Battle Royal! From Henry V to the SAS: the best history books of 2024

The Eagle and the Hart by Helen Castor (Allen Lane £35, 688pp)

THE Middle Ages came roaring back this year, with books on that era claiming my top slots for cleverly combining in-depth scholarship with pacey readability. They offer a new take on English kings we probably know little more about than the fanciful spin Shakespeare put on them.

Richard II and Henry IV – grandsons of Edward III, born three months apart –

were cousins and childhood companions who became deadly rivals for the throne of England in the 14th century.

Richard was the legitimate heir but petulant and paranoid, a ten-year-old boy king who grew into a monster of a monarch, demanding obedience and loyalty by divine right but failing to earn it. A narcissist whose emblem was the white hart, he surrounded himself with unsuitable companions and brought the nation to the brink of ruin.

Henry Bolingbroke built a reputation as a military man and leader, biding his time until his cousin turned on him, then seizing his chance in 1399 to return triumphantly from exile to grab the throne for himself, an eagle (his emblem) claiming his eyrie. Taking the crown was one thing; hanging onto it as a usurper was another and his 14-year reign was dogged by unrest and rebellion.

Helen Castor is a master storyteller not only of what she sees as ‘the tragedy’ of their relationship but also of this most turbulent period in English history, a real-life game of thrones and violent power plays in which one wrong move would cost a careless duke or earl his head and a king his crown. Who said medieval history was boring?

Henry V by Dan Jones (Apollo £25, 464pp)

THE hair’s-breadth vagaries of history, in which fortunes turn on a sixpence – or, in this case, millimetres of flesh – are demonstrated in my second medieval history pick, Dan Jones’s absorbing life of Henry V, son of Henry IV.

As a 16-year-old Prince of Wales, he was in a battle against the rebel army of Harry Hotspur at Shrewsbury when he lifted the visor of his helmet to take a drink and an arrow penetrated his face, just below his right eye.

He instinctively tugged on the shaft, which broke in his hand, leaving the metal arrow-head buried six inches deep in the back wall of his skull. A fraction to the left or right and it would have blinded him, damaged his brain or killed him outright. It was the skills and the bravery of a surgeon by the name of John Bradmore that saved Henry’s life, and allowed him to become arguably England’s greatest king and certainly its most notable warrior.

For weeks on end, the doctor gradually opened the wound – causing his teenage patient immense pain, which he bore with characteristic grit – before he could wiggle and tease out the arrowhead.

The God-fearing Henry believed he had been saved for a purpose, and felt the same at Agincourt 13 years later, his most famous victory, when a French knight brought an axe down on his head, knocking the spikes off his royal crown but miraculously leaving him unharmed.

He reigned for just nine years; the legend endured for centuries.

James and John by Chris Bryant (Bloomsbury £25, 336pp)

THIS was the sexual offence that dare not speak, disguised (but not really) in legal euphemisms such as ‘an unnatural crime’, ‘an abomination’, ‘the unmentionable sin’. But in early 19th century England, sodomy could cost one of the publicly derided ‘mollies’, ‘margeries’, ‘catamites’ and ‘poofs’ caught in the act his life on the scaffold.

Between 1806 and 1835, 404 men were sentenced to death for this, of whom 56 were hanged – the last of them being James Pratt and John Smith, two pretty ordinary blokes with their trousers down shopped to the police by a prurient landlord who spied on them through a keyhole.

Through their case, Labour MP and historian Chris Bryant – fortunately for him, gay in a more enlightened age – gives a compelling account of what he rightly calls this ‘era of spectacularly cruel and bloodthirsty prejudice’.

He is driven by his understandable anger that, in retaining capital punishment for the offence, Britain lagged behind the rest of Europe by decades in the case of France and centuries in Germany, Spain and Italy.

But he nonetheless tells the story with forensic calmness, while along the way also, like some latter-day Dickens, vividly catching the authentic atmosphere of London 200 years ago, its streets, prisons and courts, its dirt, its smells, its excitement, its inhumanity.

The Siege by Ben Macintyre (Viking £25, 400pp)

FOR six days in the spring of 1980, the world held its breath after armed dissidents opposed to the Ayatollah Khomeini seized the Iranian embassy in London, holding 26 people hostage, among them a British policemen on duty at the door and two members of the BBC who were there to get visas.

It was a turning point, an event that broke new ground. Not only was it the first time that Middle East terrorism reared its head in the West – an unwelcome chapter that is still far from finished – it was also the premier performance of Britain’s SAS, who re-took the embassy, gun-toting figures in black balaclavas storming it on live, prime-time television.

