Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King

By Dan Jones

Viking 2025

Dan Jones’ triumphant new biography of Henry V is an unapologetic revival of a long-established literary tradition – a boys’ adventure story, one that plainly reveres its subject. The suspenseful opening introduces us to the sixteen-year-old Henry, who has sustained what should have been a mortal wound at the battlefield of Shrewsbury in the summer of 1403. The takeaway is clear: here we have a man of destiny, whose career even a deadly arrow could not truncate. A historiographical survey of how Henry’s legacy has been considered through the ages sees Jones rivet his colours doggedly to the mast. Considering the judgement of one medievalist that Henry was ‘the greatest man who ever ruled England’, Jones responds: ‘Does Henry deserve that name? I believe he does.’

This, then, is more than a dry-a-dust life-and-times, but a full-throated revival of the Great Man theory of history. Jones even goes as far as to say that his kingship constitutes ‘a case study in the art of leadership in a time of crisis, which feels especially apposite as I write these words today.’ Readers can draw their own conclusions as to how much the experiences of a fifteenth-century English warlord can be transferred to the modern business of governing. Nevertheless, the boldness of the claim is a refreshing riposte to the modernist prejudice towards the past.

Jones is not an academic historian, but he does his best to lend the necessary rigour to what is a work of riveting popular history (and there is no shame in that). He considers the difficulties attendant on bringing out Henry’s interior life owing to the lack of the necessary source material, asking ‘How, then, do we animate Henry V?’ His solution is to narrate his life in present tense. For Jones, ‘Henry fights. He prays. He plans. He rules.’ It is a simple but effective story-telling mechanic that renders this book an effortlessly immersive reading experience. From Henry’s tumultuous childhood under the capricious King Richard II, to the moment of his father’s dramatic return from exile and deposition of the old king, to his long apprenticeship in kingship as Prince of Wales, followed by his accession and his bloody campaigns against the French (culminating in the quasi-mythological triumph at Agincourt), the reader is encouraged to follow everything as if it is happening in real time. This is the sort of living history from which a movie script could be written.

Jones retires the arrogant contemporary insistence on judging every age that came before ours and finding it wanting. Instead, he displays a welcome lack of condescension when writing about the mores and beliefs of medieval Englishmen and women. When discussing infant mortality rates in the context of Henry’s birth at Monmouth Castle in September 1386, he presents the popular myths around avoiding infection in a matter-of-fact way, one of which involves ‘drinking warm ale infused with ginger, or bloodletting.’ When discussing Henry’s controversial order to slaughter prisoners-of-war after the Battle of Agincourt, he contextualises what would today be considered a war-crime: ‘Henry is no saint. But nor does he presume to be.’ The false alarm over a second French army, supposedly on the horizon, leads him to act, ‘a commander who would rather not see his own men slaughtered like hogs’. Jones does not shy away from the ruthless side of Henry, but seeks to understand it. Cold, brutal calculations like this are littered throughout his life – from his decision to kill Welsh prisoners-of-war as a fourteen-year-old, facing off against the partisans of the rebel prince Owain Glyndwr (whilst serving as his father’s deputy in Wales), to the execution of erstwhile friends and allies such as Sir John Oldcastle and Lord Scrope.

Yet Jones’ Henry is a three-dimensional figure. He is a man of war, yet he adores books and devours works of literature and history. Whilst on campaign in France in April 1418, we are told that he claims a historical chronicle as his personal prize from the spoils of war after storming Caen. During his second campaign in the summer of 1421, Jones observes that ‘His travel library includes volumes from the royal library at Windsor’, books on hunting, religion and Arthurian legends being among them. He is also a king who revels in the performance of monarchy, learned first-hand from his grandiose cousin, the hapless King Richard, but also from his father.

Jones escapes from the shadow of Shakespeare, revealing how the ‘Prince Hal’ of Henry IV and Henry V is largely a fiction. The young Henry was diligent, dutiful and sober-minded – it was his brothers who indulged in the rabble-rousing and ribaldry that is falsely attributed to Shakespeare’s Henry. In doing so, he creates a more nuanced, but no less charismatic, portrait of England’s most iconic soldier-king.

Aaron Kyereh-Mireku is a writer and reviewer living in London.