#852 - Dan Jones - The Untold Story Of England’s Greatest King
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Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dan Jones. He's a historian, author, and a podcaster. Though many English kings throughout history have left a lasting impact, Henry V is considered potentially the greatest ever, even though he only ruled for nine years. So what made him such an important figure, and why has his legacy endured for over 600 years?

Expect to learn why King Henry V made such an impact on history, how he rose to power and what he managed to accomplish during his reign, why he was so impressive as a leader, what happened to his legacy in the 600 years since he died, why he became so controversial recently, and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dan Jones. ♪♪♪

Why write a book about Henry V? Why is he sufficiently important for you to spend several thousand words talking about him? Well, in a sense, it's what I do. I mean, I write mostly medieval history books. And so there's a personal element to it, which is like...

unfinished business. So early in my career, I wrote a book called The Plantagenets and that was like a dynastic history of the great English medieval dynasty that started in the 1150s with Henry II, founder of the dynasty, and worked up to Richard II who was deposed in 1399. Then I wrote another book about the Wars of the Roses which took the last half of the dynasty and that started in 1420, marriage of Henry V and Catherine de Valois, and it went up to the early Tudor period.

So that left a little slice of 21 years, mostly covering Henry V's life. So filling that gap, that Henry V-shaped hole, was sort of important in completing a run of books, not quite a trilogy, but a triptych in my mind.

earth or canon if you will um but there's i think there's a more important point than that with regards to the subject himself henry v was considered in his day and thereafter for hundreds of years to be the acme the paradigm the um the the the goat of medieval history like a british aurelius kind of yes or a little bit like alexander the great

just considered the best who ever did it, you know, who really understood every side of kingship and performed it.

and his name became a byword for great kingship. So I think that biographical studies tend to be very interesting if they're about somebody who's the best at doing something or the worst at doing something, and Henry's the best. So if you're a medievalist, this is a landscape you've got to approach at some point. But the biggest reason probably to write it now is that Henry's life can be read, even if you're not interested in medieval history, which I accept...

There are a few people in the world still left who aren't. It can be read as a great case study of leadership in a time of crisis.

Because he comes to power when you've got a realm that's like politically partisan, fractious, divided, two kind of camps at each other's throats. You've got sort of the lingering after effects of a pandemic. You've got a kind of period of at least regional, possibly global climate change. You've got a real sense of...

hopelessness around politics in particular, and failed foreign policy as well, but a hopeless sense around politics in particular that feels like it's intractable, that it's unsolvable. And yet along comes one guy, seemingly almost out of nowhere, who through the force of personality, charisma, competence, diligence,

probity, moral example, drags his realm from the doldrums to the peak of triumph. And I think that's something, that's an attractive idea today. In some ways, that's like

everybody's kind of fantasy today, whether you're in the United States, whether you're in Europe, whatever, outside probably the tyrannous autocracies of the world, that is the kind of thing everyone's looking for at the moment. So although Henry V is not an analogy for American politics directly, it's not a parable, his story does speak to themes that I think are really in the air, in the world at the moment.

Given the fact that he only ruled for nine years, how did he manage to make such an impact? Is it just the legacy and the fact that he was doing it the best that ever did? Well, there's...

In some ways, having a short time in power with a lot concentrated into it, and then in his case, you know, checking out very early. I mean, he dies, and it's not too much of a spoiler. They all die. But he dies, you know, at age 35, just after his greatest triumph, which is effectively, as an English king, conquering France. And so he packs a lot into a short time, and he doesn't live long.

long enough for the decay to set in on his watch. So that's kind of an important part of his legacy. But how is he able to achieve so much?

A couple of reasons. Firstly, and I think most importantly, he has a long apprenticeship and a very busy apprenticeship and a dramatic apprenticeship so that when he comes to power, age 26, he's at the peak of his sort of physical prowess, mental acuity. He's experienced in almost every facet and aspect of doing the job he's about to do, which in this case is kingship.

And that apprenticeship serves him very well. So he hits the ground running. He doesn't have to learn on the job. He's just ready to go. And he's also lucky. You know, that's the old Napoleon thing. Give me lucky generals. He is lucky. Shakespeare says in his play, Henry V, the chorus comes on in the epilogue.

And to explain what's just happened and says, fortune made his sword. And that's at least a double meaning. It was improbable that he was ever going to be king, and yet he was. It was fated. He was made by fortune. But he was also fortunate in the modern sense. He was lucky. He got lucky a number of times. Lucky not to die a number of times. Lucky to win the critical battles. And in his world, that was interpreted as being favored by God. Blessed. Yeah, blessed. There you go.

Why was he so unlikely to become king? Well, he was born as the eldest son of the eldest son of the Duke of Lancaster. Now, in that time, the Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt, was the most powerful, richest, best-known, and arguably hated character in the kingdom, apart from the king. So he was, you know...

uncle of the king, a super powerful, mighty noble who had a claim to the crown of Castile, but not to England. The king at the time was Richard II and it was expected that he would at some point have children and they would inherit the crown. So young Henry V, when he's born on the 16th of September 1386 at 11.22 in the morning, an astrologer later tells us, is born

ultimately probably to inherit, he's born to inherit the greatest power

noble landholding in the realm. He's not going to be the king, but he's going to be a very important political figure. So he has a noble upbringing, a noble education, but it's not preparation for being king. He only becomes king because in 1399, a great quarrel arises between his father, Henry Bolingbroke, and the king of the day, Richard II. It comes to blows, to cut a long story short, and Bolingbroke deposes Richard II, imprisons him,

starves him to death, takes the crown for himself. And at that point, young Henry, Henry V to be, is 12, 13 years old. So his life changes dramatically from the sort of preparation one day to become a great lord. He's now a heartbeat away from wielding supreme power. That was a problem for his father though, that he was sort of forever mired with the title of usurper. Yeah, so in

Middle Ages, you know, the office of king is, well, it's anointed. And that means then as now,

The king, at his coronation, is anointed with holy oil. That's more important than the crown going on the head. That's a sign, you know, you're anointed on the shoulders, on the chest, on the head with holy oil, which puts you in a different realm from every other human being. You are in communion with God in a different way, and your power is God-given. And it's not for man, human, then to undo the anointing. It can't be washed off.

So to depose an anointed king... And then starve. And then starve him to death. You have to do that, really. Or you have to kill him in some way, and history shows that throughout the Middle Ages, once you get rid of a king, you can't keep him around.

But to depose them is not only a political act, it's in some ways a religious, a divine act. It's to tear a sort of, tear a great hole in the fabric of the universe. And Henry IV, having done that in 1399, look, in 1399, Richard II has proven himself repeatedly to be completely incapable of kingship, to mislead.

to misunderstand the office entirely and to be incorrigible and unwilling to change his ways. There is no political case for keeping this guy as king. However, there is a sort of, it's not even a moral case, it's a sort of spiritual case for, but you're not supposed to get rid of these people. So Henry IV, having done the right thing politically, then has to labour, firstly under the political consequences of the usurpation in that he's in hock

All his reign, which runs from 1399 through 1413, so for 14 years, he has to constantly make allowances to the people who put him in power. You know, the kingmakers, literally, the powers behind the thrones.

He's sort of beholden to weird social debt things going on. Yeah, and financial debt. You know, the people who were his Lancastrian retainers, so people who were paid by him to be on his side as a great lord, need to keep being paid or they're not going to support him. And so, yeah, he's beholden to them.

But I think even more than that, he just wears the burden of sin on him as he sees it. And he's trapped by the moral repercussions of what he's done. And he becomes, I don't know, it's ludicrous.

linear and direct that he's guilty therefore he becomes ill but he can't he has you know increasing numbers of serious health problems which are incredibly debilitating to him and by the end of his life he he writes of himself as a sinful wretch and he's sort of he's tortured by the idea of having done the wrong thing yet when he hands over the crown to his son henry v

Henry V doesn't have to deal with any of that because he's been handed the crown fair and square by his father. And the stain of usurpation, the stain of illegitimacy doesn't pass down the generations. What is the...

What's the first impressive thing that Henry V does as a part of his royal apprenticeship post-12? What's a pretty big incident for him? Well, he's sent into... So his father becomes king, and then he sends... Henry IV, who has four sons and two daughters, sends the eldest three sons to difficult regions of the British Isles to learn their craft. Because one of them, depending on how they survive to adulthood, if they survive to adulthood, is going to be king. So...

John is sent up to the Scottish borders, Thomas is sent to Ireland, and Henry the eldest is sent to Wales, where this enormous rebellion has broken out, led by a guy called Owen Glynder. Owen Glynder wants to kick the English out of Wales, a common theme even today in Wales. And he leads this massive rebellion which tears the principality to bits.

All tax revenues dry up. English-held castles are taken by Welsh rebels. English officials are either murdered or driven out of the country. It's chaos. Foreign soldiers are invited in. So young Henry, at the age of 14, is sent into Wales with minders, right? But to learn his craft, because the job of medieval king is like 50% warlord, to learn his craft on the ground.

And he does. And there's a great letter that he writes when he's 15. So he's only been there a year, a year and a half, something like that. He writes back to his father to let him know how things are going. And you just get this real sense for a boy enjoying himself. And the letter's written in French, which is the normal language of aristocratic discourse, even in England in that day. And it's, to paraphrase, dear dad.

All going jolly well in Wales. This Englander you told me so much about, he keeps putting it about that he wants to fight me. So I went to give him a fight, but he wasn't where he said he was going to be. So I went round his house and he wasn't in. So I burned it down. And then I went round his other house, but he wasn't there either. Wow, you're really enjoying this. He wasn't there either. But one of his mates was, oh, please don't kill me. I'll give you my money. So I cut his head off.

We're now, we're still having fun, but we are quite short of money. Please send money. Praise be to God. Lots of love, Henry. That's like, there's not much of an exaggeration of the letter. And just sort of brims with this, like, just a joy of what he's doing. He's like, it's a physical, aggressive, determined kid who's trying to tell his dad that he's doing the job properly. And he wants both money and he wants...

respect and praise so he gets it pretty early on and then a year after that comes I mean I think the central test of his entire life

And in some ways, the pivot, the formative moment in his life, if you believe that lives work like that and turn on individual moments. Some do, some don't, probably. But Henry's comes at the first battle he ever fights at Shrewsbury in 1403, when he's very nearly killed. He gets an arrow shot from a longbow in the face. And it's a miracle. I mean, I don't think that's the right word to use. It's a miracle that he survives. How many inches into his head? Well, so he's commanding the rearguard in the battle.

