Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens, by David Mitchell (Crown, 2023)
David Mitchell is a British comedian, tv panelist, and writer whom I think is not well-known in the US. I know his screen work exclusively from clips on YouTube. But I'm aware that he's both very funny in a ruthlessly logical way and extremely intelligent, so I picked up this book which is a history of English monarchs from post-Roman times up through Elizabeth I, which is when, Michell says, royal history became too much of a subset of general history to be worth pursuing.
Reviews describe this as a humorous book, but while it does have some comic digressions in the manner of John Oliver, it's mostly an entirely serious historical account; it's
the way that it's told that's funny; and this appeals to me, for though my style is different and I'm nowhere near as good as Mitchell, that's similar to the effect I aim at when writing informally about history myself.
Mitchell has a main theme which becomes more explicit as the book goes along, which is an analysis of the whole point of having a king, what good does it do to have one in a medieval society. And he measures the kings he discusses in terms of how well they succeed at those aims.
I'll leave that analysis to him, but I would like to quote extracts from his extraordinarily level-headed (i.e. he agrees with me) evaluations of some of the more challenging historical problems of the period.
On whether King Arthur actually existed:
Some people will still say he might have existed, but the sort of person they say he might have been is so far removed from King Arthur in any of the forms we understand him that it feels like they're just saying he didn't exist in a different way. Perhaps a Roman officer who served in Britain, or a Romano-British chieftain, or a Welsh king. Someone like that, the idea goes, might have been the bit of real grit in the imagination oyster that turned into the Arthurian pearl. Personally, I don't think imagination oysters need real grit any more than metaphorical bonnets need real bees.
On whether Richard III was really a bad guy:
It's well established, then, that the Tudors worked hard to make Richard III look bad. Too well established. People in modern times got a bit overexcited about it and started to jump to the contrary conclusion that Richard was, in fact, lovely. This is a bit of a leap. The lamentable problem that you can't believe everything you're told is not solved by merely believing the polar opposite. I find all this a bit daft. It's nice to take an active interest in history. But we don't and can't really know these people. The truth is lost under centuries of propaganda and then centuries of contrarian rejection of it.
This is an amazing, entertaining, and useful history book.
