Orleans & Bourbon
Orleans and Bourbon round out the play's picture of French aristocratic overconfidence before Agincourt — their camp-scene boasting, alongside the Dauphin and the Constable, sets up the total reversal the battle delivers to French chivalric pride.
Appears In
Biography
Orleans and Bourbon are French noblemen present in the camp scenes before Agincourt, part of the same general chorus of aristocratic overconfidence that includes the Dauphin and the Constable. Orleans is the more measured of the pair, occasionally offering a skeptical aside to the Dauphin's boasting about his horse and his own valor, a faint note of doubt within the general French certainty of victory.
Bourbon is hotter-tempered and more absolute in his confidence, declaring at one point that he would rather sell his own dukedom to buy a slovenly, common-bred nag than be mounted as poorly as he imagines the English are — bravado that curdles, after the battle turns decisively against France, into a furious vow that he would rather die than live to see such a disgraceful defeat, urging his fellow nobles back into the fight rather than accept the shame of it.
Both men's fates are folded into the general catastrophe that befalls the French nobility at Agincourt, their earlier confidence — shared by nearly every French voice in the play until the battle itself — standing as the clearest evidence of how completely the chivalric assumptions of the French court have been overturned by the day's end.
Motivation
Orleans and Bourbon are motivated by aristocratic pride and an assumption of French martial superiority that neither man seriously questions until the battle's outcome forces the issue.
Personality
Bourbon's temper runs hotter and his boasts more absolute than Orleans's more measured, occasionally doubtful presence, but both men share the same underlying certainty that French valour cannot seriously be threatened by Henry's exhausted army — a certainty the battle dismantles for both of them equally.