And at some point, we don't quite know how or why, probably because he's thirsty, hot, disoriented, removes the helmet or lifts the visor. Because it's a full face. Full face thing. And this is a battle where you have, you know, thousands of longbowmen, archers on both sides.

and an arrow goes either that side or that side. It's not, it's not totally clear, but it goes into his face and the arrowhead buries itself in his skull to the depth of six inches. As the surgeons notes, what the surgeon who operated on him called John Bradmore. He later notes in his, uh, his account of the, of the operation. That's,

That's bad. That's really bad. You know, you've got one ounce that Henry or someone else pulls at the shaft of the arrow and the shaft, which is designed to come away easily from the arrowhead so that the arrowhead gets lodged in you and you get blood poisoning. Ideally, um, that goes, but the, you've got, you still got a one ounce slump of metal lodged inside his skull. So it's, it's said he fights on. I mean, adrenaline is a powerful thing. We know that. Um,

But at the end of the battle, which his father wins, he's taken off to Kenilworth Castle, which is the Lancastrian dynasty, his family's headquarters in the English Midlands, and they summon the doctors. And it's a bit of a head-scratcher. I mean, literally. What do you do? They've got to get this out. And only one surgeon, I think, has the skill and the nerve to perform this operation, and it's this guy John Bradmore.

one of his father's retained preferred surgeons. He's carried out really impressive operations for any day, really, particularly the Middle Ages. He saved the life of a carpenter who slipped with a chisel and opened an artery. Bradmore's cauterized the artery, saved his life.

um brad moore has operated on henry ford's master of pavilions who's attempted suicide by running into a wall with a dagger in his guts serious operation you know you say you know not to give someone blood poisoning when you're operating on their intestines and it's the 15th century um brad moore has done blepioplasty plastic surgery we call it now eyelid bag surgery he's got some ointment to um

To fix scarring. So he's got the tools and he's got the know-how and he's got a steady hand. But as he says in his notes, he says he's worried. You know, there's lots of things that can go wrong in this operation. What would have happened if he'd not saved him? Would there have been repercussions for not having saved the king's eldest son? Probably not because the chances I think everybody would have recognized were... This is a headshot. Yeah, it's vanishingly slim chance of survival. It's like effective zero chance.

But Bradmore carries out this operation, and the operation is technically difficult. They have to open, you can't push the arrowhead out the other side as you would if it was in the leg or the arm. So they have to push, they have to take the arrowhead out of the entry wound. So that means opening up the wound in Henry's face by degrees, putting little sort of cloth plugs into it and making it bigger and bigger, keeping it clean with known antiseptics, honey and wine based mainly. Then using a tool that Bradmore's had designed specifically for the purpose, which is

designed to sort of, excuse me, and then using a tool that Bradmore's designed for the purpose, which fits into the arrowhead, like locks onto it, and then he can pull it out, and then sewing the wound up whilst keeping it clean, whilst keeping Henry's kind of neck and head warm, trying to calm, trying to stop him going into spasm. And that's like a big operation, and it takes 30 days. So for 30 days, this 16-year-old prince has to lie there hovering between life and death,

presumably in immense pain, presumably quite scared, presumably quite bored. And at any moment his life could end and yet it doesn't. And I think that the fact he survives the initial wound, the fact that he survives the operation, the fact that he has a very long time to lie there contemplating this. And we can only be speculative about this from his judging, reading his later actions. I should stress there's no secret diary of Henry V where he talks about this. But I think it's not an

A wild supposition. I think it's a fair Hypothesis to say that this this does something to him to his personality he but he seems to believe Really from this moment on and certainly once it becomes King that he has been saved for a reason that He has God has kept him on earth because God wants him to do something and

That is a powerful, motivating force, not only for the individual, but for others around. I mean, if you think about modern American politics, improbably surviving an assassination attempt via headshot... Galvanizing. Yeah, it'll get people going. Yeah.

And I think, you know, obviously in the Middle Ages, we're not talking about a kind of mass media world as we are now. And you don't have the same kind of memed images. The legend can grow in different ways. Yeah, right. It can. And I think that it can certainly, it certainly seems to me that when you look at Henry V, you know, the greatest medieval king...

as an adult, acting with this extraordinary focus, certainty, determination, and then explicitly saying to people when he succeeded, I am just God's vessel. After his famous Battle of Agincourt, which is dramatized by Shakespeare so memorably.

And one of the high-ranking French prisoners who were taken by the English, by Henry's men on that day, is the Duke of Orléans. And Henry sort of puts his arm around him after the battle and says, look, mate, you know, it's nothing personal. It's just because you, the French, are decadent. And God, and you know, you're sinful. And God wants to punish you. And I'm just God's...

His conduit. Yeah. So like, come on, it's not between you and me. This is this, God just works through me. It's that kind of mentality that, um, although, you know, not, not totally outlandish in the, in the day, given the middle ages is probably closest in modern terms to like, I want to say modern Saudi Arabia, but yeah, maybe I mean modern Saudi Arabia in terms of the way that religion permeates every, everything in, in politics. Yeah.

Um, that's, it's still quite punchy from Henry, right? And, and, and I think that, you know, you can, in, in the book, in, in my telling of Henry V story, I think we can, we can root a lot of that in his experience as a 16 year old.

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This has happened so shortly after he was just going to be some rich nobleman bloke that the raw materials must have been there already. I don't know whether from the age of 12 to the age of 16 you can develop the constitution to lie with an arrow in your face for 30 days. No, I think, and look, in history, it was very unfashionable in history for a long time, or it has been unfashionable in history for a long time, to think in terms of, quote-unquote, the great man theory, you know, that history is a succession of

mainly men, powerful epoch-shaping individuals whose vagaries of whose personalities are at root the causes for historical change. That's been considered old-fashioned nonsense for a long time. But I think maybe too much of that has been thrown out in the way that we think about the world.

And I think it would be wise to always try and take into account when you look at historical events, not only the sort of structural shaping forces, the technological change that moves and guides the world, but the randomness of individuals. And look, we're living in an age right now that speaks to that.

How can you understand world politics at the moment without factoring in the specific upbringing and personalities of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Bibi Netanyahu, and so on and so on, and MBS? You can't. And it would be facile and futile to try and explain the events of the early 21st century without considering the

the personalities involved. Is there not a case as well, especially as we look further back in history and the power is concentrated so much, it's so unevenly distributed, especially when you've got somebody who's blessed. This is the monarch, they're literally the conduit for the Lord. It seems silly to...

deny that the sort of conceptual inertia that would be generated by that sort of a person, the legend, the downstream implications to culture, to the stories, to the songs, to the naming of the pubs, to the, you know, so on and so forth. You know, I've heard about the sort of great man theory being pushed

push back against. And I can see why it would be horribly unpopular because there is this in an egalitarian meritocracy where everybody's supposed to be able to make whatever they want of themselves to admit that the world was maybe shaped by mostly men in the past, especially men who had desire for conquer and mastery and war and whatnot. I can see why that would be unpopular. But so

Many people are galvanized by individual whether it's Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift or Ronaldo or you know Either there are individuals that synthesize this together and when the world is smaller because it's not globalized and power is more centralized also it seems

absolute bro history here, but just like using my theory of mind and what I know about human nature, that would be, it would carry for generations. You know, the one time that your grandfather saw Henry go past in his carriage, that kind of thing to me seems like it would be, and he looked him in the eye and that was a blessed moment. And that's why you are called, you know, Harold or whatever the fuck. Yeah. Well, it,

There are two things going on that we need to separate out, aren't there? The first question is, is the world really shaped by individuals? Like, is that how things work? And then there's the question of, do we as human beings best understand

world through the stories of individuals and I think the second question is much easier to answer than the first second question the answer is just yes and if you think back to if you look at this whole tradition of historical storytelling back to Homer if you consider Homer a historian but it's certainly the

or indeed a single individual but the Iliad the Odyssey the stories of the Trojan War even earlier than that there's a Greek mythology that sought to explain the kind of the the the the

the geographical, topographical, meteorological makeup of the world, all of that tends to be humanized, anthropomorphized, told through... The personification. Personification is the way we understand history. And so obviously when we talk about historical change, we tend to gravitate towards what can become the great man theory of history. Right.

It becomes oversimplified or problematic when you think that history is only shaped by the personalities of individuals. And to return to the sort of modern analogy, it would be equally facile and fatuous to try and understand the 21st century only in terms of the personalities of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and so forth. You would have to say, well, we lived through a technological revolution as...

as epoch shifting, as dramatic, as radical as the industrial revolution or the agricultural revolution. So it's about the interplay between the two things. Is there a role to be played here that you can explain what's happening technologically during the period that you're studying here and the wider parentheses? What

Given the fact that it seems to be relatively flat, or at least if it's moving up, it's moving up linearly as opposed to exponentially, does that mean that there's more stasis in the environment that people find themselves in? You can more easily compare age to age, leader to leader, and also that the biggest differentiators between periods fall to the humans and their actions as opposed to some unlock that occurs...

I don't know. Things always look different depending what lens you've got on the camera, right? And if you narrow – so I've just written this book about Henry V in which the parameters of the story run roughly 1386 through 1422. That's a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of even human history which occupies a tiny, tiny sliver of the world's history, right?

So with that lens on the macro lens on the camera, of course, the personalities become massively more important when you're analyzing history. But if we were to put the sort of the big wide lens on the camera and look at...

Well, the last book you and I talked about was when I wrote Powers and Thrones, and that was a book that covered more than a thousand years. And when you do that, then you look less at individuals and more at great shaping forces, climate being the obvious example. If you look at the Middle Ages in the context of all recorded human history...

then the onset of the Little Ice Age, an adjustment of a degree or two in temperatures, regional temperatures around the West, becomes way more important than the personality of Henry V because Henry V's personality in the Hundred Years' War between England and France just becomes then an example of sort of more generalized turbulence

in military and political terms that you trace to geography, essentially. What's the impact of the Little Ice Age? What does it make happen?

Well, one argument would be that the Little Ice Age changes crop yields. It makes agriculture more difficult. It's just less conducive for easy human habitation of particularly colder climates like northwest Europe. And that's – well, let's take the English case –

that you have the combination of the Little Ice Age and then the Black Death pandemic, and you find that there's massive population decrease. You know, the population of England drops from about 6 million down to roughly 2 million across the course of the 14th century and doesn't recover until the Industrial Revolution.

And that's partly because lots of people just die in the Black Death, 50 to 60, maybe even 70% in some areas of people die of that disease.

And it's also because it makes, you know, if you buy into the little ice age theory, it makes living on marginal land more difficult. It means that, you know, basically the country you live in is less productive. You can't squeeze as much out of it. And when you're a close to subsistence economy, that's a bad... Margin for error isn't already there. Right, yeah. You know, you can't squeeze as much product out of the land you live in. Right.

