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

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David Mitchell brings adelightfully contrary and hilariously cantankerous eye to the history of the English monarchy, offering a jewel of an insight or a refreshing blast of clarifying wit on every page. In 2023, we flatter ourselves that we no longer put foes’ eyes out with swords or die of bubonic plague, and that the NHS, universal suffrage, widespread literacy, CBT, social media and increased life expectancy make us different from the toxic wingnuts who predominate in Mitchell’s book.

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). 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.Mitchell doubts, for instance, that Henry II actually said: “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest? Intriguingly, Mitchell doesn’t tee up the sequel but argues rather that this is the natural end to his story since afterwards kings and queens were less central to England’s story. During the reign of his predecessor, his elder brother Richard the Lionheart, he tried to steal the throne by pretending Richard was dead. In 1157, for instance, Thomas Becket headed to Paris to negotiate the perfectly normal betrothal of Henry II’s two-year-old son to King Louis VII of France’s one-year-old daughter. Mitchell elucidates St Thomas’s thought process: “If I don’t have horses with monkeys riding them, the king of France won’t take me seriously.

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. Throughout the middle ages, our rulers supposedly had the endorsement of God, which made their failures all the more humiliating. 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.Four years later, when Harold himself was dead, the new king, his half-brother Harthacnut, took revenge on Alfred’s behalf: he had Harold’s body dug up, beheaded and then chucked in a ditch. 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. David brings a delightfully contrary and hilariously cantankerous eye to the history of the English Monarchy. Unruly is worth reading, not just for its exemplary gag to fact ratio, but to disabuse us of such delusions.

To be portrayed to the country and the world as so important and yet be able to walk into every room without seeming arrogant, despite the presence of hundreds of people starting to bow and scrape, is a unique gift. It was something more along the lines of ‘What sort of a bunch of saps have I surrounded myself with that they let me get treated like shit by this fucking oik? Once Richard had genuinely died, he murdered the only rival claimant, his nephew Arthur, possibly with his bare hands, which feels like unnecessary attention to detail. Nobody’s quite sure of the number and it’s not clear whether that fact has been lost in the intervening centuries or whether the king himself didn’t know.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. Worryingly the country was better governed during that year than at any other time during the reign. 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. This article was amended on 16 October 2023 to remove a reference that was inconsistent with the Guardian’s style guidelines. The psychological impact of this was particularly tough on Henry VI and, at the news of the collapse of England’s position in France, he too collapsed and was reduced to an inert blob, needing to be fed and washed and moved about for over a year.

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.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. Henry I, whose only legitimate son died in that shipwreck I mentioned, had nearly 30 children out of wedlock: 28 or 29 – something like 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. But the real nightmare was when they seemed briefly to succeed, as happened under Edward III and Henry V.