November 19, 2024 • 34 mins
Comedian, writer, and actor David Mitchell joins the podcast to discuss his newest book, Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens. The book is an overview of the monarchs from King Arthur to Elizabeth I, but it's also a cultural analysis of how the stories we tell ourselves about kings inform who we are. The book is available now in paperback.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim
and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. I'm so
thrilled to be talking to the brilliant David Mitchell, who's
an incredible comedian, actor, writer, television show creator, icon of
British panel shows, an author of several books. But his
(00:23):
latest book, Unruly, The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens,
is now out in paperback. If you're a listener of
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
(00:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
No, not at all, thank you for having me. Thank
you for that lovely introduction.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Just to start. What inspired you to write a book
about the British monarchy?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Well, it was definitely partly the global pandemic in that
I was sitting around doing nothing and I sort of
went through a long period of frustration at all of
the books and screenplays that everyone else seemed to be
using their time to write while I sat there and
miserably refreshed the BBC news page and the hope of
(01:26):
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
(01:48):
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,
(02:10):
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
(02:31):
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.
(02:52):
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
(03:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Well I was going to say, well, we would all
hope for that, but let's just say if there was
another pandemic, that would be the slight silver lining.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Well, thank you.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Where did you begin in your historical research? Obviously there
you cover a wide swath of history. What was sort
of your process like of finding sources or reading?
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Genuinely? I started writing about what I knew about already
and to try and find a funny way through it.
And then when i'd sort of realized, actually I've got
to a point I don't know what happened now, then
I've just read around it and I can't pretend to
have gone back to primary sources in any way. But
I just read some books about it and got my
(04:12):
sense of what was vaguely going on, and tried to
re express it in a way that's comic and informative.
And I see myself as a comedian, not a historian.
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
(04:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
You can do that, the existence of King Henry the Eighth.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Yeah, exactly. Or you can try and do what I
hope I've done, at least partly, is take the thing
that were important and see the funny side of that.
And that doesn't mean, because I'm a big believer that
anything that matters is looked at in a certain way funny,
and if it doesn't matter, it's never that funny. The
(05:15):
best comedies have always been about things that really matter,
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
(05:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
They should put that on the Emmy campaigns. I haven't
seen that on the billboards.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Well, I think the greatest truth comes through comedy, I think,
and I you know someone who's tried to say funny
things about the news that various in my career. I thought, well,
I'll try that about what was the news? Which is history.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
One thing that I love about this book that I
mentioned briefly in the introduction is that you choose to
start earlier than William the First, than William the Conqueror,
where the counting sort of begins, But there's so much
British English history that happens before then. And particularly I
loved your analysis of King Arthur. Can you talk a
(06:26):
little bit about how the myth of King Arthur sort
of is understood in modern day Britain.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Well, King Arthur is probably the most famous king in
some ways. It's probably more programs made about Henry the
Eighth these days, but he is an incredibly famous figure,
the original good King who reigned at some point after
the Romans had left and before the Anglo Saxons arrived,
and a wonderful, very very pure and Christian Kingdom. And
(06:56):
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
(07:19):
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
(07:39):
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
(08:02):
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
(08:22):
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
(08:45):
certainly utopian when it comes to kingship, and decided that's
what they would hark back to.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
I found that idea in your book very striking, with
a lot of modern parallels of how motivating it is
for people to harken back to an imaginary past, whether
or not that past actually existed.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Well exactly, and our views are memories of the past
that you know, with the issue of making America great
again is hanging over this conversation. So I'm just going
to say that is an attempt to harp back to
something in people's minds, and whether or not that thing
ever existed is well certainly unproved either way. It was
(09:27):
a different world in all of the West in the
nineteen fifties and sixties, and in many ways it was
a worse world, but in some ways it was a
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
(09:47):
a bit less, you know, our these were less troublesome,
Our death was further away, and you can't actually get
back to that.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Our parents weren't telling us about all the bad things
happening on the news, and movies were better because we,
