The 'Unruly' British Monarchy (with David Mitchell)

Comedian, writer, and actor David Mitchell joins the podcast to discuss his newest book, Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/742812/unruly-by-david-mitchell/ 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. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/noblebloodtales — Noble Blood merch https://store.dftba.com/collections/noble-blood — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250840578/anatomyalovestory' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250861016/immortalityalovestory' See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:32Dana Schwartz?

  Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. Listener discretion advised.

• 0:43Dana Schwartz?

  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, and author of several books, but his 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 I, which I thought was a brilliant decision, but an analysis, really, of what our historical understanding of those kings says about British culture and human culture as a whole. David, thank you so much for joining me.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  No, not at all. Thank you for having me. Thank you for that lovely introduction.

• 1:32Dana Schwartz?

  So just to start, what inspired you to write a book about the British monarchy?

• 1:38Speaker 03

  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 in the hope of some sign of an end to it all. And then finally, when there was some sign of an end to it all, I found something to do, which was to initially sit down and start typing about how the Arrival of Covid felt a bit like the arrival of the Vikings must have felt to the Anglo Saxons. As in, it was just something that came out of the blue and was a real pain for everyone.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  It 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 Covid and the suddenness, you do think more about history. Because you think, oh, my God, this is a bit of it that's happening. It's just happening suddenly to me and it's not out of a trend, really. I mean, obviously, people relentlessly talk about how it was out of a trend and we should have seen it coming. And why wasn't there more P P E and all the covers, et cetera, et cetera. But they weren't saying it beforehand, or if they were, no one was listening. So I sort of, I think broadly speaking, no one saw it coming. I mean, the Anglo Saxons thought that they should have seen the Vikings coming by, you know, and it was all because they hadn't prayed enough.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  And there's really no evidence of a connection between their lack of praying and the arrival of Norse warriors. But, you know, you start thinking about your powerlessness in the universe. And that's how a lot of people in the Middle Ages felt all the time because they really didn't know what the hell was going on. So it was a natural thing to start typing about. And then it was great that I just had that freedom for a few months just to play around with it and find a tone of voice that I hope is funny for talking about the past. And not in a detailed way, but in a way that gives an overview for people who wish they had more of an overview of, in the case of my book, The Kings and Queens of England.

• 3:46Speaker 03

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

• 4:01Dana Schwartz?

  Well, I was gonna say, well, we would all, we would all hope for that. But let's just say if there was another pandemic, that would be the slight silver lining.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Well, thank you.

• 4:11Dana Schwartz?

  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?

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Genuinely, I started writing about what I knew about already and to try and find a funny way through it. And then when I sort of realized, actually, I've got to a point, I don't know what happened now. Then I 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 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

• 5:05Speaker 03

  matter, then that would be hopefully a rewarding read. Rather than taking, you know, obviously, you can find funny things in history in terms of broadly the disgustingness of life, then the lack of plumbing, the weird superstitions. You can do that.

• 5:24Dana Schwartz?

  The existence of King Henry VIII.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Or you can try and do what I hope I've done, at least partly, is take the things 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 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 problems.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  And in that, you sort of, there's a sort of deep truth about human disappointment that makes that show much funnier than if it was just, you know, funny about silly things.

• 6:19Dana Schwartz?

  They should put that on the Emmy campaigns. I haven't seen that on the billboards.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  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 at various times in my career, I thought, well, I'll try that about what was the news, which is history.

• 6:38Dana Schwartz?

  One thing that I love about this book that I mentioned briefly in the introduction is that you choose to start earlier than William I, than William the Conqueror, where the counting sort of begins. But there's so much British English history that happens before then. Particularly, I loved your analysis of King Arthur. Can you talk a little bit about how the myth of King Arthur sort of is understood in modern day Britain?

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Well, King Arthur is probably the most famous king in some ways. There's probably more programs made about Henry VIII 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 this is a lovely idea, lent on and enjoyed for centuries by other kings, by people who were sad that their king wasn't better, and they thought only he could have been more like good old King Arthur was. And, you know, has been dramatized for television and in films, and it's a really lovely idea. The only problem is there is absolutely zero evidence that he existed at all.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  And, you know, he, he just didn't. It's just not possible. I mean, he looks like a medieval king in all the pictures, and that's because the key time of imagining and enjoying imagining him was the Middle Ages, and they didn't really think about whether people wore the same clothes hundreds of years earlier as they did. So that's a bit of a clue. Why would there be this sudden, basically totally medieval king, a bit like Edward I or Edward III cropping up soon after the last toga just rotted and before the first boat comes over from Denmark? It just doesn't add up. And the monks of Glastonbury Abbey, who were, you know, nothing if not entrepreneurial, created a grave. For King Arthur and his queen and and everyone thought, well, he must have existed.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  He's got a grave, but it's no, it's it's, you know, you could say the same about Mickey Mouse and his castle. So, yes, King Arthur is a lovely idea, but he didn't exist, but very, very important. If you're writing a book about kings, because that's the template. That's what everyone was saying a king should be, and they didn't. And they weren't great many periods of the past, and we're not necessarily that great at it now even. They weren't great at hoping for a better future. What they could do, though, is hark back to a better past. But they didn't necessarily really know what the past was like. So they sort of invented a utopian past in King Arthur, or certainly utopian when it comes to kingship, and decided that's what they would hark back to.

