Modern Wisdom - #852 - Dan Jones - The Untold Story Of England’s Greatest King

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

Dan Jones is 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 9 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 has happened to Henry’s legacy in the 600 years since he died, why he became so controversial recently and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get expert bloodwork analysis and bypass Function’s 300,000-person waitlist at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get $5 off your next Magic Spoon order at https://magicspoon.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Check out Dan's podcast - This Is History: https://tinyurl.com/mr33drez Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 earth or canon, if you will. But 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 goat of medieval history. Was he like a British Aurelius? Kind of, yes.

Or a little bit like Alexander the Great. Just considered the best who ever did it, who really understood every side of kingship and performed it. 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 camps at each other's throats. You've got the lingering after effects of a pandemic. You've got a 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, 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, 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 in Europe, whatever, outside probably the tyrannous autocracies of the world, that is the kind of thing everyone's looking for at the moment.

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 died, but he dies, you know, 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 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? There are a couple of reasons. Firstly, and I think most importantly, he has a long apprenticeship and a very busy apprenticeship and a dramatic 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. 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 the fifth, the chorus comes on in the epilogue and to explain what's just happened and says, fortune made his sword. And that's a double, double, at least a double meaning. It was, it's, it was improbable that he was ever going to be king and yet he was.

He 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. You know, 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 king of, 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

the greatest 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, and at that point, young Henry, Henry the fifth 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 the middle ages, you know, the office of King is, well, it's anointed and that means that 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'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 starved 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 3099, look, in 3099, Richard II has proven himself repeatedly to be completely incapable of kingship, 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 labor firstly under the political consequences of the usurpation in that he's, he's in hoc all his reign, which runs from 1399 through 1413. So for 14 years, he's, he has to constantly make allowances to the people who put him in power, you know, the, the King makers, literally the powers behind the Thrones.

Now he's sort of beholden with social debt things going on. Yeah. And financial debt, you know, the, the people who were his Lancastrian retainers. So people who were paid by him to be on his side as a great Lord, uh, need to keep being paid or they're not going to support him. And so yeah, he's beholden to them. Um, he's all, but I think even more than that, he just wears the burden of sin on him as he sees it.

And he's, he's trapped by the moral repercussions of what he's done. And it, he becomes, I don't know if it's linear and direct that he's guilty. Therefore he becomes ill, but he can't, but he has, you know, increasing numbers of serious health problems, which are incredibly debilitating to him. And by the end of his life, 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 doesn't, 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 the fifth 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 O Englander. O Englander 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 is written in French, which is the normal language of aristocratic discourse, even in England in that day. And it's to paraphrase, dear dad, um, or all going jolly well in Wales. Um, this England, uh, 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 and, uh, but he wasn't where he said he was going to be. So I went around his house and he wasn't in, so I burned it down. Right. And then I went around his other house, but he wasn't there either. Why are you really enjoying this? 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 some ways the pivot, the formative moment in his life, if you believe that lives are 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, the battle and at some point we don't quite know how or why probably cause he's thirsty, hot, disoriented, removes the helmet or lifts the visor. Cause it's a full face. Full face thing. And this is a battle where you have, you know, thousands of, of longbow,

longbowmen archers on both sides and an arrow 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 surgeon who operated on him called John Bradmore. He later notes in his account of the operation. That's bad. That's really bad. You know, you've got one ounce. Henry or someone else pulls at the shaft of the arrow and the shaft, which is designed to come away easily from the arrow head so

that the arrow head gets lodged in you and you get blood poisoning ideally. Um, that goes, but the, you've still got a one ounce slump of metal lodged inside his skull. So it's said he fights on. I mean, adrenaline is a powerful thing. We know that. Um, then he's, but at the end of the battle, which his father wins, um, he's taken off to Kenilworth castle, which Lancastrian, you know, his din 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, they've got to get this out and there's only really, you know, only one surgeon I think has the skill and the, uh, and the nerve to perform this operation. And it's this guy, John Bradmore, one of his father's retained preferred surgeons. He's, 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 quarterized the artery, saved his life. Bradmore has operated on Henry IV's master of pavilions, who's attempted suicide by running into a wall with a dagger in his guts. Serious operation. You say not to give someone blood poisoning when you're operating on their intestines, and it's the 15th century. Bradmore has done blepiaplasty, plastic surgery, we call it now, eyelid bag surgery. He's got some ointment 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. 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 arrow head out the other side, as you would, if it was in this leg or the arm. So they have to push, they have to take the arrow head 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, and then using a tool that Bradmore was 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 neck and head warm, trying to calm, trying to stop him going to spasm. And that's like a big operation and it takes 30 days.

