Henry V: England's Greatest King

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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 ace of kingship, a model to be closely imitated by his successors. William Shakespeare deployed Henry V as a character study in youthful folly redirected to sober statesmanship. In the dark days of World War II, Henrys 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 of medieval history, yet at the same time one of the hardest to pin down. He was a hardened, sometimes brutal, warrior, yet he was also creative, artistic and literary, with a bookish temperament. He was a leader who made many mistakes, who misjudged his friends and family members; yet he always seemed to triumph when it mattered. As king, he saved his shattered country from economic ruin, put down rebellions and secured Englands borders and in foreign diplomacy, 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. Unlike many competing volumes, Dans life of Henry V stands out for the generous amount of space it allots to the critical first 26 years of Henrys life before he became king. Both standalone biography and a volume that completes his sequence of English medieval histories that began with The Plantagenets and The Hollow Crown, Dan Joness Henry V is a thrilling and unmissable life of Englands greatest king from our best-selling medieval historian.

Reviews

Praise for Dan Jones: A terrifically colourful and compelling narrative history... A hugely impressive achievement, bustling and sizzling with life on every page - Sunday Times A badass history writer... to put it mildly - Duff McKagan An audacious, entertaining page-turner - Dan Carlin, Hardcore History Dan Jones is in a class of his own - Professor Suzannah Lipscomb Jones is careful to entertain, as well as enlighten... Flashes of humour exist on the same page as academic rigour - Aspects of History A historian who writes as addictively as any page-turning novelist * Observer *

Author Bio

Dan Jones is the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of many non-fiction books, including The Plantagenets, The Templars, and Powers and Thrones. He is a renowned writer, broadcaster and journalist. He has presented dozens of TV shows, including the Netflix series Secrets of Great British Castles, and writes and hosts the podcast This is History. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.