Dan Snow's History Hit - England's Greatest Monarchs with David Mitchell

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

David Mitchell joins Dan in today's episode to ask the all-important question - who was England's greatest monarch? From the 'overrated' William the Conqueror to the tantrum-throwing Henry VIII, anyone is up for grabs.Produced by Mariana Des Forges, James Hickmann and Beth Donaldson. Edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.PLEASE VOTE HERE for Dan Snow’s History Hit in the 'Best Individual Episode - History' category for the 2023 Signal Awards. Every vote counts, thank you!We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got a BAFTA award-winning actor, comedian, broadcaster and now history author on the podcast today, David Mitchell. National treasure here in the UK for his acting in the hit TV show Peep Show and he's gone on to many wonderful projects after that. His latest project though is a history book, a history of England's kings and queens. From the emergence of England, which as you'll hear we have a little discussion about, he locates it sometime during Athelstan's reign. Others might say Edgar, who knows, the debate goes on, right the way up to 1600 with the passing of the Tudors. He is interested in kings and queens when they wielded power. But his book is informative, but it's also funny.

It's a cross-genre book, folks. He points out that the Vikings were great, unless you met them. A bit like Peter Sellers. And I expect he is right. Very pleased that this former history student at Cambridge University has come home to history after decades wasting his time in comedy. The history world's lucky to have him back. So here's David Mitchell. Enjoy.

T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Hi folks, welcome to this live recording of Darren Snow's History Hit Podcast. It's live because we've got one of our biggest guests ever, David Mitchell, star of Stage and Screen. David, how are you?

Very well, thank you. Well, it's good to have you. When you say live, this isn't live. No, it's not live. No, live recording. Did I say live? You said live recording recording. That's actually a contradiction in terms. Well let's say... We're live now. We may be dead by the time people watch this.

It's now live. There'll be no editing, we can't afford editors. To what do we owe this great treat? Why are you a colossus delving into our little world of history? What's going on? I've written a history book. I know. Yeah, that's why I'm here. No, no, but why have you done that?

Why have I written it? Because we assume you could be bestriding the stage and being funny on much bigger platforms than our little geeky world of history. What platform could be bigger than the entire history of human endeavour? Well, that's what I secretly say. But no, I started writing this book during the lockdown, when a lot of people are trying to write things, and I hadn't been. And then I started typing about the Vikings, because it occurred to me that COVID is a bit like the Vikings, in that it was a

terrible thing that suddenly happened to an unsuspecting community. In the case of my typing, Anglo-Saxon England. There were being Anglo-Saxon England in their way and it wasn't of great life, but you know, they were used to it. And then suddenly the Vikings turned up and it was grim and they didn't know why. They didn't know whether they'd stop turning up, whether they'd go away and just thought that's one of the bleakest things about being a human being. Sometimes a bit of history just happens to you. And there's nothing you can do. And you're a victim of it.

And you're not part of it. And you don't have agency. And the Anglo-Saxons, as we did, tried to give themselves some agency by saying it was their fault. And you know how all the talk about, yes, with COVID, we haven't been preparing enough for pandemics or that somebody may be at a bat or whatever it was. Let's please, as humanity, let's take ownership of it and make it something we've done to ourselves rather than the more frightening thing, which is just something that's happening to us that has nothing to do with us

and makes us not a villain, but just a victim. And that's what happened with the Vikings turning. And the Anglo-Saxons said, oh, it's God's cross with us. We haven't been praying enough. We haven't been holy enough. That wasn't why. It was just because the socioeconomic conditions in Scandinavia shifted slightly,

as did maritime technology. Yeah, we can't control the waters around the island, slightly, as did maritime technology. Yeah, we can't control the waters around the island, David, as we know. That's the ongoing problem in British history. So you- It used to be Vikings, now it's sewage. Good point. Then they try, I've got images now of the monks on Lindisfarne attempting to enforce social distancing. Sorry, can we just- Well, it's the ultimate social distancing, just going to Lindisfarne, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. They've been practicing it for generations. But yeah, the poor guys, they were sitting there all quiet, praying away, and then the Vikings turned up. Okay, so that's history. Why kings and queens? Why do we return? It's so interesting,