So for 30 days, the 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. We can only be speculative about this from 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 a wild supposition. I think it's a fair hypothesis to say that this does something to him, to his personality. He seems to believe really from this moment on and certainly once he

becomes king that he has been saved for a reason. 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, improperly surviving an assassination attempt via headshot. Well, yeah, it'll, it'll get people going. Um, 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, 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, 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. You know, after his famous Battle of Agincourt, which is dramatized by Shakespeare so memorably, one of the high-ranking French prisoners who were taken by the English, by Henry's men

on that day, is the Duke of Orleans. 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 have, you're sinful and God wants to punish you. And I'm just, I'm just God's tool. 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 although not totally outlandish 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 everything in politics.

Um, that's, it's still quite punchy from Henry, right? And, and, and I think that, you know, you can, or 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. Over the span of about a year, I tried pretty much every green string that I could find trying to work out which one was best. I came across AG1 and I've stuck with it for three years now because it's the best. It's the most rigorously formulated, highly tested and comprehensive green string that I've ever found. And that's why I put it into my body and I've got my mum to take it and my dad

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It seems that your point around his apprenticeship being very, uh, crafting for how he ends up being true, but also 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 has been unfashionable in history for a long time to think in terms of quote unquote, the great man theory, you know, the history is a succession of mainly men, powerful epoch, shake it,

powerful epoch shaping individuals whose, the vagaries of whose personalities are at root, 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 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 implications to culture, to the stories, to the songs, to the naming of the pubs, to the, you know, so on and so forth. Um, you know, I, I, I've heard about the sort of great man theory being pushed back against, uh, and I can see why it would be horribly unpopular. Um, because it kind of, 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, there are two things going on that we need to, we need to sort of separate out on 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 the 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, right, 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's that sought to explain the kind of the or the the geographical topographical meteorological makeup of the world all of that is tends to be humanized anthropomorphized told through the personification personification is is the way we understand history and and so obviously when we when we talk about historical change we tend to gravitate towards what can become the sort of great man theory of history.

It becomes oversimplified or problematic when you think that history's only shaped by the personality 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, Biblio Nenai, Kim Jong-un and so forth.

You would have to say, well, we lived through a technological revolution 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. Um, and also that the biggest differentiators between periods fall to the humans and their actions as opposed to some unlock that occurs. Yeah. I don't know. Things always look different depending what lens you've got on the camera.

Right. And if, you know, if you narrow as, so I've just written this book about Henry the fifth 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 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 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 wars, 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. The population of England drops from about six million down to roughly two million across the course of the 14th century and doesn't recover until the Industrial Revolution. 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, um, that's a bad margin for error. Isn't already there. Right.

Yeah. You know, you, there's, oh, you can't squeeze as much product out of, uh, out of the land you live in. Um, that's, you know, that's the theory, but if there's a million holes in the theory as well. And, and, and, and, 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 over the last 10, 15 years, it's Yuval Nohari's Sapiens series and so on. Very attractive book to big popular audiences, tens of millions of copies sold across the world. I should add for the record that this is a medieval historian by training who's out there

selling all these books, so you know, go the middle ages. But as is, I think, the sort of the backlash against Yuval Nohari 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 brush strokes. You want it, this doesn't apply there and that doesn't apply. apply that. Um, depending, like I say, the history is, writing history is so often about framing and about, um, the lens. I like this, this idea of the lens and then what, what are

your parameters for looking at this? What, what kind of story are we looking to tell? So Henry rising to power. Oh yes. Henry the fifth. Yeah. How does he become king? He becomes king, uh, because he inher 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 at Shrewsbury. For the next 10 years, once he's recovered, he goes back to Wales and by degrees the the rebellion of Owen Glyndyr 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? Glyndyr. 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.

Yeah, the story with no satisfying end was a shame. But Henry, so yeah, so he has to learn on the job in Wales effectively, how to besiege castles, how to deploy cannon, right ratios between, you know, 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, you know, shift money around your own accounts to try and, like, pay for this stuff out 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, you know, but no war is, has ever been possible without, without that boring stuff, logistics, the money. So he has a good, you know, a good long training in that. Then his father's health starts to collapse, a series of skin complaints, probably circulatory conditions, series of strokes, and he becomes increasingly debilitated. And Prince Henry, future Henry V, starts to move more and more to the center of power. He starts to effectively operate as regent, president of the royal council.

He's immersing himself in foreign policy, the policy particularly 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, lolardy as it's

called in those... It's lol-a-dy. Lol-a-dy is... To be a lol-ard is an insulting term at the time, pejorative, but lolards basically follow 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 sacraments weren't based in 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 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 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. 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 life.