That's the theory, but there's a million holes in the theory as well. And these are just, but of course there are, because whenever you deal with big history, history over long time, I mean, what's been one of the most phenomenally successful history books of the last 10, 15 years? It's Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens series and so on.

very attractive book to big popular audiences, tens of millions of copies sold across the world. I should, uh, I should add for, um, uh, for the record that this is a medieval historian, uh, by training who's, uh, who's out there selling all these books. So, you know, go the middle ages. Um, but,

as is, I think, the backlash against Yuval Noah Harari has somewhat started within the historical profession, maybe motivated a little bit out of envy, but certain, you know, people picking holes in big history. Because big history is easy to pick holes in when you're sort of painting in broad brushstrokes. You want it, this doesn't apply there and that doesn't apply there. It depends, like I say, writing history is so often about framing and about...

I like this idea of the lens and what are your parameters for looking at this? What kind of story are we looking to tell? So, Henry rising to power. Oh yes, Henry V. Yes. That guy. How does he become king? He becomes king because he inherits the crown from his father, but he has a difficult ride through his father's reign.

We left him at 16 years old, having nearly died on the battlefield of Shrewsbury. For the next 10 years, once he's recovered, he goes back to Wales and by degrees the rebellion of Owen Glynder is put down. But it's hard and it's a hands-on training in the arts of war and of kingship. He has to learn how to besiege castles. How does that bloke die, the Welsh? Glynder? Glynder.

It's the most frustrating story. It does not conform to Hollywood shape. He just sort of drifts away and disappears. And then one day there's a record that says, I think he's dead. It's a story with no satisfying end. What a shame. But Henry, so he has to learn on the job in Wales, effectively, how to besiege castles, how to deploy cannon, right ratios between men-at-arms and archers when you're in the field.

How to go back to an English parliament and beg for more money when the people in the parliament don't think you've spent the last lot of money properly. How to shift money around your own accounts to try and pay for this stuff out of your own pocket. How to convince people to stay in the field fighting when they haven't been paid for the last six weeks, eight weeks. A lot of persuasion and finance. Persuasion and finance, the boring stuff. But no war has ever been possible without...

without that boring stuff, logistics, the money. So he has a good long training in that.

Then his father's health starts to collapse, a series of skin complaints, probably circulatory conditions, a series of strokes, and he becomes increasingly debilitated. And Prince Henry, future Henry V, starts to move more and more to the centre of power. He starts to effectively operate as regent, president of the royal council. He's immersing himself in foreign policy, the policy particularly to

with regards to France, which is collapsing into civil war between two factions called the Burgundians and the Armagnacs, deciding English policy, whose side do we go in on? Do we go in on a side at all? How do we get the best advantage for our realm out of their problems? He's got to deal with the whole problems of heresy, loladi, as it's called in those days. What's loladi? Loladi is, to be a lolad is an insulting term at the time.

pejorative, but Lollard's basically followed the teachings of a radical Oxford theologian called John Wycliffe. Wycliffe had come up with some ideas that Martin Luther would come up with again, if you like, in the 16th century.

The thing, you know, the sacraments weren't based in, you know, marriage, baptism and Eucharist and so forth. Not all of them are based in scripture that the church has far too much wealth and is basically corrupt that there should be a sort of big program of wealth redistribution by stripping wealth from the church and putting it into the secular into the state, that sort of thing.

It is both heretical and usually by implication seditious as well because there are – as well as it being a sort of deviation from orthodox, by which I mean Catholic Christianity, it is also bound up with rebellions against the state.

So Henry's got all of these issues which he's learning to do as his father's deputy in effect. And he gets to the point when his father's really decrepit and old, actually not that old, but really decrepit and his health is badly failing, where Henry and some of his closest allies on the royal council go to the king and say, we think you should abdicate and the coming man should step up.

it's not dissimilar from a let's drop Biden kind of move. And in this case, Biden refuses. But in this case, that's not a terrible idea. Henry IV refuses despite his growing decrepitude, the physical pain of doing his job.

the burden of both political difficulties and moral guilt that he carries around everywhere with him, Henry IV refuses to abdicate. Because I think he knows that if he does that, he's going to land his son and heir, Henry, with all the same problems that he's suffered throughout his reign. Is abdication seen as usurping by the incumbent?

It's not quite, and in fact, usually when a king is deposed in the Middle Ages, which isn't very often up until this point, it only happened once before, that was with Edward II, depositions are framed as voluntary abdications, that the king relinquishes the crown rather than has it taken off him. In the case of Edward II and Richard II, that's just a political fiction. What Henry V proposes to his dad, Henry IV...

is a voluntary abdication. Just hand it over. Hand me the crown and let me get on with it and you can go and sort of go to the retirement home for... But I guess when you've got this...

existing heritage of people who didn't want to leave being forced out, this sort of poisons the well of, well, he did want to leave and he does want to hand it over to me. Well, how do we know? It just muddies the waters and it's going to leave. I think Henry IV just figures this is going to leave his son

With a question mark. Henry IV has a question mark hanging over his head his whole life. Which you think has potentially contributed to his poor health, to his sense of sort of existential malaise. Certainly the sense of existential malaise, yeah. And we don't know about the poor health, but it doesn't seem unlikely that you would probably know better than I do, but that somebody living with enormous levels of sort of stress and constant anxiety is probably going to feed into your physical health at some point. Yeah.

Henry IV, I increasingly think a selfless way is like, no, I'm going to remain in office until I die. Hide this out. Yeah, and I'm going to suffer this because it's the only way for you, son, to take over legitimately. But he really slaps future Henry V down. He really slaps him down. Gives him such a telling off. And then he strips him of all power.

Completely ostracizes him from any involvement in government whatsoever, reverses some of his key policies, particularly with regards to France, and makes it look like he's actually promoting his second son, Thomas, in the succession. Let's Henry believe that he's on the verge of being pushed out of line for the throne. It's that level of, I'm going to have to teach you a lesson. Why do you think he does that? Teach him a lesson. He's got to learn. What's the lesson he wants him to learn?

That it's not as simple as he thinks. This is an incredible blunder to ask his father to abdicate the throne. And this is no small thing he's asked that is just a favor refused. That this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what's about what he's in line for, kingship. And he has to learn this extremely hard lesson. And...

It looks like Henry IV was a pretty impressive person as well with good foresight. Yeah, very impressive person. And if you look over the course of his entire life, again, like Henry V, if you only concentrate on these people's reigns, they look very different than if you blow out the story to examine their whole lives. Henry IV, as Henry Bolingbroke, had been

one of the most glamorous well-liked sort of chivalrous dashing adventurous guys of his generation he went to go and slash Richard the second up well he'd starve him to death that's where he ends up in rebellion but before that in happier times when Henry the fifth to

to be is a small child. His father is off, you know, fighting jousts with Boussico, the great French knight of the day. I mean, the most famous knight in Europe, a guy who could do backflips in full armor and jump onto his horse from a standing start. No way. Yeah, I knew you'd like Boussico. He's gone to fight against the pagans of the Baltic with the Teutonic Knights on Crusade. Is this just, you know, the...

implication of king to be warrior as well or or uh military not just competent military strategist but to have skill with weapon in hand to have earned their stripes in this sort of a way is that something that was expected of the king given that he was supposed to be adorned by god i suppose also an assumption would be protected by god and therefore uh

But you're throwing out the most important person onto the fucking field of battle, wielding a stick or a sharp thing. You know, is that, this was par for the course, earn your stripes, show us that you're lead from the front type thing? The great seal, which is the sort of the authenticating device,

for all government documents in this time, shows the king. It's two-sided and it prints on a disc of wax, two images. The one side shows the king as judge or scepter, sits in judgment over his people. He is the fount of justice, of the law, of order. And on the other side, he's on horseback with a sword in his hand.

Those are the two parts of the job. The job is, in that sense, simple. Not easy, but it's simple. You are the source of law and you are the defender of the realm. And it's a hangover by the late 14th, 15th century for that to involve the king as commander-in-chief, literally fighting from the front. Not all kings do it. Edward III, a great sort of quote-unquote warrior king, tends to hang back in a sort of Napoleon role, you know,

on high ground surveying and strategizing and directing.

Henry V likes to lead from the front, you know? In the thick of it, narrow in the face. Yeah, and he is prepared to put himself in harm's way and does so at Shrewsbury, does so at Agincourt, does so whenever, you know, his style of leadership is demonstrative. And so even when there's not a, he never fights two battles, so mostly it's siege craft. When he's directing a siege every morning,

He will be doing the rounds, sort of patting people on the back, micromanaging where the cannons are.

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Can you explain, let's say that you're Henry V and you're sieging, pick anywhere of choice, what's his daily routine look like and what are they trying to achieve with the siege? What are the sort of tactics that are being used? So typically the object of the siege is to force the people in the place you're besieging to give it up. And that could be a castle, a town or a fortified town, so a combination of castle and town.

And you're going to make them give it up by one of a few ways. Either you will scare them into giving it up, make them feel hopeless. There's no, you know, and under the laws of siegecraft, you ask people to, let's say we're besieging Austin, Texas. You want to besiege Austin? I don't myself want to besiege Austin, Texas, but let's just say it. Okay, fine. Right. So we surround...

The target. And then you go to the leaders of the target. Joe Rogan. Yes, you go to Rogan and say, Rogan, you're under siege, brother. And are you going to give up? Or are we going to have to make you give up? And is this emissary to emissary? Is this shouting it over the wall? Yeah, yeah, emissary to emissary. We're going to make you give it up.

Are you going to say yes or no? If you say yes and give it up, that's fine. It will be theoretically a peaceable transfer of property and you can negotiate terms. If you say no, I'm not giving it up, then it has to be taken by force. And if the besieging army do succeed in breaking into the city, then they are within their rights under the laws of war to massacre everybody, enslave everybody.

rape, burn everything down, plunder the whole place. What about if you surrender after you said no? You can probably negotiate those terms, but you're in a much worse negotiating position. Big decision at the very beginning. Yeah. So what normally decided is Rogan will say, okay, it's a qualified no. No, I'm not going to give up right away.

But if, so I need an ally of Rogan. Jocko, is Jocko based here? He can be. Well, he needs to be based not here. He's not based here. Okay, so Rogan will say, I'm not going to give up straight away, but if within the next 40 days Jocko doesn't come and drive you all away from your besieging positions and relieve the city, then I'll give up.

That's the deal. So then you have this sort of structured 40 days, like, you know, well, okay, this match is going to last for 40 days. And now it's kind of a game, right? The besieging army's got 40 days to attempt it. The defenders have 40 days to try and hold out. And Jocko's got 40 days to come and save Rogan.

Okay. This is actually turning into like quite a compelling drama. Yeah. And a believable one as well. Maybe we have a reality TV show on our hands. Mm-hmm.

