This book is about the life and works of Sir John Fortescue, the most important political thinker of fifteenth-century England. His major treatises remain the starting point for an understanding of ideas about kingship, law and government during the Caroline civil wars and their aftermath. Yet in his lifetime Sir John Fortescue was a prominent man but not remarkable. The dates of his birth (c.1395) and death (c.1479) have to be prefaced by circa because none of his contemporaries thought to record them for posterity. He was sometimes referred to in the Paston Letters informally, almost in a jocular tone, despite the fact that he was, at the time, Chief Justice of King's Bench. In exile (1461–70) he was Chancellor to the Lancastrians but was swept aside in favour of the more powerful claim of Bishop George Neville when Henry VI was briefly restored to the throne. His contemporaries might well have been surprised at the weight that later generations gave to his opinions. Recent scholarship can account for this and bring new evidence to bear on Fortescue's career and thought.

The Fortescue family promoted the rapid posthumous growth of his reputation, assisted by local historians and the heralds from the College of Arms who visited his descendants and obligingly awarded their remote ancestors a distinction that they had never possessed. His great-nephew Sir Adrian Fortescue was an admirer and assiduously copied at least one of the works, The Governance of England, before his disgrace and death during the reign of Henry VIII. The new art of printing fed a growing demand by lawyers and political commentators for Fortescue's De Laudibus Legum Anglie. A century later the book could provide support to both sides in the confrontation between kings and parliament over where sovereignty should lie.

Fortescue's reputation as a political guru continued to flourish into the eighteenth century, assisted by the three editions of The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy by John Fortescue Aland. It was further enhanced by the work of Charles Plummer in the late nineteenth century when he demonstrated that The Governance of England, the title he gave to The Difference between Absolute and Limited Monarchy, was even more central to constitutional debate than the De Laudibus.