Dan Jones (writer)

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Henry has demonstrated a reliable lesson of warfare: often as not, extortion works.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“They have heard enough about Ireland to know what they need to acquire for the journey. Ireland is going to be cold, and wet.”