The Rise Of England’s Greatest King: An Untold Story - Dan Jones

Why write a book about Henry V? Why is he sufficiently important for you to spend, uh, several thousand words talking about him?

Well, um, in a sense it's what I do. I mean, I, I write mostly medieval history books, um, and so there's a personal element to it which is like, um, unfinished business. So early in my career, I wrote a book called The Plantagenets, and that was like a dynastic history of the great English medieval dynasty that started in the 1150s with Henry II, founder of the dynasty, and worked up to Richard II, who was deposed in 1399. Then I wrote another book about The Wars of the Roses, which took the- the last half of the dynasty, and that started in 1420, marriage of Henry V and Catherine de Valois, and it went up to the early Tudor period. So that left a little slice of 21 years, mostly, uh, covering Henry V's life. So, uh, filling that gap, that Henry V-shaped hole, um, was sort of important in- in completing a sort of run of books, a- not quite a trilogy, but a triptych in my oeuvre, or canon, if you will. Um, but there's- I think there's a more important point th- than that. With regards to the subject himself, Henry V is considered, in his day and thereafter, for hundreds of years, to be the acme, the paradigm, the, um, the- the- the GOAT of medieval history.

Was he like a British Aurelius?

Kind of, yes. You know, uh, or a little bit like Alexander the Great. Um, just considered the best who ever did it, you know, who really understood every side of kingship and performed it, and was then, you know, it- bec- his name became a byword for great kingship. So I- I think that biographical studies tend to be very interesting if they're about somebody who's the best at doing something or the worst at doing something, and Henry's the best. So i- if you're a medievalist, this is- this is a, you know, a landscape you've got to approach at some point. But the basi- the biggest reason, probably, to write it now is that Henry's life can be read, even if you're not interested in medieval history, which I accept there are a few people in the world still left who aren't, um, it can be read as a- a great case study of leadership in a time of crisis, because he comes to power when you've got a- a realm that's, like, politically partisan, fractious, divided, two kind of camps at each other's throats. Um, you've got sort of the lingering aftereffects of a pandemic. You've got a kind of period of- of at least regional, possibly global climate change. You've got, um, you know, a- a real sense of hopelessness around politics in particular, and failed foreign policy as well, but a hopeless sense around politics in particular, that- that feels like it's intractable, that it- it's un- unsolvable. And yet along comes one guy, seemingly almost out of nowhere, who through the force of personality, charisma, competence, diligence, probity, moral example, drags his realm from the doldrums to the peak of triumph. And I think that's something- that's an attractive idea today. In some ways, that's like everybody's kind of fantasy today, like who, whether you're in the United States, whether in Europe, whatever, outside probably the- the tyrannous autocracies of the world, that is the- the kind of thing everyone's looking for at the moment. So it- although Henry V is not an analogy for American politics directly, he's not a parable, his story does speak to themes that I think are really in the air in the world at the moment.