Dan Jones - Henry V

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’.

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 Jones’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.