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
Well, France is effectively teetering permanently at this point on the brink of civil war. Because you mentioned Charles VI, and rightly so. Charles VI, king of France in France, In the year 1392, so a long time before Henry comes to power himself, Charles VI has a very severe mental breakdown. and thereafter he is in and out of lucidity for the rest of his reign.
He's periodically completely insane, either catatonic or running around madly, thinking he's on fire, thinking he's made of glass, doesn't recognize anybody, running around his palace naked, smeared in his own feces. He's like, the guy's gone. Not great. But the trouble is he'll come in and out of these madnesses.
If the guy was just completely gone and never coming back, that's one thing you can sort of try and rule around it. But he comes in and out of madness. That's a big problem. It's a problem that England will much later suffer with Henry VI as well. I'm sure we can come to that. So Charles VI in France is teetering on the brink of insanity from 1392 onwards and factions emerge in the court
led by various of his relatives, the most important of whom is a guy called Jean Saint-Pierre, John the Fearless, Duke Burgundy, who is constantly a disruptive force in French politics, trying to pursue his own ends, trying to make himself the effective master of the French state, resisted heavily by another faction. They come to be known as the Armagnacs.
So you have this French civil war with the Burgundians, followers of John the Fearless on the one hand, and the Armagnacs on the other. And they're constantly at each other's throats. So this provides a perfect opportunity, if you like, for the English to try and insert themselves as a third party in the civil war for their own advantage.
Throughout Henry IV's reign, there's always this question of, do you side with the Burgundians? Do you side with the Armagnacs? They go back and forth. Henry V always prefers the Burgundians. He teams up with John the Fearless periodically once he becomes king. But his overriding goal is always to leverage this French civil war to get as much out of it for the English as possible.
So at all moments, he's trying to play the two sides off against one another for his own military, political, territorial advantage.
Yeah. It's not a disease of our time, although it is a disease that is particularly severe in our time, of casting moral judgments over past ages, which happen to work to a completely different standard of behavior. You mentioned Andrew Roberts. Andrew is a brilliant scholar. I like him a lot. He's a great man. and a brilliant historian.
In the book of his, I suppose, that springs to mind as you're speaking is not just his Napoleon, but his Churchill as well.
And Andrew is a great fan of Churchill and read a very favorable biography to Churchill, an excellent biography, which attracted a degree of criticism because it's fashionable now to say of Churchill, he was a warmonger, he was a racist, he was an imperialist, he was really saying, he's just a sort of mildly old-fashioned guy in his own day.
To call Henry V a warmonger is simply to say that he was a medieval king. Those medieval kings who shied away from pursuing warfare, like Richard II, were very, very, very seldom successful. Warfare was, per Clausewitz, politics pursued by other means. I mean, in fact, in the Middle Ages, it was one of the principal means of politics. Warfare was just part of the job.
You see the seal, the great seal of the kings applied to authenticate documents in this age. Well, what does it have? It has the king as judge on one side and as warrior on the other. Those are just the basic elements of the job. That doesn't mean that the purpose of kingship was just looking around for somebody to fight.
But it was inevitable in this age that you would have to be a military ruler. And that was that was like imbued through the entire class, the cast of aristocrats who, by definition, ruled the country, that chivalry was a knightly thing. code of behavior and chivalry informed the way you were supposed to behave. So these are just basic political norms.
And it is naive bordering on crazy for historians to look back and say, well, I don't know why they didn't seem to be more in tune with 21st century mores. The hardest thing for historians today to remember oftentimes is that we are the weird ones. Compared to most of human history, we are the weird ones. To have lived in a world, you know, I was born in 1981. My parents were born in 52.
So we're all post-war, the post-war generation, to have lived in this world that has been largely, not totally, obviously, but largely free of major conflicts which have ravaged Western Europe. So I'm putting aside the current Ukraine conflict and that. To have grown up in an age for four generations now where that hasn't happened is bizarre. It's historically almost totally unprecedented.
And it means that we can often be initially very baffled when we look at periods of European history where it's just war after war after war. Well, that was normal. That has been the history of certainly Western Europe. Forever. So it's like, it's not a great line to pursue Henry V on. Now, there are also, you know, you mentioned the misogyny. Oh, come on. This is just the Middle Ages.
It's baked into everything. He's a man of his time. Henry V was not necessarily the typical man of his time. He was unusually competent at warfare and unusually willing to pursue a fight if he saw one. He was unusually self-disciplined and uninterested in women, pretty much, with the exception of his wife, Catherine de Valois, whom he married for pretty much political duty.
He was unusually unapproachable to many of the people around him in terms of this sort of severe public demeanour. He was not a good time party king like his grandfather, Edward III, who combined warrior and party goer quite effectively. But he was by no means like a weird outlier in his own society. He was just sort of a particular kind of guy within the norms of the world.
had no business having the position i mean that's at least the way i when i got through the book that's kind of the thing i landed on where it's like he actually was meant to do this and succeeded well i think that he would have said the same thing himself you know the the meant to do it thing and a lot of it stems back to this moment when he is 16 years old and is almost killed at the battle of shrewsbury with that arrow in the face i think he comes out of that with um and again this very obvious parallel with modern politics american politics he comes out of that uh that brush with death
really, really convinced that he is, God wants him to succeed. God wants him to do this. And he says it explicitly at later times in his life. After the Battle of Agincourt, the Duke of Orléans has been captured, very dejected about that fact, young man.
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