Tags

Agincourt, Henry V, Lawrence Olivier, Medieval Europe, Military Stuff, Shakespeare

This week, I want to do something a little different. Instead of looking at one movie, I want to compare two of them. Specifically, I want to compare the depiction of the battle of Agincourt in Sir Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944) to Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989). So today we’re looking at the historical Agincourt, and at Olivier’s treatment of it, and in my next post, I’ll explore Branagh’s approach to the same scene.  It is a truism about historical movies that movies about the past are always reflective of the time they were made in; in some sense movies about the past are movies about the present. The fact that we have the same historical event depicted in two different films made during very different cultural moments allows us to look at this principle for an interesting angle.

The Historical Agincourt

In 1415, the young Henry V (r. 1413-1422) launched an invasion of France as a renewal of the Hundred Years’ War. Henry landed his army in northern France and after a long siege that cost him perhaps a quarter of his army, he captured the town of Harfleur. Having lost such a significant proportion of his army, he decided to return to England, but did so by marching his forces to the English-owned city of Calais, a considerable distance to the east. This may have been intended as a provocation to the French, to encourage them to offer battle.

The Agincourt campaign

The French, under the leadership of Constable d’Albret, responded and after some maneuvering and delay, the two sides encountered each other between a woods and the small village of Agincourt. Henry’s forces were low on food and suffering from some sickness, perhaps dysentery, with the result that Henry’s forces were at a distinct disadvantage.

As is often the case with ancient and medieval wars, good numbers are hard to come by. Medieval chroniclers routinely over-estimated the size of armies, often by a factor of 10 or more. Modern scholarship has suggested that Henry had a force of around 5-7,000 longbow archers and perhaps 900-1,500 men-at-arms, a type of cavalry that could dismount and fight on foot easily. The French forces were substantially larger, but contemporary estimates of 50,000 men are probably an exaggeration. They had a large force of men-at-arms, perhaps 8,000-10,000, who could certainly dismount and fight on foot but were less adapt at this tactic than the English. They also had a substantial compliment of crossbowmen, and some regular archers. Overall, the English were far more adept at archery than the French were, while the French cavalry were among the best in Europe. The French generally disdained archers and considered them of secondary importance, whereas the English focused a good deal of their military strategy on them.

We have four eyewitness accounts of the battle, but unfortunately we still have some serious problems with understanding the battle. The sources tell us that Henry arranged his troops in a formation called a herce, meaning a ‘harrow’, a large grid-like tool used to prepare the ground for plowing. Scholars have debated the exact meaning of this term since the 1940s. In the 1940s, the prevailing interpretation was that the dismounted men-at-arms were interspersed with the longbow men , so that units of archers alternated with units of men-at-arms.

Here’s a reconstruction of the battle according to the 1940s understanding of a herce:

The 1940s notion of how the battlefield was arranged. The black triangles represent archers

But this interpretation was effectively challenged in the 1980s by Jim Bradbury, in favor of a formation in which the men-at-arms were all in a line, with longbowmen on each wing. To protect them from direct attack, the archers drove sharpened stakes into the ground in front of them, which would have been impossible for cavalry to attack through. If the wings were angled forward slightly, the result would have been a field that slowly narrowed toward the men-at-arms. The English had the woods to their back, and therefore could not be outflanked.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a reconstruction of the battle following Bradbury’s approach. This reconstruction has archers flanking the men-at-arms, but it still has some archers interspersed according to the 1940s model.

Not quite Bradbury’s reconstruction

The field at Agincourt was wet from autumn rains, and it may have been freshly plowed for planting; it was therefore not ideal terrain for fighting in, since it would have been slippery. In particular, it was poor ground for a cavalry charge.

The battle opened with some exchange of arrows, but the English longbow had a better range and much faster rate of fire than the crossbows, and this forced the French crossbowmen to pull back. The French cavalry made a half-hearted charge against the longbow men, but were forced back by missile fire, losing formation and quite possibly losing control of their mounts, who were injured by arrows during the disorderly retreat.

The French men-at-arms advanced on foot, but in poor formation because the retreating cavalry were disrupting them. All the while, the longbow men were able to continue firing. The French had to keep their visors down, because of the arrow fire, and the charge through the mud and the panicking horses must have meant that when they reached the English line, they were tired, demoralized, and in disarray. If the archers were angled slightly forward, the inability to penetrate their wall of stakes would have had the effect of channeling the French into an increasingly narrow zone, which would have made it hard to maintain any sort of order. All of this seems to have cancelled out both the French numerical advantage and the fact that many of the English were sick.

