Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens

by David Mitchell

Admit it: ideas can be annoying and frightening and threatening and most of us slightly shudder whenever someone has one.

but it nevertheless shows that thinking outside boxes can sometimes result in thousands of young men getting buried in them.

The fact is that, when millions of people are involved, any sense of a nation united in its values can only be portrayed by repressing the feelings and views of many.

History is a very contemporary thing – it’s ours to think about, manipulate, use to win arguments or to justify patriotism, nationalism or group self-loathing, according to taste. In contrast, the past is unknowable. It’s as complicated as the present. It’s an infinity of former nows all as unfathomable as this one. That’s why historians end up specializing in tiny bits of it.

Someone like that, the idea goes, might have been the bit of real grit in the imagination oyster that turned into the Arthurian pearl.

People found it much easier to believe in a rose-tinted view of the past than a utopian future. They still do: hence ‘Take Back Control’ and ‘Make America Great Again’.

Shit, this history’s going backwards! Although, if you think about it, that’s the logical direction to go in. It’s how archaeology works. You can’t start with stone age axes and work your way up through Roman pots to clay pipes and finally ration cards and an old Nokia.

There is only a grim sense that everything went down the drain (or would have done if the drainage infrastructure hadn’t fallen into disrepair) and, as a result, those centuries are commonly known as the Dark Ages.

dark. Plus there was a lot more going on that we know about by then, so using the term ‘Dark Ages’ about that era speaks more of some people having gone a bit nuts about how amazing the Renaissance was, as if we might as well not bother with any history until Leonardo started doodling helicopters.

Manufacturing collapsed, coins were no longer minted, population numbers went into freefall, and not because people were choosing to have fewer children in order to focus on their careers.

This example of a civilization suddenly getting markedly worse, by any meaningful definition of the word, is extremely interesting and worthy of note. The fact that history took such a sudden and, yes, dark turn is important to emphasize. It’s something every society might profit from remembering. I don’t mean to be a doom-monger but we could do with it now. A big threat to our current civilization is the persistent post-Victorian assumption of progress. This ‘Whig Interpretation of History’ has been regularly debunked ever since the term was coined by the historian Herbert Butterfield in 1931, a tough year for believers in things getting better. Still, most of us unreflectingly go along with it.

Bede and Ceolwulf are also both saints. I don’t disapprove of Ceolwulf’s kingly sainthood as much as Edward the Confessor’s, because he abdicated in 737 and lived as a monk for the rest of his life, so he put the hours in sanctity-wise.

I was an agnostic who didn’t like thinking about religion because I hoped there was a God but didn’t have the confidence to commit. Plus the trappings of religion felt a bit embarrassing and weird, like properly putting on a French accent when saying things in French.

Over on the continent, Roman rule may not have survived but Roman religion did. Tribes like the Goths and the Franks were content to live in Roman cities and were soon worshipping the Romans’ lovely big single God. Despite repeatedly sacking Rome itself, these upwardly mobile barbarians were keen to live an increasingly Roman life. It was as if they were collectively willing into existence the expression ‘When in Rome’.

Violence is a constant, the religious views are just the accompanying spin.

My point is that I don’t think religions are themselves to blame for all the violence in the name of religion, though it has to be said that the religions also totally failed to stop it.

Christian? Well, you know, just Christmas and Easter and when I’m committing genocide

A bit like smoking to look cool and then becoming addicted, medieval kings soon came to believe their own Christ-proclaiming hype.

You might die, but the circumstances usually remain plush.

If he wanted to be chivalrous to Matilda, he shouldn’t have stolen the throne from her. It was an eccentric moment to suddenly give a shit about her feelings.

In an environment where brothers fight wars against each other, where sons try and overthrow fathers, I’ve never quite understood why there was any expectation that you could rely on your in-laws.

The potential undesirability of being king hasn’t been an issue in this book so far. Almost all the kings seemed to want to be king. Possible exceptions: Aethelred the Unready came to the throne as a child and had a very unenjoyable reign, and Edward the Confessor was far too holy to enjoy anything.

It would be a tall order to expect SDM both to invent parliament and to buck the antisemitic trend of the century he lived in. But when you’re looking for a hero, the latter does cast a pall over the former.

The fact that everybody is convinced of something is no guarantee that it isn’t evil horseshit.

Edward II was twenty-three when he became king and there was no reason to hope he’d die any time soon – except that it was the middle ages and anyone might drop dead at any moment, but we can’t really expect the barons of the time to take much comfort from that. ‘Don’t worry about the king – he’ll die in a minute, everyone does. Just look at the place’

That, you’d think, would be the end of the Wars of the Roses. But I’m sorry to say it isn’t. This war is reminiscent of the process of disentangling a very long string of Christmas lights. You sort out one bit and then there are just more twists, more tangles.

The big news, though, was that, in Edward IV, England had found the grown-up it had been seeking since the death of the Duke of Bedford nearly four decades earlier. Edward was a capable king and ruled sensibly until his sudden death in 1483. His major achievement was balancing the books, which he managed by various sensible economic measures such as not having a civil war and not trying to conquer France.

For a long time it was his coronation and anointing that mainly made him a king. Then the notion morphed a bit and a man’s place in a line of succession based on primogeniture came to feel more significant than an archbishop’s deployment of a metal hat and blob of goo.

The odd thing about Henry VIII is that we know such a lot about his feelings and desires. He lived his life in public, like a cross between Kim Kardashian and Vladimir Putin.

Jane Seymour was Henry’s ideal wife: she didn’t argue, she gave birth to a boy and then she promptly died without his having to kill her.

Amazing people existed but they did not seem to matter. That is probably the most far-reaching conclusion we can draw from centuries of violent kingship.