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

by David Mitchell

By 1940, several loop-the-loops later in Churchill’s rollercoaster career, he was hoping this new idea would somehow prevent the surrender of France even if it were to be militarily defeated. If ‘two become one’, as the Spice Girls put it (in a song that weirdly turns out not to be about the proposed Anglo-French merger at all but just about having sex), then both Britain and France would have to be defeated before either of them could be. That was what Churchill reckoned.

The UK, the establishment assumption would have been, was primarily England. And England was predominantly not its fields, valleys, lakes, poetry, music, cuisine or folk art, but the pillars of its constitution: its empire, its church, its ancient noble families, its parliament and, first and foremost, its monarchy. For England to always be, those things must always be too. 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.

So this book may be about all the kings and queens who ruled England – and it’s mainly kings, the olden days being, among many many many other flaws, extremely sexist – but it’s not really about the past. It’s about history. History the school subject, the hobby, the atmosphere, the wonky drawings of kings, the grist to heritage’s mill-that’s-been-converted-into-a-café, the sense of identity. 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.

Of all of those attempted answers, history is the one I reach for first. After all, if you walk into a room and someone’s standing on a table waving a gun and someone else is having a wee in the fireplace and there’s an enormous bowl of trifle in the middle of the floor in which a terrier has drowned and, on the TV, it’s nine minutes into a DVD of One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing, and you ask that great human question, then the best answer is a history. What happened before is the best explanation of what happened next. It’s more pertinent than getting into how dogs evolved or the functioning of the human kidney or the economics of 1970s cinema.

1. King Arthur He didn’t exist. That’s the headline. It’s a disappointing start, I know, but it’s an early sign of how tricky history can be.

To be honest, I slightly disapprove of kings being made saints. It’s like CEOs getting knighthoods, standing alongside all those dedicated charity volunteers who raised millions for incubators but only get MBEs.

as a result, those centuries are commonly known as the Dark Ages. Academic consensus has turned against that term in recent years because that’s what academics are like. Their favourite thing is saying that previous academics have got it wrong, even if it’s just about the naming of an era. At one point ‘Dark Ages’ was used to refer to the whole medieval period up to when the Renaissance kicked off in the fifteenth century. That is simplistic, as well as being poor brand management of the late middle ages which, I don’t know about you, but I think of as being absolutely slathered with heraldry. Perhaps I’m basing it too much on the eye-bruising Technicolor of Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V, but it feels like there’s altogether too many shiny trumpety things and maidens with pointy hats and youths with pointy shoes to be dark. Daft maybe, but not 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.

Let’s say a big “well done” to all the people of history for being there at all. We won’t get all analytical and judgy.

Plus they definitely existed. You can take that as read from now on. The mists of time have lifted considerably.

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. As did Bede, though the soubriquet Venerable seems to have stuck to him despite achieving higher-ranking saintly status. These things happen. People never really said ‘Admiral Kirk’.

Aethelberht’s conversion gave Christianity its first foothold among the Anglo-Saxons, but the flame of Romano-British Christianity was being kept alight in western parts of Great Britain. In fact this Celtic church, as it tends to be referred to, had converted Ireland in the fifth century. It’s odd that it’s called Celtic because its root is as Roman as the pope’s church. It had spread to Britain because of the Roman Empire, but had then become cut off because of the Anglo-Saxons. Without the wifi of the empire, the app hadn’t been getting the updates. Different practices had started to emerge. Don’t let the last sentence fool you into thinking it was anything interesting like human sacrifice or Jesus being a Martian. The main things were a different tonsure (monks’ hairdo) and a different way of calculating the date of Easter. The argument among prelates about this last tedious issue was so interminable it feels like they were just trying to prove they believed in eternal life.

An Offa you can’t refuse Boom! I’ve dropped the pun. I couldn’t help it. It’s been hanging over me all chapter. My justification for making it is – bear with me – that Offa asserted dominance over, or took over, all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except Northumbria. For those kingdoms King Offa’s domination was what he offered and, if you refused Offa’s offer, he would respond with lethal violence. So you can’t refuse it. It’s actually a completely apposite pun and, on reflection, I’m extremely proud of myself.

I don’t mean to imply, by the way, that the Vikings aren’t fun. This is the problem with all the empathy. One can easily end up focusing exclusively on what it was like being a Viking (cold, scary, damp, desperate, navigational excellence worn lightly) or meeting one (‘Jesus save me from the arsehole with the axe!’) when, for the vast majority of humanity, and absolutely everyone reading this book, that’s not the main thing at all. They were brilliant! Unless you met them personally, in which case they were awful. Bit like Peter Sellers.

