Some of comedian and Observer columnist David Mitchell’s account of English history is old news. Everyone knows John was an inept king who tried to slime his way out of the baron-generated shackles of the Magna Carta, that William the Conqueror’s bowels exploded, that Harold would have done well to take two steps to the left to miss an incoming arrow, that Henry V needed a new barber, that Henry VIII had nice legs, that Richard I preferred France or indeed anywhere than his rain-soaked no-mark kingdom, that Lady Jane Grey held the highest office for less time than Liz Truss, and that if you really want to understand Cnut it’s best to think of his name as a spelling error.
But there are revelations here, too. In 1157, for instance, Thomas Becket headed to Paris to negotiate the perfectly normal betrothal of Henry II’s two-year-old son to King Louis VII of France’s one-year-old daughter. For this city break, he took 24 outfits, had 12 packhorses to carry his silver dinner service, eight wagons of baggage and horses with monkeys riding on them. Why? Mitchell elucidates St Thomas’s thought process: “If I don’t have horses with monkeys riding them, the king of France won’t take me seriously.”
