On December 1, 1420, King Henry V of England rode into Paris in a warm welcome, with wine gushing out of the streets. He did something that had not been done by British monarchs before or after him—the french throne.
The warrior king of England, Shakespeare's hero, is considered by some to be the greatest monarch in English history, and he is still famous today for his heavy blows to the French at Agincourt in 1415.
However, less than two years after entering Paris, Henry died, and in 1453, in the fields of Castillon, the English were finally defeated.
Henry was born in Wales in 1386 as a member of the Lancaster family, a cadet branch of the Plantagenet family.
Henry was a natural fighter. He suppressed the Welsh rebellion as a teenager and fought his first fierce battle at the age of 16.
More than two years after being crowned king in 1413, Henry invaded France and the Hundred Years' War resumed.
In August 1415, he landed in Le Havre during the French Civil War.
In October of the same year, the army led by Amaniac achieved a prestigious victory at Agincourt. Whatever the ratio of the incompetence of the French to the luck of the British, the result was that thousands of French knights were devastated against the much smaller number of Englishmen. This incredible victory can be attributed to a number of factors, including Henry's military genius and creative battlefield tactics, allowing mobile infantry against enemy forces made up of heavy cavalry and, of course, famous archers.
After Agincourt, Henry conquered Normandy, and crucially, in 1418, the influential Queen Isapo of France would be loyal to Burgundy.
The following year, Duke John of Burgundy planned to ally with Prince Charles against Henry. When John was murdered by the Prince's men, the meeting ended in disaster.
Henry was militarily invincible with the son of his new ally John, Philip, and eventually signed the Treaty of Troyes, ratified in May 1420. In the treaty, Henry asked to become regent and heir to the throne and marry Catherine, the daughter of the King of France. Duke Philip, as part of the treaty, demanded that Henry avenge his father's murder by continuing to wage war against the Prince, under which he was formally stripped of his inheritance by the king.
Despite the well-intentioned remarks made in Troyes respecting French law and customs, Henry almost certainly wanted to establish a permanent British stronghold in France in the future. Even in Normandy, although ostensibly continuing local Norman rule, he had placed the English nobility in key positions and was under close supervision.
Because Henry considered himself the rightful king of France, he wanted to show the French people that he was not an invader, but a just and protective ruler. The treaty is partly a continuation of this proposal by the French people.
However, this may not be a local reality. Chroniclers known as the "Parisian bourgeoisie" said Henry's army was "plundering, killing, robbing" and described the British as "always trying to wage war."
Given the Prince's continuing sources of authority and the fragility of the French factional alliance on the England side, there seems to be good reason to say that if Henry were alive, he would want to completely crush the Prince and bring the entire Kingdom of France under his yoke, not just nominally.
In addition, many historians believe that Henry was obsessed with conquering all of France. Although his ambitions in the treaty seemed limited to the individual union of the two monarchies, Henry himself told the blessings on his Tour of England in 1421 that he still needed to work on the "total conquest of France".