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

by David Mitchell

Monarchy is what England has instead of a sense of identity. The very continuity of English government – the rule of kings morphing into the flawed parliamentary democracy of today – has resulted in our sense of nationhood, patriotism

and even culture getting entwined with an institution that, practically speaking, now does little more than provide figureheads.

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.

What caused the Arthur pearl was the persistent longing of humans, of almost all eras and cultures, to hark back to something better. It’s a far more enduring psychological habit than a belief in progress.

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 Cont...

There is: it just happens to be deep-seated psychological need rather than historical reality.

So, while King Arthur didn’t exist, the idea of him is lurking, guiltily or inspiringly, in the minds of many of the rulers who did.

There wasn’t a day when all the signs saying ‘Britannia’ got taken down. There was no

signage. Hardly anyone could read. Those last two sentences can be applied to most of human history, so I hope you’re not expecting this book to be about anything nice.

You hear it in the way people rebuke each other for prejudiced remarks by saying ‘Come on, it’s the twenty-first century’, as if the passage of time inevitably brings with it ethical improvements.

Is assuming that things improve the best way of ensuring they will? I doubt it. A healthy fear of societal cataclysm may be a good technique for avoiding

it.

Christianity, for Bede, wasn’t merely something he was massively into, or he solemnly exhorted other people to adhere to, it was everything. It was the real underlying truth of existence, like science is today. It was very

much not like religion is today, even for those who are very religious. If we don’t accept that, we can’t begin to understand the times he lived in and the attitude he took.

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.

This need outwardly to assert a massive holy link between God, Christ and some beardy guy with a sword and a colossal sense of entitlement was becoming entrenched on the mainland and followed Christianity into the lands of the Anglo-Saxons.

Christianity and the right to rule were welded together. By the time of Bede, for a king to remain unbaptized, as Caedwalla had been, would be as unlikely and egregious a lapse in professional housekeeping as a Democratic senator not having all their COVID jabs.

From most of our points of view, the coronavirus pandemic

was just a shit thing that suddenly happened, and not the inevitable consequence of the insufficient pandemic-preparedness of governmental structures that incentivize using public money for easing politicians’ paths to re-election rather than for stockpiling PPE or maintaining a vast permanently mothballed

emergency-vaccine-manufacture infrastructure. The pandemic might look inevitable in retrospect, but...

The thought that disasters are your fault is comforting, on some level. It gives you the illusion of control when, in truth, something horrible came out of the blue and ruined your life.

Sadly for Egbert, though, it wasn’t possible to enjoy it. This

early ninth-century squabbling between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is reminiscent of the way the BBC and ITV still tussle to win the Saturday-night TV ratings war. Like Wessex and Mercia in the 820s, they must find something comforting in that old, irrelevant conflict. It distracts them from the terrifying

new threats they’re facing. For King Egbert the equivalent of YouTube, Netflix, Amazon and the Conser...

though nobody seemed to be able to draw a face that looked realistic

at any point between the Romans leaving and the Tudors. Does thinking that make me a philistine?

Though latterly it has been

questioned by the bloody ‘let’s try and work out what actually happened’ killjoys, fresh from lopping Viking horns off.

Is all that enough for him to be known as ‘the Great’? Demonstrably it is. Still it’s not quite Napoleonic. It’s more the regal equivalent of rescuing the fortunes of a struggling regional chain of family-owned shoe

shops. If ‘Great’ monarchs have parties in the afterlife, I reckon Catherine of Russia and Alexander of Macedon are going to be raising their eyebrows behind Alfred’s back in the same way St Peter and St Mary Magdalene do when St Edward the Confessor walks into the reception for saints and starts troughing

on the special canapés reserved for martyrs. These mediocre B...

These days it’s possible for us to contemplate the confusing events between the death

of Alfred the Great and the arrival of William the Conqueror without getting distracted by the prospect of a nice British imperial happy ending, because we know about the Somme and the Blitz and Suez and Profumo and the miners’ strike and Brexit and Covid. We can understand more clearly that history isn’t

act...

a proper story. It’s more like a soap opera. It never fucking ends. So it has to get cyclical. England comes together and then something has to happen next, and one of the options that the exhausted cosmic hack writers might go for is England fall...

div...

The towering sexism of many ages, and of many subsequent ages which have spearheaded

the analysis of those earlier ages, has left the specifics of all the brilliant or shitty things women were doing largely unrecorded. You’d think that all they were doing was marrying kings, which the overwhelming majority were not.

Storing up anecdotes for posterity makes sense for a character actor and raconteur, but it’s not a sound basis for building a regime.

Once again, history is written, and edited, by the victors (or, rather, by some nerds the victors have ordered to write it, the actual victors being far too macho and illiterate to be arsed to write it themselves).

but millions of people support football clubs other than the four or five that ever win anything.

They root week after week for unsuccessful teams with no more or less statistical

hope of major silverware than Harold has of being the victor at the Battle of Hastings whe...

I’ve just had a virtual wander round it on Google Street View and it still looks idyllic: it must have been a lovely sunny day when the dystopian droid car went through stealing everyone’s data.

I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an afterlife – frankly, if I could, it would be on the cover of the book. But, if there is one, I wonder how kings William I and Henry VIII are getting on. That’s assuming

the afterlife isn’t just airy-fairy spirits and feelings and nebulous niceness amid white light, but is something we can get our heads round: translucent figures chatting on clouds, or sweating in lava-dripping hell-caves. It’s also assuming that both William and Henry would be in the same section of the afterlife, but that does

seem reasonable. They were both ruthless and killed a lot of people – so if that matters, they’re surely both in hell. On the other hand, they were both kings and incredibly well connected. If that helps at all, as it very much does in this vale of tears, th...

which one of them is damned and the other saved would seem to be splitting hairs in terms of when it’s okay to have people killed in order to get your own way. It also implies a God more engaged by the details of what the pope thinks than the m...