If Henry V survived, he would have been king of both England and France, forging one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful country on Earth at the time. After I killed him however, a slow, agonizing death, not suited for a warrior, the world was changed forever.
I am an amoeba and I just killed the most powerful man in the world. The year is 1422 at the Château de Vincennes in France. Henry V, the second Lancastrian King of England, and the first King of England in generations to secure all of the Plantagenet holdings in France and then some, even marrying the French Princess Catherine to succeed to the French throne, at least in principle, lay dying of what they called the “bloody flux” at the time, a severe intestinal infection that causes diarrhea, fever, and stomach cramps, an infection caused by a parasitic amoeba like me. Of course, the germ theory of disease wouldn’t be discovered for centuries. Henry, his court, the people of England, the people of France, indeed the whole civilized world, knew only that war camps bred pestilence somehow and masses of men gathered together in muddy, refuse-strewn fields frequently caused outbreaks of the bloody flux, afflicting rich and poor, noble or commoner, all the same, perhaps the most egalitarian experience in the entire epoch. So it was that a few months earlier, at the Siege of Meaux, where Henry was leading his forces against the French, the great king was struck down in his prime, not even able to mount his horse by late summer. Meaux, itself, was an ironic place to fell such a warrior-king, a backwater, not particularly important in the great conflict between England and France. The previous year, Henry had returned to France from England to protect his claim to the throne, backed by 4,000 fresh troops. Once on French soil, he swept through Dreaux, captured Vendom and Beaugency, but then was stymied by the larger, more strategic city of Orleans. He chose to go north from there, his army swelling to 20,000 where he captured Villenueve-le-Roy, then went onward to Meaux itself. Meaux might not have been of particular strategic importance, but it was well defended, located on a loop of the Marne River, “with the walled city and its suburbs on the north bank and a smaller, heavily fortified area known as the Marché inside the riverbend, joined to the rest of Meaux by a single bridge,” according to Dan Jones, author of Henry V: The Astonishing Rise of England’s Greatest Warrior King. While Henry’s army was much larger, Meaux was manned by some 1,000 diehard troops committed to the French cause. The leader of these troops, the Bastard of Barus, was also notoriously vicious. He was said to have tied a pregnant woman to a post, alone as she birthed her baby, waiting for wolves to rip her to shreds simply to make a point. As a result, though the forces at Meaux were outnumbered by about 20-1, the siege lasted for more than seven months, not ending until early May 1422. Henry was ultimately victorious, but at a cost of over 6,000 men and an infection that would change the entire world.
Of course, I am merely an amoeba, a single celled organism without thoughts, feelings, or aspirations of any kind, and I know none of this. At the same time, I am everywhere. Defined by my ability to alter my shape, extending and retracting pseudopods from a flexible cell membrane, I am found in every major lineage of eukaryotic organisms, including the cells that make up your own body plus algae and fungi. This makes me an incredible case of convergent evolution, where cells of every line have adopted my structures and lifestyle even though we do not descend from a single common ancestor. Thus, I am defined primarily by my freedom of movement and how I feed, using microfilaments in my cell membrane to alter my shape, pushing out what appear to be blob-like arms from anywhere on my body, if you can claim a single cell has a body in the first place. At the same time, based on my own unique lineage and that of my cousins, there are subtle differences in my appearance and structure. What are known as the classically Amoebozoan species, part of the actual genus Amoeba, feature bulbous pseudopods, like a developing fetus’ hands rounded at the ends, roughly tubular when sliced crosswise. In contrast, the Cercozoan amoeboids, including Euglypha and Gromia, have slender, thready pseudopods which look like filaments or hairs extruded from the surface without a follicle. Foraminifera take that one step further, emitting extremely fine, branching pseudopods that can merge with one another to form something remarkably close to a net, as if the microorganism was fishing. Some, such as the Radiolaria and Heliozoa, don’t have nearly that level of flexibility. Instead, they emit stiff, needle-like, radiating axopodia stood up from within by specialized microtubules. However, we are classified, amoebas are sex-less organisms with no distinction between male and female. We do not mate, except under extremely special circumstances. Normally, we split in half via a process known as mitosis, which occurs in almost all of the cells in your own body except the brain and without which you would not be able to grow that body from a single cell in the first place. Essentially, you can see this as a process of making copies from a single source; the chromosomes inside the cell, which contain the DNA separate and duplicate. Once the genetic material is copied, the cell membrane or wall pinches in the middle until there are two separate halves, each with its own nucleus, and then fully separates. This means two things. First, we tend to evolve more slowly, at least under stable conditions, than our sexual reproducing counterparts because there is no shuffling of the genes between generations. (Scientists aren’t sure, but this might be why we can mate sexually under duress, to kickstart evolution, so to speak.) In principle, the two daughter cells are an exact copy of one another in all respects, except nothing is perfect and slight genetic differences arise. Second, and most importantly in the case of my killing Henry V, we double the size of our population constantly. One amoeba becomes two becomes four becomes eight becomes sixteen becomes thirty two becomes sixty four, and onwards and upwards very fast under the right conditions.