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, certainly 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 Henry, 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 what 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. 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. Um, Henry the fourth in, in, in, I increasingly think a selfless way is like, no, I'm going

to, 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 ostracises him from any involvement in the 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, um, pushed out of, of, of lying for the throne. It's, 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. It's good to learn. And 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 or a refuse. That this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what's about what he's, he's in line for kingship and he has to learn this extremely hard lesson. And, um, and he does. I think Henry the fourth 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 the fifth, if you, if you only concentrate on these people's reins, they look very different than if you,

if you blow it out, the, um, the, 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 II up. Well, he'd starve him to death. That's where he ends up in rebellion. But before that, in happier times, when Henry V to be is a small child, his father is off, you know, fighting Jouse with Boussicaud, the great French knight of the day, I mean,

the most famous knight in Europe, a guy who could do backflips in full armour and jump onto his horse from a standing start. No way. Yeah, I knew you liked Boussicaud. He's gone to fight against the pagans of the Baltic with the Teutonic Knights on Crusade. Is this just the implication of King to be warrior as well or a 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, 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 your, your lead from the front type thing. The great seal, which is the sort of the authenticating, um, device for all

government's documents in this time shows the case it's two sided and it prints on a disc of wax, two images. The one side shows the King as judge or sceptre, 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, quote unquote, warrior king, tends to hang back in a sort of Napoleon role, you know, on, on high ground surveying and strategizing and directing. Henry the fifth likes to lead from the front, you know, the thick of it narrow in the face. Yeah. And he's, he is prepared to put himself in harm's way and, uh, and does so at Shrewsbury does so at Agincourt does so whenever, you know, he, his, his style of leadership is, um, is demonstrative. And so when, even when there's not a, he never fights two battles. So mostly it's siege craft.

When he, when he's directing a siege every morning, he will be doing the rounds, sort of patting people on the back, micro managing where the cannons. In other news, this episode is brought to you by function. I partnered with function because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to understand what's happening inside of my body. Function has been an absolute game changer. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor everything from your heart health and your hormone levels to nutrient deficiency and stuff like thyroid function. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more

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That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. I was getting, can you explain, let's say that you're Henry the fifth and you're sieging pick anywhere, anywhere of choice. What's a, 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? Um, so typically the object of the siege is to force the people in the place you'll be seizing to give it up.

And that could be a castle, a town or a fortified towns or a combination of castle and town. And you can 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, uh, and under the sort of laws of siege craft, you, you ask, uh, 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. Right. So we surround the, the target. Um, and then you go to the leaders of the, of the target. Joe Rogan. Yes. You go, we go to Rogan and say, Rogan, uh, you're under siege brother. And, uh, 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 up? And is this emissary to emissary? Is this shouting it over the wall? Yeah, emissary to emissary. We're going to make you give it up. Hmm. 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, 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. It's a qualified no, no, no, I'm not going to give up right away.

But if so, I need an ally of Rogan. Jocker is Jocker based here. Yeah, he can be. Well, he needs to be based not here. He's not, he's not based. Okay. So Rogan will say, I'm not going to go 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 credit note, this match is going to last for 40 days. And now it's kind of a game, right? You've got 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. Um, and a believable one as well. Um, maybe we have a reality TV show on our hands. So then what is, 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. Yeah. Uh, and what are you, what are you doing? What are you throwing out? Well, Henry typically, um, takes a, uh, takes over a building. So a city or a castle, but

let's say a fortified city will typically have an enclosed center walled bit with a fortified bit of 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 he'll be living in 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. And he's very good. Hats on the head. Hats on the head, slaps on the ass. You know, come on boys, we've 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 kind of man of the people, able to, he has him touring kind of incognito around the other soldiers and, and, you know, on the eve of battle and, and, um, moving amongst them. And that's drawn from, 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 was a pretty chill dude. No, no chill really. I mean, he liked music and he was a sort of 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 frontline 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 what's happening that everybody can understand. But because he 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 nagging, it's imperative. It's like, do this. There's no sort of frills. Do this, do it now. Why haven't you done it? You know, it's always unwavering. Yeah.

And, and say, and see that you fail not thereof. He's always used that as 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 micro manager. There's this point at which he's in a, you know, he's besieged town after town, ground his way through Normandy.

