A brand-new life of England's greatest king from our bestselling medieval historian 'A historian who writes as addictively as any page-turning novelist.' Observer Henry V reigned over England for only nine years and four months, and died at the age of just 35, but he looms over the landscape of the late Middle Ages and beyond. The victor of Agincourt was a model king for his successors. Shakespeare's version of Henry V saw his youthful folly redirected to sober statesmanship, and in the dark days of World War II, Henry's victories in France were recounted in British propaganda. Churchill called Henry 'a gleam of splendour in the dark, troubled story of medieval England', while for one modern medievalist, Henry was, quite simply, 'the greatest man who ever ruled England'. For Dan Jones, Henry is one of the most intriguing characters in all medieval history, but one of the hardest to pin down. He was a hardened, sometimes brutal, warrior, yet he was also creative and artistic, with a bookish temperament. He was a leader who made many mistakes, who misjudged his friends and family members, yet always seemed to triumph when it mattered. As king, he saved a shattered country from economic ruin, put down rebellions and secured England's borders; in foreign diplomacy, he made England a serious player once more. Yet through his conquests in northern France, he sowed the seeds for three generations of calamity at home, in the form of the Wars of the Roses. Dan Jones's life of Henry V provides unprecedented insight into the critical first 26 years of his life before he became king. Both a standalone biography and a completion of Dan's sequence of English medieval histories that began with The Plantagenets and The Hollow Crown, Henry V is a thrilling and unmissable life of England's greatest king from our best-selling medieval historian.

When Henry V became king of England in 1413 he inherited an exhausted realm. The coup d'etat in which Henry's father deposed his uncle Richard II had left deep political fault-lines; the impact of the Black Death still lingered; public finances and law and order were in crisis. To the outside world, England was irrelevant, the glorious victories over France won by Henry's grandfather Edward III at Cre¿cy and Poitiers largely forgotten.

But, in less than a decade, Henry transformed England. He reunited the political community behind the crown, reformed the justice system, invested heavily in shipbuilding, put down rebellions and secured England's borders. In foreign diplomacy, he made England a serious player once more. And, by defeating a larger and better-equipped French army at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, he brought about the union of the crowns of England and France, an achievement which ranks Henry alongside medieval rulers such as Charlemagne, William the Conqueror and Frederick Hohenstaufen.

In terms of his military genius and force of personality, Henry was arguably the closest thing England ever produced to a Napoleon Bonaparte. And Agincourt was his Austerlitz.