So then you've got your besieged place. Let's say it's a castle. Seems like it's easiest to do it as a castle. This is Austin Castle. Joe's at the top. And what are you doing? What are you throwing at him? Well, Henry typically takes over a building, so a city,

Or a castle. But let's say a fortified city will typically have an enclosed centre walled bit with a fortified bit with a garrison defending it. Suburbs on the outside, and those suburbs might include some sort of fine buildings, monasteries or fancy houses or whatnot. Presumably they're fucked. Everyone runs away and maybe burns it down so that the besieging army can't use it. But Henry would typically take over a nice...

the nicest house in the suburbs or on high ground in the strategically useful position and direct things from there. So we'll be living within a degree of sort of splendor and luxury. But then every day we'll sort of toddle down from his palace to do a round of the positions to go see the people operating the cannon because we're now in the 15th century when there are cannon used to, cannon used in siege.

Sieges, the archers, the people who are just sort of standing around making sure no one gets in or out of the gates to bring food or weapons into the city. Yeah, it's going around making sure everyone's morale stays high. Hats on the head. Hats on the head, slaps on the arse.

You know, come on, boys, we got this. What's going wrong? Who's not happy? Who is happy? Who needs to be sort of switched out? Who's ill? Do we have, you know, what are our supplies? Very hands on. Very hands on. Very hands on. And that's part of his, you know, Shakespeare picks up on this with this idea of him as, you know, as a kind of man of the people, right?

He has him touring kind of incognito around the other soldiers on the eve of battle and moving amongst them. And that's drawn from history. Henry was sort of in and around his people and he was good. I mean, he was not like fun.

you know but he's i think he was a pretty chill dude no no chill really i mean he liked music and he was a talented musician loved to read um had sort of calming hobbies if you like

But and not possessed of like a manic energy, but it's kind of laser focus and probably even more terrifying that way than someone that's got a bit of a parasympathetic routine. Yeah, but then turns it on the next day and goes from dirt to clouds and high-level stuff ground floor stuff. Yeah, you can hear Henry's voice because he's the first English King routinely to write back from the front line to his people back in England in English.

And that's a sort of propaganda move. It's a deliberate sort of... It's a galvanizing kind of tactic. It's trying to get the word out of what's happening that everybody can understand. But because he dictates those letters, you can hear his voice. And early 15th century English is pretty similar to modern English when it's written down. It would have sounded different spoken, different vowel sounds and so on, but still. So you hear him, and he's got a really distinct voice. And it's...

It's nagging. It's imperative. It's like, do this. There's no sort of frills. It's do this. Do it now. Why haven't you done it? You know, it's always... It's unwavering. Yeah. And see that you fail not thereof. He's always used... That's his sort of standard formula. It sounds very wordy to us, but it's see that you fail not thereof. Don't fuck this up. Don't fuck this up. And he's a real micromanager. There's this point at which...

He's, you know, he's besieged town after town, ground his way through Normandy. You know, imagine the Allies going through Normandy in 1944. It's, you know, all the way through heading towards Paris. And he's at this negotiating point where it looks like he's going to get the French, the mad French King Charles VI to disinherit his only surviving son and make Henry the heir and regent of the crown of France. That's the end goal of this war.

It's within touching distance. And Henry writes this letter back to the keeper of Pontefract Castle, where now Charles Duke of Orléans is being kept, one of the most high-ranking prisoners from Agincourt, and someone who has an alternative claim to the French crown, so potentially a rival. Well, he's one of Henry's prisoners. He's writing sort of drippy poetry in Pontefract Castle at this point. But Henry, from hundreds of miles away,

is writing back to England telling them to make sure that this guy is...

kept under lock and key but it's not just that he's like Mike he's saying make sure he's locked up double the guard like he's going to try and tell you this that and the other don't you have any of that you make sure that you don't listen to his sort of fine words and you keep him under lock and key because if you don't do this I'm going to be seriously pissed off he's like it's not just the here's an instruction it's a list of step by step if

If you screw this up, you cannot say you didn't know what to do because I actually told you step by step what to do. Is that a great leadership style? Some people would, I think, rankle under that degree of micromanagement, but it seems to work for him. Effective. Effective. What's he doing romantically? Nothing, which is bizarre. Henry is, well, the French spy says that, more like a monk than a king. Yeah.

So the Prince Howell character, Shakespeare's vision of him as a young man, as a prince, is of a sort of the womanizing drunkard. Lothario. Lothario, wastrel, gets up at midday, goes back to bed as soon as possible, or so on and so forth. That's mostly confected. There are little hints in some sources here and there which alludes to Henry being inflamed as much with the fires of Venus as of Mars as a young man.

He likes war, he likes girls. But there's vanishingly little, bar these sort of quite oblique allusions here and there. He doesn't have many notches on his bedpost. And when he becomes king, he's apparently completely chaste. Now, put that into the context of sort of medieval kings in general, and you had Henry I who fathered 22 illegitimate children, Henry II, you know, keeping sort of endless numbers of concubines,

drawn rather immorally and disgustingly from girls who are wards of his court. In fact, in Henry II's case, none of that. None of that with Henry V. He has his heart set on getting married to the youngest daughter of the French king, Charles VI. That's Catherine de Valois, who he does in fact marry in 1420.

And he won't touch anyone else until he's got her. As soon as they marry, she's pregnant within months and bears his son and heir who becomes Henry VI in time. But Henry is... It's all... Business. It's all business. To an almost pathological degree, you could say. Or you could look at the guy and say this is...

it's just extraordinary for somebody to have that level of, he has an amazing level of clarity about what he wants to do and an exceptional ability to execute on it without distraction, without deviation, without sort of surrendering to his appetites and, uh, and losing focus. Uh, it's an unusual combination. What I'm finding interesting is, and again, as a historical ignoramus, uh,

There is a meme, there is a caricature of the sort of cheese and wine dealing with their gout king. Yeah. You know, very opulent, very sort of sitting by ordering the people around, being entertained, drinking the mead and, you know, maybe they went to war before a little bit, but they don't want to, they're lazy. And

It seems like given all of those opportunities, power at a pretty young age, I'm going to guess 26 is probably pretty young. Pretty old. Well, you're in the slot at 26. It's exactly the right age. You've got on the one hand kings like Richard II who becomes king at 10 years old.

Bad, bad idea. Do not make it. That's like the Justin Bieber, Macaulay Culkin approach. Yes. Right. Yes. That's a very good example. Richard II is crowned in 1377 after decades of drift and political decline under his grandfather, Edward III, who he succeeds.

And he's crowned and he's brought to Parliament and he's told, you are the Messiah, basically. You are the sort of solution to all our problems. Great thing to tell a 10-year-old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's political rhetoric, but how does a 10-year-old differentiate between political rhetoric and absolutely everybody who's anybody telling him he's the best thing since sliced bread? And it becomes a big psychological problem for Richard II. He never really gets that idea out of his head. So you don't really want your king to be nine years old.

Henry, yeah, 26, sort of relatively old to become king, but not too old, if that makes sense. I mean, he's not Charles III becoming king in his 70s, you know what I mean, after...

No, that really is Biden. Okay, Agincourt. Agincourt. The famous Agincourt. The big one. This is, you know, who was that gig that Oasis did? Nebworth. This is Nebworth for Oasis, right? Crowning glory until they come back and sell expensive tickets. Well, sort of, except that it's one of the first things he does. So it's like if Oasis' kind of second gig was Nebworth. It's a big mistake.

It's a huge blunder. Agincourt should never, ever have been fought. It was ridiculous. And it's, again, this word miraculous that they won. But they won because they had to win. What's the story? Why were they in Agincourt? Henry becomes king in 1413.

And the thing he's fixated on straight away is going to France, making the most of conditions that may never present themselves again, where the French king is mad, the country's riven with factionalism, you've got the Burgundians, the Armagnacs at each other's throats. There's never been a better time to pursue what has for generations been the high goal of English foreign policy, which is to take the crown of France and conquer back large swathes of lands that had been English in the past.

So he wants to strike, you know, strike hard, strike first, no mercy or whatever they say in Cobra Kai. He goes and he's crowned in 1413. 1415, he takes this huge army by sea across the English Channel to the coast of Normandy to besiege the town of Halfleur, which is on the south side of the mouth of the River Seine.

And they besiege it for a few months and reduce the city. You know, they take the city. Joe Rogan gives up, if you like. Jocko doesn't come. And then Henry has a decision to make. It's getting quite late in the year, in the campaigning season. You know, you don't want to be fighting sieges over the winter because you're sitting outside in the open air and the weather's bad and you're starving. No, thank you. So it's getting into October time. So there's not time to go and besiege another city.

He doesn't have enough men to do so anyway. They've been dying in droves of camp disease from living in unsanitary conditions in the siege. He needs to leave some men in Hafla to defend it in case the French Jocko comes and tries to take it back. But he feels like he needs one more win. He's...

He's taken a lot of money and basically pushed all of his political capital that he has as a virtue of becoming king into this one campaign. And he just seems to feel like he needs one more thing.

So sometimes argued he wants a battle to win, but I'm not sure that's absolutely accurate. His army's in no state, fit state to fight a battle as becomes evident. So he takes eight days worth of provisions and says, anyone who's fit to march, basically march with me. We're going to the only other English town held on the French side of the channel, which is Calais, which had been seized by Edward III and the Black Prince in 1347. It's an English sort of militarized enclave. So Henry's like, we're going to run.

almost literally run from Wafle to Calais. Is that basically him saying to the French, look at us, look at how strong we are, you can't stop us, you French fucks. Yeah, basically. What are you going to do? And it's to show the people of France their king is inadequate. No, no, no, no, can't touch me. So running down the street, knocking on everyone's door, flicking the Vs as they come out, come on, and then like jump in your mate's car. Have a go if you're Ardner. In your mate's car and off you go and leaving everyone like fuming behind you.

And he always go for the first sort of few days it goes fine and then they hit the geographical the inconvenient geographical fact that to to make that journey from half-blood to Calais you got across quite a few rivers and one of them is really big it's called the river Somme and There are bridges across it, but the French start breaking all the bridges. They there had been a forwarding place called the Blanche tack and

where Edward III had once crossed it during the crazy campaign of the 1340s. But that's been sort of mined, it's been made impassable or no one knows where it is. It's not quite sure. One of those two things. So the French start breaking the bridges and Henry gets like driven away from Calais. He's going up river along the Somme looking for somewhere to cross and they keep breaking the bridges. And meanwhile, the French in Paris have got their shit together and raised an army.

And they're coming towards Henry to cut him off. So Henry's army is getting increasingly tired. They're living rough. They're starving. Well, not starving, but they're on the edge of starving. Do you know how many there are at this stage? The numbers are just a constant course of minor disagreement between historians. But something like 8,000 maybe, something like that. And the French at Agincourt have significantly more, maybe double, maybe more than double.

