#(mortimer is Totally Normal about it and is like 'and then richard ii summoned a parliament just to spite henry and tear him away from

[heartofstanding]

It's also - like Henry and Thomas were pro-Armagnac in 1412. The resumption of the war with France wasn't under active consideration and the Dauphin wasn't the Dauphin who was allied with the Armagnacs (this was Louis, who was married to Margaret of Burgundy so maybe Hal wasn't thinking about war with France in 1412 since he was allying with the Dauphin's father-in-law). God knows how the pro-Armagnacs would feel in 1415 or in 1420.

William Courtenay had bouts of illness (it's not clear whether it was a recurring illness) so I've wondered if it was a genetic illness Courtenay had but Courtenay's grandparents - William's parents - lived into their 70s and 80s so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Honestly, I can see it being a workaholic thing, which John also seems to have had.

Honestly, that's so weird like, it was Henry's desire and it was left to Arundel to execute. How is it Hal's fault? You also have the flip attitude with Nigel Saul, who criticises Richard II for intervening in the burial of William Courtenay and some others because it was against their will. William wanted to be buried in the churchyard of Maidstone and Richard was like "no, give him a fancy tomb in the shrine of Thomas Beckett near to my dad". It also speaks to the way that Hal gets this intense scrutiny and hyper-criticism now - probably it worse back then. Honestly, I think there's very little evidence of Hal going after anyone Team Henry in revenge - Gascoigne resigned but we don't know why and Hal and Arundel seemed to have worked together fine enough for there to be no conflicts after Hal's coronation.

YES. I feel like with Joanna and Hal, he's sixteen by the time she marries his father and comes to England and he doesn't meet her until some time after that (he wasn't at the wedding, apparently), probably not until after the Battle of Shrewsbury and his 17th birthday. And I think he probably never really got the chance to know her like Humphrey (and possibly John) did - he was too old and too absent (since he was mostly in Wales) to really spend much time with her or to need her to "mother" him. But Mary would have been a far more constant presence in his life and from such a young age too (there's limited information about their relationship but I like to think he was a huge mama's boy) and also willing to support him (plus there's the whole thing of Joanna's not his blood mother and the stereotype of the stepmother to favour her own blood over the first wife's children).

It really was. Have you read Peter McNiven's The Burning of John Badby? He has a really interesting interpretation of Hal during this time, that Hal was more sympathetic but became boxed in by his failure to convince Badby to recant. I'm not sure I buy his theory completely but I have wondered if Badby's burning sort of marked a coup de grace on Henry and Arundel's parts since both Courtenay and Hal were involved in the burning (Courtenay preached a sermon) so it may have been a kind of punishment/public humiliation for defying Arundel at Oxford.

I realised today that a lot of Henry V's detractors are sort of... less condemning because they're anti-war but because they want war to be "fun" or "romantic". So you have Ian Mortimer who makes Henry's Crusade as a big part of his Great Man of History argument and celebrates the wars of "the perfect king", Edward III. Desmond Seward who, judging from the blurb on the back of the book, seems outraged that Hal was waging warfare on Christians instead of non-Christians (I've never read him and refuse to). A recent, highly-critical book of Hal did a big chest-beating number about how the romantic myth of Henry V's wars wasn't true and I'm sitting there like, "you don't think the problem is more in the romanticism of war in the first place? what wars are romantic and bloodless and morally clean?" Like, we know what Hal's public attitude about the victory of Agincourt was and it was more tied to mourning than victorious swaggering about.

To torture you: Courtenay extremely reluctantly giving Hal any last rites he may need in case the Dagger Incident does end fatally

Oh mannnn. I was actually poking at the thing I've been writing about the Dagger Incident and trying to determine just whether Courtenay knew about the Dagger Incident before Hal pulled it or whether he didn't know until afterwards (I think he's somewhere in the middle - he knew the gist of what Hal was planning but not the details). But man. Courtenay being the one who Hal goes to for the last rites? I'm going to go insane.

Though I might raise you a wounded Hal, post-Shrewsbury and delirious with pain, insisting that Courtenay give him last rites...

And both are like an inverse of Hal at Courtenay's death bed, where "after extreme unction, with his own hands wiped his feet and closed his eyes". I'm going to chew glass.