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

by David Mitchell

In 1045 Edward married Godwin’s daughter, and Harold’s sister, Edith. It’s unlikely to have been a love match – that was the reality of royal marriages for centuries. In this case, it’s also unlikely to have been a no-hate match – and that was something that even medieval princes and princesses were permitted to shoot for. Okay, maybe you’re only twelve and they’re sixty-two, and you don’t speak the same language, and you’ve never met, and yet somehow you’re also cousins, but you can still be civil, right? You can be like cordial neighbours who say good morning and occasionally try to procreate heirs

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, not perfection.

Only a few centuries after the Byzantines started making this shit up, coronations were now viewed as real and sacred and transformative. Once you were crowned and anointed, you simply were the king – that was the view. Maybe you shouldn’t be the king, but you still were. That’s why, in those days, no one hung about being uncrowned for months so the ceremony could be nicely organized with lots of pageantry. It wasn’t worth the risk of a rival claimant steaming in with some biddable bishop and getting himself crowned while the rightful ruler was busy choosing bunting.

she was married to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V until he died in 1125. The couple were childless and Matilda then headed back to her father, whom she hadn’t seen since she was packed off to Germany at the age of eight as the emperor’s intended bride. (Obviously she didn’t marry him when she was eight. That would have been barbaric. They waited until she was twelve.)

This is quite unfair on Richard the Lionheart. He never claimed to give a shit about England. On the contrary, he apparently said, on the subject of his ruthless fundraising drive, ‘I would have sold London if I could find a buyer.’ If only he’d known some Russians.

Magna Carta was the barons’ attempt to address this problem – to come up with a framework to constrain this furious and infuriating idiot they were stuck with. It’s got some big ideas in it, most notably clauses 39 and 40, which are still part of British law today: ‘No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land’ and ‘To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.’

Clause 61 of Magna Carta provided for a council of twenty-five barons to ensure the king’s adherence to the charter. It was empowered to confiscate his castles and lands if he strayed. This was a massive affront to the concept of kingship – the regal equivalent of what happened to Britney Spears

In 2020, during the Covid pandemic, as part of the general internet-fuelled stupidity of our time, some lockdown refuseniks took to citing clause 61 of Magna Carta as a justification for ignoring lockdown rules. Their reasoning was that the clause made it legal to rebel against government that the people considered unjust. I’m quite fond of this sort of bullshit – a little learning can be a hilarious thing, and the same goes for a little googling.

Let’s not get overexcited: the twelfth century wasn’t exactly woke, but the various Jewish minorities around western Europe were generally left alone. Then, in the following century, the mood changed. It’s one of the many historical examples of the weird way antisemitism waxes and wanes for no clear reason, with little warning and with cataclysmic consequences for Jewish people. It’s why those who nowadays accuse Jews of hysterical sensitivity to the slightest undercurrent of antisemitism need a fucking history lesson.

That’s what Henry had been doing since Agincourt. He went back to England for a bit, to soak up the plaudits and sign a treaty with Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, no less, in which the empire recognized his claim to the French throne. This must have been exciting. The crazy Plantagenet claim to the French throne, Edward III’s chancy punt, was getting endorsed by Europe’s biggest-wig. The daft notion that the King of England was also the rightful king of France was becoming mainstream. Think on that when you next assume that all internet conspiracy theories are doomed to be blasted away by the leaf-blower of reason.

It is impossible to discuss any aspect of Richard III’s reign without mentioning the Tudors. In this, their victory over him is even more complete than at the Battle of Bosworth. That battle, in 1485, marked the end of the Wars of the Roses (hooray!) and, in it, Henry Tudor defeated and killed Richard III and established the Tudor dynasty on the throne where it stayed for 118 years.

This crisis was developing in the late 1520s at the same time as Henry was becoming infatuated with the much younger (than either him or Catherine) Anne Boleyn. He’d had an affair with her sister, Mary Boleyn, but Anne was more aspirational than Mary and wouldn’t have sex with him unless they were married – a technique known at the time as ‘doing an Elizabeth Woodville’. If Woodville’s resolve had caused a few problems and a minor civil war, Boleyn’s ended up changing the whole nation’s belief system as well as doing almost as much long-term damage to the Catholic church as Martin Luther had.

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. What a catch.

The king responded enthusiastically to the portrait, which is interesting because I wouldn’t say it looked exactly sexy. It wouldn’t make it into a Pirelli calendar. It’s quite a plain picture of a normal-looking woman dressed extremely oddly. The oddness of the dress is to do with it being the sixteenth century so we have to ignore that. Almost everyone I mention in this book dressed very strangely by our standards. All in all, it’s not a picture that would make you rule out marrying its subject, but it wouldn’t clinch the deal for me.

Beheadings feel bloody, burnings are more ashy. Or smoky. Smoky Mary would sound quite sexy, like a jazz singer, but, from the sound of her, that too would have been inappropriate. Still, considering the form of execution that she favoured, it seems odd to associate her with a non-flammable liquid.

In order to have a probably fatal pregnancy, Mary needed first to have sex with a man and in order to have sex with a man, she needed to get married. That was her strong feeling. You can’t go burning hundreds of Protestants over what a wafer is made of if you’ve got a racy sideline in extramarital sex. Smoky Mary might get away with it, but not her buttoned-up namesake Bloody.