of course weren't watching them with the critical eye.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Yes, quite so, you know, you can't help Nostalgia is
a powerful force. And even that, you know, it's possible
to feel nostalgia even for great misery. In one's own past,
and that's just because it's gone now and will never
be recaptured, so it has a kind of rose tinted aura.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
One idea that I love in this book is the
notion that the for lack of a better phrase, da
Vinci codification of trying to find the real King Arthur
is ultimately a meaningless exercise, because even if you found
a man who happened to be called Arthur, he wouldn't
be the king that he became in popular legend.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Well know exactly. And people are so desperate for King
Arthur to have existed, you know, understandably it would be
really cool that they seem willing to drop almost every
meaningful attribute I'd say, including his name. Maybe he was
based on some major chieftain who ruled the Britons, you know,
soon after the Legions left and the and the Anglo
(11:11):
Saxons arrived and he said, well, yes, okay. And obviously
there were powerful figures then because people lived, and so
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
(11:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Who in your research of this book, which goes from
the imaginer King Arthur up until Elizabeth, I would you
say is the most underrated king that you came across.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
I've got a soft spot for Henry the first, and
he's certainly not very highly rated at the time. I
don't suppose he felt underrated. He was, you know, everybody
said he was a very successful king, but I think
he's largely forgotten now. And the reason he interests me
is that he feels very professional, and you sort of
feel that the government under him was he had an interest,
(12:19):
not necessarily in the priorities that modern government have, but
he wanted order. He wanted expansion of his own realm,
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
(12:42):
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
(13:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
I do love the emphasis over the book of predictability
and the value of stability and understanding what's coming next,
and whether that is knowing which son is going to
become king next, or knowing that you're not going to
go to war and lose all your holdings. In Normandy,
predictability feels like a sort of undersung factor in what
(13:34):
makes a good king. It's not usually as glamorous in
a conversation when compared to war or conquering or crusades.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Basically, they knew at the time, as far as I
can tell, that there was no amount of good stuff
that any individual ruler could do that was as bad
as what could go wrong if there was a disputed succession,
and they were very much happened. The whole principle of
kingship is saying, never mind how good the ruler is,
(14:02):
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
(14:23):
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
(14:46):
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
(15:09):
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,
(15:31):
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
(15:52):
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
(16:15):
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.
(16:37):
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
(16:58):
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
(17:20):
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
(17:44):
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,
(18:07):
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?
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Then?
Speaker 2 (18:23):
I think the other thing that we forget is that
they really bought into this. It might have been invented
in the Middle Ages, the notion of kingship, but they
didn't feel that they'd invented it. They thought it was
something fundamental and natural and genuinely ordained by God. So
as soon as they undermine it, they feel have we
committed a terrible sin? And if they don't feel like that,
(18:45):
they're just sort of rudderless in the universe, saying, well,
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
(19:05):
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
(19:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
I mean, there's that idea where if the king isn't
chosen by God, then it's just a man in a
gold hat, and we've we've created all of these institutions
around him that are artificial and ultimately meaningless. You know,
hundreds of people bringing him his breakfast and organizing his
jousts and every that goes into kingship. What is it
(20:02):
all for if it's not God anointing this person as
the leader of all of us.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Exactly a tremendous comfort come from it, and the sort
of duty to this figure, and sort of trying to say, well,
you know, the Lord moves in mysterious ways, so the
king may seem like a maniac, but maybe this is
all going to come good in the end. And throughout
my book you see people try and shore up that idea,
and you see them confront it, and it doesn't really
(20:30):
come to any final conclusion. But at the end there's
still a sovereign on the throne claiming that they rule
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
(20:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
If Henry the First is sort of the unsung king
or an underrated king in British history, who would you
say is the most overrated king?
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Henry the Fifth, I think is probably the most overrated.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
He had that one buzzy battle.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Though amazing battle Agincourps, definitely won against the odds, and he,
by the end of his reign was you know, the
heir to the French throne as well as King of England,
and so you know, on his own terms he was
spectacularly successful. That's where I sort of play my comedian's
card and say I'm allowed to take a step back
(21:42):
from medieval kingship and say that the hundreds of years
of English kings desperately trying also to be kings of France.