They didn’t have horns on their helmets. That might have been the first thing a teacher ever told me about the Vikings. As far as I recall, the order of events for me was: 1) Not having ever heard of any people called the Vikings; 2) a teacher said, ‘Here is a picture of some Vikings’ and showed me an illustration of some amazing warriors in a dragon boat with horns on their helmets; 3) the teacher said, ‘They didn’t really have horns on their helmets.’ The fact that history remained my favourite subject despite that moment is a real testament to how boring the other lessons were. I don’t know where the idea of Vikings having horns on their helmets came from, but it’s a brilliant one. In every possible way, other than the literal truth, they totally had horns on their helmets. Horned helmets was absolutely their vibe and I feel we all have a right to that deeper artistic truth.

You can start thinking about their reasoning and ferreting around for the evidence. But I think it’s a bit of a shame – rather George Lucas of you. You’ve got some horned warriors in dragon ships emerging enigmatically from the mist – why ruin it with the prequel? Why start asking, ‘Ooh, what happened before this dramatic bit? What dry socio-economic causes can we root out?’

There are many issues with this account: why were these ‘followers’ allowed to stroll about in the wake of a Viking victory? What the fuck had they been doing when King Edmund was trying to win a battle? Why did the victorious Vikings give a damn whether Edmund renounced his faith? How can we be sure that the wolf wasn’t just pausing to work out how to eat a king’s head without breaking a tooth? In fact, the disembodied talking head seems like the most plausible element. And as miracles go, reattaching a head to a dead body is pretty lame. What’s the use of that? You wouldn’t last long in the Marvel Universe with that superpower.

Where do you start? With my own daughter, I quickly realized that my instinct to explain the United Nations, and then cover the structure of global human interaction downwards from there, had to be resisted. We may as well start with animal noises, even though, in adult life, they hardly ever come up.

The original owner of the jewel, King Alfred of Wessex, known as Alfred the Great, is a very famous king indeed – certainly the most famous to be covered in this book so far, apart from King Arthur. That’s largely because, unlike any other Anglo-Saxon ruler, a biography was written about him during his lifetime and, with a little bit of chopping and changing and a few random additions, it has survived to this day. It was written by a monk called Asser and it’s very much an authorized biography – overwhelmingly positive. It says Alfred was ... well, great. Capable and clever and wise and kind and nice and terrific at battles and admin, and that’s basically the view of Alfred that’s come down to us. 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.

Nevertheless, the terms in use at the time were, among others, Norse, Northmen, Norsemen or Danes, whether or not they originated from what we’d now call Denmark. I’m going to start using those names too, mainly when I don’t want you to think of them as having horns on their helmets. The trouble with the imagined picture of them with the horns is that it looks like a stag do, which is a bit negative and trivializing for something so geopolitical, particularly once, as is about to happen, they start converting to Christianity. That would be a weird vibe for a stag do. That’s when the penny drops that the beatifically smiling best man, who seems like such a lovely guy, is a Mormon.

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 Brits get everywhere.

I remember being told at school that Alfred was the only British king who’s called the Great. The ninth century seemed quite early for British history to have peaked. The best king over with before the proper numbering system even started.

Some patriots can get really pissy about sharing the convenient repositories for their feelings – which is why it’s a bad idea to tell a football hooligan that St George was from Turkey. An English football hooligan, that is. I don’t suppose any other sort of football hooligan, even a Turkish one, gives a damn where St George was from.

Yes! Lord Rosebery! (Lord Rosebery had briefly and unsuccessfully been prime minister – not as briefly or unsuccessfully as Liz Truss, more at the Theresa May level. Still, I think we have to accept that the prospect of a speech from him was more of a draw in 1901 than the prospect of one from May is today. Thank the Lord for TV.)

We can understand more clearly that history isn’t actually a proper story. It’s more like a soap opera. It never fucking ends.

cut a long history short, they never really get to be in charge of France. But they keep trying.

In the chapter heading, I’ve referred to Aethelflaed as a queen, which isn’t strictly true. But, as the daughter and sister of kings and the effective ruler of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, she deserves the title, tonally speaking. Also I’m bitterly aware that this is the first mention of a woman in this narrative, apart from a brief one for Queen Bertha of Kent and an adjectival contribution from Queen Victoria. And actually I think my daughter got a nod, but that’s really just nepotism as her impact on early medieval English history is tiny. I’m sorry about that. It is one of the boring things about a lot of history. 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.

Letting people win can be a great way of shutting them up. If only it had worked on Nigel Farage.

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).

