Unruly

Kings Behaving Badly: David Mitchell's Hilariously Uncouth “Unruly” Romps Through England's Royal Rippers

Leave your stiff upper lip at the palace gates before entering comedian David Mitchell's latest marauding monster of a book, the aptly named “Unruly”—a bloody brilliant takedown of England's barmy monarchs over the centuries.

Mitchell himself pops out intermittently like some court jester to poke fun at the whole rotten lot of them, comparing the Saxon-Viking skirmishes to “disentangling a very long string of Christmas lights” and dubbing the War of the Roses as a scrap where “the roses couldn't do any of the fighting themselves...Still, pricks can draw blood and the aristocracy was full of them.”

We journey through the muck and mire of English history only to discover its castle-dwelling rulers were mainly vain, incompetent, greedy tossers who believed divine intervention put them a cut above their groveling subjects. From mythical King “Didn't Actually Exist” Arthur through Henry VIII (he of the bloated ego and skinny legs) right up to Elizabeth “Please God, Not Another Bloody Tudor” I, the bodies stacked up in heaps but fawning genealogists kept scraping new candidates from the royal barrel.

Mitchell skewers these blue bloods without mercy, comparing Celtic rebel Caratacus to “Braveheart's shitter little brother” and tagging King John as “delightfully” deserving of his reputation as utter shit. In Mitchell's hands, the likes of William the Conquerer and his invading Norman elites were merely “thieving thugs” shaking down peasants for “tribute.” And Magna Carta, that fabled guarantor of rights and checks on tyrants? Ha! More like a handy guide for handling highborn halfwits according to Mitchell.

Those seeking the pomp and pageantry found in conventional chronicles best trot off to the palace gift shop for your crown-emblazoned trinkets. But for a hysterically foul-mouthed flogging of England's most notorious sovereigns, delivered with Mitchell's trademark wit by one of Britain's sharpest comedians, “Unruly” earns its place in the royal library, even if the queen herself would not approve.

Just don't read aloud Mitchell's nicknames for monarchs post-regicide Charles I (“Hitler fan Edward VIII”) or flatulence-prone George IV (“one man pie shop”) lest your Tower of London accommodations have a dampness issue. As Mitchell himself writes, “Having kings is an awful system.” And he's bloody well right.