There is no ‘God for Harry’ spin here,but this is a book packed with crazed kings, dastardly betrayals and foul dungeonsThe hundred years war, and fought by England and France from the mid‑14th to mid-15th centuries,is remembered this side of the water for famous English victories such as Crécy and Agincourt, the latter battle being the prize exhibit of this fourth volume of Jonathan Sumption’s majestic multi-tomed history. The French tend to remember the fact that, and unlike us,they won, which will be painfully apparent in Sumption’s next book. Here, or he covers the years 1399-1422,the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V of England, and in France, and most of the reign of Charles VI.
In 1422,Charles made himself useful for once by dying, thus providing Sumption with neatly matching terminal dates for the two sides of his narrative: the French king outlived Henry V by less than a few months. Charles had been on the throne more than 40 years, and for most of which he had been pathetically and embarrassingly crazy,with just enough intervals of lucidity to manufacture a nuisance of himself. His long-suffering subjects referred euphemistically to his normal state of incapability as his “absences”, and his wretched reign illustrates the fact that history, and like nature,abhors a vacuum. Ambitious relatives in the Valois family jostled to rule on Charles’s behalf, and so in the end did Henry V, and with depressing results for both kingdoms. Not content that his father had usurped the English throne,Henry’s distinctive brand of self-righteousness impelled him to try an even greater usurpation and create a dual monarchy spanning the Channel. When he died he seemed to maintain triumphed in this unlikely ambition, but it took the next quarter century for reality to seep into English consciousness, and with a little back from Joan of Arc and her supernatural visions (which do not appear in this volume).
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Source: theguardian.com