My starting point in this bit of history was as a Harold supporter. Before I’d heard of Edward the Confessor, I knew about the Battle of Hastings and who won and thought that was a pity. I only learned about Edward afterwards and didn’t like him because he seemed pro-William. The fact that that’s how he seemed is the victory of Norman propaganda. Central to William’s claim was the assertion that Edward had bequeathed the throne to him. My dislike of Edward shows that I have bought that argument. Well done the Normans. It doesn’t make me think William should have been king, though. Since I’m a twenty-first-century comedian, the issue of royal legitimacy isn’t that important to me (typical TV lefties ...). I’m imposing anachronistic values. Some would say that’s unfair of me. I reckon I’ve got the right to enjoy 1066 in whatever way I like.

It’s impossible to know how the battle played out because it happened a long time ago and nobody videoed it. Someone tapestried it, though. Most of our sense of how it went comes from that massive tapestry. The Bayeux tapestry: you may have heard of it. If you’ve only heard of one tapestry, it’ll be that one. If you’ve heard of two, I don’t know what the other one will be because personally I’ve only heard of one. I haven’t really even heard of one, because the Bayeux tapestry is, strictly speaking, an embroidery. I know. Why is it called a tapestry if it’s not a tapestry? Why, for that matter, has the fact that it’s the most famous object on earth to be referred to as a tapestry not resulted in the definition of the word ‘tapestry’ being widened to include it? I thought the English language was supposed to be governed by usage rather than arbitrary rules of the kind that have long hobbled French. But then it is a French tapestry. Except it isn’t, despite its location and the other part of its name. It’s English. It’s not a French tapestry, it’s an English embroidery. It was commissioned by the victorious Normans, but they didn’t have the skill base to commemorate their triumph in needlework, so it was made in England by English women. Another example of how disasters can boost GDP.

What happened to William the Conqueror in the end? Same as James Bond – he exploded.

History bristles with examples of people who died in poverty despite being great artists or musicians or having invented vulcanized rubber.

I wasn’t expecting to find out what happened to James Bond in the end. He’s not real. He doesn’t have to end. Or begin. There’s no need to make those things part of the story. So imagine my surprise, when tentatively venturing out to the cinema in post-lockdown London for the relaxing escapism of a Bond movie, at finding myself (spoiler alert) watching that character die. I was fucking furious. I’d looked forward to that night out. We’d been to Pizza Express first. We’d had popcorn and chocolate buttons brought to our seats at a swanky cinema. And then, at the very end of No Time to Die, James Bond is killed in an explosion. Yes, he actually dies. In the middle of a pandemic when death was feeling really unoriginal. I’m sorry if this is where you’re finding that out but it’s one of the most extraordinary creative missteps that Hollywood money has ever been lavished on. James Bond not dying is the premise of a Bond film. It’s the premise of the whole franchise. What you are supposed to watch and enjoy is the exciting manner in which he does not die. The fact that a movie that departs from this sound convention was deemed by many reviewers to be clever or interesting or dark or real – to be, in summary, good and indeed better than the ones where he doesn’t die – is an index of how mediocre, joyless and self-importantly worthy our commentariat has become. Honestly, the whole creative team right up to Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig need to be lined up against a wall and cri...

I should warn you that, as a name, Matilda was very much the Aelfgifu of the twelfth century. Henry’s mother, first wife and daughter were all called Matilda. Henry’s daughter Matilda is going to spend much of her life fighting to be queen of England but I’m not risking any spoilers when I say that one person or another called Matilda was queen of England most of the time from 1066 until the middle of the following century.

(Obviously she didn’t marry him when she was eight. That would have been barbaric. They waited until she was twelve.)

To complete her exotic allure, she wasn’t even called Matilda.

For Richard, it was a splendid source of funds to pay for his main priority: raising a big army to take part in the Third Crusade. This was the fashionable and righteous thing to be doing at the time – like going vegan is now, but with the opposite impact on the amount of blood that gets shed.

So poor was the management he provided that it famously spurred the English aristocracy into unionizing. That’s what led to Magna Carta. Magna Carta just meant ‘Great Charter’, though now it means so much more: some would call it the foundation stone of English liberty. If that’s true the architect of English liberty should be struck off by whatever organization regulates the metaphorical professions because it’s a bloody wobbly foundation. But English liberty has no architect – it just got thrown together by various accidents, one of which was John’s personality.