Um, you know, imagine the allies going through Normandy in 1944. It's the, 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. Uh, 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 Orleans 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 riding 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 gonna try and tell you this that and the other Don't you have any of that? You make sure that you you don't listen to his sort of fine words and you keep him under lock key because if you don't Do this I'm gonna be seriously pissed off. He's like it's it's not just that the here's an instruction It's a a list of step-by-step

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? Um, some people would, I think, rankle under that degree of micro management. Um, 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. So the Prince Howell character, Shakespeare's vision of him as a young man as a prince is of a sort of the womanizing drunken... Lothario. Lothario, wastrel, gets up at midday, goes back to bed as soon as possible, 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 and as of Mars as a young man. He likes war, he likes girls. But there's vanishingly little by 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 chased. 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 keeping sort of endless numbers of concubines drawn rather immorally and disgustingly from girls who were wards of his court, in fact, in Henry

the Second's case. None of that. None of that with Henry the Fifth. He has his heart set on getting married to the youngest daughter of the French King Charles the Sixth. That's Catherine de Balois, who he does in fact marry in 1420. And he won't touch anyone else until he's got her. Soon as they marry, she's pregnant within months and bears his son and heir who

becomes Henry the sixth in time, but Henry is, yeah, it's, it's all, it's all, it's all business to an almost pathological degree. You could say, or you could, you know, you could look at the guy and say, 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 losing focus. It's an unusual combination. What I'm finding interesting is,

and again, as a historical ignoramus, there is a meme, there is a caricature of the sort of There is a meme, there is a caricature of the sort of cheese and wine dealing with the 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 the lazy. Um, 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, it's, it's, um, it's, it's, you're in the slot at 26. It's there is exactly the right age

You've got on the one hand Kings like Richard the second who becomes king and ten years old Bad bad idea. Okay, not make it. That's like the Justin Bieber Macaulay Culkin approach yet. Yes, right? Yes, it's that that's a that's a very good example in Richard the second 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's, it's, it's becomes a big psychological problem for Richard the second.

Uh, he never really gets that idea out of his head. So you don't really want your King to be nine years old. Um, Henry, yeah, 26, sort of relatively old to become King, but not too old. If that makes sense. I mean, he's not Charles the third becoming King in his seventies. You know what I mean? After, you know, that really is Biden. Uh, okay. Yeah. Ajinko Ajinko, the core, aging core, 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, uh, it's like if Oasis is kind of second gig was Nebworth. Um, it's a big mistake. It's a huge blunder as in core Ashen core should never ever have been fought was ridiculous. Um, and it's, uh, uh, again, this word miraculous that, um, 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 his first, 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 Armenians 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 larger 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. Um, he goes and he was 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 Harfleur, 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 or in the siege. He needs to leave some men in Halfler 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 spent, he's taken a lot of money and basically pushed all of his political capital from, you know, from 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 I 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 the third and the black Prince in 1347, it's an English sort of a militarized enclave. So Henry's like, we're gonna run, almost literally run, from Halfler 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 gonna do? And it's to show the people of France their king is inadequate. No, no, no, no, no, no, I can't touch me. So running down the street, knocking on everyone's door, flicking the visas. They come out, come on and then like jumping. You may have a go if you're on.

In your mate's car and off you go and leaving everyone like fuming behind you. Um, and he all, it almost 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-flurred to Calais, you've got to cross 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, a forwarding place called the Blanchetac where Edward III had once crossed it during the crazy campaign of the 1340s but that's been, it's a mind, has been made impossible 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 upriver 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 starved, well not starved, 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 it's 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 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, you know, football match. You've got, um, Barcelona are going to pay 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, you know, who fit long ball and like, and just hack them in midfield. Okay. So it's, 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 their 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 so they can drive into the ground in front of them when it comes to battle so that any horses charging at them will either shy away, refuse or be gored on these polls. So that's a basic line of defense against French cavalry charge.

But the French have weight of numbers, their army's fresh, they know, they feel that they know what the English are going to do and that that's going to help. They watch the game tape. Yeah, yes, exactly. So it becomes like, you know, like a sporting match. Both sides have a game plan, can execute who wants it more.

And who wants it more? The English and the English have got Henry the fifth in charge and, and that's not just Oh, it's Henry the fifth. 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 DoFan'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. So you've got divided leadership on the one hand, uh, and you've got, you know, 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 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 Glendower, 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, what's the opposite of the Avengers? Right, okay, 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 of, for, for what became the Ashenkor campaign. Had Henry gone back having lost the battle of Ashenkor.

Um, and then probably he would have found Halfler undefendable because the tail would have been up, they would have gone to Halfler and taken it back. His credibility had 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. Um, 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. He, um, and he wins in dramatic fashion and they take tons of prisoners and it's a, it's a bloody brutal battle. He's, you know, he's not far from being killed in the battle for because he fights in the thick of it as an axe swung at his head and dense takes off one of the fluorans of his crown. Um, several of his allies over the course of the, our flow

campaign and asian core battle, 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, you know, 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, I'm God's instrument. He's a man of intense seriousness, intensity and seriousness, intense seriousness. He is that that's what he is. He's a serious guy.

