Book Review: The Plantagenets

The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made EnglandBy Dan JonesViking, 2013It seems almost impertinent these days to mention English monarchs who aren’t Tudors. The New Release tables at your nearest evil chain bookstore are piled high with Tudor histories, Tudor biographies, and most of all Tudor fiction; Netflix and Hulu have countless Tudor offerings, whether you incline toward the bee-sting lips of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers or the wasp-sting wit of David Starkey; the general populace is so passingly familiar with those key showboating five figures that hardly any room is left on stage for anybody else (unless it’s the well-meaning Windsors, whenever one of them cavorts with James Bond, or insults an entire nationality, or impregnates his wife).And yet, as historians have pointed out fairly regularly for a fairly long time, the tempestuous Tudors and the spaniel-eyed Stuarts and the hefty Hanoverians and all the rest wouldn’t have had a stage to hog if it hadn’t been built by the Plantagenets, the longest-ruling British dynasty, who held power for more than two centuries in an extravagantly violent age. In the Edwardian era, the great Kate Norgate (a trailblazer whose mighty books really ought to be in print) lavished unstinting – if slightly ominous – praise on the Plantagenets, telling her readers that “whatsoever their hands found to do, whether it were good or evil, they did it with all their might. Nearly all of them were men of great and varied powers.” Seventy years ago, in a very popular volume called The Plantagenets, John Harvey didn’t hesitate to claim that the dynasty “gave England its form and character.” Around the turn of the 20th century, the irresistibly readable Thomas Costain wrote some of his best books about them: The Conquering Family (1949), The Magnificent Century (1951), and The Three Edwards (1958).And now historian Dan Jones, despite having been born at roughly 10:45 this morning, has published the single best one-volume general introduction to the Plantagenets ever written, and he agrees with his predecessors as to the centrality of his subject:

The Plantagenet kings did not just invent England as a political, administrative, and military entity. They also helped invent the idea of England, an idea that has as much importance today as it ever has before.

There’s a wayward, if forgivable, bit of homeland-pride in that (the idea of England being rather gigantically less important today than it was during, say, the century-and-a-half during which England enjoyed virtually uncontested rulership of the Western world), but Jones’ feel for the uncanny ways fact and legend intertwine in the Plantagenet story is so consistently assured throughout his book (called, inevitably, The Plantagenets) that he manages the considerable feat of making readers feel both the facts and the legends with equal and simultaneous vividness. This is Game of Thrones for adults:

A rich mythology of national history and legend was concocted, and the cults of two national saints - Edward the Confessor and St. George - were established. The English tongue rose from an uncultured, rather coarse local dialect to become the language of parliamentary debate and poetic composition. Great castles, palaces, cathedrals, and monuments were raised; many of them still stand as testament to the genius of the men who conceived them, built them, and defended them against attack. Heroes were born, died, and became legends; so too were villains whose names still echo through the pages of history. (Some of those villains wore the crown.)

Even readers only slightly familiar with the pages of history will know some of those legends. There’s the civil war between good King Stephen and the Empress Maud; there’s Henry II and his perennially fascinating queen Eleanor of Aquitaine; there’s the murder of Thomas Beckett by Henry’s henchmen; there’s the war with Saladin and the Third Crusade embarked on by Richard the Lionheart; there’s Magna Carta, the dark birth of representational government; there’s Edward I’s crushing campaigns in Wales and Scotland; there’s the sad, sordid reign of Edward II (who, if later slanders about him are to be believed, would have taken one look at Jones in his leather jacket and lavished him with, er, castles); there are the magnificent battles – on land and sea – of Edward III; there’s the troublesome tyranny of Richard II and his deposition. There's the Hundred Years War. There’s Chaucer. There’s the Black Death.It’s incredibly rich, heady stuff, and it would be a shame if its historian were blind to its riches. Jones proves time and again that he’s alive to the inherent drama of his subject:

To be in Paris during the summer of 1313 was to know the high delights of medieval France. At the beginning of June the whole population flocked in the city streets, and lodgings were crammed with countless noblemen, young knights, the aristocratic young ladies of Europe, and dignified visitors from foreign lands. Great crowds watched public performances, ceremonies, and processions. Colorful fabrics decked the streets, while the city bourgeois provided a fountain that sprayed wine into the air and was decorated with fabulous creatures: mermaids, lions, leopards, and mythical beasts. In a covered market in one part of the city an enclosed wood was built and filled with rabbits, so that revelers could amuse themselves by chasing tame animals.

But he can be flinty as well as florid; the very frequent military scenes in The Plantagenets are always produced in a different register, tougher, more businesslike, as in the blunt, knowing summary of a turn in the Crusade Richard I was fighting against Saladin in 1192:

At the end of July, Richard attempted a feint around Acre, hoping to convince Saladin that he had designs on Beirut. Saladin did not rise to the bait. In Richard's absence he launched a fierce attack on Jaffa. It was a brilliant success. The walls were mined and sapped with lethal skill, and on July 31 huge sections collapsed in a juddering landslide of stone and dust. The city was sacked by rampaging Saracens. It was a disaster: Jaffa was Jerusalem's port and an essential strategic stronghold for Christian maritime superiority.

It’s unlikely that even so ripping good a book as this one will supplant the spotlight-greedy Tudors any time soon, but readers will notice a key difference between Henry VIII & co. and the kings and queens in Jones’ story. Henry VII did more to establish the bureaucracy of the nation than anybody before him, and bureaucracy is the mortal enemy of heroism. After Henry VII, kings no longer fight each other hand-to-hand on the battlefield; they don’t leap from their burning ships and throw themselves into the upturned faces of their enemies; they don’t suddenly show up, with an exhausted but heavily-armed retinue, on the doorstep of some surly baron at dawn. Instead, tradition and precedent and decorum lay their silky hand over the human impulses of royalty, and that hand has never since been lifted (except in rare and scattered instances – Edward VII, one likes to think, would have made a fairly decent Plantagenet).The kings and queens of Jones’ book never felt that civilizing hand. They seem larger than life because, one strongly suspects, life was larger while they were in it. They brawled and laughed and rode and loved and warred (and occasionally peaced) as though the world itself depended on what they did. And they were right about that.