"Shining fresh light on England’s transformational warrior king, this thrilling new biography of Henry V reads like an absolute blockbuster. "
As packed with personality as it is with scholarly depth, Dan Jones’ Henry V presents a thrilling biography of, in the words of the subtitle, “England’s greatest warrior king”. Concluding the author’s series of medieval histories (see also The Plantagenets and The Hollow Crown), its page-turning pull makes it a bar-raising biography.
In his introduction, Jones reveals that he “deliberately left a Henry-V-shaped gap” between writing The Hollow Crown and The Wars of the Roses, because “I wanted to wait until I was a little more experienced in my writing to take him on”. The result is a work that lays bare the life of this brutal, creative warrior king in dazzling style, with considerable attention and weight given to Henry V’s less-explored apprenticeship years, before he was crowned at the age of 26. On the subject of Henry’s earlier years, with the two men laying claim to being Prince of Wales, I found the chapter covering his battles with Welsh national hero Owain Glyndwr especially fascinating.
Throughout, Jones’ passion is infectious, with his first-person narrative animating Henry V as a man who feels like he still lives, breathes and battles among us.
| Primary Genre | History |
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A brand-new life of England's greatest king from our bestselling medieval historian
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.
Henry V features in the following genres: Non-Fiction Books of the Month, Recommendations, Biographies & Autobiographies, History, Biography: historical, political and military, European history, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, Biography: general, History and Archaeology
Henry V is available in Paperback, Hardback
Henry V was written by Dan Jones and published by Apollo an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Henry V has 464 pages
£22.50