we return time and again to this. Does it give us a track and narrative that we can then write, hang on the rest of British history onto? I think so. I think for me, certainly in the medieval period that my book's about, that's the basic political narrative, the who's in charge narrative. And that doesn't tell the full story, but it tells one of the main stories and it leads you through it. And that was a story I had found most compelling before

and the one I was interested to tell. And it's, you know, in many ways, probably there are more important things to look at in terms of the lives of the majority of the people, but in terms of characters and story, that's what I was drawn to. And you can't also, one of the reasons my book ends in 1603 and one of the reasons is that after that,

if you just talk about the kings and queens, that becomes less and less relevant and that stops being even the main political story after 100 years or so. I think that's so true because if we're in this poll, we're going to try and get a bit of a pecking order going. And actually, it's so hard to compare medieval monarchs with early modern and modern ones

because you end up having to like go well was Elizabeth II better than Athelstan and you're like it is just you're comparing two totally different entities aren't you? I certainly feel that if they swapped roles they'd both be very unhappy. I think if Elizabeth II was trying to consolidate Anglo-Saxon control on a partly Viking-occupied island. I don't think that would have been her great strength. And similarly, I think he might have found it a bit frustrating, the endless duty and positivity. And he might just, at some point,

can I slash someone to bits with a sword? Go, no, your majesty. Just now take the posy of flowers and smile. I think that is totally true. So that makes life a bit easier. And when did you, you started writing about the Vikings. Yeah. You must have found writing these books... Whenever I write and think about kings and queens, it's a bizarre habit of starting the king list with William the Conqueror. It just is so strange, isn't it? And you've gone all the way back to the early medieval

as well, haven't you? Well, I thought if we're going to define a book, one of the ways you could define it is say it's about the kings and queens of England. And so you immediately say, okay, so England has to exist. And England didn't exist. I mean, obviously the physical space did, but no one called it England before the Anglo-Saxons arrived because that term derives from then. So we can forget about the Romans or not forget about them, but you know, don't have to do the Romans. And similarly, after Elizabeth I, you've got the same monarchy in charge of England and Scotland. And so it starts to be more Britain. And I didn't want to pretend that England was Britain. I'm explicitly not doing the history of Scotland, which is separate. It impacts, I mention it. But if I said, okay, I'll do it, the kings and queens of Britain, you're opening up so many other arenas.

You've got to put the Bruce in there. Either the book is much longer or it's much less detailed. So you, okay, well, this is the big problem we all face, isn't it? Who was the first king of England? Yes. It's a nightmare. Well, it might be Athelstan. It might be Edward the Elder.

It's not Alfred the Great. Sadly not. But it's around then. As I say in the book, it's a sort of soft launch, the Kingdom of England. Before the Vikings came, the Anglo-Saxons definitely had lots of different kingdoms and a vague sense that they're from the same cultural root, but no real sense that the notion of England is really forged in opposition to the Vikings. They sort of, we want to get back to England, was the sort of Alfred the Great's pitch, but there was no England to really get back to before. When you started this project,

you mentioned you started from the kind of point of view of the Vikings, but did you think, oh, I'm going to write a history of England, it's going to be very heavily kind of Plantagenety, and were you kind of drawn towards those early monarchs? I find them increasingly interesting, only because we overlooked them until quite recently. They just weren't part of our kind of national story. I like it because it's so confusing. Definitely.

You understand why there's been so much televising of the Tudors. You sort of know where you are. there's been so much televising of the Tudors. You sort of know where you are. There's a handful of easy characters to get a grip on. You can assume a bit of knowledge in the audience. Everyone knows where they are. But the Wars of the Roses, it's all over the place. Even since writing the book, I've forgotten most of it.

Okay, great. But the Plantagenet's going into cadet branches of York and Lancaster, that's the big muddle of what basically happened in medieval England that I used writing this book to briefly get a sort of grip on. But, yeah, the confusingness of it is attractive. And that's what all kingship is. Our notion of kings is partly Henry VIII, but apart from his big iconic figure, we're thinking of

kings that were in that period. That's the proper period of kings. That's when all of the aesthetic of kingship derives from that time. Yeah, that's interesting. When individual, usually men, ruled with pretty arbitrary, pretty total power over all the rest of us. Yes. And they had crowns. They had crowns. They had shields. They had coats of arms.

