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

by David Mitchell

The word ‘set’ famously has more different meanings and uses than any other in the English language. It does a hell of a lot of work. The same cannot be said for the word ‘readeption’. Readeption just means restoration to the throne and is used exclusively to refer to Henry VI. No one else’s restoration – and there have been a fair few over the centuries – is called a readeption. It is the special word just for the time when Henry VI started being king again for a bit, nine and a half years after he’d been deposed. For most people, this was a depressing development. The Yorkists, obviously. Most of the ordinary people, because they were sick of civil war. Henry VI himself, because it just meant more stress. Most importantly, it’s depressing for you and me, because we felt we were getting somewhere, didn’t we?

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. Henry claimed to be heartbroken at her passing, but there’s a certain amount of self-pity that has to be waded through before we can properly discern the sincerity of the emotion. I’m sure he thought he was very sad, but he’d known wives die before and bounced back very quickly. On the first occasion he got dressed up in a bright colour and had a party, and on the second, which he had ordered, he was about to get engaged to someone else. So let’s keep the size of the violin we play for him under control.

Queen Mary was known as Bloody Mary because of the large number of people she killed. And also because of misogyny. She was the first properly crowned woman to rule as queen regnant, not just queen consort. You weren’t supposed to be able to do this job if you were a woman, so a lot of people didn’t like it. That may be why she gets the soubriquet ‘bloody’ when many of her male predecessors were responsible for more deaths – in battles as well as executions. That said, if you’re going by executions alone, Queen Mary was right up there on the leader board. She had almost 300 Protestants killed, mostly by burning – something else that undermines the ‘bloody’ thing. 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.

Before Shakespeare the Renaissance didn’t hugely affect England. It was like a copy of French Vogue in a Guildford hairdressers – just something people who wanted to be aware of things were aware of. It didn’t touch many. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and it played to packed theatres, something new had begun. Renaissance is underplaying it. It was a birth, not a rebirth – but novelty is more approachable when spun as restoration.

Historically speaking, there is no justification for the claim. Those who say ‘we know so little about him’ seem to be unaware of how little we know about anybody from late sixteenth-century England. Compared to most, William Shakespeare is documented in enormous detail. Why claim that he didn’t exist, or rather that the person of that name didn’t write all those plays and poems, and assert that it was someone posher and therefore supposedly more plausible? The evidence doesn’t support it – so, to believe that nonsense, you really have to want it to be true. Who would want that to be true? Rather than the actual truth? Here’s the actual truth: a man with a normal background and education, an impecunious member of the provincial bourgeoisie in a backward kingdom on a war-racked island at the edge of civilization, turned out to be the greatest writer, and possibly the greatest artist of any kind, who ever lived. So far. That might be the most life-affirming fact in the entire history of humanity. Sometimes it makes me want to cry with joy. It’s such a celebration of what humans can be. To want the truth to be otherwise is an act of spite against the very sanctity of our species. He’s where this book has been heading, it turns out. From King Arthur to William Shakespeare – a literary character to a literary genius. From someone everyone wishes existed to someone that some people, inexplicably, wish didn’t. Shakespeare is a good reason to stop writing about kings because his b...

It was all pointless in the end (one of the many suggested titles for this book).