Even his sort of, uh, is, you know, touchy feely interests, if you like, are serious. The harp and the 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 is quite 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? Uh, you do see other images of, you do see images of other people with similar time dues 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

with, just as you've mentioned Oasis already, the feathered Mancunian horror show that is still supported by some veterans at that age, I meant to say, uh, including the Gallagher brothers themselves. Yeah. It was just a time and they, yeah, they weren't the only ones to have it, but in other news, this episode is brought to you by magic spoon. You probably know magic spoon for their super popular high protein cereal that's got tons of five-star reviews. Well now they've turned their cereal into treats that taste just like classic crunchy cereal bars that you had growing up but with more protein and less sugar. It is a

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Right now you can get $5 off your next order by going to the link in the description below When it comes to Henry as a person, as he sort of growing into maturity, what ways was he most impressive? Or what were the real advantages that his constitution, his personal principles, his principles of the world, his principles of the world, his principles of the world, his principles of the world, his principles of the world? And what are the real advantages that he had in his life? And what are the real advantages that he had in his life? sort of growing into maturity, what ways was he most impressive? Or what were the real advantages that his constitution, his personality was made up of and then where were his biggest flaws or weaknesses?

We sort of, we've touched on a lot of the advantages already. There is this, this ability to, um, to drill down as Tony Blais saying to the down, as Tony Blair is saying, to the issues, to identify what needs to be done, what the issue actually is. There's 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 the 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 criticize 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 consultant. 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 first off and Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry. He's a Lollard heretic. When Henry becomes king, And Shakespeare's Henry, he's a lullard heretic. When Henry becomes king, Old Castle refuses to abjure his heresy.

He 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 courts, 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. a lullard burned and hanged at the same time.

Yeah. Lullard gallows. What's that mean? It means, uh, you're strung up, you're hanging in chains. And the neck. Yeah. Right. And you're burned at the same time rope around the neck and, you know, you're changed to the gallows

rope around the net and, and you're, there's a fire lit under you. And eventually this is special. This is a special, special treatment. Right. It's symbolic. I mean, is that hung, drawn and quartered? Is that still happening? There's still some of that going about.

Yeah. What's that for? Is that worse? That seems worse. It depends how much you like being, well, yes, neither of them are good, but they are both very symbolic. So there's a being killed on a lullard 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 Old Castle 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, uh, you know, the, the hanging is for being a thief. The, you know, the, 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, you know, each component of this has a,

a sort of visual, um, meaning. And in this age of semi-literacy, by which I mean, not all the population are literate and no media, no mass media. And the presentation of things, the optics, symbolism, when those, yes, it's always symbolism. French seem more clinical with the guillotine. That's much later though. Is it? Yeah. the guillotine. That's much later though. Is it?

Yeah. That's French revolution. That's 18th century. Oh, what are they doing? Much the same thing. I mean, it's probably more barbaric and, and in some ways less symbolic in France. There's a lot of flaying seems to go on in France. I mean, that's, that's cutting all your skin off while you're still alive.

Cutting all your skin off. How do you do that? Like special, special sharp knife. Imagine peeling a banana. Only the banana is a human being. Okay. Um, yes, a sharp knife, a butcher, you've butchered. And you're strapped down, laid down, standing.

Uh, you're sort of held still. Yeah. Strap, I mean, strapped to. Cross type thing. Yeah. Okay. And then like potato, big Cross type thing? Yeah. Okay. And then like potato, big potato peeler. Yeah.

Yeah. Not nice. I mean, so the, uh, Philip the fourth, um, Philip the fair of France, the beginning of the 14th century does a lot of, uh, 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 prince's wives cop off

with a couple of knights and they're caught, they're flayed in public. During Henry V's time, the Count of Armagnac is, these two factions, Burgundians and Armagnac, so permanently at each other's throats. Uh, the count of Armagnac is, um, is killed and it's said, and this isn't totally unbelievable, uh, that he is flayed and then goose feathers are stuck to these bloodied kind of, uh, muscles. And then the blood dries and then they're pulled out one by one. Oh, okay. That just seems like insulting. 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 that might not be completely true. There are a lot of testicles stuff. 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, the sort of blackened rims and the tire treatment, or you just want a quick sort of jet wash. Uh, and the, the box, the bronze is as described hanging, you're tied to a hurdle and dragged by a horse through the streets. Uh, that's the drawing hanging, you know, sort of, uh, 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, uh, between the hanging and the, and the beheading and the quartering, you can add in a bit of castration, a bit of disembowelment. You know, these are added, these are optional extras you pay more for. Right. Okay. Yeah. Like a McFlurry at the end. Yeah, right.

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That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. And then how does this all end? Cause it's all going so well. Yeah. I mean, Henry the fifth rain has a weird shape. So Agincourt 1415, 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, uh, the, he forces on the treaty of Troyes which he, he replaces the Dofan as the heir to the realm.