All of the pictures of King Arthur have him like that, even though if he had existed, which he didn't, he was a millennium earlier and would have had very, very different clobber. Probably a bit of an old toga, you know. Yeah, clinging on to the remnants of... Half a gladius and a sandal saying, I am the emperor. Is writing a history book, is that one of the dad sort of things to tick off? You know, like it's dad life, hashtag dad life. I mean, you could have done so many different things. So many of my friends like come to history in the middle years of their life.

But you've got previous... It strikes me that one of your more famous alter egos, someone who you've had to struggle in the past to put distance between you and this fictional person, he wants to write a book called Business Secrets of Errors or something. Yes. Well, look, I can't say that I've entirely escaped the shadow of Mark Horrigan in writing a history book. This is a book that he might be interested in. Well, I think so.

But the thing is that him and me, we were young fogies. And now I'm gradually growing into the appropriate age for fogies. As another young fogey, it's quite nice because all your friends suddenly join. You don't move. You remain as interested in Stalingrad as you were at 19. But strangely, your weird mates who are interested in house music and other things start to, and then sometimes surpass you. I've got mates now who are writing detailed descriptions. Their grandfather at the Battle of Passchendaele. I'm like, you have gone, you've overshot the runway. Yes, what's your music collection looking like now?

Exactly. Exactly. So let's talk, when you did this book, I'm so interested, I love that people have different perspectives on all the monarchs. Can we just start with, like, anything you are just sick of and you think are massively overrated? Well, I'm not keen on William the Conqueror. Okay. I'm not keen on William the Conqueror, and I'm not keen on Edward the Confessor.

Now, I wouldn't say Edward the Confessor is massively overrated. No one likes him. We call him... Well, I'm very glad to hear it because it seems like lots of people like him. They allow him to call himself Edward the Confessor and talk about his holiness and his praying. Absolutely useless, man.

He was a useless man. Totally. He sowed the seeds of discord. Absolutely. Do we not like William the Conqueror because you have a kind of nostalgic love for the Anglo-Saxon, sort of all a bit 19th century, a bit nostalgic for that? Or do you just think he was a right bastard who was just a violent psychopath? Well, they were all right bastards, basically, in terms of the standard of conduct is woefully below what we'd

expect, you know, even of Hollywood. I mean, you wouldn't imagine a prime minister behaving like that, with that level of incompetence, that level of promiscuity, absolutely shocking this day and age, wouldn't you? No, yes, we just have a much higher... but the truth is, we do. Even the worst, even Liz Truss is probably a safer pair of hands than most of these people. But certainly was less interested in waging war. And crucially, you could get rid of her without waiting for her to die. And that is a very, very good system. Exactly. Because there were so many times in the Middle Ages where people were just waiting for this useless bastard to die. And then on

very occasion, they go, well, it could be ages, even though it's the Middle Ages and people just drop dead for no reason all the time. We just can't wait for him to die. We're going to have to do something else. Edward II, I'm sorry. It's just too long.

He might not die for 30 years. His father made old bones. His dad made old bones and his son did all. Richard II, similarly. It's going to be too long before he dies. We're just going to have to put him in a castle and starve him. So William the Conqueror, you don't like him because you're affectionate. You've got to pick a side.

I mean, that may be that some academic historians would say you don't. I think possibly. But I think they've lost the joy. But I think Battle of Hastings, one of the first things you get taught about, or I got taught about, you've got to pick a side. Do you want to pick the invading Normans or do you want to pick the Harold sitting on Senlac Hill? And I picked Harold. Most of the people in my class picked Harold. But turns out, sadly, spoiler alert for people who haven't yet bought the book, Harold loses. C book Harold loses and that's a bit of a shame

and it's one of the good reasons not to start your history of the kings and queens of England with William the Conqueror because it's a bit of a pitter. Harold's an attractive character I think. Yeah he's very obviously had no birthright to be king we feel more relaxed about that now that we're not so keen on the whole notion of people being in charge because of a birthright. But he was professional. He was organized. He did everything right. And he would have won the Battle of Hastings if his army had listened to him. And his brother, Tostig, was obviously such a horrible person. Harold got rid of him. We all know families can be difficult. And I feel for Harold trying to deal with Tostig. And initially, he's got a nice earldom in the north.