Was an enormous waste of energy, money, lives, and effort,
and it was pointless. It was the wrong policy. The
(22:02):
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
(22:24):
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
(22:45):
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
(23:07):
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
(23:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
That's a fantastic reed. I also, I think one of
the most controversial kings, and controversial in the sense that
people have very very strong opinions on both sides of
the issue, is Richard, because there are people who have
very strong feelings are what are your feelings on Richard
the Third?
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Well, my feeling I take the conventional line on Richard
the Third, which is that he is overwhelmingly the most
likely person to have caused the deaths of his nephews,
the princes in the Tower. That's the key point of
controversy over Richard the third. He definitely took the throne,
you know, usurped the throne from his nephew, who was
referred to as end of the fifth, although he wasn't
(24:21):
really meaningfully ever a king, but he definitely usurped the throne.
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,
(24:42):
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
(25:04):
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
(25:26):
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
(25:47):
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.
(26:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
It kind of goes back to what you were saying
about history being the story that we tell ourselves in
that it's very fun to imagine that it's a detective
story that we can solve and not an incredibly messy
series of complicated people and complicated events that will be
forever Unknoble.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Well exactly that all we have is the evidence that's
come down to us and things have been written about it,
and you know, we're not going to suddenly discover video
footage of Henry the Seventh killing the young Prince of
the Fifth. It's just not going to happen. There's always
going to be a question mark over it. So I thought,
(27:05):
in my overview, i'll, you know, I'll say what I
think probably happened, and the reason I think it probably
went that way, that's what most people think, and that's
that's the direction most of the evidence points in. But
I fully accept we can't totally know.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
I don't want to keep you too long, but just
as we wrap up the conversation, what I love about
this book is Not only is it an overview of
the monarchs as they came, but also it fundamentally deepened,
especially as an American, my understanding of how British people
see themselves through the monarchy. Is there something you learned
about British identity or discovered over the course of writing
(27:44):
this book that surprised you.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Well, I think the more I thought about it, the
more I was very careful to say, this is a
book about the English kings, so it's not about the
Scottish king. Yes, I apologize, No, no, not at all,
but I'm sort of more explained. Why I was so
clear on that partly because I, you know, I Scottish
history up to sixty you know three is of you know,
(28:07):
linked but separate thing. Ditto Irish history, and I wasn't
going to pretend I'd covered them because I hadn't. So
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
(28:28):
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
(28:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
To an American, I would say that the English identity
and correct me if I'm wrong, seems to be exclusively
bunting and baking in a tent and having a man
to poke at your bread and tell you if it's
overproofd or not.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Well, that certainly is a big part of identity, of
our identity, but that program, confusingly is not called the
Great English Bacoff. So we have this issue Englishness and
Britishness where they're distinct. For Scott's, even the ones that
don't want Scotland to become an independent country even Scotts
in favor of the union, still have a strong sense
(29:45):
of what is different about Scotland from England, What Scotland's
unique identity within Britain is England I don't think has
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
(30:06):
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
(30:26):
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
(30:48):
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
(31:12):
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
(31:35):
got is our sort of badge of belonging.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
And forgive me because this book does stop at Queen
Elizabeth the First, but I'm curious on your read on
the modern day monarchy. Do you think that that fundamental
nostalgia and fondness for a sort of national story is
enough to keep the monarchy going in the present day.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
I don't know, but I've certainly I have no problem
with the constitutional monarchy at all, and I think there's
something quite useful about having the figurehead of the country,
the most important person in the country, not actually being
the person with the power. I think putting the power
(32:17):
and the sort of dignity of nationhood in the same
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
(32:38):
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
(32:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
It would leave you so vulnerable to the vikings.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Excellent point, yes, and then we'd only have ourselves to blame.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Well, unruly. The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens
is out in paperback in the UK and across the Pond.
You should absolutely pick it up. It is a delightful
and such a smart read. David Mitchell, I can't thank
you again enough for this conversation.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Thank you so much, Thank you very much for having me.
