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

by David Mitchell

worst enemy would admit, got on better with popes tha...

The massive year 1066 – the

most famous in English history and the inspiration for a million guessable PINs – is dominated by – NOT MINE! – is dominated by the brilliance and luck of William of Normandy. He needed both to become king of England. That’s a bit disconcerting. It’s not how we like to view history or world events.

England’s most pukka lineage is a descent from thieving thugs. But it’s okay because a) they were thieving thugs an exceptionally long time ago and b) they were extraordinarily successful thieving thugs. (We should of course remember that the Anglo-Saxon kings and nobility were also, in all probability, though with a few more mists of time to spare their blushes, descended from thieving thugs.)

This fascinates me. It seems to be an admission that, fundamentally, everything’s awful. There is no justice, just strength. The foundations of our state, the position of the family whose coat of arms hangs above every courtroom in the land, derives from

conquest – militarized theft. The brutal reality of new people in charge, and owning everything, was quickly evident – and, after a f...

I reckon that, as soon as anyone starts seriously believing a system of government is at bottom rooted in justice and loveliness, they’ve let

their sceptical guard down and are inviting the unavoidably imperfect to descend into the downright hellish. The world has never been fair, and cannot be made fair, and claims that it can are foolish or dishonest. It can be made fairer and attempts to make it less fair can be resisted.

Optimistic realists seek improvement, n...

But castles as structures controlled by the local lord, or by the crown – as nodes for the imposition of power on the surrounding

land and settlements – came with the Normans. Literally. They brought wooden ones as flat packs in their invasion fleet. Overconfident bastards.

Doubt is a dangerous thing in medieval politics. We’ve seen how doubt over the line of succession bred violence and discord, and we’re going to keep seeing that. That’s going to get boring. A key skill in a medieval ruler is eliminating doubt, and

ruthlessness is part of that. The knowledge that, if crossed, the king will respond with immediate reflex savagery, no matter who is doing it or why, is in a sense reassuring.

Some say that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. I find that an awkward principle because, in my view, allowing good men to do nothing is the purpose of civilization.

He’s talked of as a very nice guy in person. Having myself once met and warmed to Boris Johnson, I’m aware of the

limitations and fickleness of this attribute – but it’s interesting.

It wasn’t nice, the Anarchy. It was a big and brutal civil war and my main feeling about it, throughout – and this must have been the sentiment of the overwhelming

majority of people in England at the time – is a desperation for one side or the other to win. It really didn’t matter which, except to two people.

Justice for people who are already beneficiaries of a massively unjust system becomes difficult to give much of a damn about.

What had been devised as an instrument for asserting Norman control over a foreign land was – under new circumstances where the Normans weren’t all on the same side any more – becoming a catalyst of chaos.

Castles are like the twelfth century’s asbestos. Seemed like such a great idea, got put in everywhere and then the lethal and resource-hungry consequences dragged on for decades.

You can see that things have gone a bit crazy when it’s easier to build two new castles than gain access to one.

Stephen and Matilda were just colossally entitled

posh people whose incompatible ambitions caused enormous suffering.

It may be that two-thirds of the symbol of the England football team actually represent regions of France.

John, on the other hand, seems to have been an instinctive believer in the hype of early medieval kingship. That misplaced confidence is what nearly brought the whole unjust

edifice crashing down. His failure to question it in his own mind led to the barons starting to question it in theirs. They were reluctant to do so, because kingship was a reassuring idea and felt natural. But John forced them to think.

English control of Ireland has never really worked out, as you’ll know if you’ve watched the news at any point since the invention of television,

The financial

balance of power was transformed because the English monarchs had lost control of huge amounts of territory and all the potential money that came with it, and the French kings had gained it.

Clearly there was a feeling that, if you go against the righteousness of primogeniture, things might go badly wrong. Needless to say, they did anyway.

Let me try and briefly explain this dynastic claim while we’re here because, as I mentioned before, it resulted in the ludicrous situation that every ruler of England from the mid-fourteenth century until the start of the nineteenth claimed also to be the rightful ruler of France. Half a millennium of delusional bullshit

rested on this, which makes the couple of decades for which the United Nations pretended Taiwan was China pale into insignificance.

The

first kings, as we’ve seen, were just successful bullies – all the talk of religion and legitimacy is a distraction from that fundamental truth. I find the absurd claim to France of the English monarchs an amusing reminder that all these people with crowns are just chancers.

That’s what spoils Edward and his son’s valiant-underdog image. Yes, they were often outnumbered, and yes they were very brave and militarily astute, but they were also invaders and aggressors. If burglars find themselves outnumbered by the residents of a house they’re attempting to clear out, that doesn’t necessarily

make them particularly sympathetic.

They perfected a tactic known as the chevauchée, which was basically wasting, that

beloved technique of William the Conqueror, but done at speed: an army on horseback cutting a swathe of destruction through the countryside, killing, burning and ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of French peasants. Edward Prince of Wales used the chevauchée particularly effectively and mercilessly, and there

is speculation that this is why he came to be known as...

The Black Death had nothing meaningful to do with humans. Human trade drove its spread, the close cohabitation of humans incentivized its emergence, but no person or people had done a stupid or sinful thing to cause it. It existed because we existed. I don’t think you can blame humans

any more than you can blame chickens for foxes. Still, I hope the solemn self-important guilt that people resorted to in their bewilderment and grief gave them some sort of comfort, some feeling of significance in the face of a bacterial tsunami for which they were no more than a fertile shore.

It’s a bit shit, the institution

of monarchy. It’s not fair. Some guy gets to be in charge of everything just because of who his dad was. It’s not a good system. But it is a system of some sort. It’s not anarchy. Richard is in charge and that’s that. One day he’ll die but until then he’s king – we know where we are and we can work on a coping strategy.

Nevertheless, accepting who the king is and, crucially, who the king is going to be – gripping the notion of primogeniture ever more tightly – is a good way of maximizing stability. It means you don’t really need to have a civil war every time a king dies,

on top of all the civil wars you’re having anyway. The idea is: you stop things like the Stephen and Matilda situation with a totally inflexible and preordained line of succession, and you stop things like the King John situation with Magna Carta and parliament. Both kinds of mega-crisis are precluded.

When the magnates got rid of Richard – and, as you are probably inferring, they are going to get rid of him – and he didn’t have a son, and someone else became king ... well, suddenly the position of that king, and every other

king for ever, is weaker. Kings can be got rid of. But there’s no system in place for how that’s done, or who gets to be the new king. As a result, English history in the fifteenth century is an absolute shitstorm. There’s no way that it wouldn’t have been better all round if they’d stuck with crappy Richard until he died.

condemning Richard’s most senior ministers to death – this included de Vere and de la Pole, but they had fled to France so escaped execution. This might have been exciting if they hadn’t both died

quite soon thanks to medieval Europe’s narratively insensitive mortality rate.