Saving Prince Henry

Though Henry V reigned over England for only nine years and four months, dying at the age of just 35, he looms large over English history. He inspired Shakespeare and numerous artists afterwards, from Laurence Olivier to Kenneth Branagh to Timothée Chalamet. He has become a case study in the art of leadership.

In a new biography, Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King, historian and journalist Dan Jones examines Henry’s life anew, from his years of apprenticeship through his accession in 1413 to his extraordinary achievements as king, to separate the man from the legend.

Scholar and author Stephen Greenblatt, in his New York Times review, wrote: “With meticulous research and in lively style, Jones presents us with the man beyond the Shakespeare character.”

In this excerpt from early in the book, Jones shares a story from Henry’s youth—told from the perspective of the surgeon, John Bradmore. He would save the prince’s life following a life-threatening  battlefield injury.

The doctor is nervous. John Bradmore is the best surgeon in England. He has a famous practice in London. He attends on rich and powerful clients, including the king. He has the supreme self-confidence—bordering on arrogance—common to elite surgeons since the days of the ancient Greeks.

But this case is different.

In the course of his career, Bradmore has proved time and again that he can heal patients other surgeons have written off as incurable—often by daring and inventive means. He has cured a woman of scrofula—an infection of the lymph nodes so awful it is commonly thought to respond only to the touch of monarchs. He has developed a technique to cure drooping eyelid bags. He has saved a London carpenter who accidentally slashed an artery in his arm with a chisel, by cauterizing the wound with a powder of his own invention.

Bradmore once spent nearly a month restoring to health a royal servant—the master of pavilions—who had succumbed to “diabolical temptation” and attempted suicide, sticking a dagger to his guts and running into his office wall. But none of those cases had been so delicate, nor so high-profile, as the one he is about to take on.

It is July 1403, and Bradmore has been summoned one hundred miles from his home in London to Kenilworth Castle: the palace-fortress in the English Midlands that is the historic home of the mighty dukes of Lancaster. It is a long journey, on uneven roads, toward a part of the country that is riven with disorder.

But traveling is not the problem, even at this time of great turbulence, during which England teeters on the brink of all-out civil war. Nor is dealing with the demands of wealthy clients.

What makes this job different is what is at stake.

The patient who lies at Kenilworth, having defeated every other doctor who has seen him, awaiting Bradmore’s attention as a matter of last resort, is one of the most important members of the Lancastrian dynastry. He is a teenage boy, born in Monmouth sixteen years ago, who has survived the lurching, bloody times through which he and England have recently lived. He is a promising warrior, a prodigious lover of music and literature, an avid sportsman and hunter.

He is the eldest son and heir to a man who four years ago became the first Lancastrian king of England, Henry IV.

He is Henry, Prince of Wales.

Henry is almost certainly going to die.

A few days ago, on July 21, at a battle fought just north of Shrewsbury, in the borderlands between England and Wales, he was hit in the face with an arrow shot from a longbow.

How exactly this happened is not altogether clear. Henry ought to have been wearing a helmet with a visor protecting his face. Perhaps he lifted the visor, or removed the helmet entirely, to take a drink or get a better view of the chaotic, blood-soaked battlefield. But how it happened does not matter now. The fact is that several days ago the iron head of an arrow tore into Henry’s face just to the right of his nose. It sheared through his cheek, tearing cartilage and flesh before lodging itself, six inches deep, in the back wall of his skull.

At some point someone—probably Henry himself—tugged at the arrow shaft, and it came away from the arrowhead. That must have seemed, in the panic of the moment, to have dealt with the worst of it.

Far from it. Once Henry left the battlefield, having performed, by all accounts, very bravely, it was obvious that he remained in mortal danger. It was only thanks to the miracle of a few millimeters that the arrowhead did not instantly blind him, damage his brain, or kill him outright. All the same, he still has a one-ounce chunk of metal embedded inside his head.

So having been saved by one miracle, Henry now needs another. Bradmore needs to provide it. Unless this arrowhead is removed, it is only a matter of time before it either shifts and damages the nerves and blood vessels inside his head—or blood poisoning sets in.

Bradmore has an idea how he might remove the arrowhead, then seal and heal the wound. His bag holds all he needs: blocks, called tents, for opening wounds; honey- and wine-based antiseptics; clean dressings; and a tool he has designed himself, a little like a speculum, with which he hopes to grip the arrowhead and tease it out without causing further damage to the flesh. He knows how to make pastes to stem bleeding, creams to control the rate of healing, and oils to flush out entry wounds. He has a lifetime of experience and a steady hand.

Yet like any good surgeon, Bradmore knows there are things he cannot control. Dirty metal in human flesh, close to the brain stem: experience tells him there is a high risk of the patient going into seizure. (“The fear of the spasm . . . was my greatest fear,” Bradmore writes later.) A fit could be brought on simply by the catastrophic damage already wrought on the delicate tissues of the patient’s head. It could be caused by secondary infection: the painful toxic spasms that today we attribute to tetanus. If it occurs it will probably prove fatal.

What’s more, even if seizure is avoided, this is still going to be a long operation, involving many hours of painstaking surgery without reliable anesthetic, followed by weeks of diligent aftercare. Bradmore will have to be at his best for all of it. His patient will have to be abnormally tolerant of pain. And God will have to be on their side.

So Bradmore has good reason to be nervous. This will be among the most difficult operations anyone in England has ever performed. The odds are stacked against him, even if he does everything well. And if he makes the slightest mistake there is a good chance he will be remembered as the man who killed the eldest of the king’s four sons and redirected the line of succession to the English crown.

The consequences of failure are clear. But what Bradmore cannot comprehend are the consequences of success.

For what he does not know—what no one can possibly know, including the patient himself—is that if this sixteen-year-old lying stricken at Kenilworth lives, he will grow up to be someone very special.

He will be the king regarded by most generations after him as the greatest medieval ruler England ever had.

About the Author

Dan Jones is the New York Times bestselling author of Powers and Thrones, Crusaders, The Templars, The Plantagenets, Wars of the Roses, and Magna Carta, as well as the novel Essex Dogs.

He is the host of the podcast This is History: A Dynasty to Die For and has produced, written, and presented dozens of TV shows, including the popular Netflix series Secrets of Great British Castles.

For ten years Dan wrote a weekly column for the London Evening Standard and his writing has also appeared in newspapers and magazines including The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, GQ, and The Spectator.