Fortunately for you, most of my kind are harmless. We live our lives literally beneath your notice, measuring between 2.3 and 3 micrometers in diameter, much smaller than you can see what the naked eye, though the largest, a deep-sea variety with a hard shell, can reach 20 centimeters. In fact, we are so small that humans didn’t discover us until 1755, when August Johann Rosel von Resonhauf named one of my cousins, “Der Kleine Proteus,” “The Little Proteus,” drawing remarkably life-like illustrations that depict an unknown freshwater species he observed using an early microscope. Because we can move around on our own in a fashion directed by chemical sensors in our membranes, we were called an “animolecule” in the 18th and 19th centuries, officially taking the name Amoeba in the 1820s, after the French naturalist, Bory de Saint-Vincent named us Amiba, from the Greek meaning change. We feed by either preying on smaller microbes such as bacteria and other single-celled organisms, grasping them with our pseudopods and then swallowing them whole in our cell membrane, or scavenging dead organic material using the same process. Unlike an organism with a mouth, this can happen anywhere on the body, like the infamous blob from science fiction, only much, much smaller. The majority of us are free-living, inhabiting freshwater such as ponds, lakes, and even ditches or puddles, but a few of us, like me, known scientifically as Entamoeba histolytica, can take up residence inside the human body where we transform into lethal parasites, causing amoebic dysentery or Amoebiasis, the bloody flux as it was known in Henry’s day. For some, we can prosper inside the body without causing any symptoms, but for those who suffer my wrath, the invasion of their intestines causes lethargy, weight loss, ulcerations in the colon, severe pain in the abdomen, and diarrhea with or without blood. These, in turn, can cause inflammation and ulceration of the colon from the death of the tissue or outright holes in it, which can result in either damage to the wall of the abdomen or even anemia, all truly ugly, painful, terrifying ways to die. If I reach the blood, I can even spread throughout the body, taking up residence in the liver where I cause further infections. As a parasite that preys upon a host, I am uniquely adapted to survive until I find the perfect victim. My cysts can survive for a month in soil or contaminated water, close to an hour under fingernails, waiting for someone to consume me.