• 9:23Dana Schwartz?

  I found that idea in your book very striking with a lot of modern parallels of how motivating it is for people to hearken back to an imaginary past, whether or not that past actually existed.

• 9:37Speaker 03

  Well, exactly, and it and you our views, our memories of the past that, you know, we're the the issue of the of making America great again is hanging over this conversation. So I'm just gonna say

• 9:48Dana Schwartz?

  Yes, thank you.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  That is an attempt to hark back to something in in people's minds. And whether or not that thing ever existed is, well, certainly unproved either way. It was a different world in all of the West in the nineteen fifty's and sixty's. 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. You know, our backs hurt a bit less, you know, our knees were less troublesome, our death was further away. And you can't actually get back to that.

• 10:27Dana Schwartz?

  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 a critical eye.

• 10:36Speaker 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 it's gone now and will never be recaptured. And so it has a kind of rose tinted aura.

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• 12:01Dana Schwartz?

  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.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Well, no, 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. That's sort of go, maybe he was based on some major chieftain who ruled the Britons, you know, soon after the legions left and the Anglo-Saxons arrived. And you say, 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.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  But unless any of these people were in any way, you know, good in the same ways as King Arthur, then the basing him on them is not very meaningful.

• 13:14Dana Schwartz?

  Who in your research of this book, which goes from the imaginary King Arthur up until Elizabeth I, would you say is the most underrated king that you came across?

• 13:26Speaker 03

  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, 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, not, 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 a, an orderly succession to the next generation. He very much didn't get that, but he, he really worked at it.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  So you sort of think that that's not that nightmarish for the people at the time. If you've got a king like that, then that is reasonably competent government. And that may sound like faint praise, but it, 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, I think Henry the First, I think if all the kings had been like Henry the First, then being a medieval peasant would have been 40% more pleasant than it actually turned out to be. So yeah, I, I'll put in a word for him.

• 14:41Dana Schwartz?

  I do love the emphasis over the book of, 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, in Normandy. Predictability feels like a sort of undersung factor in, in what makes a good king. It's not, it's not usually as glamorous in a conversation when compared to war or conquering or crusades.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  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, the whole principle of kingship is saying, never mind how good the ruler is, let's just know who it is. Because when we don't... 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.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  And even quite bad kings might keep those basic services limping along. So by saying, and in the early part of the book, the Anglo Saxons, they didn't have a, the principle of primogeniture. So it wasn't necessarily the eldest son who was supposed to succeed. So quite often when an Anglo Saxon king died, there was a mini civil war while his sons fought it out for the, who was going to run the kingdom. And that's actually a marginally more meritocratic system. You get, get the more effective warrior king tends to be the one that prevails. But that element of meritocracy was, was demonstrably not worth it for the amount of fighting and killing that that system involved.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  You know, now in a functioning democracy, you get, fingers crossed, an orderly succession when one government replaces the other. And that's a really important part of what makes a democracy work. Because if you don't have that, you're better off just not changing the government ever. Sticking with who you've got and then saying as clearly as possible in advance. And when he dies, it'll be his son. And please may it just continue on this even keel for as long as possible. Because the worst things that happened in the Middle Ages weren't the things the king did. It was the times no one knew who the king was or couldn't agree on that. And that's the, happened a lot in the Anglo Saxon era with no primogeniture established.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  It happened when Henry the first died and he wanted his daughter to succeed him. That was, did not go down well at the time.

• 17:28Dana Schwartz?