The fighting was fierce, but the tide turned when the longbowmen abandoned their bows and waded into the fight. They were only lightly armored, which must have been an advantage in the muddy field, and they were equipped with long knives and mallets (to make and plant stakes with). The result was that the cream of French chivalry was defeated in considerable part by low-born English longbowmen.

Agincourt was a terrible slaughter for the French. Numbers are hard to estimate, but French sources claim that they lost 6 times as many as the English did, variously putting the number between 4,000 and 10,000 French casualties. English sources claim that the French lost between 1,500 and 11,000 men, while the English lost only 100. The startlingly low total of English dead does appear to have some factual basis, since a close study of records have identified only 110 Englishmen known to have died, although the wounded would have been perhaps 4 times that figure. The French lost two leading royal officers, the Constable and the Admiral, three duke and seven counts, while the English lost only the duke of York and the earl of Suffolk. A large number of French nobles were captured.

Although the battle was an enormous victory for Henry, his army was in no condition to capitalize on it, and he continued his withdrawal to Calais. So while Agincourt was one of the largest English victories during the war, it was not a decisive victory of any sort. But it made Henry V’s reputation as a skilled tactician and strengthened his position both in England and against France. It’s easy to see why Shakespeare focused his play on Agincourt, and then essentially skipped to 1420, when Henry is negotiating the surrender of the French.

Olivier’s Agincourt

Olivier made his version of Henry V in 1944, while the English were still at war with Germany. The BBC, at Winston Churchill’s suggestion, had asked Olivier to make a patriotic film to help inspire the British. Olivier chose Henry V, a play in which the English invade France and fight a battle in which they are desperately outnumbered; few in England would have failed to recognize the parallels with the D-Day Invasion. Indeed, Olivier had made radio broadcasts of some of the film’s speeches during the war, so making a full-scale film was a natural idea (although Olivier was uncertain that Shakespeare could properly be adapted to film). So Olivier’s film must be seen in the context of World War II and as a sort of propaganda piece.

Olivier omitted a number of darker scenes, such as the one in which Henry threatens to inflict rape and infanticide on Harfleur, and the scene in which he orders the execution of men for looting (one of them his good friend Bardolph), as well as the sad epilogue in which the Chorus reminds the audience that the English lost France and descended into civil war a generation later. His Henry is largely a righteous and charismatic hero, with little of the moral complexity of Shakespeare’s Henry. What was left was mostly a patriotic film filled with rousing speeches to inspire the English to go “once more into the breach”. The speeches are directed simultaneously at Englishmen in 1415 and 1944. The cause is just and victory is assured if only the English stand their ground and fight.

These facts strongly influenced Olivier’s depiction of the battle of Agincourt, which he depicts in a surprisingly light style. The sun seems to be shining despite some clouds, the music is lively if not cheerful, and the ground is dry, except for a brief shot of a puddle intended to signify the wetness of the field. This last detail might have been a concession to the safety challenges of trying to film a cavalry charge on wet ground. Stunt work was obviously less sophisticated in 1944 than it is today, so we have to be careful not to project modern expectations of what a battle scene can look like back onto Olivier’s film. By the standards of the day (not to mention the limitations of filming on a limited budget during wartime), Olivier’s Agincourt was an impressive spectacle.

I’d like to offer you the whole scene, but I’ve only been able to find the second half of it on youtube, so I can’t show the opening of the scene. This is unfortunate, because the cavalry charge is both great cinema and worth analyzing.

The scene opens with the French cavalry charge. The French knights wear bright-colored surcoats, and their horses are wearing caparisons, bright-colored cloths than hang down from back to ankle. These were mostly used for show occasions such as parades and tournaments, but they could be worn in war to protect a horse from the sun and, if they were padded they could provide modest protection from injury.

The French cavalry charge

The cavalry charge begins slowly and then gradually increases speed. The music here brilliantly increases its pace with the charge, drawing the audience into the drama of it. The depiction of the cavalry charge draws heavily off then-current notions of how knightly cavalry charges operated. It was wrongly assumed that cavalry charges were not well-organized, so that a charge was conducted in a haphazard style, with no attempt to keep the line dressed (with all the cavalry roughly abreast of each other and none out in front). It is now understood that keeping an evenly dressed line of knights was vital for the charge to have its proper effect. It was also assumed that a charge was done at full gallop, whereas modern thought suggests that the charge was not done at the horse’s top level of speed (among other factors, that would have made it hard to keep the line evenly dressed). So Olivier’s charge is entirely wrong by modern standards, even though it was roughly in line with what scholars thought in the 1940s.

