Henry V: The astonishing rise of England’s greatest warrior king

REVIEW BY STEPHEN ROBERTS

One of the shoutouts on the cover of Dan Jones’ new biography of Henry V is courtesy of Dan Snow, which tickled me as I know the two historians have been mistaken for one another on occasion. But this book is indisputably the work of Jones. The covers are interesting, with the back lauding Henry V as ‘England’s greatest king’ and the front qualifying that slightly as ‘England’s greatest warrior king’. These are big claims to make, and I sense the likes of Alfred the Great and Edwards I, III, and IV shifting uneasily in their graves.

Another early point of interest is that Jones has written this book in the present tense, which worked for this reviewer. I felt like a time traveller fully immersed in the events described. A book needs a punchy start, and this one gets it, as Jones flashes forward to the 1403 Battle of Shrewsbury’s aftermath and the dilemma facing one Dr John Bradmore, who must deal with an arrow’s iron head that had penetrated Henry’s face and lodged itself six inches rearward in the back wall of his skull. Bradmore must remove this without also removing England’s heir. After that, we go back to Henry’s beginning.

The copy I reviewed was an ‘uncorrected advance reading copy’, which was an interesting experience. I took it in that spirit and didn’t get hung up on typos, which were only a minor distraction in the otherwise free-flowing prose. Talking of ‘uncorrected’, I was interested in the author’s early claim that ‘lynchings’ at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 had included the Archbishop of Canterbury, although he was actually unceremoniously decapitated. This is how his head comes to adorn St Gregory’s in his birthplace of Sudbury. Maybe Jones is using ‘lynching’ as a euphemism of sorts for being done in by the mob.