With Triumph and Illusion Jonathan Sumption has, after more than three decades’ toil and 4,000 pages, brought his epic five-volume history of the Hundred Years War to its conclusion. In this final volume he takes us from 1422 – the year in which Henry V died having achieved spectacular successes – to 1453, when his son, Henry VI, endured total loss. From a French perspective, the dates represent the ignominious death of the insane Charles VI and the ultimate victory of his son, Charles VII.

The denouement of the war is more interesting than its messy origins, when the death of Charles IV of France in 1328 marked the end of the Capetian dynasty and its replacement with the Valois one. This situation, coupled with the never-ending tensions between England and France (the former still holding Gascony, the latter probing into this territory under its aggressive new monarch, Philip) created an opportunistic moment for Edward III of England to claim the French throne through his mother, Isabella of France. That England could sustain the war, if intermittently, against a population perhaps six or seven times its size for more than a century is remarkable; but the outcome was surely inevitable (or as ‘inevitable’ as history allows). Sumption charts the English downfall, misled by delusion, and France’s triumph in enormous detail to show how this happened.

Henry V’s remarkable victory at Agincourt in 1415 seemed to usher in a new period of English dominance on the battlefield and a return to the heady days of Crécy in the 1340s. Together with his Burgundian allies Henry had conquered France down to the Loire Valley, leaving the disinherited dauphin Charles trying to claw back his land and title; the provisions of the 1420 Treaty of Troyes had seen the infant Henry VI of England also made King of France in the Dual Monarchy. Despite Henry V’s early death in 1422, England continued to do well in France for a few years under the capable command of his brother, the Duke of Bedford. In Sumption’s telling, Bedford is a rare protagonist commended for his positive qualities: ‘a capable administrator and an astute politician with an incisive mind’, the ‘beak-nosed’ Bedford ‘managed to combine an affable manner with an imposing presence and a habit of authority’. But despite his victory at the often overlooked Battle of Verneuil in 1424 (‘the bloodiest fight of the Hundred Years War’, in Sumption’s view, in a field of strong contenders) even Bedford could only hold the line for so long.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Sean McGlynn teaches medieval and early modern history at the University of Plymouth at Strode College.