As the cavalry charges, the longbowmen fire once, and then, rather absurdly, run forward, stopping occasionally to fire an arrow. This would have been absolutely disastrous in real life. The reason the longbowmen were so effective is that they could easily fire six to eight arrows in a minute; the best trained longbow archers may have been able to do up to 20, although muscle fatigue sets in very quickly at that point. One calculation suggests that at Agincourt, the English may have been firing around 700 arrows a second. It was this withering barrage that shattered the French charge, not a single volley with occasional fire thereafter. And had the archers advanced from their defensive positions at this point, the cavalry would probably have destroyed them.

The French cavalry is shown milling around, which is a reasonable attempt to simulate what was happening, given that most of the cavalry were extras hired because they owned horses, and not professional stuntmen. The French cavalry retreat and then run into a second wave of cavalry. If you look closely, you can see that some of the extras think they’re supposed to be fighting each other. The English archers continue their advance. The French infantry advance and then just fall down. Again, I think we can overlook the less-sophisticated stunt-work here.

Then something very odd happens. The French charge a group of English archers who flee into a stand of trees. As the French ride through the trees, English soldiers leap down on them from the trees and knock them off their horses. This scene is totally Olivier’s invention, and from a tactical standpoint is unbelievably silly. (Every time I see this scene, I can’t help but imagine Spanky, Alfalfa, and the rest of the Our Gang kids—“Hey guys, let’s go help defend England from the French!” “Great idea, Spanky, we can jump on them from the trees!” Perhaps it’s the incredibly cheerful music.) Then Henry leads a counter-charge on horseback, which is incorrect because we know he was on foot during the battle.

Apart from the constantly advancing longbowmen and the absurd scene in the grove of trees, the main problem with Olivier’s depiction of the battle is that, in keeping with scholarly ideas of the day, he emphasizes the role of the cavalry and almost completely ignores the fact that the English fought nearly entirely on foot at Agincourt. For much of the 20^th century, it was assumed that medieval warfare was primarily knightly cavalry, but that idea has been gradually abandoned in favor of an awareness of the importance of infantry even at the height of the dominance of knightly cavalry. But even then, a reading of the sources should have made it clear to Olivier that this was not really a cavalry battle.

Henry V on horseback

In all likelihood, Olivier’s choice to focus on cavalry was probably due at least in part to the fact that he was trying to depict battle as something glorious and heroic. Europeans had already learned in WWI that war was hell, and if they had forgotten, the past five years had done a good job of reminding them. But Olivier’s whole purpose in this film is to help the English forget the horrors of war and take them back to a time when war was somehow good. The last thing anyone wanted to see was how unpleasant war actually is. So at his Agincourt, there is little mud, only brief glimpses of injured men, and the camera cuts away from killing blows. The camera never dwells on dead bodies, and the result is a glorious English victory in which no one seems to actually die. Between the scholarly mistake that medieval battles were mostly cavalry and Olivier’s need for a “pretty” battle, his version of Agincourt turns out to be inaccurate and more than a little nonsensical, although it’s mostly good cinema.

Of course, it’s also important to remember that in the 1940s, violence on-screen was considerably more taboo than it is today, and one way films handled this challenge was to suggest violence more than show it directly. Blood was shown in much smaller amounts, and graphic violence was virtually unheard of. By the time Kenneth Branagh got around to making his Henry V, things had changed a great deal, both in film-making and in the culture. We’ll look at that next time.

Want to Know More?

Olivier’s Henry V is available on Amazon.

Henry V has been the subject of a lot of popular biographies. One of my rules is that I won’t read historical works by journalists or ‘popular’ historians like Desmond Seward or Alison Weir because they tend to really irritate me with their superficial readings of the documents and facts. I haven’t seen a bio of Henry that I thought was really excellent yet, but John Matusiak’s Henry V (Routledge Historical Biographies)is fairly solid.

There are a variety of books on the battle of Agincourt, some of rather dubious value. It’s such a famous battle that it attracts a lot of writing by military enthusiasts, who are often former soldiers who think that because they know what modern warfare is like, they automatically can generalize to medieval warfare. Probably the best recent book is Anne Curry’s Agincourt: A New History. Curry is arguably the world’s expert on Agincourt and she makes good use of administrative records as well as the traditional narratives of the battle.