Unruly

 Unruly: A History of England's Kings and Queens, by David Mitchell

You may be familiar with the UK comedy duo Mitchell and Webb?  They're probably best known in the US by this sketch.  The one who asks, "Are we the baddies?"  is David Mitchell, and besides being a very funny comedian, he is also a history nerd, and he wrote this comedic take on the kings and queens of England, at least up to the end of the Tudors.  It's quite long enough as it is, without bringing in modernity.

Mitchell is interested in the questions that humans have been working out in real time for the past several thousand years -- how do we decide who's going to be in charge, and how do we transfer power?  What is a king anyway?  So while he's narrating, amusingly, the list of kings, he's bringing out how people thought of their kings and what they did about it.  

For example.  Pre-Norman Conquest, the king's sons were all eligible for the crown, and the barons would try to pick the most competent one to rule.  But this meant that brothers (and often cousins, and members of other prominent families) were at each others' throats on a regular basis, and every time the king died, there was a crisis.  So primogeniture came in; the oldest living son was first choice, whether he was competent or not.  If he wasn't much good, well, you just hung on and hoped for better next time.  Or in the absence of a really obvious heir, did it go to the closest relative, or to the first person who could get himself crowned?  This could easily, and often did, lead to a civil war.  

The problems of succession, and what to do when your king is incompetent, are always present, but the ways people thought about it changed over time.  I really enjoyed Mitchell's thoughts about this.  It was by no means his only narrative thread; the ways in which English kings made enemies for themselves unnecessarily is another, as in for example all of Scotland, or the centuries-long obsession with trying to own France, which was never ever going to work.

A very worthwhile read.  I had a lot of fun.  If you like history and comedy, this is the book for you -- or also if you're interested in the nature of power and succession.