Horrible Histories – The Slimy Stuarts

Terry Deary's The Slimy Stuarts is a Horrible Histories book for 8 year olds about the century when the English chopped their own king's head off.

What happens

It opens with a timeline, and the timeline tells you exactly what you're in for. Elizabeth I kicks the royal bucket. James I turns up his regal toes. Charlie gets the chop and his head lands in an un-royal bucket. Most of the kings get a daft little rhyme too.

Then it works through them one at a time.

James I comes off worst. He was a nose-picker who used his sleeve when a hanky was called for. On the way to his own coronation he had a pickpocket hanged, and nobody mentioned until afterwards that English kings weren't actually allowed to do that.

The Guy Fawkes chapter is the one your reader will quote at you. Five things everybody knows about Guy Fawkes, five answers, and every single one's false. He wasn't the leader. He wasn't brought up Catholic. He wasn't burned on a bonfire. Each one gets a proper explanation afterwards.

That's how the whole book works. It takes something your child half knows and pulls it apart, usually with a joke and usually with something revolting in it. A Stuart doctor treating a fever with a pigeon. A wart cure where you've got to bury the fish afterwards or it won't work. The first pineapple in Britain turning up on Oliver Cromwell's table with nobody sure whether you ate it or gave it a bowl of milk.

The quizzes are headed Test Your Teacher, which is more or less an instruction, isn't it? Expect it read aloud at you over dinner.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

It was a violent century and the book doesn't look away. A traitor's execution is set out in a few flat sentences, and what happens is a hanging, then being cut open, then a beheading. A hundred thousand plague deaths go past in one line (the rats get a mention in the same breath). If your child's squeamish, or chews things over at bedtime, read the Guy Fawkes pages together first and see how they land. Loads of eight year olds think this sort of thing is the best they've ever read, and the jokes are carrying most of it.

What to read next

If grisly history goes down well, try The Lost Diary of Tutankhamun's Mummy. It's Tutankhamun's mum writing up her cruise down the Nile, and she's very sniffy about the pyramids.