Review : Henry V

Time for something a bit lighter.

Dan Jones being one of my favourite popular history writers, a signed copy of Henry V was an obvious "yes, actually I do know what I want for my birthday" item last year, which I've finally gotten around to reading. This isn't a book that needs a long discussion – if you want a detailed history of Henry V, you should bloody well read the dang book. My job, as I see it, is to extract the broader themes and tell you why they're interesting.

But first, the review bit.

Dan Jones is a master of blending the analytical with the page-turning narrative. And here he manages that rarest of things : a historical biography done right. While proceeding absolutely linearly and chronologically, he doesn't just set out what Henry did, but attempts an insight into why he did it. Foreknowledge of what happens next is never allowed to become a distraction, so the reader follows along with Henry (Jones here writes almost entirely in the present tense, a format which could easily be annoying but isn't) while being carefully guided towards Jones' conclusions. He sticks to this remit pretty strictly, not allowing it to become a wider discussion of the Hundred Years War but seeing things directly from Henry's perspective. Characters flit in and out as Henry himself encounters them : we don't get diverted onto tangents, and everything serves a narrative purpose.

Obviously, Henry's most famous achievement is the battle of Agincourt. Entire books have been written about this one incident. Personally I enjoyed Juliet Barker's book of the same name very much; her sequel Conquest is also a superb bit of military history. While Jones is the sort of person I can easily imagine running amok by gleefully describing military details of the campaigns, here he maintains a level of self-discipline worthy of Henry himself. His laser-like focus is absolutely fixed on Henry the man, not his war per se. We get plenty of detail on the tactics and logistics and battles themselves, but only when necessary, only with a purpose to providing an insight into Henry's character. The result is something absolutely gripping.

The main selling point for Henry enthusiasts is that fully half the book is given to his upbringing. Jones uses an approach which ought to be common-sense for history writers but sadly isn't : where there are gaps in the knowledge (and there are plenty), tell us how things generally went in these situations without making it sound like a definitively factual account of anything unique to Henry himself. Jones does this perfectly. Confidence in what young Henry was doing comes through very clearly but implicitly in the language used, being speculative when necessary and assertive where possible. Thus the narrative flow is unbroken; uncertainties are openly acknowledged without ever bogging it all down.

If anything, I'd have liked a bit more about the mechanics of Agincourt. Obviously this debate has rumbled on for some time, but I'd have liked Jones' own take on it. As it is, what we get is implicit : it was the longbow what won it. This ought to be obvious, so perhaps Jones is deliberately trying to avoid re-opening that rather dubious argument*. The only other (really trivial) thing I can find fault with is Jones' very surprising and un-needed dig at the The Last Duel :

* I know of at least one documentary which did some fairly extensive testing and found that the longbow efficacy just wasn't up to the standards of legend. There were any number of problems with this which I won't go into here.

... which made the 1386 battle... a ponderous meditation on the politics and ethics of twenty-first century sexual abuse.

Readers will know I loved both the book and movie so I find this slight against them to be jarring and strange. But, ultimately, forgivable : I give Jones' book a commendable 8/10. It's a solid, compelling yarn, enormously readable and intelligent, but – and this is no fault of the author – a discussion about one man can only ever teach you so much. In brief, Jones' has done about as good a job as is realistically possible here.

Things that have particularly stuck with me include Jones' favourable assessment of Henry IV. Here was an extremely accomplished general and diplomat, enormously well-travelled, who was beset by circumstance. He was given an impossible choice to either stand by his capricious, tyrannical and ineffectual monarch (Richard II – though Jones is careful to give credit where credit is due, and stops well short of painting him as unintelligent or monstrous) or to commit to the heinous crime of overthrowing the established order. Henry IV chose the latter. The problem for the medieval mindset was that this was always going to be the wrong thing to do, and from that moment on, he inevitably faced continuous uncertainty : if one king can be overthrown through force, why not another ? He was a weak king – but only because he'd been forced into a situation where there were simply no good options.

Not so for his son. Interestingly, what comes across firstly implicitly and later explicitly, is that Henry V could seek legitimacy by simply waiting for his father to die. All Henry IV had to do was not get himself murdered and die of natural causes, and nobody would much doubt the anointed prince as successor. It's a strange mindset : you're dad's a usurper, but you'll be legitimate when he's dead. Nevertheless, that's how it went.

The other really interesting thing for me was Jones' take on the Glyndwr rebellion. Most books on this paint a vivid and inspiring picture of Welsh nationalism. Jones' description is quite different, partly for his emphasis on Henry V's role in the campaign – where he cut his teeth in warfare – and partly for his assessment of the rebellion itself. The latter is often viewed as an essentially inevitable reaction to a century of English oppression following Edward I's conquest; certainly opportune, but nevertheless a deliberately nationalistic, patriotic endeavour that summons up the blood in every Welshman. 

