David Mitchell on a new history of England’s monarchy | HistoryExtra
"'I've always found it interesting, the fact that Roman civilization was in, let's let's call it in superficial capitalistic terms quite advanced. They had a lot of the things that we've been enjoying since the rise of the West like you know running water and central heating and rules about not everyone being armed as they walk around the place. And it, you know it seems on a superficial level to have been quite well organized and comparatively nice for a time… and then that Empire collapses and things aren't as nice… know we've been obsessed with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire for a long time but it's really, it really is interesting that it collapsed and left such a void and left in modern terms such economic collapse collapse. in population, collapse of infrastructure and one of the places it hit hardest was this island, the bit of you know the southern part of Great Britain…
One of the forms of rhetoric I find most irritating is when people say oh come on it's 2023 you can't behave like that. As if the fact that it's later means that people are behaving better. That's, that's not how things go. Sometimes we go through a period where people's behavior improves and sometimes it gets worse. Sometimes life gets easier and sometimes it gets harder. Broadly speaking there's a technological advance but still that's only broadly speaking. So many of the things the Romans could do were then forgotten for centuries. Central heating often cited. You had central heating in the 4th century and it didn't really come back until the 19th…
I think [the Dark Ages] quite, seems like quite a good label for the, you know the bit just after the Romans have gone. Certainly in England and I supect in other parts of Western Europe. I don't think you can label that period of history globally with that term but it's it seems quite evocative of the sort of economic and societal collapse that, that was endured in this part of the world then...
Historians don't like the term the Anarchy being used about the Civil War that happened between Steven and Matilda. And again I sort of think I think that's quite it's quite a good term for it...
Some of the most disastrous monarchs are the ones that most completely believe in their right to rule because then essentially they feel they can do no wrong… in a way it was our, our most ineffective kings that ushered in constitutional change. So perhaps we should be most grateful to John and his son Henry III who because of their various levels of incompetence triggered both Magna Carta and then Parliament. But when there's a good King on the throne people don't tend to feel the need to reign him in with sort of constitutional innovation ...
Richard the Lionheart… he's basically, he's French. There's a big posh French family the Plantagenets and what he wants to do is control areas of France, give the king of France a rough ride and go on crusade, those are his priorities. One of his many many assets is that he happens to be king of England. And as far as he's concerned that asset is just there to be milked for cash to pay for a crusade to go and you know, fund more islamophobic violence. And that's who he is and he's never pretended to be anything else. And it is very clear at the time. He was hardly in England, so uninterested by it was he. He was just there to get resources out of it. But unfortunately for his reputation, the fact that his badge, the Three Lions has been adopted by England, and he has this name Lionheart which sounds all sort of English is because of the Lions’ association with England, which if you think about it is bonkers, there are no lions in England apart from in the zoo, but he he sort of gets condemned as a hypocrite for having projected all this Englishness down the ages when in fact he was all French and wanting to go to the Holy Land, and I think that's rather unfair on him. And it's it's interesting that the Three Lions on his badge, some people think represent not England, but one of those lions is England, one of them is Normandy and the other one is Aquitaine. So it may be that the Three Lions on the England football shirt, two thirds of them represent areas of France'...
‘Can we trace a moment in this story where real doubt started to creep in about the power of monarchy? Was there a moment at which the public at large started to question it?’
‘I think so, I mean I don't know about the public at large because we know so little about most of the lives of the people at that time, but the the people whose views come down to us, who were largely quite privileged people. I think you can see that there's a real sea change in the reign of Richard II. And that's not the beginning of his reign when there's the what's called The Peasants Revolt when there's huge uprising which has almost sort of socialist undertones really. But even in that uprising, where they hate gentlemen, they hate aristocrats, they still believe in kingship. They think the king is badly advised. But later in Richard II's reign you feel that the Parliament and the aristocracy are absolutely at their wits’ end. And you know previous bad kings they've reigned in as I said with Parliament and Magna Carta and they just think nah this this isn't going to work, we've got to get rid of of him. And they do get rid of him despite the fact that he's undoubtedly the rightful King.
And for me the uh institution of kingship, of of monarchy never quite recovers from there. They've got rid of one king and they know that no King has to be there. They don't have to resort to constitutional innovation anymore, they can just get rid of the king and have someone different. And that's hugely destabilizing. And so you've got Henry IV who is the usurper, he comes in and has a very very wobbly reign. Then you have Henry VI. And now Henry the V is obviously a great operator and so his reign goes beautifully. But he's an anomaly. And when he dies young and he's not even a toddler, his baby Henry VI inherits the throne, then we go into a period of unprecedented instability. Because Henry VI is obviously initially a minor but no better when he's grown up, he's just no good. And so all those notions of getting rid of him uh start entering people's minds again. In a way they just hadn't done before, they got rid of Richard II.
And then we have the Wars of the Roses which which essentially create huge violence and instability until the Tudors take charge. And the Tudors, ah, their claim to the throne is so sketchy, their very existence is basically an admission that, well, kind of anyone could be king, let's just hope for a bit of stability and relative competence from them. So yes I think the the magical notion of kingship is kind of shot by then, for most people. But then as I said earlier when Charles I is on the throne over a 100 years later, he still seems to believe it, and very little good it does him...
You can't tell the story through Kings alone after 1603 as effectively as you can up to that point’"