Most of the public had never heard of the Regiment before; afterwards, they were – and still are – a legend.

Ben Macintyre tells the inside story with his customary pace and panache, the tension mounting as the minutes ticked away and the terrorists threatened to murder their hostages, but also not shying away from the moral nuances of the finale in which all but one of the perpetrators died.

His account draws on contemporary diaries and interviews with witnesses. The Ministry of Defence cleared SAS soldiers to speak to him. He writes: ‘Most of the source material is secret, pseudonymous or privately owned.’ With some justification, this has been described as ‘the last word on the subject’.

Queen Victoria and her Prime Ministers by Anne Somerset (William Collins £30, 576pp)

A MONARCH reigns but does not rule – that is the eccentric and unique nature of the British constitution.

And the restrictions placed on her ability to get her own way frequently made Queen Victoria very cross.

In public, her prime ministers queued up to praise her ‘thorough understanding’ (Gladstone’s phrase) of her constitutional position, but they, of all people, knew first hand how much she kicked against being reminded who really ran the country.

Theoretically, she had immense power – to disband the army, declare war, pardon all convicted offenders and dismiss the civil service. Wisely she chose not to risk a revolution by exercising these rights, but that didn’t mean she was politically inactive. Behind the scenes, she made her presence, her views and, above all, her displeasure known to the various men – ten in all over 64 years – who headed her governments.

Her meddling led Gladstone to whisper behind her back that she was ‘an imperious despot’.

She couldn’t stand him and complained he was humourless, unable to take a joke.

But she made an important impact, argues Anne Somerset, through her ‘uncanny ability to align herself with public opinion, instinctively espousing views that coincided with those of many of her subjects’, even though her day-to-day life in palaces and country houses was far removed from theirs.

The common sense of the stout little widow in a black bonnet – drawing on what she called her ‘desire to do what is fit and right’ – was crucial in steering the nation away from the sort of popular unrest and extremism that after her death would overtake other European countries.

Takeover: Hitler’s Rise to Power by Timothy W. Ryback (Headline £25, 416pp)

AT THE back end of 1932, it was common currency among the politically aware in the Weimar Republic that the man they sneered at as the ‘Bavarian corporal’ was a busted flush, along with his Nazi Party and its uniformed stormtroopers.

They’d failed to get anywhere near a majority in recent elections to the Reichstag, with two thirds of German voters rejecting them and their share of the popular vote falling.

A cartoon on the front page of a national newspaper had Adolf Hitler slouching against a table holding a broken swastika in his hand like a child moping over a broken toy.

And yet just weeks later, at the end of January 1933, that same Adolf Hitler was all-powerful, reluctantly appointed Chancellor of Germany by the ageing President von Hindenburg.

Twice in the past, Hindenburg had sent Hitler away empty-handed, refusing to elevate the would-be dictator. This time, caught in a constitutional deadlock of rival parties, none of whom had majority backing, he gave in.

How Hitler combined foot-stamping intransigence with skilful political manouvering (aka lies and broken promises) to reach his goal is forensically examined by US historian Timothy Ryback. What comes across is how close the Fuhrer came to failing and possibly sparing the world all the horrors that followed.

Instead, the complacency of his multiple enemies, pursuing their own interests instead of combining to keep him out, gave Hitler his opportunity.

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant, Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Fourth Estate £30, 640pp)

EVERYONE admired his extraordinary beauty, even those who came to loathe and fear him. It was this that propelled the low-born George Villiers into the court, the inner chamber and then the bed of Queen Elizabeth I’s successor, the Stuart King James I of England, awkward, ugly, ambisexual son of Mary, Queen of Scots.

The love-struck monarch – despite having a wife and siring an heir, a spare and six other children – was simply mad about the boy, calling him his ‘sweetheart’ and heaping treasures and titles on him, finally elevating him to Duke of Buckingham, the only dukedom in the land not occupied by a royal blood relation.

The king alone took precedence over him, much to the disgust of those who thought him an over-mighty subject, with too much power, too much influence, too much wealth.

They identified him as the cause of all the nation’s discontents, a monster leading not only King James astray but also his successor son, Charles I. Here were the seeds of the popular anti-royalist sentiment that would lead to the Civil War and the beheading of the monarch.

But Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s epic is more than just one man’s story. This delightful book casts its net wide, giving a lively in-depth portrait of the early Stuart era, overflowing with telling detail and written with compelling pace and verve. One to get stuck into. One to savour.