Unruly: The Number One Bestseller ‘Horrible Histories for grownups’ The Times

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So, when King Henry I died 15 years later, Stephen’s path to kingship had been cleared by diarrhoea. King Alfred, the first king to lay claim to ruling the English as a people and the only English king to have been issued with the epithet “Great”, nevertheless spent a large part of his early reign hiding from the Vikings in a bog – by which I mean a marsh. Discover who we are and how we got here in comedian, star of Peep Show 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. He was spectacularly unsuccessful, inheriting England, Ireland and most of France but then losing control of almost all of it within two decades. But this ruthlessness, while showing ambition and vigour, was no barrier to incompetence or vainglorious delusion.

This article was amended on 16 October 2023 to remove a reference that was inconsistent with the Guardian’s style guidelines. David brings a delightfully contrary and hilariously cantankerous eye to the history of the English Monarchy. It’s a tale of narcissists, inadequate self-control, middle-management insurrection, uncivil wars, and a few Cnuts, as the English evolved from having their crops stolen by the thug with the largest armed gang to bowing and paying taxes to a divinely anointed king. Everyone on the ship died except for a solitary Norman butcher, and among the watery dead was the heir to the throne. 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.

Monarchy lends itself not to capable and professional rulers like Henry I, but rather to chancers and scumbags like Stephen and Matilda who caused misery to their subjects in ways that make later virtuosos Johnson and Truss seem like rank amateurs. In the same way, a victory such as Agincourt fatally skewed English expectations of military success with repeatedly bleak consequences. A funny book about a serious subject, UNRULY is for anyone who has ever wondered how we got here – and who is to blame. By turns fascinating and funny – there is a jewel of an insight or a refreshing blast of clarifying wit on every page.

Perhaps this is how history should be done: not by patient scholars, but by free-swearing actor-comedians cramming more ideas and jokes into their pages than many professionals have committed to print in their careers. The public rift between William and Harry (with the latter emigrating alongside his wife amid talk of vindictive and racist treatment by family and courtiers, and then selling a tell-all book about it), the festering wound of Prince Andrew’s reputation and the king’s bad-temperedness about his pen all seem to show that royal dignity and probity have disappeared. They went so far as to claim that they were in fact the rightful kings of France despite all the evidence to the contrary and repeatedly threw all their resources into mounting military expeditions to ruin the lives of thousands of innocent French residents which achieved, in even the medium term, precisely nothing.For most of the middle ages from the Norman Conquest onwards, the kings of England were obsessed with acquiring or re-acquiring large sections of France.

Kingship, despite the crown, robes, processions, coaches, trumpets and anthems, has often been an undignified activity – all the more so because it’s supposed to be dignified. The intensity of intra-familial hatred in many periods of royal history makes the William and Harry rift look like a tersely raised eyebrow over a Boxing Day game of Trivial Pursuit.He hurried to Westminster and got himself crowned, then had one of the most unsuccessful reigns in English history, entirely dominated by a savage civil war. It would be entirely inappropriate if today’s constitutional monarchy – which is there as a picturesque reminder of our action-packed past, of the wrong-headed chaos the country emerged from – didn’t faintly reflect that. How this happened, who it happened to, and why the hell it matters are all questions that Mitchell 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. Despite the context into which she was thrust at a very young age, which was one of overt glory, one where people were obliged almost to worship her or it was a breach of protocol, she kept an amazingly firm lid on her self-esteem.

For this city break, he took 24 outfits, had 12 packhorses to carry his silver dinner service, eight wagons of baggage and horses with monkeys riding on them. To that end, Mitchell quotes Dennis, a character in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who skewers the allure of Camelot: “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.

Had he, as an ambitious minor prince, not suffered a sudden, violent bout of food poisoning while on board a ship in Barfleur harbour in 1120, he wouldn’t have disembarked before it headed into the Channel and sank. 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.