EARLY in Henry V, the King shows himself a master at the art of deferring responsibility as he maneuvers the Bishop of Ely and the Archbishop of Canterbury into taking all responsibility for the upcoming invasion of French territory:

The audience knows—and suspects that the King might as well— that the bishops have their own cash-flow reasons for wanting the war with France, but most impressive here is King Henry's deflection of responsibility onto the bishops for whatever comes next. In the course of the war, when he threatens rape on the people of Harfleur and when he executes prisoners in violation of the just conduct of war and of the code of chivalry that he inherits from kings before, all things, as far as this encounter is concerned, fall not on his head but on the bishops’.

Three acts later, Harfleur has fallen, and the King prepares for the seemingly doomed battle that we have learned to call Agincourt. In the darkness of the night before the battle, he moves unknown and unseen without the aura of ceremony among his soldiers. Shakespeare's campfire scene before Agincourt in act 4 of Henry V, almost certainly newly invented rather than derived from any historical source, does not have a single agenda but allows each character to interact and emerge in a drama of concealment rather than display. But in one conversation, Henry meets something unexpected, a connection between the sacrament of confession and the justice of waging war, a spectre of a practice that in the fourteenth century would have resonated as a live force resisting the wills of kings but in the late-sixteenth century barely a memory of a Catholic past.