Things are going nicely for him. But he pushes his luck. And I think Harold deals with it with great dignity. You listen to Dan Snow's history. Talking to David Mitchell about kings and queens of England. He's just written a book called Unruly. More coming up. Queens of England has just written a book called Unruly.

More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans.

Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So you're a Harold fan. Yeah. You are not a Willing fan. Anyone else overrated? I think the Tudors in general are overrated because their imagery is great.

The portraits of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I in particular, that's great iconography. And you sort of think, we's, we can do that. They've got the outfit at angels, get the right actor, stick them in that. That's a great trailer. But they're a bit of an afterthought of medieval kingship, really. And I think in their time, England is essentially accepting its own mediocrity. Henry VIII, it's got to be said, he's been over-covered, but he is a lot of

fun. I understand why he's had so much coverage and in a way looked at in terms of if you take the job of a king not to be to rule his own age, but to give lots of interesting stories to posterity, he has been an amazing content provider. And I do accept that he's fun, but I've had a bit of enough of him and also if you think about him for more than five minutes he was so awful unbearable you know he almost he'd rather a complete tyrant but the fact that he had a sort of an intelligent thoughtful intellectual side to him almost makes his tantrums and his... Crushing insecurity. Yeah, all the more contemptible.

So you're a blood and thunder guy. I mean, you're like a king. Was it Henry IV of Navarre, the France, said, you know, I rule with my arse in my saddle and my sword in my hand. That's your archetype. Well, that was the way to do it. That's what Henry II did, and he's one of the most effective medieval monarchs,

albeit one who sort of met with a sad, lonely end. Henry I was great. He's a professional. I agree. He got rid of his brothers. Yeah. He usurped the throne brutally. Well, no, there was a terribly unfortunate hunting accident in the New Forest where poor Prince Harry saw his older brother William get killed very killed very accidentally not on purpose at all he definitely bounced back quickly from his grief uh and got

in ahead of his poor the elder brother i mean what a life one of life's losers yeah one of history's Robert Curto's who who died he was made very old bones but spent most of his life in Cardiff castle and you know Cardiff wasn't the vibrant centre then that it is now. So, you know, I feel sorry for him. But no, Henry I, he just feels like he's professional. He got it. What you have to do, you have to be horrible. They were all horrible.

You have to be willing to kill at a moment's notice. But if you do it with a rationale, you do it even-handedly, you don't have favour, and you have some notion of the stable government you want to be heading towards, then it can work out. And he created a very peaceful kingdom, albeit through violence. And in those days, that's sort of as good as it gets. And also, another thing he doesn't do, that many of the other ones that vie for best king, they all do do, is he didn't try and conquer too many other places. That puts a lot of pressure on the kingdom.

When the hundreds of years where every king of England is trying also to be king of France, and it's not really viable. But he said, no, I've got Normandy and England. Yeah, great. And I'm going to stick. Happy days. Yeah. And well, Ireland, the Irish also, and the appalling result of that conquest. Wales wasn't easy. And as you say, France.

But I mean, Henry V, Britain's Alexander, what a legend, but he died of dysentery after the siege. Because as you said, I guess those conquests put pressure on the institution and money and stuff, also on the individuals. I mean, it's exhausting. And Richard I got shot with a crossbow bolt during a siege as well. Yes, and they say he was pausing to applaud the bravery of the castle's defenders. Well done.

