The 'Unruly' British Monarchy (with David Mitchell)

this podcast, you will absolutely love this book. It's such a phenomenal analysis not only of the early kings and queens of England, starting from before William the First, which I thought was a brilliant decision, but an analysis really of what our historical understanding of those kings says about British culture and human culture as a whole. David, thank you so much for joining me.

some sign of an end to it all. And then finally, when there was some sign of an end to it all, I found something to do, which was to initially sit down and start typing about how the arrival of COVID felt a bit like the arrival of the Vikings must have felt to the Anglo Saxons, as in, it was just something that came out of the blue and was a real pain for everyone. Was you know, literal and metaphorical pain ensued. So I literally started typing that chapter.

I think because of that, you know, the weirdness of cod and the suddenness, do you do think more about history because you think, oh my god, this is a bit of it that's happening. It's just happening suddenly to me, and it's not out of a trend. Really. I mean, obviously people relentlessly talk about how it was out of a trend and we should have seen it coming and why wasn't there more ppe in all the covers et cetera,

et cetera. But they weren't saying it beforehand, or if they were, no one was listening, So I sort of I think broadly speaking, no one saw it coming. I mean, the Anglo Saxons thought that they should have seen the vikings coming by, you know, and it was all because they hadn't prayed enough. And there's really no evidence of a connection between their lack of praying and the arrival

of Norse warriors. But you know, you start thinking about your powerlessness in the universe, and that's how a lot of people in the Middle Ages felt all the time, because they really didn't know what the hell was going on. So it was a natural thing to start typing about.

And then it was great that I just had that freedom for a few months, just to play around with it and find a tone voice that I hope is funny for talking about the past in a not in a detailed way, but in a way that gives an overview for people who wish they had more of an overview of in the case of my book, The Kings

and Queens of England. So yes, by the time we were allowed to go out and get a cafes again, I'd written a third of it, and that I was bound to finish it or that third would have been wasted. I tend to write another book, but I'm not quite sure how I'll do it without a pandemic.

And I thought, the first thing the book needs to be if at all possible is amusing, and if it can be amusing through things that are true and in my view sort of historically matter, then that would be hopefully a rewarding read rather than taking you know, obviously, you can find funny things in history in terms of broadly the disgustingness of life, then the lack of plumbing, the weird superstitions.

you know. The heart of the Simpsons is a story of disappointment and a failed dream and the sort of I mean, there's a great line in it I think that, you know, be the cause of an answer to all of life's problem and in that you sort of there's a sort of deep truth about human disappointment that makes that show much funnier. Than if it was just you know, funny about silly things.

and a wonderful, very very pure and Christian Kingdom. And this is a lovely idea lent on an in Jul for centuries by other kings, by people who were sad that their king wasn't better and they thought, if only he could have been more like good old King Arthur was. And you know, it has been dramatized for television and in films, and it's a really lovely idea. The only problem is there is absolutely zero evidence that he existed at all, and you know, he just didn't. It's just

not possible. I mean, he looks like a medieval king in all the pictures, and that's because the key time of imagining and enjoying imagining him was the Middle Ages, and they didn't really think about whether people wore the same clothes hundreds of years earlier as they did. So that's a bit of a clue. Why would there be this sudden basically totally medieval king, a bit like Edward the First or Edward the Third cropping up soon after the last toga just rotted and before the first boat

comes over from Denmark. It just doesn't add up. And the monks of Glastonbury Abbey, who were you know, nothing if not entrepreneurial created a grave for King Arthur and his queen, and everyone thought, well, he must have existed, he's got a grave, but no, it's you know, you could say the same about Mickey Mouse and his castle. So yes, King Arthur is a lovely idea, but he didn't exist, but very very important if you're writing a book about kings because that's the template. That's what everyone

was saying a king should be. And they didn't. And they weren't great many periods of the past, and we're not necessarily that great at it now. Even they weren't great at hoping for a better future. What they could do, though, is hark back to a better past. But they didn't necessarily really know what the past was like, so they sort of invented a utopian past in King Arthur, or certainly utopian when it comes to kingship, and decided that's what they would hark back to.

better world. Obviously, there are people who want to cherry pick elements of the past and say, let's get back to that it was. It was better. One of the things that was better for us all, of course, is that we were younger, so you know, our backs hurt a bit less, you know, our these were less troublesome, Our death was further away, and you can't actually get back to that.

there will have been people bossing them around. That's the way of the world. But in what meaningful way are any of them King Arthur? And yes, I suppose King Arthur is based on them, because that's the time in history that he's supposedly sort of cited. But unless any of these people were in any way, you know, good, in the in the same ways as King Arthur, then the basing him on them is not very meaningful.

but sort of to a limited extent. He wasn't going mad for that. He wanted an orderly succession to the next generation. He very much didn't get that, but he really worked at it. So you sort of think that that's not that nightmarish for the people at the time. If you've got a king like that, then that is reasonably competent government. And that may sound like faint praise, but in the context of the Middle Ages, it isn't faint praise. It's high praise, because the standard of government

was dreadful. So I think Henry, I think if all the kings had been like Henry the first, then being a medieval peasant would have been forty percent more pleasant than it actually turned out to be. So yeah, I'll put in a word for him.

let's just know who it is. Because when we don't know who it is, that civil war and the very basic stuff that we expect from our government, stopping us being invaded, maybe a bit of help if the crops fail, you know, low level law and order that will collapse if we don't know who the king is, and even quite bad kings might keep those basic services limping along.

