Forever waging wars

Death by buggery. Death by castration. Even death by being scared to death. Or so we are led to believe for the Plantagenets’ world. They had a lighter side, too: Henry II employed a professional flatulist with the trade-name of Roland the Farter. The longest reigning royal dynasty in English history (1154-1399), the Plantagenets offer the glaring contrast between their even balance of outstanding kings and outstandingly bad ones; this adds to the already exciting dynamics of a dramatic period, captured to great effect in Dan Jones’s big book on a big subject.

The Plantagenets were established on the English throne by the ‘incessantly busy’ Henry II. He brought with him his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine; with her extensive lands added to those of his new acquisition of England, Henry’s Angevin empire now extended from the border of Scotland to the Pyrenees, slicing France in half all the way down. By siring four legitimate but ungrateful sons (he rightly predicted they would ‘not cease to persecute me even unto death’), he quickly secured the kingdom for his new ruling dynasty.

His two surviving sons — Richard and John — followed him on the throne and built on their father’s great legal and administrative reforms. Jones has a lot of time for Richard the Lionheart, recognising the king’s prodigious military skills. The author has a great knack for vividly setting scenes throughout the book, and his account of Richard’s coronation wonderfully evokes the solemn occasion of Richard ‘being anointed God’s hammer’.

Jones notes how famously little time Richard spent in England, forever waging his wars abroad, but the narrative drive of the book does not allow for much in the way of developed analysis, and hence Jones does not really explore the implications of this.