He was just defending the castle with a frying pan and he thought, how brave that is. He may be on the other side, but I applaud my fellow. Ah! A kid. Yeah. And then thanks to the complete absence of knowledge is but he may be on the other side but i applaud my fellow ah a kid yeah and then you know and then thanks to the complete absence of knowledge of how to medically treat a wound he just died agonizingly over a fortnight that's a terrible description isn't it yeah it took him a long time

to go okay so uh tudor's overrated william the conqueror's overrated anybody else that you you came to really think was so Elizabeth Tudor usually tops the list, doesn't she? Elizabeth the First. I suppose she is overrated. She wasn't amazing. I struggle with her because sometimes I think, God, what a mate, and all that kind of clever politics. And then partly you think, well, Ireland was a disaster. She didn't solve any of the big problems. She delayed all the big problems. She didn't seem to solve any of them. So I struggle with her. Well, the thing about her that people don't seem to say, but strikes me, and it's a success of her brand building that people don't say it, is she was just very, very cautious. And she inherited the throne at a time where she was

the daughter of Anne Boleyn. The country is hugely divided, religiously speaking. She was in an extremely insecure position and had a tricky life up to then. So I understand the caution. It's an intelligent person's response. But she sort of knew she was on a sticky wicket and behaved like it, really. And she was, yeah, repelling the Armada went well. But everything she actively pushed out into the world was essentially underfunded and nervously done well and yeah she underfunded the poor old sailors who fought in the armada as well and to their great detriment so well she sort of launched her own armada didn't she a couple of years later

that went at least as badly we've got that one yeah so henry the first interesting i think i agree with that there i have we got top three? Well, I'd have to, I think Henry II was pretty amazing. I think so too. He held together most of France as well as England, and it's all down to energy. I think he wasn't great at dealing with his own family because the relentlessness with which his sons tried to overthrow him. To me, it suggests that he must have been a difficult chap, you know, domestically speaking, because that doesn't always happen. It didn't happen to Edward III, who had a very good relationship

with his kids, despite by the end of his reign, he was totally decrepit, but nobody was trying to overthrow him, whereas Henry II, they were trying to overthrow him the whole time when he was still quite hale and hearty. So we like Henry first and second. Yeah. But I'm wondering about the big two in terms of trying to conquer France are Henry V and

Edward III. Yeah. What do you think about the two? Well, it's interesting. They're both supreme military leaders. Probably the best two. Well, Richard, okay. Richard the Lionheart's very good.

Richard the Lionheart's very good. I mean, extraordinary. Well, yeah, very good. But as you say, ultimately, those plots just bank... Well, and in case Henry V destroyed his dynasty, because Henry VI, his son, was just sort of completely broken by that effort and the effort to hold on to France. And then with the third, yeah, it's a hubristic thing to do, undertaking, isn't it? Well, the thing is, they both tried with all their might to take over

France and they both nearly succeeded. But the whole notion of trying to take over France is so ridiculous that can you count them great kings? They've devoted themselves to something that was just a horrible experience for both of the armies. And the poor French, you sort of think about all these famous battles of the Hundred Years' War, Poitiers, Crecy and Agincourt, these great victories where outnumbered English armies destroy huge French armies because the French armies have got a ridiculous strategy. It makes the English the underdogs and it makes us feel all good and plucky. But the reality is all of this is happening in France. The reason the English are so outnumbered is that they have left home in order to destroy the lives, livelihoods, crops and villages of people in a neighbouring country who'd done them no harm.

So that suddenly slightly turns around the whole plucky underdog thing to say, no, what they are is nasty thieving bandits. And, you know, sometimes a burglar will be in a house and find himself outnumbered by the people that live there. But that doesn't make him plucky. And in both cases, Edward III's successor and Henry V's successor both, and in both cases Edward III's successor and Henry V's successor both partly as a result

depose yes so yeah damaging for their dynasties okay so we don't so yes so we're not huge fans trying to conquer France

even though obviously Henry II who I've just named he was obviously controlled a lot of France but he wasn't trying to be king of France yeah

he married the king of France's wife, which was shots fired. But yeah. What about Edward I? It feels like we haven't... Well, I'm quite judgmental about him in the book because obviously he was militarily quite successful and basically asserted control over Wales, which was not necessarily what all Welsh people would say was nice, but it was his aim. So he succeeded in his aim. But he also had the same aim with Scotland, and he didn't succeed in that remotely. And in fact, the enmity between England and Scotland existed for a long time afterwards. And you can see certainly remnants of in the way people from Scotland, people in England relate to each other now, was hugely inflamed

