Conquest

For thirty dramatic years, England ruled a great swath of France at the point of the sword—an all-but-forgotten episode in the Hundred Years’ War that Juliet Barker brings to vivid life in Conquest. Following Agincourt, Henry V’s second invasion of France in 1417 launched a campaign that would place the crown of France on an English head. Buoyed by conquest, the English army seemed invincible. By the time of Henry’s premature death in 1422, nearly all of northern France lay in his hands and the Valois heir to the throne had been disinherited. Only the appearance of a visionary peasant girl who claimed divine guidance, Joan of Arc, was able to halt the English advance, but not for long. Just six months after her death, Henry’s young son was crowned in Paris as the first—and last—English king of France. Henry VI’s kingdom endured for twenty years, but when he came of age he was not the leader his father had been. The dauphin whom Joan had crowned Charles VII would finally drive the English out of France. Barker recounts these stirring events—the epic battles and sieges, plots and betrayals—through a kaleidoscope of characters from John Talbot, the “English Achilles,” and John, duke of Bedford, regent of France, to brutal mercenaries, opportunistic freebooters, resourceful spies, and lovers torn apart by the conflict.

Barker weaves strands of contemporary evidence into a fluent account of a complex but fascinating era. There is a steady succession of treaties, marriages, murders, massacres, famines, sieges, battles and skirmishes, but Barker has an eye for the kind of detail that can illuminate the mindset of the long-dead., The story of how Henry V swept all before him, how his relatives under the infant Henry VI bickered over his conquests, how Joan of Arc rallied the French and how Charles VII won his country back, makes for engrossing reading., Juliet Barker takes the story to 1450 in her compelling Conquest: The English Kingdom of France…which tells how England threw away Henry’s legacy in a sorry tale of lost battles, political bickering and financial mismanagement. Plus ça change, indeed., The story is worth telling and Barker tells it superbly well. Her judgments are shrewd. Her understanding of the complex politics of the period is impressive. She writes in a spare, elegant style… There was a need for a good history of the failed enterprises of the English. Juliet Barker’s book supplies it handsomely., [A] lucid guide to this very complicated period… Barker’s narrative combines high drama and low humor. It could be argued that both the origin and end of the English Kingdom of France was a dynastic comedy of errors… Barker is both learned and lucid in bringing alive the characters, the struggle and the ultimate futility of it all.

Juliet Barker is one of Britain’s most distinguished literary biographers and medievalists and author of Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle That Made England.