Shakespeare’s histories · Agincourt and the Low Countries
Henry V: Agincourt, Roger Williams and Fluellen
The Lewknors at Agincourt, Lewkenor’s testimony about Roger Williams, and the professional soldiers beneath Shakespeare’s medieval history.
Henry V belongs to two military worlds. Its campaign leads to Agincourt in 1415, where Sir Thomas Lewknor served in the Earl of Arundel’s retinue. Its captains also speak to the experience of Elizabethan soldiers: siege warfare, disputed expertise, honour, discipline and the obligations of service. Lewes Lewkenor’s accounts of the Low Countries bring that later world into focus.
The Lewknor at Agincourt
Malcolm Mercer’s Driven to rebellion? Sir John Lewknor, dynastic loyalty and debt identifies Sir Thomas Lewknor of Trotton as a Sussex landowner, sheriff and parliamentarian. In note 6, Mercer records his service in the Earl of Arundel’s retinue at Agincourt, citing the retinue roll now at The National Archives, E 101/47/1, membrane 1r.
Sir Thomas was the father of John Lewknor, who later served Henry VI and died fighting for the Lancastrians at Tewkesbury. Mercer also records that Hugh Halsham, from the family into which John married, fought in Arundel’s retinue at Agincourt. The family connections therefore cross the boundary between the reigns dramatised in Henry V and Henry VI.
The record places a named Lewknor in Henry’s army. It does not establish the exact direct line between Sir Thomas and the later Sir Lewes Lewkenor; the connection presented here is to the wider medieval Sussex family.
“Awake remembrance of these valiant dead”
Shakespeare’s account of the French campaign repeatedly invokes inherited military reputation. At the beginning of the play, Ely urges Henry to remember the achievements of his forebears:
ELY
Awake remembrance of these valiant dead,
And with your puissant arm renew their feats.
You are their heir, you sit upon their throne;
The blood and courage that renownèd them
Runs in your veins, and my thrice-puissant liege
Is in the very May-morn of his youth,
Ripe for exploits and mighty enterprises.
The speech is addressed to a king, but the survival of retinue rolls allows that remembered army to be examined below the level of royalty and great commanders. Sir Thomas Lewknor and Hugh Halsham are among the named men through whom Mercer connects Sussex family history with the campaign.
“Sir Roger Williams well remembereth this day’s work”
The later connection rests on Lewkenor’s own printed testimony. Describing English soldiers who had entered Spanish service, he recalls fighting at Wynochbergen and names Roger Williams on the opposing side:
Thence they were drawn to Wynochbergen to serve against the French and English that lay there encamped, where they behaved themselves with such desperate resolution that day, that monsieur de Balançon, brother to the marquess of Warambon, was taken prisoner; that besides the loss of many of their lives, they were a wonder to the whole army; which praise of theirs the pride of the Spaniards not enduring, did upbraid them, that they had served rather like giddy headed drunkards, than men wisely valiant. Sir Roger Williams well remembreth this day’s work, for he was there in service of the states; and unless I am deceived, lost a brother in that service.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595); spelling modernised.
This is a specific reference to Williams’s service, rather than an association inferred from two soldiers being in the Netherlands. Lewkenor qualifies the reported loss of Williams’s brother with “unless I am deceived”. The passage gives the battle’s human cost alongside its reputation for courage.
Roger Williams and Fluellen
Roger Williams was a Welsh professional soldier and military writer whose career extended through the Low Countries and France. Charles Wisner Barrell proposed him as a model for Fluellen. The comparison brings together Welsh identity, courage, quick temper, military learning and a strong concern for discipline.
Henry’s description of his Welsh captain captures that combination:
KING HENRY
For I do know Fluellen valiant
And, touched with choler, hot as gunpowder,
And quickly will return an injury.
Fluellen’s professional knowledge makes him valuable; his readiness to defend honour also makes him vulnerable to a joke. The proposed Williams comparison should be read through those particular characteristics, rather than as a claim that every incident in Fluellen’s story records something Williams did.
The breach and the practical soldier
Williams’s writing attends to the danger concealed by the language of glory. On assaulting a breach, he insists that the first attacking troops face exceptional risks:
the greatest warriors account the first troupe that entereth a breach in more danger than the first troupe that must charge in their several battles. They have reason, for I know it by good experience, whether they enter or retire the most of them are killed.
Roger Williams, A Brief Discourse of War (1590), discussion of assaults; spelling modernised.
In Henry V, the captains’ discussion outside Harfleur similarly concerns how a siege is actually conducted. Fluellen wants to debate the inherited rules of warfare:
Captain Macmorris, I beseech you now, will you voutsafe me, look you, a few disputations with you, as partly touching or concerning the disciplines of the war, the Roman wars?
Fluellen, Henry V, III.ii.
The comic friction between Fluellen and Macmorris puts military expertise into conversation and conflict. Rules matter, but the battle also creates an urgency in which the men cannot simply sit down to dispute them.
Sir John Smythe and the argument over weapons
Williams’s A Brief Discourse of War appeared in 1590, the same year as Sir John Smythe’s Certain Discourses. Their disagreement over the longbow and firearms forms part of the military controversy surrounding Shakespeare’s histories. Smythe defended the bow; Williams argued from the practices of contemporary warfare.
Fluellen’s reverence for Roman discipline adds another strand to the Williams comparison. It can invite comparison with conservative military argument as well as with Williams’s professional confidence. The play does not, however, make Fluellen deliver Smythe’s case for the longbow. Ancient discipline and opposition to firearms are different propositions.
Sir John Smythe of Essex must also be kept distinct from Captain John Smith of Norfolk, the soldier whose drunken quarrel and death Lewkenor describes. The latter belongs chiefly to the Falstaff comparison explored on the Henry IV page.