  As seen on House of the Dragon.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  Right, yes. And you know, that was so, there was, there was absolute, you know, hellish. It's, it's known unfashionably now, but it's known as the anarchy traditionally, that period. And, and that's a hint that it wasn't nice. The Wars of the Roses, a few hundred years later, that's a long period of lack of clarity as to who the king was. That was the lesson of the age, but every so often they broke their own rules. So Richard the second, absolutely terrible king.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  But undoubtedly the rightful king. Nobody ever really disputed his right to rule, however awful his conduct was. But in the end, he was so bad, they couldn't stand it. And the barons got rid of him and he and 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. So the next king was Henry the fourth. He had a sort of very unstable, unhappy reign. But basically thereon, that the the office of king was never properly strong again.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  And there was a lot more fighting over who who would be in charge after that. And so fundamentally, it wasn't worth it. They should have stuck with Richard the second until he died. And, you know, there would have been less horribleness if they had. But at the time, they thought, well, he just can't, this 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 I find it funny. I find that quandary they're relentlessly in that the aristocrats of of sort of stability versus competence. I find that amusing, amusing to see them struggle with it. Amusing how they they've invented collectively this thing, kingship,

• 19:24Speaker 03

  that they claim God is into. So they they give the ruler the sort of endorsement of the almighty. That was a clever idea to have cooked up. But then the problem is, what if you have an absolute idiot, you know, slash murderous maniac, who you're now saying is endorsed by God? What do you do about that? And should you just do nothing? You know, hope it gets better, wait till he dies. Should you try and get rid of him? But then what are you saying? What's what's the system then? I think the other thing that we 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

• 20:08Speaker 03

  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, they're just sort of rudderless in the universe, saying, well, who's who's supposed to look after us? Who's supposed to say what's what? And we're quite used to the notion of atheism now. There are a lot of atheists and there's no one who hasn't heard of the idea. So we've all contemplated that feeling that what if there is no order to the universe? There is no big beardy guy in charge, making sure we'll all be okay. And so even if we do decide we're religious and we it's a sort of choice. In those days, it wasn't a choice. They were that's they were told it was true

• 20:50Speaker 03

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

• 21:12Dana Schwartz?

  I mean, there's that idea where if 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 his jousts and everything that goes into kingship. What is it all for if it's not God anointing this person as as the leader of all of us?

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Exactly. The tremendous comfort comes from it. And the sort of duty to this figure and a 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's it doesn't really come to any final conclusion. But at the end, There's still a sovereign on the throne claiming that they ruled by divine sanction. I think the idea is less bought 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 reining in the monarchs.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  And that obviously is a prelude to the next chapter of English and British history. When the parliament and the king end up fighting a war. But you can sort of see that that was inevitable because they were fundamentally always going to come to blows.

• 22:35Dana Schwartz?

  If Henry the first is sort of the the unsung king or or an underrated king in in British history. Who would you say is the most overrated king?

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Henry the fifth, I think, is probably the most overrated.

• 22:48Dana Schwartz?

  He had that one one buzzy battle, though.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  Amazing battle, Agincourt, 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 from medieval kingship. And say that the hundreds of years of English kings desperately trying also to be kings of France was a was a an enormous waste of energy, money, lives and effort. And it was it was pointless. It was the wrong policy.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  The King of England will never be the King of France as well. The King of France will never be the King of England as well. It was just unworkable. But yet, English kings, for hundreds of years, their main focus was raising money to raise troops to go over to fight battles in France with horrendous consequences for the people trying to just live in France. And in the end, they usually failed. There are a few examples of that, you know, in 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? King of England never became King of France and it wouldn't have been good if they had.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  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, wanted control of Normandy. He'd like, he'd like control of some other bits around Normandy if possible, but he didn't have any ridiculous ideas about also being King of France like Henry the Fifth and Edward the Third did, or being say like Henry the Eighth did, being some sort of emperor or whatever. He, he knew his place. He had reasonable ambitions for a king of his scale and that caused a lot less suffering. Henry the Fifth was a maniac fueled by sort of religious fervor, very successful militarily.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  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 armour?

• 25:11Dana Schwartz?

  That's a fantastic read. I also, I think one of the most controversial kings and not, and controversial in the sense that people have very, very strong opinions on both sides of the issue is Richard the Third. Because there are people who have very strong feelings. What are, what are your feelings on, on Richard the Third?