So with a minute Charles the sixth dies, Henry will become king of France as well as of England. Has he got this bird yet? He I think you're referring to Catherine de Valois, that bird, that bird. Yes. Uh, he marries her at after the treaty of Troy and that's part of it. Um, it's a part of the agreement. Good deal. Great deal.

And they got a big dowry as well. So the whole thing works out very well. This is where 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 it effectively becomes a French civil war.

Henry's fighting, raises money in England for that occasion 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. I didn't answer you properly. Henry's weaknesses as a leader. Um, are, I think it's very hard to keep up with him and he doesn't optimize

it particularly sensitively for the fact that not everybody else is Henry the fifth. So he leaves his brother Thomas in charge and, you know, 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 Bouger 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, the Tesla worry of how do we cope if we don't have it Elon Musk, do you know what I mean? Um, so that's a problem for him. Anyway, he goes. Curse of competence. Curse of competence. There you go. Um, and there, but it's so he's, he's back in France and he carries on siege craft and grinding away in this, this French civil war. And then he dies of dysentery like that. You have, you've seen the film in France. Um, 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. 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 the fifth 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? Uh, 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, uh, to his people. I mean, on the French side, as well as the English side, his body is taken

back from, uh, wide of Vinson where he dies to England for burial in Westminster. 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, you know, cut down on 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 of 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, Charles the Sixth, 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 till 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 longstanding veterans of Henry's reign, Humphrey 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 a 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, he is a sort of timid pacifist, you know, couldn't get more different for, he was more interested in sort of architecture. I mean, he's responsible for Eaton College Chapel, King's College of Cambridge, and some beautiful masterpieces of late Gothic architecture, but he ain't no soldier. And he didn't, 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. Whatever the opposite is, is what happens there.

How does, uh, how does Henry V set us up for the war of the roses? Well, because Henry VI 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. At Castillon in 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 faction 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 the third loses the battle of Bosworth and 1485. And arguably even after that, the problems don't go away until Henry X reign. So, um, the question is, where do you root all that? and arguably even after that the problems don't go away until Henry the X reigns. So the question is where do you root all that? You could root it in 1399 with the removal of Richard the second, that tear in the fabric of the universe I've described. That would be the sort of 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. And if Henry V had lived, even another five years, my feeling is he would

probably have settled matters with the Dofam, 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'd 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 the council of Constance and you only had 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 had he lived. In the course of that, he would have had to renegotiate the Troutier of Troyes. I don't doubt that he would have done that. Um, he was too aggressive. The first one was very happy. Disinherited the Dofan, the Dofan, but left the Dofan alive.

So you had, uh, and you had France like partitioned basically along the Loire. So you had the kingdom of bourgeois in the South and then you had the English Anglo-Burgundian kingdom in the north is 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 a, 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 that you have this guy with such a heroic story that dies by shitting himself, uh, just out of nowhere while he's, you know, in the middle of everything. And it's a really sort of nice, stark 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 the, how they explain the way that things occur.

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, you know, 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. All the Wheel of Fortune things sort of go up and then come down.

Um, you just don't know what's going to happen. Right. And, um, uh, that's, it's always salutary. It makes for a way, you know, as a writer, it makes, I found writing severely unsatisfying ending. Well, it's, it's a great challenge. If you're, if 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 to a reading audience that is probably most used to Hollywood shapes. And the Henry V reigns a challenge in that sense, because it doesn't have a neat third act. Heros 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 that he was cruel, he was cold, he was barbaric, he was brutal. Particularly 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 or people who'd fled the battlefield were returning. People were turning up late, that there was going to be a second 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 Oriflam, this was sacred battle banner that was

captured at Saint Denis, which was said to have been Charlemagne's, which was in fact dated from the reign of Louis the sixth in the late middle ages. But once the oriflam 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 were pissed off about it were the English ordinary English archers. He thought they'd got like life-changing paydays because once they'd taken these

high, high ranking French prisoners, they could be sold for huge ransoms. Once they're dead, they ain't worth anything. So the English, a lot of the English refused to do it. And Henry had to send around a hit squad to, to kill these Oh, those unscrupulous guys that'll go and chop their heads off. Yeah. Someone's got to do this. Kill them, kill them now.

You've got to kill them now. So now that 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, of the early 15th century and the specific situation of Ajan Kaur, he, there's no other choice. He had to do it. But he is criticized today for that action and for, you know, the criticisms are value judgments about his character, cold, brutal, sometimes called misogynist. 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 a find out what happened, B, tell story. Lots of historians

today optimize for go round history as if you're a time-traveling policeman berating history for not matching up to 21st century pieties or exercise in, um, in borrowed guilt hand ringing. You know, judging the actions of yesterday by the values of today. Yep. Yeah. I mean, this, this sort of, um, like, uh, masochistic apology culture of let's look at the, you know, there's a, there was a book published a few years ago called, I think like 52 times Britain was a bellend. The most British book title ever written by a Brit.