So by saying, and in the early part of the book, the Anglo Saxons, they didn't have the principle of primogeniture, so it wasn't necessarily the eldest son who was supposed to succeed. So quite often when an Anglo Saxon king died, there was a mini civil war while his sons fought it out for the who is going to run the kingdom? And that's actually a marginally more meritocratic system you get the more effective warrior king tends to be the one

that prevails. But that element of meritocracy was demonstrably not worth it for the amount of fighting and killing that that system involved. You know, now, in a functioning democracy you get fingers crossed an orderly succession when one government

replaces the other. And that's a really important part of what makes a democracy work, because if you don't have that, you're better off just not changing the government ever, sticking with who you've got, and then saying as clearly as possible in advance, and when he dies, it'll be his son, and please may it just continue on this even keel for as long as possible. Because the worst things that happened in the Middle Ages weren't the things the king did. It was the times no one knew who the king

was or couldn't agree on that. And that's happened a lot in the Anglo saxon Araa with no primar geniture established. It happened when Henry the first died and he wanted his daughter to succeed him. That did not go down well at the time, a non house of the dragon, right, yeah, yes, And you know that was so there was there was absolute you know, hellish it's known unfashionably now, but it's

known as the anarchy traditionally that period. And that's a hint that it wasn't nice the Wars of the Roses a few hundred years later. That's a long period of lack of clarity as to who the king was. That was the lesson of the age. But every so often they broke their own rules. So Richard the Second absolutely terrible king, but undoubtedly the rightful king. Nobody ever really disputed his right to rule, however awful his conduct was.

But in the end he was so bad they couldn't stand it, and the barons got rid of him, and he basically killed him or allowed him to die and put another guy on the throne who was in every way more competent, and they all liked him, and you know, he'll be much better, but they all felt they'd done wrong.

The next king was Henry the Fourth. He had a sort of very unst stable, unhappy reign, but basically thereon that the office of king was never properly strong again, and there was a lot more fighting over who would be in charge after that, and so fundamentally it wasn't worth it. They should have stuck with Richard the scond until he died, and that you know, there would have

been less horribleness if they had. But at the time, they thought, well, he just can't carry on to me because it's a long time ago, and all of the pain caused just as long you know, has receded well into the background. I find it funny. I find that quandary. They're relentlessly in that, the aristocrats of sort of stability versus competence. I find that amusing, amusing to see them

struggle with it. Amusing how they've invented collectively this thing kingship that they claim God is into So they give the rule of the sort of endorsement of the Almighty. That was a clever idea to have cooked up. But then the problem is, what if you have an absolute idiot, you know, slash murderous maniac who you're now saying is endorsed by God. What do you do about that? And should you just do nothing, you know, hope it gets better, wait till he dies? Should you try and get rid

of him? But then what are you saying? What's the system?

who's supposed to look after us? Who's supposed to say what's what? And we're quite used to the notion of atheism. Now there are a lot of atheists, and there's no one who hasn't heard of the idea. So we've all contemplated that feeling that what if there is no order to the universe, there is no big beardy guy in charge making sure we'll all be okay. And so even if we do decide we're religious, and it's a sort

of choice, in those days, it wasn't a choice. They were that they were told it was true in the same way we're told how to wire a plug, and that must have been very, very comforting. And the idea of kingship was fundamentally linked to that. So as soon as the king is bad, as soon as they get rid of a king, then their whole notion of the universe is shaken. As if they suddenly discover that the you know, the solar system isn't as we believe it to be.

by divine sanction. I think the idea is less brought into by the nobleman then than it had been a few hundred years earlier. But they're still going with it. But there is also something called a parliament sort of slightly reigning in the monarchs, and that obviously is a prelude to the next chapter of English and British history when the parliament and the king end up fighting a war.

But you could sort of see that that was inevitable because they were fundamentally always going to come to blows.

