The summer of 1415 found Henry V on England's south coast, readying ships and men for the French campaign that would culminate in his storied victory at Agincourt. In late July, he was shocked to discover that Henry Lescrope, Lord Masham, who was his trusted friend as well as a senior government official, was plotting to kill him and to destroy his great military enterprise. On 5 August, the nobleman was hauled up before a tribunal hastily assembled in Southampton, tried and convicted of treason. Royal justice proved swift and pitiless: Lescrope was beheaded that same afternoon.

Contemporary chroniclers depicted Lescrope in dramatic terms as a malicious double-dealing villain who had feigned love to Henry's face while conspiring behind his back to ‘murder him with the sword because he had failed to do so with poison’. Induced by ‘the stench of French promises or bribes’, he had sold out his king and countrymen for a handful of gold. The official account of Lescrope's trial was less lurid than those found in the chronicles, but the execution process he was made to endure communicated in no uncertain terms his violation of manly loyalty to his king. He was first stripped of his elite status as a knight of the chivalric Order of the Garter in a ritual of public degradation that included tearing off his sword belt and striking off his spurs. He was then dragged through Southampton from its southern Watergate to the Northgate, where he was beheaded in the street. Lescrope's severed head was sent north to York, where it was posted on the city wall at Micklegate Bar. As it decayed through the last days of a northern summer, it was a lingering reminder that any man who tried to strike the head from the body politic would find himself headless and his body divided.

When parliament met later the same year, the Southampton tribunal's judgment against Lescrope was re-enacted before the wider political community. The record preserved on the parliament roll condemned Lescrope as a man who had betrayed his king and by doing so, had destroyed his own manly honour and identity as a knight. It also included a more unusual determination: that Lescrope had betrayed ‘the tongue in which he was born’.