Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens
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(all of Henry’s ministers seemed to have been Thomases – it must have been very confusing, though useful for pinning blame on colleagues)
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This pattern of thinking would develop into a way of bolstering national self-esteem without incurring the expense of attempting to take over France.
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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.
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I know! The spelling! To be fair, they didn’t have standardized spelling back then – the only outlet for their pedantic instincts was religious war.
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considering the form of execution that she favoured, it seems odd to associate her with a non-flammable liquid.
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Impatient though I am with those of my fellow opponents of Brexit who now say that we have to accept it and move on, when I think about England going Catholic again I get a sense of where they’re coming from. Sometimes nothing matters more than the avoidance of more hassle.
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She was thirty-seven at the time of her accession which, to this day, the NHS startlingly classifies as a ‘geriatric mother’. It’s unnecessarily extremist terminology today but, in the sixteenth century when no one had a clue about germs, it really was a grand old age for popping one out.
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People were willing to die for these religious differences, but they wouldn’t sacrifice real estate.
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It’s quite an involved plan featuring not enough ships and involving coordinating lots of people to meet up, 400 years before anyone had the technology to text anyone else with an ETA.
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God, who we now definitely know was never a Catholic despite going along with a millennium and a half of popes and saintly images and everyone claiming to be solemnly eating bits of his son.
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King Eric XIV of Sweden (wow – fourteen Erics! The Louis-loving French were only on twelve at this point).
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I reckon most of the people who genuinely have no fear of upsetting others don’t just have no fear of it, they actively enjoy it.
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was the PR equivalent of what salted caramel tastes like.
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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.
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‘Mock not flesh and blood with solemn reverence.’ Ultimately, the reverence shown to monarchs is a mockery, a joke. It’s pretending they’re something they’re not. This is a bitter and clear reduction of kingship to its essentials: an office accepted only because an unjust hierarchy is preferable to anarchy. Out of the gangsterism of the lawless post-Roman land of Britannia, a few local big shots emerged, their power gradually coalescing into kingship.
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They were capable, but they were also brutal, flawed and fundamentally limited. Personally, I wouldn’t rank Henry II, Edward III, Henry V or Elizabeth I alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt, Nelson Mandela or even Angela Merkel, let alone Jane Austen, Alfred Hitchcock or Marie Curie. There must have been amazing people, but we don’t hear about them because most of them couldn’t write.
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There are still tyrants in the world today and the strangeness of their power is something we must hold in mind. It’s extremely odd. That fact can get lost in our anger at the injustice of what they do. The anger dignifies them, it makes them important. But they’re not important, they’re random.
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At this point, I’d probably recommend a thriller, really. Or a whodunnit. Maybe even a graphic novel. You know, for a bit of variety. You must feel up to your ears in history.
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But that’s not the form in these sections. They tend to work more like Amazon algorithms: ‘Seeing as you just bought gardening gloves, perhaps you’d be interested in these gardening gloves?’
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A fourteenth-century illustration of King Arthur, looking worried because he doesn’t exist. The picture of the Virgin Mary on his shield was meant as a compliment but seems uncomfortably like pinning her to a dartboard.
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The Princes in the Tower, worrying about getting murdered for their amazing hair.
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Mary I. She was the first proper female sovereign of England and yet, for various reasons, most of them incinerated Protestants, she has not been adopted as a feminist icon.
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books require the hard work and talent of a large group of people to make the thousands and thousands of words the author reckons the world can’t do without palatable to the wider public.
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You may notice that, in place of the apology I said I wouldn’t give, I’ve wasted an equivalent amount of your lives with this slightly petulant explanation. For which I am also making no apology.
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