Once more unto the breach of historical accuracy: Agincourt film leaves French fuming

GALLIC blood is boiling over Netflix’s The King, a star-studded film of the battle of Agincourt, amid claims it is riddled with historical inaccuracies and is jingoistic and “anti-french”.

The French have long railed against Shakespeare’s dramatisation of Henry V’s 1415 victory. But the Bard’s poetic license pales in comparison with David Michôd’s feature starring Timothée Chalamet, Lily Rose Depp, Robert Pattinson and Joel Edgerton.

Taking offence at Pattinson’s hammed-up representation of the French dauphin Louis de Guyenne, Henry’s nemesis, Christophe Gilliot, head of the newly renovated Agincourt museum, said: “I’m outraged. The image of the French is really sullied. The film has Francophobe tendencies. The British far Right are going to lap this up. It will flatter nationalist egos.”

English “raping and pillaging” was totally overlooked and the king’s coldblooded execution of his French prisoners glossed over. The film was rife with historical untruths, Mr Gilliot complained, including the suggestion that the battle took place in a mountainous area – Agincourt was all but flat with a slight rise – or that Henry had to be talked into waging war by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Henry’s depiction as a sensitive leader dragged into a conflict he would have rather avoided was total rubbish, he said, adding that far from being a peace-loving pretty boy, he was a bloodthirsty war criminal with a scar from an arrow wound on his cheek.

“He had a sinister look and behaviour to match,” he told France 3.

Experts dismiss as wrong Shakespeare’s claims that Henry’s “happy few” defeated a French army that outnumbered his men by five to one. The figures were most likely 12,000 French to as many as 9,000 English, they say.

The film has had mixed reviews. The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin panned it as a “Shakespeare-mangling death march trudge”.