The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The divine comedy of the English throne
David Mitchell surveys our pre-Renaissance rulers with his usual dry wit, and historical rigour to boot
UNRULY: A HISTORY OF ENGLAND’S KINGS
AND QUEENS by David Mitchell
464pp, Michael Joseph, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£25, ebook £12.99
Had Edward I been a cricketer, argues David Mitchell, he would have played spin badly.
“A smasher of the ball, not one for glancing or nurdling, or using his pad,” Mitchell writes. “Any edge he got on a delivery would have flown straight into the slips.” As sporting analogies go, this is apposite for the 13th-century king who would eventually gain the nickname “Hammer of the Scots”.
Edward’s penchant for forceful solutions extended into the administrative arena where, Mitchell suggests, he waged a “war on nuance”. The same could be said of Mitchell’s portrayal of a sovereign whose reform of English law and currency mark him out as one of our nation’s most complex and important. This doesn’t really matter, though: like many of the characterisations in Unruly: A History of England’s Kings and Queens, presenting Edward I as the medieval world’s answer to Robin Smith is accurate enough, and strikes a lively alliance between those oldest of enemies: good humour and narrative history.
Across 400-odd pages, the comedian looks at more than 40 monarchs, taking us from the Anglo-Saxon world to Elizabeth I. It’s hard to count exactly how many, because the question of what actually defines a king was muddled before England was created in 927 – part of the enduring “going to s----” quality of what Mitchell insists on calling the “Dark Ages”.
The mathematically gifted will already have worked out that even when we crunch down the least interesting monarchs (Lady Jane Grey, 1.5 pages) to make room for the busier bees (Stephen, 15), Mitchell has us running at such a flat sprint that many of the protruding details are torn off by atmospheric drag. The Hundred Years’ War, for example, is summed up with a briskness that would equip you for a pub quiz, but only just about (and provided it isn’t being held by Jonathan Sumption). What’s left, nonetheless, is accurate and intelligent enough to avoid being a flat spoof, standing out as a light day-trip for the history buff.
Mitchell says as much at the outset, praising whichever “confounder of algorithms” has managed to find the book in their possession without knowing what happened in 1066. In essence, his image of the past is a Punch and Judy show of awful people doing
terrible things to one another. The first part of Unruly, which tackles the long period pre-1066, is largely concerned with “militarised theft”; a world in which “the local hard guy had to stay in with the provincial hard guy who had to curry favour with the regional hard guy”. This is par for the course from a self-professed “Left-leaning centrist”, but it’s told in a fizzing and indignant style, rammed with entertaining tangents, from how great the Roman Empire was to the naff ending of the last James Bond film (its makers “need to be lined up against a wall and criticised”).
With plenty of jabs at modern political figures and a “Further Reading” section where the author says he’d “probably recommend a thriller”, this is a sleek rod of Mitchell, fired from a rail gun, passing straight through the reader’s skull. One picture has the 8th-century historian Bede perched over a manuscript with a stick in each hand. These are the tools of his trade: a quill and a knife, the latter used like a modern eraser to scrape mistakes from vellum. Mitchell suspects you know this, and instead his caption confidently tells us that Bede “appears to be writing with both hands at once, a trick he passed on to the young Barbara Cartland”.
Unruly seems fine-tuned to annoy prigs and pedants such as myself – and yet, despite a set of cultural references firmly wedged in the latter half of the previous century, there is refreshing candour in how it calls out the bastards, bullies and brats who have donned England’s highest-carat hats. Above all, it’s a funny read, playful and well-meaning. And while it corrects a few schoolboy errors en route, it’s most interested in why we make them in the first place. Did the Vikings have horns on their helmets? Well, Mitchell writes, “in every possible way, other than the literal truth, they totally had horns on their helmets”.