• 25:31Speaker 03

  Well, my feeling, I take the conventional line on Richard the Third, which is that it's, 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's referred to as Edward the Fifth, although he wasn't really meaningfully ever a king. But he definitely usurped the throne, but obviously plenty of people did that, including Henry the First. And 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, Edward the Fifth and his brother, when they were boys in the Tower of London and, you know, either murdering them himself or more likely having them murdered.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  I think he probably did that and that is the conventional historical line, but. Richard III has a lot of fans who think he was unfairly maligned largely as a result of Tudor propaganda because after Richard III fell, there was a regime change, the Tudor dynasty came in and they had to justify them having taken the throne, which they 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 a key part of their story was, well, the king before was awful. He killed his nephews. He was a tyrant. And

• 26:58Speaker 03

  so, you know, obviously you have to be suspicious of the things they say about Richard III. 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 VII was on the scene. So I don't see that it's plausible that they were killed by the Tudors. I think it was very likely to have been Richard III, but I'm not saying that's definite. What amuses me is how much emotional investment people have in saying, no, Richard III was lovely. He was a great king. And they sort of go, well, we can't know. We can't know for sure. We know the balance of probability. We know it's more likely he killed the princes in the tower

• 27:41Speaker 03

  than anyone else. And we sort of just have to be satisfied with that. And you can enjoy and imagine Richard III, who was unfairly slandered 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.

• 27:56Dana Schwartz?

  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 a incredibly messy series of complicated people and complicated events that will be forever unknowable.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, 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, that's we're not going to suddenly discover video footage of Henry VII killing the young prince, Edward V. It's just not going to happen. There's always going to be a question mark over it. So I thought 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.

• 28:52Dana Schwartz?

  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 deepens, 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 this book that surprised you?

• 29:17Speaker 03

  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 kings.

• 29:25Dana Schwartz?

  Yes, I apologize.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  No, no, not at all. I'm not, but I'm sort of more explaining why I was so clear on that, partly because I, you know, Scottish history up to 1603 is a, you know, a linked but separate thing, ditto Irish history, and I wasn't going to pretend I'd covered them because I haven't. So I've come in 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 becomes, the story is more unified into a story of British history, the divisions within it notwithstanding. What it struck me is that within the United Kingdom and the British Isles, the nations

• 30:09Speaker 03

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

• 30:40Dana Schwartz?

  To an American, I would say that the, the English identity, and correct me if I'm wrong, seems to be exclusively bunting and baking in a tent and having a man poke at your bread and, and tell you if it's overproofed or not.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  Well, that certainly is a big part of identity, of our identity, but that program, confusingly, is not called the Great English Bake Off.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  So we have this issue of Englishness and Britishness, where they're distinct. For Scots, even the ones that don't want Scotland to become an independent country, even Scots in favour of the Union, still have a strong sense 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 centre of its history is its monarchy. So I think I say early in the book, the monarchy is what England has instead of a sense of identity. And that's always a simplification. And I think there are many senses of identity in England, but no real unifying

• 31:45Speaker 03

  one. But the monarchy then becomes a sort of symbol of a unifying one, even for those that are against the monarchy, if you see what I mean. There it is, at the centre 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, with sort of returning to the point about nostalgia being something that people can invest in more wholeheartedly than a belief in a better future. And the Great British Bake Off is obviously part of that, because its entire aesthetic is a sort of idealised 1950s village England. But England has been largely metropolitan since the early part of the 19th

• 32:28Speaker 03

  century. And yet, the typical England, the archetypal England, is about villages. Well, most people live in big cities in England. We were the first industrialised nation, and yet we associate ourselves with rural areas. Well, 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 centre of that is part of it. And we feel safe focusing on our monarchy, because these days it's harmless and powerless. But nevertheless, it's sort of all we've got as our sort of badge of belonging.

• 33:09Dana Schwartz?

  And forgive me, because this book does stop at Queen Elizabeth I, 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?

• 33:27Speaker 03

  I don't know, but I 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 nominal most important person in the country, not actually being the person with the power. I think putting the power 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 power, most power in Britain is the Prime Minister, but they have someone else who's nominally their boss. And obviously, if we got rid of the monarchy, we would have to have a new constitution.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  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, we'd have to face up to all of that. And my fear is that we're going through a tricky time ourselves here. We're faith in politicians and politics is at a sort of all time low. And this isn't really the best time to frame a new constitution.

• 34:42Dana Schwartz?

  It would leave you so vulnerable to the Vikings.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  It would. Excellent point. Yes. And then we'd only have ourselves to blame.

• 34:53Dana Schwartz?

  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. Thank you so much.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  Thank you very much for having me. I've really enjoyed it.

• 35:22Dana Schwartz?

  Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Courtney Sender, Amy Height, and Julia Milani. The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producer Reema Ilkayali, and 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.

• 36:05Speaker 04

  Hey, Molly Ringwald here. Remember when hair was big and everything was neon and you spent all night making a mixtape instead of doing your homework? Well, here's something else to remember. Immune systems weaken as we age, even if you feel totally healthy. Getting your recommended vaccines like pneumococcal pneumonia, RSV, COVID-19, and flu can help protect you from getting really sick. Check your eligibility and book at vaxassist.com. Pfizer, out due yesterday.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.