I've really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and
Mild from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is hosted by me Dana,
with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannahswick, Courtney Sender,
Amy Hit and Julia Milani. The show is edited and
produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producerrima Ill Kali and
(34:16):
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.
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim
and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. I'm so
thrilled to be talking to the brilliant David Mitchell, who's
an incredible comedian, actor, writer, television show creator, icon of
British panel shows, an author of several books. But his
(00:23):
latest book, Unruly, The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens,
is now out in paperback. If you're a listener of
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
(00:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
No, not at all, thank you for having me. Thank
you for that lovely introduction.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Just to start. What inspired you to write a book
about the British monarchy?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Well, it was definitely partly the global pandemic in that
I was sitting around doing nothing and I sort of
went through a long period of frustration at all of
the books and screenplays that everyone else seemed to be
using their time to write while I sat there and
miserably refreshed the BBC news page and the hope of
(01:26):
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
(01:48):
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,
(02:10):
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
(02:31):
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.
(02:52):
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
(03:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Well I was going to say, well, we would all
hope for that, but let's just say if there was
another pandemic, that would be the slight silver lining.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Well, thank you.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Where did you begin in your historical research? Obviously there
you cover a wide swath of history. What was sort
of your process like of finding sources or reading?
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Genuinely? I started writing about what I knew about already
and to try and find a funny way through it.
And then when i'd sort of realized, actually I've got
to a point I don't know what happened now, then
I've just read around it and I can't pretend to
have gone back to primary sources in any way. But
I just read some books about it and got my
(04:12):
sense of what was vaguely going on, and tried to
re express it in a way that's comic and informative.
And I see myself as a comedian, not a historian.
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
(04:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
You can do that, the existence of King Henry the Eighth.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Yeah, exactly. Or you can try and do what I
hope I've done, at least partly, is take the thing
that were important and see the funny side of that.
And that doesn't mean, because I'm a big believer that
anything that matters is looked at in a certain way funny,
and if it doesn't matter, it's never that funny. The
(05:15):
best comedies have always been about things that really matter,
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
(05:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
They should put that on the Emmy campaigns. I haven't
seen that on the billboards.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Well, I think the greatest truth comes through comedy, I think,
and I you know someone who's tried to say funny
things about the news that various in my career. I thought, well,
I'll try that about what was the news? Which is history.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
One thing that I love about this book that I
mentioned briefly in the introduction is that you choose to
start earlier than William the First, than William the Conqueror,
where the counting sort of begins, But there's so much
British English history that happens before then. And particularly I
loved your analysis of King Arthur. Can you talk a
(06:26):
little bit about how the myth of King Arthur sort
of is understood in modern day Britain.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Well, King Arthur is probably the most famous king in
some ways. It's probably more programs made about Henry the
Eighth these days, but he is an incredibly famous figure,
the original good King who reigned at some point after
the Romans had left and before the Anglo Saxons arrived,
and a wonderful, very very pure and Christian Kingdom. And
(06:56):
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
(07:19):
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
(07:39):
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
(08:02):
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
(08:22):
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
(08:45):
certainly utopian when it comes to kingship, and decided that's
what they would hark back to.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
I found that idea in your book very striking, with
a lot of modern parallels of how motivating it is
for people to harken back to an imaginary past, whether
or not that past actually existed.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Well exactly, and our views are memories of the past
that you know, with the issue of making America great
again is hanging over this conversation. So I'm just going
to say that is an attempt to harp back to
something in people's minds, and whether or not that thing
ever existed is well certainly unproved either way. It was
(09:27):
a different world in all of the West in the
nineteen fifties and sixties, and in many ways it was
a worse world, but in some ways it was a
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
(09:47):
a bit less, you know, our these were less troublesome,
Our death was further away, and you can't actually get
back to that.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Our parents weren't telling us about all the bad things
happening on the news, and movies were better because we,