At the age of ten, he was made lord of Ireland. If you think that sounds more problematic and less fun than being made duke of a nice sunny part of France, then you’re right. Angevin control of Ireland was shaky and Ireland was a long cold sea voyage in the opposite direction from the centres of power. Even when you got there, it was very rebellious and rainy rather than relaxing and calm. I expect there were nice walks and a strong local artistic tradition, but the Angevins were more into clubbing – in every sense. 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,

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. Clause 61 of Magna Carta only gave twenty-five thirteenth-century barons the right to rebel against unjust laws, not anyone at all, and it was only in the 1215 version of Magna Carta, which was repudiated by all signatories and the pope within three months and never became law. So they were wrong twice: they were wrong about what the clause said and they were wrong in thinking that it was ever a law. Of course if two wrongs genuinely make a right, they have a point.

Dying was by far the most astute and successful thing King John did in his entire reign. In general, when kings died that was bad news for the royal dynasty and the security of the regime. But John had contrived to inoculate the realm against that affliction, so his sudden absence had no negative impact whatsoever. In fact, it was an unqualified boon. Had he been an iota less unpleasant or more competent, the barons might have been concerned by the replacement of an experienced forty-nine-year-old man, who’d been on the throne for seventeen years and fought many campaigns in the British Isles and France, with a nine-year-old boy. As it was, a crowned turd would have been preferable, so a biddable child under the guardianship of William Marshal, the elder statesman of the Plantagenet court, looked like a comparatively safe bet.

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

Did it change Edward? Well, as I keep saying, people don’t change, so no. But obviously a bit yes. I hope you’re pleased with the level of historical nuance you’re getting: no, but a bit yes. That’ll see anyone through A-Level.

When a new party is swept to power on a huge wave of fragile optimism and then faces the predictable setbacks of actually having to govern rather than just talk about it, there’s a peculiar bitterness to the nation’s disappointment. It’s peculiar because it’s tied in with self-loathing. We blame ourselves for our naivety. ‘We might have known.’ ‘We should have known.’ ‘We fell for it.’

Henry V’s most famous triumph was his victory at the Battle of Agincourt on 25 October 1415. This is the last of the big three battles of the Hundred Years’ War – Crécy and Poitiers are the other two – in which vastly outnumbered English armies thrash the French, and the most famous thanks to Shakespeare’s play Henry V, of which it forms the climax. I used to find these victories very enjoyable and now I don’t so much. Does that make me a better person or just a curmudgeon? I’m not sure the fact that I can no longer summon any jingoistic glee from a medieval battle is much help to the thousands of Frenchmen who were once slaughtered as a result of their leaders’ colossal strategic miscalculations. My sincere hope is that you can still get some fun out of it and it hasn’t all been spoiled by empathy and Brexit.

There’s also an Honfleur near Harfleur, but no Bonfleur near Barfleur, so it’s no use thinking there’s a system).

If your awareness of history comes from a primarily English or British perspective, Joan of Arc is an awkward prospect. Her role in the story makes France right and England wrong. She is a rebuke to unworthy and unrealistic ambitions and only really enjoyable from a French perspective. ‘This is their bit,’ you have to say and let the French have fun. That wasn’t the view of the English at the time. The trouble with personifications of inevitable historical processes is that, unlike the processes themselves, they can be killed. So that’s what the English did to her, after their Burgundian allies had captured her and handed her over in exchange for 10,000 livres tournois, which is roughly equivalent, in today’s money, to a lot. The English didn’t reckon she was a personification of an inevitable historical process at all. They thought she was an annoying piece of shit – otherwise known as a heretic. It was heresy that she was convicted of in a very dodgy trial in front of a lot of pro-English priests. And then she was burned at the stake in 1431. Twenty-five years later, the verdict was overturned and, in 1920, she was made a saint. As a trajectory of posthumous Roman Catholic respectability, this is known as a ‘reverse-Savile’.

Shakespeare plundered them heavily for material and made it work, but he was famously good at writing. Plus he couldn’t really do the Tudors because, for the first half of his career, they were in charge and very sensitive unless described in a manner so ludicrously adulatory as to be unwatchable by anyone whose surname wasn’t Tudor. At the end of his life, he collaborated on a play about Henry VIII – the Stuarts were reigning by then so he could get away with it – but it’s not what you’d call a corker. I suppose it must have been tricky, for the creator of Falstaff, to write about a time when the shouty, boozy fatso was actually king. It unbalances things, like when Roseanne won the lottery.

In September, York came back from Ireland and something had changed. This is when he started calling himself Plantagenet. He arrived bearing the arms of his ancestor the Duke of Clarence, son of Edward III. He’d had enough of trying to work round a fool of a king. At a parliament in October, he basically said: ‘Yes, I admit it, I want to be king. So kill me.’ And they did. Two months later. He was giving battle in vain at the time – his last desperate gesture reminding millions of the colours of the rainbow.

This might sound like an over-involved episode of Who Do You Think You Are? but, unlike Gwyneth Paltrow’s ancestry, it turned out to be important.