The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England


‘The Plantagenets’ documents a delicious period in English history

There have been 40 monarchs of England/Britain in the 10 centuries since a bastard French-Norman duke crossed the channel in 1066 to conquer and all that. You can count the good kings — that is, reasonably competent, non-tyrannical, non-murderous, non-insane — on one hand. The Plantagenets as a dynasty do not fare well in this tally.

But The Plantagenets fares very well indeed. British historian Dan Jones has produced a rollicking, compelling book about a rollicking, compelling dynasty, one that makes the Tudors who followed them a century later look like ginger pussycats.

We know, of course, way more about the Tudors — because they were shameless spinmeisters, because their later era is better documented, and because their gory story is so entangled with religion and made-for-TV sex. But the Plantagenets (eight kings who ruled from 1154-1399) are no less intriguing for their enigmas.

(The dynasty's name comes from a yellow blossom, planta genista, a sprig of which the first Plantagenet used to wear on his headgear; it came to be associated with the family and was popularized later by Shakespeare.)

Think of Becket and The Lion in Winter, two of the best films about English history ever made, about dynasty founder King Henry II. There are few pictures of Henry (or any Plantagenet) so Peter O'Toole, who played him in both films, is the substitute face of this volatile, energetic, organized and ruthless French-speaking Frenchman who built a vast Anglo-French empire of rich duchies that his hapless descendants eventually lost.

Some of us have been fans of the Plantagenet story (and especially Henry II's incomparable wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, played by Katharine Hepburn in Lion) ever since Thomas Costain's four-volume History of the Plantagenets came out in the 1960s.

Now Jones is introducing a new generation to the story, told with the latest historical evidence (Jones apparently read every chronicle of the era) and Jones' vivid narrative, rich in detail and scene-setting. You can almost smell the sea salt as the White Ship sinks, and hear the screams of the tortured at the execution grounds at Tyburn.

Here we have William the Conqueror's granddaughter, Matilda, who should have inherited the crown but was cheated because she was a woman (so it went to her son Henry II). Her grandson, King John, was such a bad king that his equally nasty barons forced him to sign the Magna Carta, celebrating its 800th anniversary in 2015, instructing him on how to behave better. (It didn't work, but the Great Charter remains a founding document for the United States to this day.)

And the last Plantagenet, Richard II, the worst king of them all — so bad he was deposed by his cousin (Henry IV, founder of the Lancaster dynasty), who then deliberately starved him to death in a castle prison four months later.

What a long, brutal, bloody trip it is. Under the Plantagenets, England is transformed from an unimportant, French-speaking island off France into a kingdom of growing power that is indisputably English, gifting the world with the beginnings of English literature. (Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales under the Plantagenets.)

Along the way, Jones puts to rest some of the juiciest Plantagenet stories: Henry II's son, Richard I the Lionheart, was almost certainly not a homosexual, Lion notwithstanding. Edward II, the first heir to the English throne to hold the title Prince of Wales, probably wasn't gay, either, despite his obsession with a male favorite (and Mel Gibson's Braveheart notwithstanding). He was deposed, by his French "she-wolf" wife and her lover, because he was a wretchedly bad king, but almost certainly they did not kill him by sticking a red-hot poker up his rectum.

But the truth is amazing enough. The blood-curdling tortures these Plantagenets visited on their enemies! Makes you wonder how the oh-so-polite British of today could be the descendants of those people and their barbaric era.

But there is a larger point beyond just exclaiming over the horrors of waterboarding. The Plantagenets' saga is the story of how English monarchs learned, or failed to learn, how to be monarchs, and how the English people, commoners and barons alike, learned how to limit their monarchs' powers.

Why is today's placid and powerless Windsor dynasty so stable (despite its occasional annus horribilis)? Because down the centuries, monarchs took lessons from the mistakes of earlier dynasties like the Plantagenets, documented so deliciously in this book.

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