Was an enormous waste of energy, money, lives, and effort, and it was pointless. It was the wrong policy. The King of England will never be the King of France as well. The King of France will never be the King of England as well. It was just unworkable. But yet English kings for hundreds of years, their main focus was raising money to raise troops to go over to fight battles in France, with horrendous consequences for the people trying to just live in France, and in the end

they usually failed. There are a few examples of that. You know. English history has sort of always cherished of these against the odds victories, with the brave English archers defeating larger numbers of French knights. But you take a step back and what was the point in all of that. The King of England never became King of France, and it wouldn't have been good if they had. It was

just a waste of time and blood and energy. And it's one of the things I like about Henry the first is that he didn't really try any of that. He was the Duke of Normandy. He wanted control of Normandy. He'd like control of some other bits around Normandy if possible. But he didn't have any ridiculous ideas about also being king of France like Henry the fifth and Edward the Third did, or being say, like Henry the eighth did, being some sort of emperor or whatever. He knew his place.

He had reasonable ambitions for a king of his scale, and that caused a lot less suffering. Henry the fifth was a maniac fueled by sort of religious fervor. Very successful militarily, but what is the point in all of that energy and all of that killing of poor French noblemen while they were wrapped up in armor.

But obviously plenty of people in that, including Henry the First. That doesn't necessarily make you villainous in the context of English kingship, but it's also he has always been accused of murdering his nephew edd Of the fifth and his brother when they were boys in the Tower of London, and you know, either murdering them himself or more likely having them murdered. I think he probably did that, and

that is the conventional historical line. But Richard the Third has a lot of fans who think he was, you know, unfairly maligned, largely as a delt of Tudor propaganda, because after Richard the Third fell there was a regime change that Tudor did this. He came in and they had to justify them their having taken the throne, and which

they needed. It needed a lot of justification because they definitely weren't heirs to the throne by any of the conventions of inheritance, so they needed to cook up a story, and the key part of their story was, well, the king before was awful, he killed his nephews, he was a tyrant, and so you know, obviously you have to be suspicious of the things they say about Richard the third.

But I don't know what else happened to those princes because nobody, as far as we know, nobody saw them for at least two years before Henry the seventh was on the scene. So I don't see that it's plausible that they were killed by the Tudors. I think it was very likely to have been Richard the third, but I'm not saying that's definite. What amuses me is how much emotional investment people have in saying, no, Richard there was lovely, he was great king, and well, we can't know,

we can't know for sure. We know the balance of probability. We know it's more likely he killed the princes in the tower than anyone else, and we sort of just have to be satisfied with that. And you can enjoy and imagined Richard IID, who is unfairly slantered by the tudors if you want to, but you can't tell yourself that was definitely the case, just because you find it an attractive idea.

that's the direction most of the evidence points in. But I fully accept we can't totally know.

I'm coming clean. This is just England. Obviously, after the period of my book onwards, the monarchy, the same monarchy is effectively shared by more parts of the British Isles, so it become the story is more unified into a story of British history, the divisions within it. Notwithstanding what it struck me is that within the United Kingdom and the British Isles, the nations that aren't England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland have very very strong senses of cultural identity,

and England doesn't. I don't think so. I think England's various sections of England have strong senses of identity Cornwall and Yorkshire, and London and Kent, and you know, the North of England versus the South of England. These are strong senses, but England as a whole doesn't have a strong sense of itself as separate from Britain in the way Scotland and Wales do.

that sense. So England very much turns backward on its own history, and at the center of its history is it's monarchy. So I think, I say early in the book, the monarchy is what England has instead of a sense of identity, and that his simplification. And actually there are many senses of identity in England, but no real unifying one. But the monarchy then becomes a sort of symbol of a unifying one, even for those that are against the monarchy. If you see what I mean. There it is at

the center of us. Whether you like it or not, it's there. It's why England is so obsessed with its own heritage, obsessed with looking back, with nostalgia, sort of returning to the point about nostalgia being something that people can invest in more will wholeheartedly than a belief in a better future. And the Great British Bakeoff is obviously part of that, is that its entire esthetic is a

sort of idealized nineteen fifties village England. But England has been largely metropolitan since the early part of the nineteenth century, and yet the typical England archetypal England is about villages. Well, most people live in big cities in England. We were the first industrialized nation, and yet we associate ourselves with rural areas well. That's there's something fundamentally absurd about that. We should be the most sort of urban focused of

all the cultures. But no, we think of ourselves as rural, even though we're patently not. And the monarchy being at the center of that is part of it. And we feel safe focusing on our monarchy because these days it's harmless and powerless, but nevertheless it's sort of all we've got is our sort of badge of belonging.

person can be problematic. I say that at risk of, you know, of straying into topicality again, but I genuinely think it's useful that the person with the most power in Britain is the Prime Minister, but they have someone else who's nominally their boss. And obviously, if we got rid of the monarchy, we would have to have a new constitution. We'd have to decide whether to have an executive presidency like in the United States and France, or whether you have a president you elect but has little

more power than a monarch. And you know, I don't know how well we cope with that, because if you've won an election, you should have power, shouldn't you. Or you know that we'd have to face up to all of that. And my fear is that we're going through a tricky time ourselves here with faith in politicians and politics is a sort of all time low, and this isn't really the best time to frame a new constitution.

executive producers Aaron Manke, Trevor Young and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.