Yeah. But, and, and that's sort of like, I think, I think partly comic, but definitely a hundred percent, uh, summing up in that title, the, the, the sort of factuous kind of, uh, summing up in that title, that the, 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, my people weren't hard done by, but I'd like, I'd like to pursue my, uh, my trade within this intellectual milieu. So why don't I, um, become a warrior on the behalf of the downtrodden in general or this specific group? There was a, 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 were, 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, uh, that said, uh, 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. And the way that big game hunting was labeled, that if it happened once, it was the equivalent of that being, 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. Uh, so I came up with the, um, you'll have heard of the soft bigotry of low

expectations, uh, this is the soft bigotry of male expectations that anything that Amanda's is seen as being inherently superior, more preferable, uh, and, and by either not attributing that action to a woman or by, uh, saying that women can't do that thing, you are somehow derogating them that that is, that is them being downtrodden, uh, which implicit, the thing that women do is less valuable than men is an incredibly misogynist perspective to take that what, what, what is it about child rearing and gathering and berries, which inherently makes it less important than what it seems like. 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 grouse and fucking rabbits and squirrels and whatever the hell else it is that they, 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, like 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, you know, by tacking on the value judgment, particularly the value judgment, which is that, you know, and this was sort of terrible and, you know, this, you know, this brings shame on our nation today and we should apologize for it. You know, you can go further and further down this. 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. Um, the, you see it everywhere, don't you? All professions, um, once they build a hierarchy, once they build institutions, once they build like jobs to strive for or to maintain, whether those are sort of jobs within a university or whether those are just positions within a sort of publishing industry or, or, you know, whatever it might be. People start just optimizing and writing for that tribe, that group. The purity spiral gets ever more pure.

Right. Yeah. But what's this feel like for you as someone who, uh, although you might not look it a 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, are people not bothered about you because you got tattoos? I don't care that much. Don't, I don't not care at all because I think that would be pretty, you'd be pretty weird not to, not to give any fucks at all about anybody.

That's pretty lonely existence. But I definitely don't feel like the thing I need to do most when I write or do my podcast or whatever is, oh, I must make sure that 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 as political choices in my work. I write on the one hand, I've written lots of quite traditional and you might even call them small-see conservative historical works about royalty and about battles and such like. But I executive produced a drama about Anne Boleyn where she was 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, called the first one's called The Color of Time and 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, the, all the terms are, I was just interested in that story. Just interested in that story. And, um, 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, Oh, we've got this great, you know, political agenda on a Paseo. 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, I am. This is something increasingly that I'm noticing, despite what both sides of the internet seem to Think I don't actually really care that much about politics I found them interesting from a human nature perspective find it fascinating to see how they're warping to people and 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 onto is, the more we can be assured that Dan's sweet.

Don't worry about Dan. Dan believes Pizza Gate, J6E, you like flat earth stuff, or Dan believes that children don't have a sex, you know, pick whatever your sort of 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 gonna do next time? And it actually needs 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 anytime 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 just a form of self. 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 bipartisan, you can 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, this was the Tory party in the UK's, you know, cause of the great collapses that they couldn't hold the coalition together under the force of Brexit, a polarising debate, which didn't map cleanly onto the party politics. So it wrenched this coalition apart and it just showed that it would be so foolish to think that you are either 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 and. Yeah, I've been obsessed with this. I called it mono thinking. And yeah, I just don't know. I'm yet to meet anybody that is a true mono thinker, 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 signalling in one form or another. So yeah, it is an interesting time. 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 know that 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, um, sort of milieu and that's going on the ambience. Um, 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. And I think that a lot of people are finding the nature, the content, the delivery of present day politics to be, to be wearisome and frightening and depressing and the cause of great anxiety.

And for some people, but still want to have sort of think intellectually about things. So retreat into great literature, retreat into history is a sort of welcome place to put your mind and to exercise your mind without, you know, turning over the anxieties of the moment. It can also be a great contextualizer. That's one of the things that history is is that 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 skillset 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 does not 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, you know, lots of schools of history, like

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 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 intelligent response. That would be good if we could do that in more fields than just history, right? If the debates on the great issues of the day could be thought

about and analyzed from an evidence-based standpoint and in the spirit of intelligent, respectful debate and discourse, that would be terrific. That would be the opposite of a lot of politics in the internet age. Well, I think David Perrell'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 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 the Trump was shot and that, you know, it's Brad Summer, you know, now it's P Diddy or whatever. And 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, 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 and 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 had just come from his place. Yeah, he's great. Reading a lot of Ryan stuff and he've just come from, uh, his place. Reading a lot of Ryan stuff, reading your book. It just gives me this sense of perspective, you know, like a big arc, big, big fucking bridge. I think, wow, look at all the way over there.

