HENRY V reigned over England for only nine years and four months, and died at the age of just thirty-five, but he looms over the landscape of the late Middle Ages and beyond. The victor of Agincourt was remembered as the acme of kingship, a model to be closely imitated by his successors. William Shakespeare deployed Henry V as a study in youthful folly redirected to sober statesmanship.
In the dark days of World War II, Henry’s victories in France were presented by British filmmakers as exemplars for a people existentially threatened by Nazism. Churchill called Henry ‘a gleam of splendour in the dark, troubled story of medieval England’, while for one modern medievalist, Henry was, quite simply, ‘the greatest man who ever ruled England’. For Dan Jones, Henry is one of the most intriguing characters in all medieval history, but one of the hardest to pin down: a hardened warrior, yet also bookish and artistic; a leader who made many mistakes, yet always triumphed when it mattered.
As king, he saved a shattered country from economic ruin, and in foreign diplomacy made England a serious player once more. Yet through his conquests in northern France, he sowed the seeds for calamity at home, in the form of the Wars of the Roses. Dan Jones’s life of Henry V stands out for the generous amount of space it allots to his long royal apprenticeship – the critical first twenty-six years of his life before he became king.
It is an enthralling portrait of a man with a rare ability to force his will on the world. But, above all, it is an unmissable account of England’s greatest king from our bestselling medieval historian.