“I assure you”: recommending a soldier
Williams’s letter to Walsingham recommending “Mr. Were” gives the professional voice at greater length:
If you knew the virtue of this bearer, Mr. Were, I am sure he would be very well welcome to you. I am sure all his countrymen that served here will give him no less praise than I. I assure you I never saw a braver young gentleman afore his enemy. You have favoured me and a number of others for less valour and virtue than is in him. I do not doubt, after you have spoken with others that kept him company in these parts you will both favour and love him. I would trouble you with a large discourse, but that I am sure you will find more contentment in his speech than in my writing. He knows my mind. If you will help me, I humbly desire you.
Roger Williams to Sir Francis Walsingham, recommending Mr. Were; spelling modernised.
Robert Detobel drew attention to the resemblance between this repeated assurance and Fluellen’s personal testimony about service:
I assure you, there is very excellent services committed at the bridge.
Fluellen, Henry V, III.vi.
The shared habit is one of recommendation: a soldier stakes his own experience and judgement on the value of another man’s conduct. The phrases are ordinary in themselves; their interest lies in the fuller pattern of professional praise, qualification and insistence.
Fortune, mutability and military reward
Fluellen’s account of Fortune expands a passing appeal into an elaborate explanation:
By your patience, Aunchient Pistol, Fortune is painted blind, with a muffler afore her eyes, to signify to you that Fortune is blind; and she is painted also with a wheel to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning and inconstant, and mutability and variation; and her foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls and rolls and rolls. In good truth, the poet makes a most excellent description of it. Fortune is an excellent moral.
Fluellen, Henry V, III.vi.
In Lewkenor, the uncertain reward of service is repeatedly a material problem. His appeal to English captains serving abroad turns on the destruction of their expectations:
Let them not tire out their years and youth in so comfortless and unrewarded a service, the end whereof is never other than untimely death, desolation, or beggary.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595); spelling modernised.
Fluellen supplies the emblematic language of changing Fortune; Lewkenor supplies individual careers spent pursuing reward and ending in want. His Resolved Gentleman also belongs to this moral world of Fortune, mortality and the examples of history.
The king among his soldiers
Before Agincourt, Henry moves through the camp in disguise and encounters the ordinary soldier Michael Williams. Their disagreement concerns the responsibility carried by a king who sends men to war:
But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all “We died at such a place”—some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left.
Williams, Henry V, IV.i.
Henry’s answer separates duty from the individual soul:
Every subject’s duty is the King’s, but every subject’s soul is his own.
King Henry, Henry V, IV.i.
Lewkenor’s account of Englishmen serving foreign rulers gives this problem a contemporary setting. Military service, national allegiance, religious conviction and the need to earn a living could pull men in different directions. His book judges their choices, while showing the poverty and dependence that shaped them.
Williams’s glove and Fluellen’s temper
The disguised king and Michael Williams exchange gloves as pledges of a later challenge. After the battle Henry gives Williams’s glove to Fluellen, creating a quarrel when Williams recognises it. The king’s warning that Fluellen is “hot as gunpowder” belongs to this engineered collision.
The historical Sir Roger Williams and the fictional Michael Williams are distinct. Their shared surname creates an additional point of interest in a scene involving Fluellen, but it does not prove that Shakespeare divided Sir Roger into two characters.
The Welshman and the leek
Welsh identity becomes a point of fellowship between Fluellen and Henry:
KING HENRY
I wear it for a memorable honor,
For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman.
All the water in Wye cannot wash your Majesty’s Welsh plood out of your pody, I can tell you that.
Fluellen, Henry V, IV.vii.
Later, Fluellen forces Pistol to eat the leek with which he has mocked him. The professional soldier’s honour is defended through a comic humiliation. Fluellen remains both a capable captain and a man whose temper can be provoked.
Two generations of war
Mercer’s evidence places Sir Thomas Lewknor in the army at Agincourt and follows his son John into Henry VI’s service. Lewkenor’s own prose, written much later, names Roger Williams and describes the predicament of English soldiers abroad. Together these sources give the page two distinct foundations: medieval family participation and Elizabethan military testimony.
The play joins patriotic history to arguments about command, discipline, reward and conscience. Reading its captains beside Williams and Lewkenor makes those arguments concrete, while the Agincourt roll locates a Lewknor within the historical campaign itself.
Film: Falstaff—Shakespeare’s Soldiers
Explore the captains and military personalities behind the histories, including Captain John Smith and the separate controversy surrounding Sir John Smythe.
Sources and further reading
- Malcolm Mercer, “Driven to rebellion? Sir John Lewknor, dynastic loyalty and debt”, Sussex Archaeological Collections 137 (1999), pp. 153–159, especially p. 158, notes 6 and 11, for Sir Thomas Lewknor and Hugh Halsham at Agincourt. Retinue roll: The National Archives, E 101/47/1, m. 1r.
- Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), account of Wynochbergen and appeal to the captains abroad; The Resolved Gentleman (1594).
- Roger Williams, A Brief Discourse of War (1590), discussion of assaults; letter to Sir Francis Walsingham recommending Mr. Were. Sir John Smythe, Certain Discourses (1590), for the contemporary military controversy.
- Charles Wisner Barrell, proposed identification of Roger Williams with Fluellen; Robert Detobel, comparison of Williams’s correspondence and Fluellen’s speech. These are interpretative comparisons.
- William Shakespeare, Henry V, I.ii, III.ii, III.vi, IV.i, IV.vii and V.i. Play quotations checked against the Folger Shakespeare Library text. Spelling in prose quotations has been modernised.
Continue the histories
Henry IV: Falstaff and Captain Smith →