Dan Jones
speaker
338 appearances
6 recordings
5 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Dan Jones’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Henry, Prince of Wales, becomes Henry V. And from that point on, things start to get a bit easier because, as his aging father had rightly perceived, it was absolutely vital that Prince Henry became King Henry with an orderly transition of power, with a legitimate death of one king, proclamation of his eldest son, coronation.
These political norms that had been broken by the revolution of 1399 to 1400 had to be restored and normality in politics had to be resumed. It's a feeling that many people in the world hang for today, I'm sure. But they managed to pull it off. And so from 1413 onwards, English politics starts to sort of pick up a little bit and the fortunes of the country start to revive.
Yeah, I mean, the lesson there is that politics has always been about, you know, what is the phrase we use today, controlling the narrative, even when the narrative, if you start to unpick it, is completely preposterous. What you have in the 14th century is the, you know, Richard II has been murdered. They don't say he's been murdered, he's died.
They parade, as you said, they parade his body around the place. Hey, look, he's dead. Hey, look, he's dead. Here's the dead guy, he's dead. But within months, people, they don't want to hear that. And so rumors of Richard II's survival persist for well into Henry V's reign.
I mean, decades after he's been buried once, King's Langley, the start of Henry V's reign, he has him reburied in the tomb Richard had designed for himself where he still lies today in Westminster Abbey.
um and even still years after that there's there are still these kind of whispers that actually the real richard ii was kind of spirited away that his body was swapped with somebody else's that he'll be back it's not really about richard himself it's about the desire for an alternative and if you proceed from that desire people are willing to warp their their uh like suspend their disbelief suspend their common sense suspend their understanding of how the world's
physically and biologically works, but that's politics. We don't need to dig into specific examples, but you see it generation after generation, year after year. A narrative can take hold, which is a big lie, but if people are willing to believe the big lie and act as if it were true, then it may as well be true.
Henry V's great-grandfather, Edward III, who we mentioned earlier in this conversation, had staked a claim, a dynastic claim, in the year 1337 through 1340, that he was not only the rightful king of England, but also the rightful king of France.
For whatever territorial disputes had existed before that point between English kings and French kings, no one had ever said they were the rightful king of both realms. But Edward III does. And he does it because he's descended through his mother and father from both royal lines. That claim is rebuffed and rejected. Edward III begins the war we call the Hundred Years' War.
the notional claim of the English during this war is they want the crown of France. Now, there's a big question as to whether Edward III actually believes that this is a realistic prospect.
He gets relatively close, actually, in 1360, but never takes the crown and then bargains it away for a big grant of land within what we now think is the Kingdom of France, which gives him profit, which gives him trading opportunities, advantages, which gives him control of a big stretch of the French coast and so on and so forth.
That claim, which although Edwards does bargain away in 1360, seems to persist in the minds of at least some of the English who believe that it should never have been bargained away, who believe that actually, no, you know what, it is our blood right to be kings of both realms. And Henry V certainly buys into it. He comes to the throne as a 26-year-old guy with this burning sense of injustice.
He is like, I should be the king of France as well as the king of England. That's not to say that he doesn't see there are other parts to this claim. It's not just that he thinks it's his right to have that crown and that in and of itself is a political goal.
He also sees that there are great economic advantages to having cause to make war on France, that there are great territorial concessions he can make if he goes to war with France. But I think he really does believe in a way that no one before him has wholeheartedly believed that he should be the king of France. And he's going to do anything within his power to stake that claim.
So in 1415, when he's been king for just over two years, he sets sail with a very, very big army, the biggest that had been taken out of England since his great-grandfather's day, to invade England. Normandy, so the duchy in northern France. And he invades at the mouth of the River Seine, a town called Harfleur.
And if anyone listening knows their Shakespeare, they'll be familiar with the siege of Harfleur, with cannon being deployed against the walls of this coastal town. Once more into the breach, dear friends, the great soliloquy comes from that part of the play. Henry spends a long time besieging this city and then successfully takes it. And that is a great victory.
It's the greatest victory in 1415 that the English had won against the French since 1347, sort of. 1356, let's say. But it was the greatest town they'd won since 1347 when they'd taken Calais. And it wins them this really, really useful bridgehead on the French coast. But Henry's feel, like that's not enough. And you see his psychology at the moment that he wins the siege at Arfleur.
It's late in the year 1415. It's too late to besiege any other cities. His men are very sick. There's a lot of dysentery and other diseases whipping around the camp. Lots of his friends have died of these diseases. They're running out of food. Everything says, you've won Arfleur. Secure it. Go home. Regroup. Come again. But Henry doesn't do that. He decides that he wants more.
He wants to show that he is the coming man and he should be the one to take the crown of France. So he sets off on what becomes an incredibly famous march. It's supposed to last a week. It ends up lasting several weeks. And it ends with him being hunted down by the French and forced to fight a battle.
25th of October, 1415, the Battle of Agincourt, at which he gambles effectively absolutely everything on the outcome of one afternoon's fighting.
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