by his very unsuccessful policy. I think he was a bit of a thug, really, a thoughtless... You've said it very difficultly. He was a big religious extremist. He was very, very devout. One of the things he did as a result was expel all the Jews from England, which was very fashionable amongst extreme Christians at the time. But it's not something we look fondly on now. I think you're setting quite difficult set of parameters because you like a thug,

but you don't want them to be... Well, there's thugs and thugs. Yeah, exactly. But you don't want them to be... You like them to be sort of thuggish within a kind of national community rather than invading the next door one. Yes. Well, I think what I'm expecting, firstly, you say I like a thug. I think the thuggish nature of government then was regrettable. But it's all thuggish. So you can choose the sort of bonkers thugs that you don't know what they're going to do next. The more even handed thugs.

The thugs that fail in their aims, the more successful thugs. And so on the basis that they're all thugs, I'm picking the even-handed successful thugs over the unsuccessful capricious thugs. That's very clear. So Henry I, who else do we like? Who's the thuggish? Oh, Henry II. So Henry I, Henry II. I have a soft spot for Henry III, who I don't think was thuggish enough. He certainly, his worst enemy wouldn't call him a thug. You're right. Henry III and indeed Richard II and Æthelred the Unready,

the unusual thing, a medieval king that doesn't really want to go to war. Or Henry VI. And Henry VI, he's another one. I mean, he had more problems than that. But nowadays, we don't want our leaders starting wars. In those days, if you didn't want to ride into battle, it's a big part of the job description that you're not willing to cover. And they didn't go. It's very odd with Richard II, actually, because he avoided war throughout his largely unsuccessful reign. But the first thing he did, because he avoided war throughout his largely unsuccessful

reign. But the first thing he did, where he sort of faced down the Peasants' Revolt, was incredibly brave. And you wouldn't necessarily expect him to be a reluctant general from that moment. We've talked a lot about war. Is there anything else you've identified? What makes good king or queen? I mean, the organised violence side of it aside, is there anything else? I think all of the things that we expect from government today, you've just got to ignore that. They're not trying for any of it. They're not trying for peace. On the contrary, they're waging war. In terms of education and healthcare, they're not interested. Forget about it. So all you can expect is stability. The good kings provide stability, the bad kings don't. And that stability comes from

being predictable in your actions and firm and not having favorites. And I think Henry I was particularly good at that. He's even-handed. He didn't have a clique. The worst kings, particularly good at that. He's even-handed. He didn't have a clique. The worst kings, the ones that caused the most trouble, Richard II, Edward II, Henry VI, have favourites. And it's having favourites, having particular people they lent upon that made the rest of the nobility feel sidelined and frightened. That's what causes civil war. And that's what essentially makes living in medieval England even less unpleasant than it usually was. Isn't it interesting when I'm reading a book or thinking about this, how you were talking about kingship, like they don't have human bodies

themselves. So I now, as I get older, I realize how different I am at various different stages of my life. And these people, as you mentioned, like Edward III, they're trying to be Edward III. But, you know, well, you can be Edward III as a young man, but then you've also got to be Edward III as a guy crippled with musculoskeletal pain. It's fascinating, isn't it, how they age and then that changes the nature of their rule. Yes. And perhaps we expect too much of it. And one of the biggest mistakes I think Henry I made was at the end of his reign when he caused a rift between himself and Geoffrey of Anjou and Matilda, his daughter, who was his designated heir,

because he basically refused to give Geoffrey some castles that had been promised to him. And that is an old man clinging on to all of his possessions and telling himself he's frightened that if he gives these castles to Geoffrey, that that's going to start Geoffrey trying to take over Normandy, which I think there's no evidence for at all. The fear he's feeling really is of death. But he projects that onto his son-in-law. And as a result of that rift, that gave Stephen, the next king, the excuse to claim that Henry I didn't really want Matilda to inherit the throne. And that causes 20 years of civil war.

And that's the product of the changing mentality of an aging man. And obviously, Edward III, he completely outlived his faculties. And that was a shame as well. He'd been this great general and quite a good leader and clearly an effective father because his family liked him and had a strong marriage with his queen. But then she died and he starts to lose his grip and is very much in the thrall of his lover. And the country starts going bankrupt because he's still trying to fight a war in France. And it's a very, very sad end to a very glorious reign. I think wives are important and they're often overlooked, aren't they?

