Dan Jones and The Plantagenets

Dan Jones' second book, the 2012 title 'The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England' spans the nearly three centuries of the dynasty from the reign of William the Conqueror's great-grandson Henry II (1154-1189) to its end with the death of Richard III (1452-1485) at the Battle of Bosworth Field. If you can keep all the various kings Henry, Richard, and Edward straight, 'The Plantagenets' is a story filled with drama, intrigue, and battle. Here is Eleanor of Aquitaine and her sons Richard the Lionheart (1157-1199) and John I (1166-1216). This is the period of English history which made Magna Carta necessary in 1215, and which saw the formation of what we now know of as the British Parliament, and which saw the idea form and face testing that even the monarch must himself be subject to the laws of God. Here are found the armies of Edward Longshanks (1239-1307) facing off against the Scots led by William Wallace, concluding with the arrest and public execution of that man, and the reassertion of Scottish independence under Robert I (1274-1329). So also, here is the back and forth of fighting, sometimes alongside, sometimes against, the kings of France across the English Channel. This is the period of the Crusades, with Knights Templar - which Dan Jones deals with more fully in another work focused entirely on their order - facilitating the transfer of men and arms and money and information to fight the armies of Islam for the Holy Land. So also, this is the time of the Black Death and struggles between Rome and the kings of Europe for who should wield ultimate authority in matters both ecclesiastical and civil. This then is the setup for the showdown which happened during the reign of the second king in the Tudor line which immediately followed the Plantagenets, Henry VIII (1491-1547), with the breaking away of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534. That is to say that the 269-years in which the House of Plantagenet ruled and reigned - longer, it should be noted, than the 246-years in which this American Republic has now stood - should be seen as the prologue for the wars of religion and debates about separation of powers which themselves culminated in the American Revolution and the founding of the United States of America in 1776 out of thirteen British colonies which held that their king had broken faith and was trampling on their rights as Englishmen. With the history of both Plantagenet and Tudor monarchs still fresh and doubtless in mind, Scottish minister and theologian Samuel Rutherford wrote 'Lex Rex' in 1644 asserting in no uncertain terms that even the king must be subject to the Natural Law, or God's Law. What is more, if or when the king failed and refused to be so subject, it was not only the right of his Christian subjects, but even their responsibility and duty to provide accountability up to and including unmaking him king over them, just as kings of Israel are said to have been made by the assembled people of that nation. The king then cannot just declare traitor anyone who seeks to provide said accountability, taking their lands and disposing of them and their wives and children however suits his imagination. No, there must be both a separation of powers and a system of checks and balances.