Consistently viewed as the acme of kingship by generations of historians and Britain's leading filmmakers, Henry V receives more nuanced and revealing treatment from the bestselling author of The Plantagenets in this pacy, pulsating biography.
Henry V reigned over England for only nine years and four months, and died at the age of just 35, 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. He was a hardened, sometimes brutal, warrior, yet he was also creative and artistic, with a bookish temperament. He was a leader who made many mistakes, who misjudged his friends and family members, yet always seemed to triumph when it mattered. As king, he saved a shattered country from economic ruin, put down rebellions and secured England’s borders; in foreign diplomacy, he made England a serious player once more. Yet through his conquests in northern France, he sowed the seeds for three generations of 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 the critical first 26 years of his life before he became king. Both standalone biography and a completion of Dan’s sequence of English medieval histories that began with The Plantagenets and The Hollow Crown, Henry V is a thrilling and unmissable life of England’s greatest king from our best-selling medieval historian.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN: 2928377261948
Number of pages: 448
Dimensions: 234 x 153 mm
If any king needed a biography, it’s a Henry. Much of that mythos is bound up in Shakespeare, St Crispin’s Day and the idea of England as a lion-hearted country. Jones has form in this area and he takes a masterly,... More
I will not lie when I say Dan Jones is one of my favourite narrative history writers, that being said I was still taken aback with how Jones tells Henry's story - its something that needs to be read to understand... More
A fine, fascinating, fluidly written biography of a much romanticised figure, mainly owing to Shakespeare's dramatic portrayal of Hal's antics as an idle young man and friend of Falstaff.
Dan Jones'...
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