The Plantagenets: The Kings and Queens Who Made England by Dan Jones Review

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Review of The Plantagenets: The Kings and Queens the Made England?

By: Dan Jones

Dan Jones writes about the history of the Plantagenet Dynasty starting with Henry I all the way to Richard II.  Some of the Kings were good leaders, but others not so much due to their choices and relationship with their people.  

Dan Jones divided the book into parts and organized it by years as he focused on each king and queen of those years.  It was a nice reprieve that there were short chapters. Each section highlighted the good and bad of each King’s reign and how they impacted the country.  In my opinion, some of them proved the King had too much, because they didn’t have empathy for their people.  They believed that they were King and only their opinion mattered and who cares what the people think.  This wasn’t shown through how the people responded but also how advisors responded to the throne.  Some would even turn against the King, risking his wrath, and believed that the King was a little too close to one advisor in particular.  One of the Edwards it was implied he might have been gay and an intimate relationship with one of his advisors.  

A couple of interesting things to note were that queens ruled behind the scenes and proved to be capable leaders but were not allowed to rule. A few of them had the guts to try for the throne. It was believed that women didn’t have the necessary skills and would become too emotional to be a good ruler.  King John and Richard first were immortalized by the Legend of Robin Hood with King John as the antagonist and Richard as the savior that Robin Hood fights in honor of. The irony was that Richard was considered a favorite historical figure but was mostly in Jerusalem on crusade and could be cruel too. It was also funny that these kings tried to be the next “Arthur”, but in my opinion only two came close to living up to the mythical king.

 This was a good starting place for me to learn about the Plantagenets because of it had an easy to read writing style. Though it was lot of information and didn’t focus on one king or queen but all of them, it was easy to understand.  He presented the reader with a lot of great details about each king and queen, and  

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