I think Henry I had a very good wife and Henry II had a remarkable wife. Those are some of the details that we can ignore perhaps as traditionally men have written about them through the kind of military lens. Yeah, and we don't hear so much about the queens um the queen's consort but um i think they probably played a really important role um last question i guess did you when you're sitting there in modern britain writing away do you think these men and women did they matter like i in the older i get the more what did it did... Or is it all just science and engineering and microbes? And do you think that the people in charge make a difference? Well, yes. I wish I knew. They definitely...

I'm expecting an actual comprehensive answer right now. They definitely make a difference in the short term. But here's the big question in terms of the period I've done. You've got for a long time in the Anglo-Saxon period, all the relationships from England are with Scandinavian kingdoms because of the Vikings. And you have King Canute, who basically rules England and much of Scandinavia. And it sort of feels like that's England's orbit. And then suddenly, a few of the right people die. And that all changes. And William the Conqueror comes over and England's orbit. And then suddenly a few of the right people die and that all changes. And William the Conqueror comes over and England's orbit is all France. And then you have Henry II and, you know, it's almost like the whole direction the country's looking in swivels around.

Was that inevitable? Would that have happened if we know... If Cnut's kids hadn't been so bloody useless. Yes, if he'd had more effective heirs, or if William the Conqueror had lost at Hastings, which could easily have happened, Harold the Godmanson, very much more Scandinavian looking. Would that trend have continued, or was the impact on England of Normandy, and by extension France, inevitable? That cultural power was a force beyond the control of any man or men. Without William the Conqueror, would the Anglo-Saxon royal house still have basically

been dealing with France 100 years later? And you see how I've avoided answering your question by just reposing it. What a pro. Yeah, I could be a politician, couldn't I? You should be, because you're wasted. What is, let's, okay, so best monarch to go for a beer with? Monarch to go for a beer with, I think young Henry VIII. Oh, okay. I think young Henry VIII, he'd be good company, but I wouldn't trust him. Quite into modern, thoughtful ways of doing things, and then he just hurt his leg and got cross for 20 years.

Best monarch to be your brother-in-law, to marry your sister? To marry your sister? Having the family as a sort of, you know, in-law, nice in-law relationship. I think, I mean, that is an incredibly specific question. Best Edward IV. Yeah.

A bit of a shagger. He Yeah. Bit of a shagger. He was a bit of a shagger. I tell you what he did for his wife's family. Oh, that's a very good way of looking at it. He absolutely showered them with wealth. But also, I think Edward IV is slightly underrated as well, because he was quite capable. David Mitchell's sister is listening to this podcast. I don't have a sister. Well, there you go. That's why. Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

She is there simply to bring honors and jewels upon the rest of the family. I love that. I think they would have said that family. He made an okay brother-in-law. That's true. And then his little brother came along and had them all killed. Best moments gone is stag night team building exercise on a windswept island off the coast right now what do you want from someone like that you're on a team building i mean if you're me you want the monarch will guide you to the latest pub that has the nearest pub

that has nice rooms so you can avoid the whole team building exercise and so yeah i don't know i think maybe you see edward the fourth would be quite good for that sort of thing he liked his creature comforts i mean they killed him in the end um i'm going to try and think of someone richard the lionheart okay there you go yeah he was good at logistics i think if you could say if you tell him it was the holy thing to do you need to say we need to go on a crusade to find the pub yeah he did well did well on Cyprus, which is an island. So there I guess. Dave Mitchell, thank you very much for coming on this show. What is the book called? It's called Unruly. It does all of the kings of England from the Anglo-Saxons to Elizabeth I.

All of your medieval kingship needs will be met. And it has colour photography. What? Yeah. Although no photographs of the actual kings and queens, sadly. But that's because photography wasn't invented in time. It's not my fault. Yeah, it's not the picture that is sort of...

No, exactly. So instead you have the dreadful drawings that were done of them by various medieval monks. Very good. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for having me.