For Jones this is heavily tempered. Glyndwr's initial squabble was over a petty border dispute, only becoming a fully-blown attempt at restoring Welsh independence as the situation changed. It did, however, evolve into a really serious threat to the Crown as Henry IV's wider situation went from bad to worse. But what we don't get much of is anything in the way of detail of the initially disastrous royal incursions into Wales, or Glyndwr's reputed (but utterly failed) counter-invasion. This is quite understandable, though, because Jones is focused not on the king but the prince.

Now I've always though of Henry V as essentially just mopping up the last remnants of the rebellion after Henry IV died, by which point the rebels were already reduced to scarcely more than bandits. Not so, says Jones – fighting the rebels was Henry V's first taste (as a young prince) of military command. Here he learned logistics* and siegecraft the hard way, suffering a rather gruesome injury (a crossbow bolt to the head) from which he barely survived. He also made many mistakes and had no small squabbles with his father. But while he came perilously close, he never went too far to apologise and recover. He took all the right lessons from his failures : financial, diplomatic, logistical, military. He had a fairly close to ideal upbringing, fraught with danger and risk, but firmly grounded in both practical and scholarly pursuits. He often learned the hard way, but learn he did – and without the Welsh rebellion, Henry V would not have become a famed military leader, let alone known as the "star of England" of Shakespearean history.

* Especially money. Henry was frequently but calculatingly theatrical, making grand gestures whenever he could spin either failure or success to his advantage. Thus he could convey the appearance of appealing to spontaneous ideology and charisma but from a well-planned position. This was a man who could both give a stirring speech to rally the troops but also prepare the treasury to deal with the enormous expenses of said inspired troops. In taking military risks, here too we see calculation at work. Henry would risk both himself and his men but only when the cost of not doing so was, for his goals, unacceptably high.

It must be said that part of his education was in learning to be absolutely cruel and ruthless. He issued his first capital sentence at age 14 by burning a heretic alive. Famously he ordered the execution of prisoners at Agincourt, but much worse than this to me was refusing to let the non-combatants escape a town under siege in his later French campaign. Jones paints a truly dire picture of this with women giving birth and dying outside the walls, their babies hoisted back into the town only to starve to death. To me this is far less justifiable than killing prisoners, a potentially deadly threat, during battle. He could have simply let the women and children go and still taken the town.

Why didn't he ? Not out of malice, says Jones, not sadism but calculation. He needed to send a message to the French that they couldn't keep their own subjects safe. He needed to be seen as cruel and dangerous so that's the mantle he assumed, just as he would whenever he ordered executions. In this, says Jones, he did no more than what the standards of the day demanded; he made, as Jones says, the system of medieval kingship work by following procedures correctly, rather than trying to reform the model of ruling itself*. And so an ideal medieval king should be kind and generous to his subjects but merciless to his enemies, and – quite rightly in my view – judging such a person by our own standards is a pretty silly thing to do :

* This will either be extremely appealing or contemptible depending on your point of view; for my part, having naturally small-c conservative tendencies, the idea of making things work without resorting to reform (and Henry was certainly no reformer !) definitely has at least some level of merit. The argument over whether a good ruler is also a good reformer is possibly the most interesting aspect, albeit largely implicit, of the whole book.

Henry's contemporaries saw in him a paragon of Christian, knightly virtue and the living embodiment of traditional kingship. They perceived – rightly – a ruler who made the systems of English government work as they were supposed to without resorting to novelty or swindling the system. They saw a defender of religious orthodoxy and a severe but consistent disciplinarian who seldom acted rashly or unpredictably and usually kept his word. They saw a master of war, who learned from his mistakes and proved, until his final illness, freakishly hard to kill.

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 cruellest and most cold-hearted kings that England has had'... His golden reputation is based on nothing more than the inconvenient fact that people at the time seemed to like that sort of thing. 

There is, famously, no accounting for taste.

The final point I'll make is a disagreement of Jones with Barker's Conquest. She concluded that while Henry was indeed a great leader (you'd have to be properly crackers to disagree with that), his ambition to take the French crown was what ultimately doomed the campaign. It was unworkable and a goal set by, if not arrogant ambition, then at least a miscalculation. For Jones, it's unclear if it really was unworkable, or if Henry would really have persisted with his same goals and strategies when France eventually rallied. But more to the point, he didn't set this objective out of hubris. He did it partly because his diplomatic negotiations failed, with the French refusing to respond to his earlier, much more modest, demands. But also in part he went for the jugular because there was no better moment to do so : France was as weak as it would ever be, as his second, blazingly successful campaign attests to. 

Had he not died, or his son been older and less of a dullard when he did, it might just have worked. What we would have got, says Jones, is something more like an Empire : two distinct kingdoms with a shared king but not a shared parliament or culture. Interesting but surely unworkable; without a cultural sense of loyalty, it would surely be all too easy for one side to decide they wanted their own king, thankyouverymuch. 

Was it unworkable though ? Jones says that Henry had a habit of succeeding in what was considered improbable or impossible... the problem with kings, of course, is you don't know who you'll get next. Indeed, just as Henry gave way to weak successor, so the French king gave way to an altogether stronger ruler. Maybe Henry V could have made a double-kingdom work for a while, but I doubt it would have been much of a permanent solution. But, I guess we'll never know.