of course weren't watching them with the critical eye.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Yes, quite so, you know, you can't help Nostalgia is
a powerful force. And even that, you know, it's possible
to feel nostalgia even for great misery. In one's own past,
and that's just because it's gone now and will never
be recaptured, so it has a kind of rose tinted aura.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
One idea that I love in this book is the
notion that the for lack of a better phrase, da
Vinci codification of trying to find the real King Arthur
is ultimately a meaningless exercise, because even if you found
a man who happened to be called Arthur, he wouldn't
be the king that he became in popular legend.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Well know exactly. And people are so desperate for King
Arthur to have existed, you know, understandably it would be
really cool that they seem willing to drop almost every
meaningful attribute I'd say, including his name. Maybe he was
based on some major chieftain who ruled the Britons, you know,
soon after the Legions left and the and the Anglo
(11:11):
Saxons arrived and he said, well, yes, okay. And obviously
there were powerful figures then because people lived, and so
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
(11:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Who in your research of this book, which goes from
the imaginer King Arthur up until Elizabeth, I would you
say is the most underrated king that you came across.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
I've got a soft spot for Henry the first, and
he's certainly not very highly rated at the time. I
don't suppose he felt underrated. He was, you know, everybody
said he was a very successful king, but I think
he's largely forgotten now. And the reason he interests me
is that he feels very professional, and you sort of
feel that the government under him was he had an interest,
(12:19):
not necessarily in the priorities that modern government have, but
he wanted order. He wanted expansion of his own realm,
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
(12:42):
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
(13:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
I do love the emphasis over the book of predictability
and the value of stability and understanding what's coming next,
and whether that is knowing which son is going to
become king next, or knowing that you're not going to
go to war and lose all your holdings. In Normandy,
predictability feels like a sort of undersung factor in what
(13:34):
makes a good king. It's not usually as glamorous in
a conversation when compared to war or conquering or crusades.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Basically, they knew at the time, as far as I
can tell, that there was no amount of good stuff
that any individual ruler could do that was as bad
as what could go wrong if there was a disputed succession,
and they were very much happened. The whole principle of
kingship is saying, never mind how good the ruler is,
(14:02):
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
(14:23):
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
(14:46):
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
(15:09):
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,
(15:31):
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
(15:52):
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
(16:15):
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.
(16:37):
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
(16:58):
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
(17:20):
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
(17:44):
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,
(18:07):
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?
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Then?
Speaker 2 (18:23):
I think the other thing that we forget is that
they really bought into this. It might have been invented
in the Middle Ages, the notion of kingship, but they
didn't feel that they'd invented it. They thought it was
something fundamental and natural and genuinely ordained by God. So
as soon as they undermine it, they feel have we
committed a terrible sin? And if they don't feel like that,
(18:45):
they're just sort of rudderless in the universe, saying, well,
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
(19:05):
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
(19:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
I mean, there's that idea where if the king isn't
chosen by God, then it's just a man in a
gold hat, and we've we've created all of these institutions
around him that are artificial and ultimately meaningless. You know,
hundreds of people bringing him his breakfast and organizing his
jousts and every that goes into kingship. What is it
(20:02):
all for if it's not God anointing this person as
the leader of all of us.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Exactly a tremendous comfort come from it, and the sort
of duty to this figure, and sort of trying to say, well,
you know, the Lord moves in mysterious ways, so the
king may seem like a maniac, but maybe this is
all going to come good in the end. And throughout
my book you see people try and shore up that idea,
and you see them confront it, and it doesn't really
(20:30):
come to any final conclusion. But at the end there's
still a sovereign on the throne claiming that they rule
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
(20:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
If Henry the First is sort of the unsung king
or an underrated king in British history, who would you
say is the most overrated king?
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Henry the Fifth, I think is probably the most overrated.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
He had that one buzzy battle.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Though amazing battle Agincourps, definitely won against the odds, and he,
by the end of his reign was you know, the
heir to the French throne as well as King of England,
and so you know, on his own terms he was
spectacularly successful. That's where I sort of play my comedian's
card and say I'm allowed to take a step back
(21:42):
from medieval kingship and say that the hundreds of years
of English kings desperately trying also to be kings of France.