So they head the English off and eventually they do manage to cross the Somme and then they start heading back towards Calais, but they're cut off by the French army and it becomes obvious they're going to have to fight. There's going to have to be a showdown. There's no mystery about what either side is going to do. The English have, it's like a soccer match, right? You've got a football match, you've got...

Barcelona are going to play like tiki-taka, little sort of short passes, pressing game. And, I don't know, Stoke City in the old days are going to play hoof it, long ball, and just hack them in midfield. It's like that. Both sides have their tactics. The English are going to use the longbowmen to create a sort of funnel and then try and goad the French cavalry. The French are going to use the heavy cavalry to try and break up the positions of longbowmen.

The English are going to try and funnel the French into a killing zone in the middle of their archers where they can just shoot arrows and cause absolute panic and chaos. Henry tells his archers, you know, when it's clear that battle is likely and perhaps inevitable, each to prepare for themselves a six-foot pole sharpened at both ends that they can drive into the ground in front of them when it comes to battle so that any horses charging at them will either die

or shy away, refuse, or be gored on these poles. So that's a basic line of defence against French cavalry charge. But the French have a weight of numbers, their army's fresh, they feel that they know what the English are going to do and that that's going to help. They've watched the game tape. Yes, exactly. So it becomes like a sporting match. Both sides have a game plan. Who can execute? Who wants it more? And who wants it more? The English. And the English have got...

Henry V in charge. And that's not just, oh, it's Henry V. He's in charge. He's in charge. There's no question. The French have about five different people who all think they're in charge and some who don't turn up. And it's just poor leadership. And the king isn't there because the king's sort of mad.

The Dauphin's not there because they don't want to risk him being captured. So there's... That bloke's in the castle writing crap poetry. Right. No, so he's at Agincourt. He gets put in the castle writing crap poetry because he's captured at Agincourt. Right. Um...

So you've got divided leadership on the one hand, and you've got tight, united, determined leadership, and a sense that if we lose, we all die. And if Henry doesn't die, then his reign may well be over after two years when he goes home. What would have happened had the British have lost there? If Henry, if the English had lost, the English and I suppose a small Welsh contingent had lost...

Well, there'd been a big rebellion on, sorry, there'd been a big plot against the crown on the eve of departure for Agincourt, known as the Southampton plot, in which a sort of, like a confection, a concoction, an agglomeration of all the dank memes of Henry IV's reign, like Owen Glendur, the Earl of March, who lots of people saw as being the rightful heir to the throne. Richard II isn't really dead, he's going to come back.

John Oldcastle, Henry's mate, who's a heretic who'd been imprisoned in the Tower of London and then escaped. They're all going to get together in a sort of, you know, what's the opposite of the Avengers? Right, okay, like Suicide Squad. Suicide Squad are going to come together and they're going to knock Henry off. So that had been on the eve of departure for what became the Agincourt campaign. Had Henry gone back...

having lost the Battle of Agincourt. And then probably he would have found Havelaar undefendable because the French would have... The tail would have been up. They would have gone to Havelaar and taken it back. He'd have... His credibility would have been shot to pieces. All the benefits of having... Yes, you inherited the crown legitimately would have been kind of as nothing. Yeah, so he's legitimate, but he's useless. And you'd have had...

almost instantly a rebellion, I would have thought. Okay. He wins. But he wins. And he goes back and instead, and there's like, and he wins against, apparently against the odds.

It's not apparently. He wins against the odds. And he wins in dramatic fashion. And they take tons of prisoners. And it's a bloody, brutal battle. He's not far from being killed in the battlefield because he fights in the thick of it. He has an axe swung at his head and Dents takes off one of the fleurons of his crown. Several of his allies over the course of the Arfleur campaign and Agincourt battle, key noble allies are killed or die of disease.

There's big cost to it, but he comes back victorious. And there's a sort of triumph through the streets of London to celebrate this miraculous victory that's the equivalent of a sort of Olympic opening ceremony in modern terms. You know, there's unbridled joy and Henry sits in the middle of it, somber, dressed in dark clothing.

All thanks are to God. They, you know, not to me. They only come through me to God. And he'll allow his people to celebrate, but he's incredibly clear. This is not about me. This is, you know, this is because I'm God's instrument. He's a man of intense seriousness. Intensity and seriousness. Yeah. Intense seriousness. He is that. That's what he is. He's a serious man.

Even his sort of, his, you know, touchy-feely interests, if you like, are serious. The harp and the reading. He likes music. He likes to write music, play music. He likes to read. He likes wrestling. He likes to watch wrestling, you know. He's a kind of MMA, jujitsu guy. But like, there's not a big hint. He really is Jocko, isn't he? He's quite Jocko. Very Jocko. He's quite Jocko. I mean, apart from the haircut, because of course there's the famous pudding bowl haircut. Why does he have that?

You do see other images of other people with similar tattoos from this time. This is like the haircut of the day. It's a bit like if you look at the Beatles in the 50s, right? I mean, it wasn't only the Beatles that had that haircut.

But they became associated, just you've mentioned Oasis already, the feathered Mancunian horror show that is still fought by some veterans of that age, I meant to say, including the Gallagher brothers themselves. It was sort of a time and they weren't the only ones to have it, but...

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most impressive? What were the real advantages that his constitution, his personality was made up of? And then where were his biggest flaws or weaknesses? We've sort of, we've touched on a lot of the advantages already. There is this, this ability to, to drill down as Tony Blair saying to the issues, to identify what needs to be done, what an issue, what the issue actually is.

there's a sort of an acute political sensitivity. So to give you an example, when he comes to the throne, the first thing he does is not announce the war. It's to go to the English Midlands and take the entire apparatus and machinery of English judicial system, the courts, as well as the parliament, to the Midlands where there's serious rioting, serious disorder, and to hammer that. Then to hold a parliament and invite people to criticise him.

Invite people to bring their grievances. Come tell me what's wrong and I will, if I can, address it. And if I can't tell you why I can't address it. It's listening first. He's a great listener. He's a great consulter. He's great at taking criticism on board without viewing it as personal and becoming irate, angry, aggressive or otherwise.

And he's very strong at stating what he's going to do and then doing it. You know, his clarity and simplicity of objective and then execution. Tells you he's going to do it and he does it. And that's, although he is also extremely harsh, he's a disciplinarian. He is unsentimental to the point of being quite scary. You know, his friends, at least twice,

His friends Henry Lord Scroop, who on the eve of the Agincourt campaign learns of the Southampton plot against Henry and doesn't reveal it in time. Henry has him executed. Chops is one of his good friends head off for disloyalty. There's no special pleading because you're a friend of the king. Same is true of John Oldcastle, the model for Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry.

He's a Lollard heretic. When Henry becomes king, Oldcastle refuses to abjure his heresy. He just sort of carries on flaunting it, thinking he's going to rely on his friendship with the king to make that okay. And Henry does not protect him. Friend or no friend, ally or no ally. He will be brought before the appropriate court's

whatever. An old castle is sentenced to burn to death as a heretic and escapes from the Tower of London and turns into a sort of, you know, an arch-rebel for the rest of his life. When old castles run to ground, there's no sympathy because he was a friend of the king. He burned and hanged at the same time. Burned and hanged at the same time. Lollard gallows. What's that mean? It means you're strung up, you're hanged in chains.

And the neck? Yeah. Right. And you're burned at the same time. Rope around the neck and, you know, you're chained to the gallows, rope around the neck, and there's a fire lit under you. This is special? This is a special... Special treatment. Right. It's symbolic. Is that hung, drawn, and corded? Is that still happening? There's still some of that going about, yeah. What's that for? Is that worse? That seems worse. Depends how much you like being burned. Well, yes, neither of them are good.

But they are both very symbolic. So being killed on a Lollard gallows, burned and hanged, it's not just like, how painful can we make this? The idea is the fire is for your heresy and the hanging is for your treachery because Oldcastle had been leading rebellions against the crown. And you will suffer the penalties of both crimes. Hanging, drawing, quartering is the same thing. It's just, you know...

The hanging is for being a thief. The drawing on the hurdle is for something else. The beheading is for this. The cutting your bollocks off and throwing them in the fire is for the other. Each component of this has a sort of visual meaning. And in this age of semi-literacy, by which I mean not all the population are literate and no media, no mass media,

The presentation of things, the optics. Symbolism wins. Yes, it's always symbolism. French seem more clinical with the guillotine. That's much later, though. Is it? Yeah, that's French Revolution. That's 18th century. Oh, what were they doing? Much the same thing. I mean, it's probably more barbaric and in some ways less symbolic in France. There's a lot of flaying seems to go on in France. I mean, that's cutting all your skin off while you're still alive.

Cutting all your skin off. How do you do that? Like a special sharp knife? Imagine peeling a banana, only the banana is a human being. Okay. Yes, a sharp knife. You're butchered. And you're strapped down, laid down, standing? You're sort of held still, yeah. I mean, strapped to...

Cross type thing. Yeah. Okay, and then like potato a big potato peeler. Yeah. Yeah, not nice. I mean so the Philip the fourth Philip the fair of France being the 14th century does a lot of nasty Executions there are a couple of guys who are accused of having affairs with the wives of Philip's sons Okay, so the princes wives cop off with a couple of nights and they're caught they're flayed in public and

During Henry V's time, the Count of Armagnac is... These two factions, Burgundians and Armagnacs, are permanently at each other's throats. The Count of Armagnac is killed and it's said...

and this isn't totally unbelievable, that he is flayed and then goose feathers are stuck to these bloodied kind of muscles. And then the blood dries and then they're pulled out one by one. Okay, that just seems like insulting. Seems like a lot of effort to go to when you've already flayed the guy. I think that might not be completely true. There are a lot of testicle stuff involved.

Cutting them off? Well, yeah, I mean... Yeah, the castration is typically a part of hanging, drawing, quartering. Right. You get those chopped off for...

If there's been a sort of sexual component to your deviance. Oh, right. So there's levels of hanging, drawing, and quartering. You can kind of get different. Yeah. It's like, you know, you go to the car wash and you can have the sort of bronze, the silver, or the gold. It's like, how much do you want, like, the sort of blackened rims and the tire treatment, or you just want a quick sort of jet wash? And the bronze is, as described, hanging. You're tied to a hurdle and dragged by a horse through the streets. Yeah.

That's the drawing, hanging, sort of strung up to almost dead, and then your head's chopped off and your body's chopped into quarters and sent to the four corners of the realm. But as I say, you can add in, between the hanging and the beheading and the quartering, you can add in a bit of castration, a bit of disembowelment. These are optional extras you pay more for. Right, okay. Yeah, like a McFlurry at the end. Yeah, right. Right, okay.

