He reimagined Elizabeth I as a flirtatious young princess and upset David Starkey with a hedonistic Henry VIII who looks more like a male model than Holbein’s florid monarch.

Now the creator of the hit television series The Tudors is training his gaze on another English ruler: Henry V.

Michael Hirst, who also wrote Elizabeth, the film that made a star of Cate Blanchett, has signed up to write the screenplay for Agincourt.

This €30 million (£28 million) British film will explore the battle in 1415 where a bedraggled English task force — fronted by skilful longbowmen — pulled off one of the most celebrated military victories in history against a much larger French Army.