Charles VI of France died on 21 October 1422. He had been intermittently mad for most of his long reign, ‘a pathetic figure’ flitting, often witless, around his palaces. He left a ruined and divided kingdom. There was no French prince to follow his funeral. ‘Tradition was maintained by a solitary figure in a black cape and hat’ on foot behind the coffin. ‘It was the Regent of France, John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford.’ His brother, Henry V of England, married to Charles’s daughter Catherine, would have become King of France had he not died of dysentery two months previously. His infant son, Henry VI, would indeed be crowned King of France, but that is just beyond the scope of this marvellous history, which covers the years 1400 to 1422.
The Hundred Years War lasted for more than a century (1337–1453). Jonathan Sumption embarked on its history in 1979. There will be one more volume to complete what is surely a masterpiece of historical writing. It is wonderfully detailed and acute in analysis, yet the narrative never flags. Sumption never forgets that people now long dead were made of flesh and blood, driven by ambition, fear, hatred, love, jealousy. History is written looking back, but the good historian writes in the awareness that for his characters the future is terra incognita.
For the English the great Shakespearean moment of this book is the battle of Agincourt and its hero Henry V. Sumption shows that Shakespeare got it right. He also shows, dramatically, that it was a victory snatched from imminent disaster. If the French had held off battle, content to harass Henry’s diminished, sick and ill-supplied army as it struggled to reach a port from which it might escape to England, Henry’s great expedition would have ended dismally, and he would have found it difficult to persuade Parliament to grant him the resources necessary to mount another invasion.

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