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The next four years are taken up with the conquest of Normandy. By 1420, his victories have added up and the French are in such dire straits that he forces on the Treaty of Troyes, by which he replaces the Dauphin as the heir to the realm. So the minute Charles VI dies, Henry will become king of France as well as of England. Has he got this bird yet?

I think you're referring to Catherine de Valois. That bird. That bird, yes. He marries her after the Treaty of Troyes, and that's part of its...

It's part of the agreement. Good deal. Great deal. And they get a big dowry as well. So the whole thing works out very well. We're in 1420. Henry goes back to England to raise some more money to keep fighting because now the Dauphin is not dead, but he is disinherited and he's not happy about it. So they've got to deal with the Dauphin, stamp out that, you know, what effectively becomes a French civil war. Henry's fighting, raises money in England for that.

occasioned by much grumbling, because people don't want to pay for a French civil war, understandably, leaves his brother Thomas in charge while he goes back to raise the money, and Thomas gets himself killed. You asked about Henry's weaknesses as a leader, and I didn't answer you properly. Henry's weaknesses as a leader are, I think it's very hard to keep up with him, and he doesn't optimise particularly well.

sensitively for the fact that not everybody else is Henry V. So he leaves his brother Thomas in charge, and second of the four brothers. And Thomas kind of internally goaded, I think, by the fact he missed Agincourt because he was ill. He's never sort of played a big role in a battle as his brother has, tries to have his moment and charges French and Scottish troops at Beaujolais and is killed.

Henry has to come back to France and I think then is also confronted with another of his sort of the problems of his style of leadership, which is it's not really easy to deputize for this guy. Like he's really critical to the whole operation. It's the sort of, it's the Tesla worry of how do we cope if we don't have Elon Musk, do you know what I mean?

So that's a problem for him. Curse of competence. Curse of competence. There you go. So he's back in France and he carries on siege craft and grinding away in this French Civil War. And then he dies of dysentery. Like that. In France. In France. Have you seen the film No Country for Old Men? No. Then you won't get this reference. But for most of No Country for Old Men, it looks like, I think it's Josh Brolin,

Well, it doesn't look like he is the main character. And then about two thirds of the way through, he just sort of dies and the film carries on for another third. And it's like, wait, what? And it's just like really sudden and there's no big fanfare about it. That's the kind of Henry V story. It's like it's missing an act. He's just triumphed. It's like, what's he going to do next? How does he finish this off? But he just catches dysentery and very quickly dies at the age of 35 at the peak of his powers.

And it's shocking, absolutely shocking to his people. I mean, on the French side as well as the English side. I mean, his body is taken back from Bois de Vincennes where he dies to England for burial in Westminster. And it's taken back slowly through Normandy by stages. And everywhere, these massive outpourings of grief and shock that this great conqueror who looked like an English Alexander has been cut down in his prime. And no one really knows what's going to happen next. Is there turmoil because of that?

There's surprisingly little turmoil, in fact. And that, I think, is something you have to factor in. The great criticism of Henry V is that by virtue, you know, the curse of competence that you've mentioned, he goes so far that it's very difficult for everyone who comes after him to deal with his legacy. But he leaves as his heir, a child of less than one year in age, Henry VI.

But he is surrounded by veterans of Henry's reign and people who fought alongside him, principally Henry's brothers, John Duke of Bedford and Humphrey Duke of Gloucester. And what happens is John Duke of Bedford takes over in France, managing the... Charles VI, the French king, dies six weeks after Henry, so the English-French kingdom becomes a reality. Henry's brother John stays in France and manages that very effectively for...

seven years at least until Joan of Arc comes along and then until 1435, really, when John dies, he's got command of this. In England, things, you know, the long-standing veterans of Henry's reign, Humphrey of Gloucester, Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, they kind of hold the thing together.

But 30 years after Henry's death, everything comes crashing down in France. I mean, by degrees, the English possessions in France are reconquered by the French. This puts incredible pressure on the English government. Henry VI, the young boy, grows up to be an idiot.

completely sort of poor guy. He grows up as King from one year old and the whole experience is overwhelming, confusing and horrible to him. And he is a sort of timid pacifist. Couldn't get more different from... He's more interested in sort of architecture. I mean, he's responsible for Eton College Chapel, King's College Cambridge. He's a beautiful masterpiece of late Gothic architecture. But he ain't no soldier and he never...

he never knows his father. He never has it. Just as Henry V has such an in-depth apprenticeship, Henry VI has no apprenticeship or whatever. The opposite is what happens there. How does...

How does Henry V set us up for the War of the Roses? Well, because Henry VI's reign is such a disaster, by 1453, all the English possessions in France, and not just those Henry had conquered, but everything they ever had except for Calais, all goes. Castillon, 1453, the last of Gascony, the area around Bordeaux in the southwest is lost, which had been in English hands for hundreds of years.

And the backlash at home in England is horrible. And you have this split into the factions, which are now known as the Houses of Lancaster and York. And you just have this... The Civil War breaks out. And it racks England for 30 years until Richard III loses the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. And arguably, even after that, the problems don't go away until Henry VIII reigns. So...

The question is, where do you root all that? You could root it in 1399 with the removal of Richard II, that tear in the fabric of the universe I've described. That would be the Shakespeare structure across the eight English history plays. Original sin here, redemption, paid for in blood at the other end of the story. You could root it, as lots of people do if they don't like Henry V, in Henry overextending, putting too much pressure on England by having the weight of the burden of the

kingdom of france i think the biggest problem is that henry dies when he dies because it leaves his son 17 years away from becoming an adult and what that means is nobody until henry the sixth becomes an adult can renegotiate the terms of henry the fifth's triumph and victory they can't unpick the treaty he made because they're not the king only the king can do that and the king can't do it till he's an adult legally so you have 17 years in which everyone has to just try and

stick, you know, freeze time and just hold what's been held. That doesn't go very well. And it goes terribly. If Henry V had lived even another five years, my feeling is he would probably have settled matters with the Dauphin, brought the war to an end. His mind was on bigger things. His mind was on Jerusalem, on crusading. In his last campaign, he was taking a stack of books to read, which included histories of the First Crusade,

He had a fellow out in the eastern Mediterranean actually mapping Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Israel as we call them now, the Holy Lands.

The papal schism had been settled in 1417. That was a situation where you had three rival popes all claiming to be the pope. That had been settled at the Council of Constance and you only now had one. So Christendom was to an extent united. It was politically expedient for Henry to settle the English-French war and then they could have all have gone off under his leadership to Jerusalem to fight a crusade. That I think was the missing third act and that's what he would have done had he lived.

In the course of that, he would have had to renegotiate the Treaty of Troyes. I don't doubt that he would have done that. He was too aggressive, the first one. He disinherited the Dauphin, but left the Dauphin alive. So you had France partitioned basically along the Loire. So you had the Kingdom of Bourges in the south, and then you had the English Anglo-Burgundian Kingdom in the north. It's not a sustainable situation. So there would have had to be a permanent settlement.

what that looked like, who knows, but Henry would have been able, would have had the authority to do it. The trouble is once he dies so abruptly, nobody has the authority to, to fix things on the English side. So they just, they didn't kind of, um, survival mode rather than creative mode. Isn't it an interesting comment on the like melancholy mundanity of life and

that you have this guy with such a heroic story that dies by himself, uh, just out of nowhere while he's, you know, in the middle of everything. And I, it's a really sort of nice stock reminder that the personification, the stories, the symbolism, all of the stuff that we said, that's how people think that's how they like to come up with. Yeah. So they explained the way that things occur, uh, much of the time, even with the ones that are

blessed from above. They don't get the fanfare ending. No, and the way that that's sort of rationalized in the very oldest stories is the caprice of fate, the caprice of God, call it what you will. Lady Fortuna did not bless them. Yeah, or the Wheel of Fortune, things sort of go up and then come down. You just don't know what's going to happen, right? And that's, it's always salutary.

As a writer, it makes, I found writing this- Severely unsatisfying ending. Well, it's a great challenge. I mean, I'm a nonfiction writer. I love story architecture, story shape, and I try and write history with my mind somewhat on how to package this story whilst remaining historically credible, accurate, researched, noted, all the rest of it.

compelling, compelling to a reading audience that is probably most used to... compelling to a reading audience that's probably most used to sort of Hollywood shapes. And Henry V reigns a challenge in that sense because it doesn't have a neat third act. Hero's journey gets chopped off at sort of seven o'clock. Why has he become controversial recently? Well, there's... One of the most common criticisms you'll hear about Henry these days is

He said he was cruel, he was cold, he was barbaric, he was brutal. Particularly at the Battle of Agincourt, where he ordered the killing of French prisoners. Which, in battlefield terms, was a perfectly reasoned and perhaps even reasonable decision to take in the Battle of Agincourt. The English had appeared to win, they'd taken lots of prisoners, but then it looked like the French were coming back. People who'd fled the battlefield were returning. People were turning up late, that there was going to be a second war.

bit of the battle and there were French everywhere among the English. You can't just tell them to go and stand over there somewhere and wait for this next bit to happen or go back to where you started, we're going to do some more battling. Henry gives an order in the moment that is kill them all, kill them all. French could easily have done the same thing. They'd taken the Oriflamme, the sort of sacred battle banner that was kept at Saint-Denis which was said to have been Charlemagne's which was in fact dated from the reign of Louis VI.

in the late Middle Ages. But once the Oriflamme was taken from Saint-Denis, it meant no quarter given on the battlefield, no prisoners, kill them all. And once so, kill them all on the English side, not unreasonable. The people who were pissed off about it were the ordinary English archers who thought they'd got life-changing paydays because once they'd taken these high-ranking French prisoners, they could be sold for huge ransoms.

Once they're dead, they ain't worth anything. So a lot of the English refused to do it, and Henry had to send around a hit squad to kill these... Oh, those unscrupulous guys that'll go and chop their heads off. Yeah. Someone's got to do this to kill them. Kill them now. You've got to kill them now. So...

Now, I am in no sense in favor of mass slaughter. I probably don't need to say that. But if you put yourself into the mind world of the early 15th century and the specific situation of Agincourt, there's no other choice. He had to do it.

But he is criticised today for that action and for, you know, the criticisms are value judgements about his character. Cold, brutal, sometimes called misogynist. Yeah. Yeah, I know. So look, but this is not a problem that's specific or unique to Henry V studies or even medieval studies. This is a broader trend in history at the moment.

which is the historian's job is not a find out what happened, be tell story. The historians sort of lots of historians today optimize for go around history as if you're a sort of time traveling policeman berating history for not matching up to 21st century pieties or exercise in borrowed guilt hand wringing.

judging the actions of yesterday by the values of today. Or this sort of masochistic apology culture of, let's look at the world. There was a book published a few years ago called, I think, 52 Times Britain Was a Bellend. The most British book title ever. Written by a Brit. Yeah, and I think partly comic, but definitely...

