Unruly: A History of England’s Kings and Queens
David Mitchell
Penguin Audio
2023, 11hrs 39min
Purchased personal copy
Blurb {from the publisher/Goodreads.com}: Discover who we are and how we got here by listening to comedian and student of history David Mitchell’s UNRULY: A History of England’s Kings and Queens – a thoughtful, funny exploration of the founding fathers and mothers of England, and subsequently Britain.
Think you know your kings and queens? Think again.
In UNRULY, David Mitchell explores how England’s monarchs, while acting as feared rulers firmly guiding their subjects’ destinies, were in reality a bunch of lucky sods who were mostly as silly and weird in real life as they appear today in their portraits.
Taking us right back to King Arthur (spoiler: he didn’t exist), David tells the founding story of post-Roman England right up to the reign of Elizabeth I (spoiler: she dies). It’s a tale of narcissists, inadequate self-control, excessive beheadings, middle-management insurrection, uncivil wars, and at least one total Cnut, as the population evolved from having their crops nicked by the thug with the largest armed gang to bowing and paying taxes to a divinely anointed king.
How this happened, who it happened to and why it matters in modern Britain are all questions David answers with brilliance, wit and the full erudition of a man who once studied history – and won’t let it off the hook for the mess it’s made.
A funny book about a serious subject, UNRULY is for anyone who has ever wondered how we got here – and who is to blame.
Most of what I’ve learned about history, I’ve learned through fiction. Which is an interesting technique, when you think about it. But I’ve read a lot of historical fiction and if something interested me, I used that as a springboard to research about that particular person or place in time. I haven’t done a lot of historical studies, something I’ve been trying to rectify in recent times and I thought this sounded like a bit of an interesting way to go through a bit of British history. Do I know much about the monarchy? Not really. I can get back to Queen Victoria and I can name a handful of monarchs prior to her. Everyone knows ones like Henry VIII and Richard III etc. But there’s a whole bunch of others in there as well that I knew nothing about, including pretty much everything that happened prior to the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066.
David Mitchell is also someone I’m relatively familiar with. My parents are big fans of Would I Lie To You? a panel comedy show in the UK which is also popular here. Mitchell is one of the permanent “team” members where with two other people, it’s his job to trick the other team into guessing a story being told is either true or false. You want the other team to be wrong so you get points for your trickery. The other team’s permanent member is Lee Mack, who I remember from a comedy sketch show my brother used to watch a long time ago. I’ve seen a lot of this show when visiting my parents and I figured if nothing else, Mitchell would probably make this entertaining to listen to.
And it was. I really enjoyed the listen, which definitely brought in large elements of Mitchell’s personality. He weaves his own experience of being “British” (as one parent is Welsh, the other from a Scottish heritage) rather than English and begins with a King that didn’t actually exist and goes in basically chronological order all the way up to Elizabeth I. There was a lot in this I didn’t know (everything that happens prior to 1066 and a bunch of stuff early on and in the middle). I have to say that keeping everyone straight is difficult. All the Edwards and Henrys start to blur together after a while and if you asked me defining features of like, Henry II’s rein vs Edward V, I couldn’t tell you. That can be the downside of listening sometimes, you can’t flip back and check something. You just have to go with it. I also listened to this over a period of 14 days (about 45 minutes a day, at night time before falling asleep usually) so yes, I did forget things sometimes. The Kings I did know something about, the more well known ones, it was good to have a lot of that fleshed out as to how they came to be there and the ways in which claims to the throne were ‘fluid’ and changed depending on who was attempting to make a claim. This idea of the King being this anointed by God figure, was really tested when randoms started to turn up and declare that in fact they were the legitimate heir to the throne or the best person for the job. Or they had the biggest army…
Because there was a lot of bloodshed. Wow did it seem like this country did nothing but go to war for about a thousand plus years. If it wasn’t civil war between different would-be rulers or deposed rulers and the new ruler or a distant relative who thought their claim was more just, it was going to war against other countries, France being the most popular one. Also a lot of people just died. Hygiene wasn’t the best, food wasn’t the best, the lifestyle definitely wasn’t the best (you can only imagine how difficult it was for poor people) and so many Kings died at a young age. Also a lot of people were very bad about being King. The role is pretty much entirely ceremonial now, so it doesn’t particularly matter if they’re bad at it or not but when it was them deciding upon rules and the like, many of them were very bad. And then there was the whole tug of war over reformation and whether or not England was going to be Catholic and tied to the Pope or Protestant and very much not. What a confusing time that must’ve been, for religions and their practices to be outlawed and then reinstated and then outlawed again.
I think this is a good way for a relatively brief overview of history in this time in England if you’re like me and have only vague general knowledge. It gives a brief account of each ruler – how they came to power, if anything of note happened during their reign, what happened to them etc. It goes into depth with some more than others, depending on what happened. None of the reigns appear to have been uneventful but there are definitely some who warrant much more time spent on them than others. All in all I’d definitely recommend this book as an introduction to an overview of British monarchical history and if one or another interests you, pursuing that particular one further.
And it’s funny.
8/10
Book #99 of 2024
This title counts towards my participation in the 2024 Nonfiction Reader Challenge, hosted by Shelleyrae @ Book’d Out. It’s the third book read towards the challenge out of my level of 6 books and I’m using it to tick off the category of history.
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Published in 2024
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