Dan Jones (writer)

His golden reputation is based on nothing more than the inconvenient fact that people at the time seemed to like that sort of thing.

Daniel Gwynne Jones (born 27 July 1981) is a British popular historian, novelist, television presenter, and journalist.

Quotes

Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England's Greatest Warrior King (2024)

All quotes are from the hardcover first American edition, published by Viking ISBN 978-0-593-65273-2
Italics as in the book. Bold face added for emphasis. All unlinked mentions of "Henry" refer to Henry V.

• They have heard enough about Ireland to know what they need to acquire for the journey. Ireland is going to be cold, and wet.
  • Chapter 5, “Fair Cousin” (p. 48)

• Richard has long been determined to reverse the decline of English control over Ireland. To that end, he has already visited, during the winter of 1394–95, when he took several thousand troops on a tour from Waterford to Drogheda, via Dublin. He satisfied himself on the basis of one brief visit that he now understood all Ireland’s problems.‡
  In a letter to his council on that occasion Richard explained that there were three types of Irishman: “Irish savages, Irish rebels, and the obedient English.” Solving the Irish question, he had concluded, was simply a matter of reconciling all three to his own command, hearing their promises of fidelity, then sending over the most willing of his English friends to deputize for him in his absence. For some reason this policy has failed; Richard’s return in 1399 is his attempt to reboot it.
  ‡ This remains a common English delusion.
  • Chapter 5, “Fair Cousin” (p. 49)

• Richard was the rightful king, but a fool. Henry’s father is a capable man, but a usurper. Sometimes it is hard to know which of these positions is worse.
  • Chapter 9, “His Miraculous Power” (p. 94)

• So the parliament, which represents the seventeen-year-old Prince Henry’s return to political life, is hardly a resounding success. Yet in its failures, there are lessons for Henry. One is that no war can proceed without taxation, and no taxation can be collected without a happy parliament. Another is that a king can rule successfully only when his legitimacy is beyond doubt. This, perhaps, is the most positive lesson the parliament has to offer. Although his father’s demand for an oath of obedience to Prince Henry and his brothers speaks to desperation in the moment, it holds promise for the future.
  • Chapter 9, “His Miraculous Power” (p. 96)

• Henry’s father is ill, but he is not ready to die. This is a problem for the king himself. It is an even more serious problem for everyone else. A semifunctioning king is far worse for the realm than a dead one.
  • Chapter 11, “Virtuous Prince” (p. 111)

• As he grows up, he will shed any inclination to treat his enemies leniently. Toughness and a near-total lack of sentimentality will become hallmarks of his political character.
  • Chapter 9, “His Miraculous Power” (p. 121)

• Dull, painstaking, technocratic work seldom moves bards and chroniclers in the same way as battlefield victories. Yet the great triumph of Henry’s leadership of the royal council in 1410–11 is that he realizes that nothing can proceed without it.
  • Chapter 13, “Holy Fire” (p. 142)

• Henry’s experience of rolling up his sleeves and taking charge of financial administration is a crash course in the unglamorous side of kingship. It is useful, but not always a lot of fun.
  • Chapter 13, “Holy Fire” (p. 144)

• Above everything, they have been raising huge sums of money. Henry’s career since the age of thirteen has been an applied lesson in the first principles of warmongering: it must be paid for, and it will always cost more than it should. To lose one’s grip on finance risks political crisis. What is more, to Henry’s mind, to be broke is unkingly, even shameful.
  • Chapter 20, “Fickle and Capricious Fortune” (pp. 214-215)

• It means grossly inflating the traditional fees the Crown charges to noble men and women for buying royal pardons or licenses to marry. It means threatening, flattering, cajoling, and bribing anyone who seems that they might be parted from their wealth: convincing them by whatever means possible to believe in him and share in his vision of a righteous war.
  For much of 1415, therefore, Henry is a king with a begging bowl and a menacing stare.
  • Chapter 20, “Fickle and Capricious Fortune” (p. 215)

• It is undoubtedly a grand conspiracy, but not a very clever one. And as with any complicated scheme, there are more ways for it to go wrong than right.
  • Chapter 20, “Fickle and Capricious Fortune” (p. 220)

• It is the view of Henry’s chaplain, perhaps echoing the king’s own, that no besieged people could have prepared themselves “more prudently or with greater security to themselves.” All the same, Henry may reason, in a contest between prudence and cannonballs, the advantage is typically held by the side with the biggest guns.
  • Chapter 21, “Fires of Hell” (pp. 228-229)

• Henry has demonstrated a reliable lesson of warfare: often as not, extortion works.
  • Chapter 22, “His Blessed Little Many” (p. 240)

• Sigismund has become obsessed with reconciling Christendom’s divided peoples, so that a united international army might one day be raised once more and sent to chastise the Turks. Three critical steps toward achieving this are to heal the papal schism that has wrenched Europe apart since 1378, to stop the Burgundian-Armagnac civil war, and to make peace between England and France.
  • Chapter 23, “Triumphs” (p. 263)

• The task of the delegates at the Council of Constance is to wheedle or force the resignations of all three men who currently claim to be pope: Benedict XIII in Avignon, Gregory XII in Rome, and a piratical gangster from southern Italy who rules as John XXIII from Pisa.
  • Chapter 23, “Triumphs” (p. 263)

• Henry has known John the Fearless long enough to realize that the Duke, while resourceful and on occasion useful, is not a man to be trusted.
  • Chapter 26, “This Unlusty Soldier’s Life” (p. 294)

• Broadly speaking, these have remained the two poles of historical opinion ever since. Henry was either what the Edwardian scholar C. L. Kingsford called a “typical medieval hero” or the exemplar of all that was most depressing about the Middle Ages: a time of barbarity dressed up as chivalry, during which of the private ambitions of warlords were cloaked in the humbug of religion and used as the pretext to shed the blood of thousands, for the gain of a town here and a castle there, both of which might well be lost again the following year.
  • Epilogue: “Virtue Conquers All” (p. 358)

• Thus it is possible that Henry can be judged as hero and monster on the basis of the same evidence. To the influential and generally level-headed medievalist K. B. McFarlane, Henry V was the “greatest man that ever ruled England.” Yet in the view of a more recent historian, Henry was “a deeply flawed individual,” a misogynist, a religious fundamentalist, a reckless spender of other people’s money, and a second-rate military commander. In this view, Henry was “one of the cruelest and most cold hearted kings that England has had,” breathtakingly arrogant, autocratic, heedless of the needs of those who served in his armies. His golden reputation is based on nothing more than the inconvenient fact that people at the time seemed to like that sort of thing.
  • Epilogue: “Virtue Conquers All” (p. 358)

• By our standards, Henry was a cruel zealot, quick to judge and fight, frigid and stiff-necked, impatient, exacting, unforgiving, largely sexless, and mostly humorless. Seen from the perspective of an age that positively embraces vulnerability, Henry can be a hard character to like, or even to admire. Our values are not his. His are not ours. We do not need to pretend otherwise.
  • Epilogue: “Virtue Conquers All” (p. 359)

• History, however, is not a congeniality contest. How we rate Henry for likability today is of little consequence. What matters is what he did in his own time, how he optimized for the standards of his own age, and what the consequences were of his relatively short life and reign.
  This is a more straightforward assessment to make. In his day, the weight of opinion was that Henry was somewhere close to the paragon of kingship, measured both by his personal bearing and by his political and military achievements.
  • Epilogue: “Virtue Conquers All” (p. 359)