100% summing up in that title the sort of

factuous kind of uh sixth form common room approach to history which is let's let's be outraged and let's assume that outrage and kind of you know borrow the either borrow guilt or like parade us it's interesting about who it's on behalf of especially if it's your people that they did it against yes well there's there's two forms i mean there's like my people were hard done by form um

And then there's, hmm, my people weren't hard done by, but I'd like to pursue my trade within this intellectual milieu. So why don't I become a warrior on the behalf of the downtrodden in general or this specific group? I'd never finished Sapiens.

And I opened it up on my audible on a plane and I realized why I'd bailed out of a particular chapter that I'd been deep in. And it was talking about the unfair gender inequality that was sort of replete.

through humanity's heritage. Yes. Talking about how women, they didn't get to do as much big game hunting and they didn't get to do X, Y, and Z. And it's really interesting because there was recently a study that came out about 18 months ago, two years ago, that said, tried to repeal the women didn't do as much big game hunting as men hypothesis. And upon further inspection,

There was a lot of very unethical behavior done. The way that big game hunting was labeled, that if it happened once, it was the equivalent of that being done. It didn't matter. There was no difference between a man doing it a thousand times and a woman doing it once. That big game was repurposed in many different ways so that it could...

pretty much mean anything. Anyway, so I came up with the, you've heard of the soft bigotry of low expectations. This is the soft bigotry of male expectations. Right. That anything that a man does is seen as being inherently superior, more preferable. And by being

either not attributing that action to a woman or by saying that women can't do that thing, you are somehow derogating them, that that is them being downtrodden, which implicit, the thing that women do is less valuable than men is an incredibly misogynist perspective take. What is it about child rearing and gathering and berries which inherently makes it less important than what it seems like misogyny

my reading of the evidence, big game hunting was net negative for energy. Like calorically, it was net negative. Right, better to hunt and gather. Fucking great to portray around, look at the trophy. It's like a social exercise more than it was a culinary exercise. And that you would actually be much better off trying to get

and fucking rabbits and squirrels and whatever the hell else it is that they ate, you know, like little bits and pieces. So all of that together is just to say that I opened up this book to a point that I'd evidently bailed out of previously where there was a lot of

sort of Hararian hand-wringing about this thing. And it makes me feel, I don't know, I get that everybody's entitled to an opinion. If you're the guy that's written this book about all of this stuff, then why not tell us what you think about them? But then there's another bit of me that likes historians to be a bit more like scientists and to say,

this is what happened in a compelling way. And based on the best evidence, this is what we think was going on without having to then make the value. And of course that wasn't it. And of course that was, it's like, if you explain to me the fact that Henry V slaughtered 4,000 Frenchmen because he was worried that more Frenchmen were going to come,

You don't need to tell me that, and of course that was a bad thing to do. Yes, and the question is then, who are you as writer signaling to by that statement? By attacking on the value judgment, particularly the value judgment which is that this was sort of terrible and this brings shame on our nation today and we should apologize for it. You can go further and further down. Reparations to the French. Yeah, right, exactly, yeah.

It's internal tribe signaling, isn't it? It's saying to the people who you're trying to impress that you are hip to their set of... Performative empathy. There you go. You've got a phrase for everything, but I think that's a good one. The...

But you see it everywhere, don't you? All professions, once they build a hierarchy, once they build institutions, once they build jobs to strive for or to maintain, whether those are jobs within a university or whether those are just positions within a publishing industry or whatever it might be, people start just optimizing and writing for...

that tribe, that group. The purity spiral gets ever more pure, right? But what's this feel like for you as someone who, although you might not look it, bit of an old hand, when it comes to history, 20, 25 years or so, you've been publishing stuff that's around this. What is that

Like you know we talked a good bit over the last few years you seem to be a pretty straight shooting sort of Sort of boat bloke both in front of the scenes and behind the scenes. Yeah, is that um is that something that you're having to keep your eye on a little bit this sort of change the shifting requirement to Morally condemn or not underfoot or are they just people not bothered about you cuz you got tattoos. I don't Care that much

I don't not care at all because I think that would be pretty weird not to give any fucks at all about anybody. And that's a pretty lonely existence. But I definitely don't feel like the thing I need to do most when I write or, you know, do my podcast or whatever is, oh, I must like make sure that I'm sort of staying true to the values of this particular group.

I'm interested in doing things lots of different ways. So with books, it's my readers. It's readers. Our readers are going to dig this story. That's all I really care about.

I don't have a really hard, nailed-down, fixed political ideology. I think you'd probably agree that once you become an ideologue, you probably sacrifice your intellectual rigor and your independence and your intelligence to a degree. So I've done all sorts of things which people have looked at sort of as political sort of

choices in my work you know i write on the one hand i've written lots of quite traditional and you might even call them small c conservative historical works about royalty and about battles and and you know such like um but i produced a executive produced a drama about amberlynn where she's played by jodie turner smith who's black

And I've worked on a series of books with the brilliant artist Marina Amaral, which, you know, the first one's called The Color of Time, then The World of Flame. And we did one, it was called A Woman's World, which is the history of, these were colorized photographs from like 1850 through 1950. And we decided to tell the story just through women's stories. And that could look like a sort of,

you know, Wokey Boohoo, Snowflakey, whatever, you know, all the terms are. I was just interested in that story. Just interested in that story. And when we did the Anne Boleyn show, I just thought that was a kind of cool, interesting way to tell that story. I wasn't like...

I've got this great political agenda I want to pursue. I was like, this is cool. Brimming with sort of left-leaning requirement to tell everybody how virtuous you are, or on the other side, this sort of hatred of the present to try and glorify the past. Yeah, this is something increasingly that I'm noticing, despite what both sides of the internet seem to...

I don't actually really care that much about politics. I find them interesting from a human nature perspective. I find it fascinating to see how they're warping to people and the way that they see the world and the way that they relate to others. But I realized that

one of the most guaranteed ways to achieve a lot of distaste for your work is to actually align with each side at different times. Because I think

The world is becoming increasingly tribal and what that means is that everybody is looking for just reliable allies. It's the term that comes to me. So the more obscure or ridiculous the belief that you have to hold on to is, the more we can be assured that Dan's sweet. Don't worry about Dan. Dan believes...

Pizzagate, J6E, flat earth stuff, or Dan believes that children don't have a sex, pick whatever your lefty opinion is, don't worry about Dan. Dan is prepared to deny most common sense and reality in order to, he's going to adhere to the ideology. And what that means is we have someone who

If he was with us on the last thing, we can be reliable in knowing that he's with us on the next thing. The problem is, if you were with us on the last thing and not with us on this thing, we go, what's he going to do next time? And actually, he's an unreliable ally. And a lot of the time,

absurd ideological beliefs are shows of fealty to your own team and the threat displays to the other one. And any admission, any wavering in, you know, if I know your opinion on gun control, I should know your opinion on abortion and on immigration and on taxation and on what we should be doing overseas. And any time that you waver, it doesn't fit into either what I think your pre-prescribed model should be or what your compatriots or current allies think that should be that onesie that you've just zipped up and put on.

If you ever deviate from that, that's seen by the other side as a lack of conviction and as your own side as a sort of lack of commitment. Yes, and it's a very strange approach to politics because... And I do have political opinions and sort of political thoughts and I'm in my sort of private life and I try not to tack it too hard. That's keeping to yourself. But...

I do think that this is a strange moment politically for reasons that you've just touched upon where politics in the UK and in the US is roughly, is pretty much bipartisan. Not sorry, bipartisan. It's pretty much partisan. You can choose two sides, right? But those two sides are both coalitions and they're uneasy coalitions. And it's so weird to think that anyone could like hold,

could agree with the entire package of either Democratic or Republican views as expressed by the two current candidates in the election. Or likewise, back in the UK where I live, that you could agree with Labour on absolutely everything. Or, I mean, the Tory party, this was the Tory party in the UK's, you know, cause of their great collapse is that they

They couldn't hold the coalition together under the force of Brexit, a polarizing debate which didn't map cleanly onto the party politics. So it wrenched this coalition apart and it just showed that you can't – that it would be – it's so foolish to think that you are the one thing –

or the other, because with those political definitions, just how very seldom do they map onto one individual's sort of package of thoughts? Yeah, I've been obsessed with this. I called it monothinking. And I just don't know...

I'm yet to meet anybody that is a true monothinker, i.e. their actual beliefs map onto the prescribed beliefs of one party or the other. Everybody is idiosyncratic. Everybody deviates in small ways or another. And yeah, I think if you know one of somebody's beliefs and from it you can accurately predict everything else, they're probably not a serious thinker. They're probably kidding to themselves or they're lying to you or they're trying to say something that makes them feel socially signaling in one form or another.

So yeah, it is an interesting time. And if you've been able to provide a little bit more perspective

by taking everybody back to the medieval times. I think that's probably not a bad idea. I think this is one of the other reasons why shows like yours, shows like Rest Is History, guys like Dan Carlin, even maybe to actually, I disagree with what I was about to say. I was about to say Graham Hancock, but I actually think Graham plays into the current sort of milieu that's going on, the ambience. I think one of the reasons that people are enjoying history is that it feels more grounded

that it feels like, okay, well, at least we know stuff that's happening. And when we don't know, we say we don't know. Yes. And, and history has a, has a role to play, a significant role to play, um, in culture and politics at the moment. Um, it has a number of roles. And one of the roles is escape from the present. I think that a lot of people are finding the, the nature, the content, the delivery, uh,

of present day politics to be um to be wearisome and frightening and and depressing and and the cause of great anxiety and and for some people but but still want to have sort of think intellectually about things so a retreat into great literature a retreat into history is is a sort of welcome place to put your mind um and to exercise your mind without you know you

Turning over the anxieties of the moment. It can also be a great contextualizer. That's one of the things that history is, that's one of the reasons that history is taught, because it allows us to gain better perspective on the world we live in, to recognize...

themes and patterns that are sort of inherent to human behavior over centuries, millennia, whatever it might be. And then there's the skill set that history, the study of history provides you, which ought to be a sort of a balanced weighing of evidence and a decision-making that is nominally, although this doesn't always happen in practice, free from ideology.

that you look at history and your question is basically what happened, not trying to sort of, this is not the case obviously, lots of schools of history, Marxism being one of the most obvious of them. You're not looking at history as a way of validating some theory you have about the universe and then just sort of hammering it into shape.