Okay. We just still here and look at the, 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 gonna 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 huge, I'm going to sound like Noah Harari now, the high, but I believe this, the hybridization of, of human mind and machine mind isn't in the future, it's already happened. And it always happening in real time. And we, over, over my lifetime, I'm 43 now, and over my lifetime, this is what's happened.

First it was about humans became operators of machines, of basically databases. And that database type thinking, 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. 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, either 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 extremely 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 we've already done it. We've like fused our minds. You didn't have to put a chip into your brain. You had to put a fucking phone in your pocket and like and make it buzz in an addictive way. I like, I've got young kids ranging from toddler to teenager. And, um, I grew up without this shit. And so at least I, you know, I can remember the before time, remember the four times I, but I, I, I am increasing. Maybe this is just a function of becoming an old, old geezer and everyone gets this, but I, I'm, um, I'm displeased when I look at some of these developments.

Yeah. Yeah. 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 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, you know,

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 ways 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, you know, 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. I mean, the research has started to trickle out.

I know it's not conclusive, um, but that you shouldn't have given these fucking kids TikTok, right? Basically, this has been a very, very bad thing to have done. Um, and yes, I'm sure you're right. And I'm not sure you're right. I can't be sure you're right. Uh, but I, I, I feel instinctively that you're right on that. I think it's a slightly return to this idea about what, 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 like weird and like Outrageous stuff and you get like characters like Martin Luther is not only saying like really random stuff That but is able to communicate it around Europe at lightning speed the approximate 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 a reformation. Communications revolution ends up with a reformation first of sort of moral value and then of and then that 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, ever more divisive and bloody. But I'm spitballing in a sense. I'm not, again, I'm not Yuval Nohari. I don't, I haven't been gifted with the, with the ability to see into the future. But, um, I, I do think that if you don't, 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 figure, navigate your way through the world we're in at the moment. You don't, 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, any models. You're making, you're making the job so much harder for yourself. When, so obviously Henry fifth, 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, I read this and I get a really lovely perspective. Yeah. Yeah. 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, sort of the ancient Greek and Roman world. I like to sort of dabble through that. I read very general kind of books about that. I find that fascinating. It's literature rather than history. We were talking before we

began this interview about Dominic Cummings, who you had as a guest on the show. And although I didn't agree with Brexit, in the current world, you might've thought I would never read Dominic Cummings. I would try and read his Substack, read his blogs because I think he's an original thinker, um, and a good and interesting writer. And he blogged a few years, quite a few years ago now, maybe four years ago about Tolstoy. And I've, I went on a real slow burn Tolstoy jag through War and Peace and Anna Karenina, cause Dominic Cummings 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, disappearing to another world. War and Peace is obviously set in the early 19th century, Anna Karenina in about the 1870s. 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, said you would find about Tolstoy is that you just, you disappear completely immersed into this world. And, um, 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 forties and, uh, 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 tall story. I mean, I don't think I would have understood any of it or not. 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 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 a bit. Where should people go to keep up to date with the things that you do?

Um, I write a sub stack. It's called history, comma, et cetera. I, uh, I do a, uh, when that sort of functions, my mailing list. So if you want to find out about the new, new books, new tour dates, new podcast episodes, it's all on there. And I do a monthly like Q and a session on there for engaged readers and listeners. Uh, the pod, the podcast is this is history and that comes out

every Tuesday, um, and the books are in all good bookstores. How are you on, uh, the plague, like 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 a little reading up and then can we do a episode on that? Yeah.

And watching, I've been falling asleep to stories of miasma and all sorts of other stuff. Well, I mean, I'm, I'm writing a novel at the moment that's set in 1350. It's post pandemic novel. Uh, and I'm the first chapter is all about like first encounter with the plague. And it's based in a real incident. My first two novels follow this ordinary group of soldiers in the beginning of a hundred years war, battle of Crescid and siege of Calais in 1348, a 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, on the shore and was like, do not come here. The plague is here. And they go, ah, nevermind that. And she goes into the city and dies of the plague. And then, you know, two months later, it just, it's, it's in England and it just races its way through. So I've been, um, that's that takes out, 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. So it'll be, it's on my mind at the moment. So next time that comes out, I would love to have that conversation. Yeah, we should do dude. Thank you for coming to see me. My pleasure.