Dan Jones' Five Most Exciting Monarchs

One of the reasons I have come back so many times in my career to writing about Britain’s medieval monarchs is that their reigns are simply so dramatic. The life of a modern king or queen can seem to consist mostly of watching military parades and opening new shopping centres. This was very much not the case six, seven, or eight hundred years ago, when the stakes of monarchy were high and the cost of failure might amount to being murdered in your bed. Here, then, are my five most exciting British medieval monarchs. Who would make your list?

Henry V (1413-1422)

An inscription on Henry V’s tomb at Westminster abbey exhorts its readers to ‘flee idleness’. This is a very apt injunction, for although Henry V lived only 35 years, and ruled as king for a little more than nine of them, his was one of the most action-packed reigns in all the Middle Ages. Henry became heir to the throne when he was 12, after his father, Henry Bolingbroke invaded England and deposed his cousin Richard II. During the deposition crisis, Henry was held prisoner in an Irish castle. After it he was sent to war for the first time at 13, given field command in Wales at 15 and shot in the face with an arrow and nearly killed at 16. Having escaped more than one plot against his life, by the age of 23 he was starting to take command of his sickly father’s government; he finally took the throne at 26 and set about the greatest task of any Medieval English king, which was conquering France. Astonishingly, and quite against the odds, he did it, in a five-year campaign which took him from victory at Agincourt to the treaty of Troyes, by which he became heir and regent of France. At his death from dysentery in 1422 he was lamenting having not had the chance to go on crusade and rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Had he lived, few would have bet against his chances.

Edward II (1307-1327)

If Henry V is remembered as the greatest medieval king, Edward II has a good case for being considered the worst. He was born on a building site in north Wales, where his father, Edward I ‘Longshanks’ was then erecting Caernarfon Castle. As he grew up, his relationship with his elderly, belligerent father grew so fractious that the old man once physically attacked him, tearing out clumps of his hair and screaming that he was so inadequate that he could not be his real son. Once crowned, Edward II seemed determined to prove his late father right. He indulged an unseemly, distracting, possibly homosexual affair with his friend and mentor Piers Gaveston, who so insulted and demeaned every other important nobleman in England that he was exiled three times and then murdered. A chastened Edward went to war with his own cousin, the bullheaded Thomas, earl of Lancaster, whom he had beheaded in revenge for Gaveston’s death. He then empowered another favourite, Hugh Despenser the Younger, to tyrannise and plunder England for his own gain. Eventually Edward’s wife and queen, Isabella of France, rebelled, raising a mercenary army alongside her lover, Roger Mortimer, and having Edward deposed and later murdered. He was probably strangled or suffocated, but the legend that he died with a red-hot fire-tool in his rectum is too well in keeping with his high-drama reign to be entirely discounted.

Empress Matilda (*disputed 1141-48)

As a granddaughter of William the Conqueror, and only legitimate daughter of King Henry I, Matilda was earmarked at a young age for a conventional royal career: that of a bride to another European monarch. It was not unusual, then, when around the age of eight she was sent to Germany to be married to Heinrich V, king of the Germans and would-be Holy Roman Emperor. By the age of 12 Matilda was performing her duties as queen/empress - and as a teenager she was appointed regent in the Italian lands her husband ruled. In 1125, however, she was widowed. Aged about 23, she could have retired as a nun; instead her second political life began. Her only legitimate brother had died in a shipwreck and her father made Matilda the heir to the English crown. This was controversial even in theory - and when it was tested in reality after Henry I died in 1135, all hell broke loose. The English barons rejected Matilda, preferring her cousin, whom they acclaimed as King Stephen. But Matilda refused to give up her claim. She led one side in the civil war known as The Anarchy, which consumed England for nearly two decades: it was, said one chronicler, as if ‘Christ and his saints were asleep’. Matilda was briefly ascendant, ruling as ‘Lady of the English’; but she could not cling to power, and at one point had to escape from her enemies through a snowstorm, disguised in a white cloak. She eventually passed her claim to her eldest son, who made good on it as Henry II, first of the Plantagenets.

James I, King of Scots (1406-1437)

Drama was attendant on James I from the earliest years of his childhood. His mother died when he was seven, his brother was assassinated by his uncle a year later. When he was 11, young James - now heir to the throne - was evacuated from Scotland to France for his own safety. But he never made it. His ship was captured at sea by the English and James was sent to the royal court as a captive. When his father died James was not sent back north; instead, he remained in English custody for the next eighteen years. James grew up to be a talented wrestler and archer, which endeared him to the English king Henry V, who took him around France on campaign to try to soften the hearts of Scottish soldiers fighting on the French side. This did not work, and nor did James seem to learn much from the judicious, laser-focused Henry. Once released back into Scotland, James adopted a bold forward policy of murdering and imprisoning his own nobles until, in 1437, he met the same fate as his brother: assassinated by an uncle. Even by the extravagant standards of medieval Scotland, this was good going.

Richard I the Lionheart (1189-99)

‘From the devil we came, and from the devil we will return.’ So Richard I the Lionheart liked to say when moved to describe his own Plantagenet family. He lived and reigned as though he meant it. Of all the four adult sons of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard was the best natural warrior, and was called upon many times to prove it. While a teenager in 1173-4, he joined his mother in rebelling against his father; he subsequently went to war with a revolving coalition of his own brothers. As king his first obsession was with crusading, and his adventures on the Third Crusade saw him invade Sicily, conquer Cyprus, defeat the sultan Saladin at the siege of Acre, massacre thousands of prisoners of war, attempt to marry his sister off to the sultan’s brother, fail to retake Jerusalem twice, suffer shipwreck on his journey home and end up imprisoned for more than a year by the Holy Roman Emperor. Richard spent his time as a prisoner writing mournful ballads, then bought his freedom and devoted the second half of his reign to fighting his great rival Philip II Augustus of France. Richard died of gangrene after being shot by a crossbowman using a frying pan as a shield, aged just 41, and was succeeded by his brother ‘Bad’ King John, a villain to his core, and only marginally less exciting a character than the Lionheart.