Was an enormous waste of energy, money, lives, and effort,
and it was pointless. It was the wrong policy. The
(22:02):
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
(22:24):
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
(22:45):
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
(23:07):
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
(23:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
That's a fantastic reed. I also, I think one of
the most controversial kings, and controversial in the sense that
people have very very strong opinions on both sides of
the issue, is Richard, because there are people who have
very strong feelings are what are your feelings on Richard
the Third?
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Well, my feeling I take the conventional line on Richard
the Third, which is that he is overwhelmingly the most
likely person to have caused the deaths of his nephews,
the princes in the Tower. That's the key point of
controversy over Richard the third. He definitely took the throne,
you know, usurped the throne from his nephew, who was
referred to as end of the fifth, although he wasn't
(24:21):
really meaningfully ever a king, but he definitely usurped the throne.
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,
(24:42):
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
(25:04):
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
(25:26):
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
(25:47):
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.
(26:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
It kind of goes back to what you were saying
about history being the story that we tell ourselves in
that it's very fun to imagine that it's a detective
story that we can solve and not an incredibly messy
series of complicated people and complicated events that will be
forever Unknoble.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Well exactly that all we have is the evidence that's
come down to us and things have been written about it,
and you know, we're not going to suddenly discover video
footage of Henry the Seventh killing the young Prince of
the Fifth. It's just not going to happen. There's always
going to be a question mark over it. So I thought,
(27:05):
in my overview, i'll, you know, I'll say what I
think probably happened, and the reason I think it probably
went that way, that's what most people think, and that's
that's the direction most of the evidence points in. But
I fully accept we can't totally know.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
I don't want to keep you too long, but just
as we wrap up the conversation, what I love about
this book is Not only is it an overview of
the monarchs as they came, but also it fundamentally deepened,
especially as an American, my understanding of how British people
see themselves through the monarchy. Is there something you learned
about British identity or discovered over the course of writing
(27:44):
this book that surprised you.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Well, I think the more I thought about it, the
more I was very careful to say, this is a
book about the English kings, so it's not about the
Scottish king. Yes, I apologize, No, no, not at all,
but I'm sort of more explained. Why I was so
clear on that partly because I, you know, I Scottish
history up to sixty you know three is of you know,
(28:07):
linked but separate thing. Ditto Irish history, and I wasn't
going to pretend I'd covered them because I hadn't. So
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
(28:28):
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
(28:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
To an American, I would say that the English identity
and correct me if I'm wrong, seems to be exclusively
bunting and baking in a tent and having a man
to poke at your bread and tell you if it's
overproofd or not.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Well, that certainly is a big part of identity, of
our identity, but that program, confusingly is not called the
Great English Bacoff. So we have this issue Englishness and
Britishness where they're distinct. For Scott's, even the ones that
don't want Scotland to become an independent country even Scotts
in favor of the union, still have a strong sense
(29:45):
of what is different about Scotland from England, What Scotland's
unique identity within Britain is England I don't think has
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
(30:06):
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
(30:26):
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
(30:48):
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
(31:12):
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
(31:35):
got is our sort of badge of belonging.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
And forgive me because this book does stop at Queen
Elizabeth the First, but I'm curious on your read on
the modern day monarchy. Do you think that that fundamental
nostalgia and fondness for a sort of national story is
enough to keep the monarchy going in the present day.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
I don't know, but I've certainly I have no problem
with the constitutional monarchy at all, and I think there's
something quite useful about having the figurehead of the country,
the most important person in the country, not actually being
the person with the power. I think putting the power
(32:17):
and the sort of dignity of nationhood in the same
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
(32:38):
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
(32:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
It would leave you so vulnerable to the vikings.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Excellent point, yes, and then we'd only have ourselves to blame.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Well, unruly. The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens
is out in paperback in the UK and across the Pond.
You should absolutely pick it up. It is a delightful
and such a smart read. David Mitchell, I can't thank
you again enough for this conversation.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Thank you so much, Thank you very much for having me.
I've really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and
Mild from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is hosted by me Dana,
with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannahswick, Courtney Sender,
Amy Hit and Julia Milani. The show is edited and
produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producerrima Ill Kali and
(34:16):
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.
Host
Dana Schwartz
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