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The instant Sunday Times bestseller

The UK’s bestselling medieval historian brings unforgettably to life the astonishing rise of Henry V, who survived rebellion, a near-fatal arrow wound and a lengthy and precarious princely apprenticeship to become England’s greatest warrior king.

‘A historian who writes as addictively as any page-turning novelist.’ Observer

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 a model king for his successors. Shakespeare’s version of Henry V saw his youthful folly redirected to sober statesmanship, and in the dark days of World War II, Henry’s victories in France were recounted in British propaganda. 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’.

For Dan Jones, Henry is one of the most intriguing characters in all medieval history, but one of the hardest to pin down. He was a hardened, sometimes brutal, warrior, yet he was also creative and artistic, with a bookish temperament. He was a leader who made many mistakes, who misjudged his friends and family members, yet always seemed to triumph when it mattered.

As king, he saved a shattered country from economic ruin, put down rebellions and secured England’s borders; in foreign diplomacy, he made England a serious player once more. Yet through his conquests in northern France, he sowed the seeds for three generations of calamity at home, in the form of the Wars of the Roses.

Dan Jones’s life of Henry V provides unprecedented insight into the critical first 26 years of his life before he became king. Both a standalone biography and a completion of Dan’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 from our best-selling medieval historian.

Publisher Review

Wildly gripping, swashbuckling, battle-scarred and blood-spattered, in equal parts ferocious, dynamic and political, intimate and humane, the best biography yet of England’s greatest king. * Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The World: A Family History of Humanity * The king of exciting narrative history triumphs again. A masterclass in making the medieval addictively readable. * Lucy Worsley * Yet another Dan Jones book that I wish I had written. One of England’s greatest medieval kings gets the biography he deserves from one of our greatest medieval historians. * Dan Snow * With his customary combination of profound scholarship and fine narrative verve, Dan Jones brings Henry V to life better than anyone since Shakespeare himself. Here is a much more believable king – both for good and ill – than the Bard’s rendition, one rooted in contemporary sources shrewdly analysed. Truly, a Henry for our times. * Andrew Roberts * Praise for Dan Jones:
A terrifically colourful and compelling narrative history… bustling and sizzling with life on every page * Sunday Times * A badass history writer… to put it mildly * Duff McKagan * A historian who writes as addictively as any page-turning novelist * Observer *