that you're taking a lot of evidence about a complex moment in time in which, to return to an earlier part of our conversation, great forces collide with individual personalities and you're trying to get to the bottom of what happened and why and weighing the evidence and coming up with a balanced and nuanced and

um, intelligent response. Like that would be good if we could do that in, in more fields than just history, right? If the debates on the great issues of the day could be thought about and analyzed, uh, from an evidence-based standpoint, um, and in the spirit of intelligent, respectful debate and discourse, that would be terrific. That would be the opposite of, of a lot of politics in the internet age. Well, I think,

David Perel's got this idea called the never ending now. And he basically says that almost all of the content you consume today will have been created within the last 24 hours. Jesus. When you think that, you know, even Snapchat and Instagram stories are purposefully designed to expire after 24 hours. Yeah. And the story of the moment, I mean, how quickly we forgot that Biden had had that debate and that Trump was shot and that did, you know, it's Brad summer, you know, now it's P Diddy or whatever. And, um,

The pace that everything moves at convinces you and the incentives are there from the news to convince you that this happening right now is the most important thing. Because if the thing that happened yesterday was the most important thing, you don't need to read what happened today. And it's a lie. And I think that reading history, which I don't do enough of,

makes a i get the same sense as when i look up through a tree so if i look up through a tree there's this sort of down regulation that happens to me and i start breathing a little bit more slowly and my my vision the peripherals of my vision open up a little bit more and i start to i can feel my body in my mind sort of just release a little bit i feel like i'm less tight and less tense and especially uh i've read a lot of ryan's stuff and he'd just come from his place it's great

reading a lot of Ryan's stuff, reading your book, it just gives me this sense of perspective, you know, like a big arc, big fucking bridge. And I think, wow, look at all the way over there. Look at what you're still here. And look, I can see with perspective these sort of cycles up and down and they thought it was the end and it wasn't the end and then they thought it was going to be great and it wasn't great. You know, I really...

It gives you a degree of perspective that the never-ending now has robbed from us all. Yeah, and I think any escape from that, be it history or, as I say, be it sort of literature, is just incredibly good for our minds at the moment. And the way that the...

The hybridization of human mind and machine mind isn't in the future. It's already happened and always happening in real time. And over my lifetime, I'm 43 now, and over my lifetime, we have...

this is what's happened. First, it was about humans became operators of machines, of basically databases. And that database type thinking, you know, parodied with the phrase computer says no, when a human looks up from the screen and can't make a human decision because it doesn't fit within the parameters of the database they're punching in. I mean, that has been rolled out to almost everywhere. And now the version of it is,

We have like fused our minds with social media, what are known as algorithms. Anyway, yeah, the algorithm, let's just call it, inaccurate as that phrase is. And so that, and it's seen most obviously in our political thinking, but...

in some historical thinking as well, we are optimizing for, whether wittingly or unwittingly, what's the thing that's most likely to be popular on the internet and on social media. And that typically is something that's expressed in an extreme way.

without any nuance at all, and designed to be as either sort of cloyingly pleasing to our own tribe or enraging to the other tribe, ideally both, as possible. And our minds are so plastic and our addiction to cell phones is so societally complete that

But we've already done it. We've fused our minds. You didn't have to put a chip into your brain. You just had to put a fucking phone in your pocket and make it buzz in an addictive way. I've got kids ranging from toddler to teenager, and I grew up without this shit. And so at least I can... Remember the before time. Remember the before times. But I am increasing... Maybe this is just a function of becoming an old geezer and everyone gets this, but I am...

I'm displeased when I look at some of these developments. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know... Worried. It is one of those things where...

Every generation is adamant that the one coming after them is broken. Of course. And, you know, you can go back and see concerns about the printing press or concerns about people listening to too much music or concerns about them listening to the radio or watching the television or watching cable or what, you know, and I do get the sense that what we have, the technology that we've already got and what we're on the cusp of propagating

probably having more of is a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree. I feel like it's a step change in the addictive nature, the ability to really tap in and limbically hijack what we're doing, to really play on the dopaminergic system and to get people to, it's not an addiction. I use the words interchangeably. It's not, it's a compulsion. And you are compulsively using your phone. If you ever sit on a plane next to somebody, they pull their phone out and swipe up and move through the apps, knowing that they don't have signal.

Why are they doing that? Because it's just like the hamster running on the wheel, so to speak. But yeah, I think it'll be interesting to look back in 50 or 100 years' time, and I wonder whether we'll look back with horror in the same way as I think we'll probably look at factory farming or the way that we would look at putting children down chimneys or the way that we would look at ladies licking...

rayon or argon or whatever it was on the end of those paintbrushes and think look at what we exposed our heritage to we're already doing it aren't we I mean the research is starting to trickle out I know it's not conclusive but that you shouldn't have given these fucking kids TikTok right basically this has been a very very bad thing to have done and

And yes, I'm sure you're right. I'm not sure you're right. I can't be sure you're right. But I feel instinctively that you're right on that. I think, to slightly return to this idea about what is the value of history, I think...

A good example is to look at what we're living through now with this communications revolution in the saturation of this new communications technology throughout society, the speed of information distribution. The advent of the printing press in the 15th century is, I think, probably a good comparator. Maybe we talked about this when I was writing Powers and Thrones. I can't remember. But you have this revolution in how to communicate.

People are able to communicate radically faster, much greater speed. More people are able to communicate and publish. And so what do they do? They start saying more and more weird and outrageous stuff. And you get characters like Martin Luther who's not only saying really random stuff at that point, but is able to communicate it around Europe at lightning speed. The proximate cost has now gone to zero. Right.

So what you get is like more and more publishing, more and more pushes to the extreme. It leaks into politics. Politics becomes incredibly polarized and you end up with the reformation.

communications revolution ends up with a reformation first of sort of moral value and then that feeds into political systems. And I'm afraid the story of the reformation, if we're at the beginning of it, is not one that ends particularly happily. It goes on for a long time and it gets ever more divisive and bloody. But I'm spitballing in a sense. Again, I'm not Yuval Noah Harari. I haven't been gifted with the ability to see into the future.

But I do think that if you've never read a book and don't know what the Reformation is or didn't know when the printing press was invented, then you're slightly hamstrung in trying to navigate your way through the world we're in at the moment. This is the first time this has ever happened. Yeah, you don't have any sort of models to go, hmm.

Like, I wonder if this is a bit like the Reformation or, hmm, I wonder if this is a bit like the Industrial Revolution. If you don't even fucking know what those things are, then you just can't think. Or you're trying to sort of think without any models. You're making the job so much harder for yourself. So obviously, Henry V, great book, really accessible, opens with an awesome story. You're a great writer and I love your podcast and everyone should go and buy it. Thanks, bro. If you were to prescribe people after they've

had a crack at learning more about England's greatest leader. What other areas of history, periods of history, do you find particularly down-regulating? Do you find particularly... I read this and I get a really lovely perspective. Where else would you... Where else in history would you send a literary time traveler? Um...

I'm quite interested, although very ignorant about, um, so the ancient Greek and Roman world. I like to sort of dabble through that. I read very sort of, you know, very general kind of books about that. I find that fascinating. Um, it's, it's literature rather than history. Um, we, we were talking before we began this interview about Dominic Cummings. So you've had as a guest on the show and I, um,

Although I didn't agree with Brexit, and in the current world you might have thought I would never read Dominic Cummings. I'd try and read his substack, read his blogs, because I think he's an original thinker and a good and interesting writer. And he blogged quite a few years ago now, maybe four years ago, about Tolstoy.

And I went on a real slow burn Tolstoy jag through War and Peace and Anna Karenina because Dominic Cummings had mentioned War and Peace as being the greatest novel and the one from which you could learn the most about the subtle –

workings of political groups. And I really slowly read War and Peace and Anna Karenina, which they're designed to be read slowly. They're in those very short chapters, or sorry, not designed to be read slowly, but they're constructed so that you can read them piecemeal over a long, long time. And that's been my kind of go-to

disappear into another world and and you know war and peace is obviously set in the early 19th century Anna Karenina in the about the 1870s um I'm by no means a taller specialist in those historical periods but that's kind of part of the joy and this is a fictional rendering of Russian society even if in real um historical settings but what I found about Tolstoy and this is what Cummings um

you would find about Tolstoy is that you just, you disappear completely immersed into this world. And it's something that's very good to read at the age that I am now. As I've said, I'm in my early 40s. And once you've seen a fair bit of life and a fair bit of adult life and political life or, you know, whatever it might be,

You really get Tolstoy. I mean, I don't think I would have understood any of it or no more than half of it as a 20-year-old. But as a 40-year-old, 41-year-old, 42-year-old, 43-year-old, it's like this guy just seemed to see everything. Everything. And even though he's not like a great

One can't tell so well in English translation, but doesn't come across as a great prose stylist. It doesn't matter. He's just saw everything and his ability to sort of capture and render, even with his own sort of bizarre cocktail of prejudices about certain stuff. It doesn't matter. He just has this sort of eye. And so he's been my, so 19th century Russia has been my like happy place to disappear to recently. That's cool. Dan Jones, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I love you to bits. Where should people go?

So keep up to date with the things that you do. I write a sub stack. It's called history, comma, et cetera. I do a, well, that sort of functions my mailing list. So if you want to find out about the new books, new tour dates, new podcast episodes, it's all on there. And I do a monthly like Q&A session on there for engaged readers and listeners. The podcast is This Is History. And that comes out every Tuesday.

And the books are in all good bookstores. How are you on the plague, Black Death stuff? How are you on that? I mean, I know a bit about it. Should we do an episode on that at some point soon? Yeah, we could do, yeah. We could do a little reading up and then can we do an episode on that? I've been watching, I've been falling asleep to stories of miasma and all sorts of other stuff. Well, I mean, I'm writing a novel at the moment that's set in 1350. It's a post-pandemic novel.

And the first chapter is all about first encounter with the plague. And it's based on a real incident. My first two novels follow this ordinary group of soldiers in the beginning of the Hundred Years' War, Battle of Cressida and Siege of Calais.

In 1348, a bunch of veterans of those campaigns got on boats and went to escort Joan, the daughter of Edward III, to Bordeaux, where she was going to be married to the heir to the Castilian throne, who became Pedro the Cruel eventually. And when they got to Bordeaux, the mayor sort of came out on the shore and was like, do not come here. The plague is here. And they go, eh, never mind that.

And she goes into the city and dies of the plague. And then, you know, two months later, it just, it's in England and it just races its way through. So I've been, um,

That's the sort of prologue bit of my book, them going to Bordeaux and that happening. And then the rest of the novel is then in 1350 in this world that's sort of just coming out of lockdown, if anything. So it's on my mind at the moment. So next time when that comes out. I would love to have that conversation. Yeah, we should do. Dude, thank you for coming to see me. My pleasure. Get on fans.