No one can say for sure, not even me as I have no memory, but I likely found my way into Henry’s body from contaminated water, where I laid in wait, growing and multiplying inside for several weeks before striking. Whatever the case, Henry began exhibiting early symptoms in either late May or early June, when he was taken to the nearby castle of Vincennes. Later that month, he was able to recover well enough that he began leading his forces against the French at Cosne-sur-Loire, but the summer was extremely hot and he once again succumbed to severe illness, reduced to being carted around on a litter. He was ultimately taken to Paris, where he tried to mount a horse one final time but failed, and then back to Vincennes, where he was joined by his wife, the French Princess Catherine before he died. Henry and Catherine left behind an infant son, who he never met, also named Henry. The infant couldn’t possibly know it at the time, but his father’s death would set in motion a sequence of events that would alter the history of the world for centuries, down to this very day, serving as a fulcrum point separating before and after. Henry V was a unique figure both by virtue of his birth and his own talents. He was born to yet another Henry, who became king by deposing Richard II in 1399. Richard was a truly terrible king, known as a vacuous tyrant too easily pricked by his own pride and belief in his royal prerogatives, vengeful and spiteful to the core, but he was also a direct heir to the Plantagenet dynasty that had ruled England since 1154, almost 250 years of direct succession. Though Henry IV was a cousin of the Plantagenets, his ascension to throne didn’t come without discord, strife, and even civil war. His son, Henry V, however, represented a new beginning. Rather than taking the throne by force as his father had done, he inherited it by right when Henry IV passed, increasing the stability of the realm. Henry was also a valiant warrior, practically from birth, fighting in his first battles when he was still a prince at a mere 14 years old, and a brilliant politician. After assuming the throne on April 9, 1413, he channeled English unrest against their arch enemy France and launched an invasion as soon as 1415. Once in France, he unleashed a string of victories, taking Harfleur on September 22 and then securing his most famous victory at Agincourt on October 25. The French were crushed, and two years later a revitalized British force under Henry V himself swept through the country, ultimately reaching Paris by August 1420. As a result, he was able to force the French king, Charles VI, to disinherit his own son, and pass the throne of France to Henry after he married his daughter, Catherine.
If Henry V survived, he would have been king of both England and France, forging one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful country on Earth at the time. After I killed him however, a slow, agonizing death, not suited for a warrior, England was thrust into turmoil. An infant couldn’t rule, and even when Henry VI reached maturity, he was nothing like his warrior-politician of a father, completely unable to hold the country together and the victim of bouts of delirium in addition. By 1429, just seven years after Henry’s death, the English had lost most of their holdings in France, forgetting the fantasy of actually ruling both countries from a single throne. They would be reduced to rump on the Continent by 1453 and by 1558, England was completely expelled from France, losing lands that they had held since before the Plantagenets were even in power. This might have been bearable, but the home front was even worse. In 1455, the War of the Roses broke out, pitting the Lancaster branch of the Plantagenets against the Yorks. Henry IV himself was captured by Richard, Duke of York at the First Battle of St. Albans, and was ultimately deposed in 1461, when Richard’s son Edward ascended the throne. Incredibly, Edward was deposed again by Henry himself in 1470, only to return a few months later, when he imprisoned and then killed Henry himself. Edward’s son succeeded to the throne in 1483, but reigned for only 78 days before Edward’s brother, Richard, the boy’s uncle, deposed him and then killed him and an even younger brother at the Tower of York, their young bodies never found. Richard, however, was so unpopular that he was deposed himself in 1487, when a half-Welsh descendant of the Lancaster’s through Princess Catherine herself, Henry Tudor finally secured the throne, and founded another dynasty that lasted until 1603, of which the famous Queen Elizabeth I was a direct descendant. These changes in power, however, came at huge cost. Some 105,000 British were killed, an estimated 28,000 in a single battle, the Battle of Towton. Entire noble families were wiped out including old women, along with uncounted commoners, many of whom died from starvation and disease. The British economy was destroyed, decades of progress were lost, allowing the French, Spanish, and Dutch to build massive empires around the world while the British looked on in envious impoverishment. It took more than a century to recover, and even then famous Brits like Sir Francis Drake were more pirates than true warriors or noble knights. While no one can say for sure, it’s almost impossible to believe any of this would have happened had Henry survived his illness at my hands. If he weren’t besieging Meaux those fateful months, if he never drank contaminated water, or even if medicine at the time was a little better, the following five hundred years would be radically different, but what do I know? I’m just an amoeba. You can’t see me. Henry didn’t even know I existed, and yet I can still change the world, for better or worse, I don’t care. I just am, sending out my psuedopods to feed.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 