In case there is any doubt on what the article says the answer is, this is the 2nd paragraph:
> Surely Richard was the least successful of English kings. His reign was brief (1483-85) and he left no legitimate issue and no political heirs. He destroyed his immediate Yorkist family and indeed the whole Plantagenet dynasty. He plunged England back into civil war. He re-started the Wars of the Roses that had ended with Yorkist victory in 1471; the conflict raged on for another 20 years. Richard’s principal achievement, albeit inadvertent, was to make feasible the vestigial claim of the obscure Henry Tudor and to create the Tudor monarchy. His regime was catastrophic.
The article really really wants to put a positive spin on Richard III, but in Dictator's Handbook terms he clearly failed at building an effective coalition to rule England. The people whose opinions counted in 1485 mostly did not want Richard III to be king.
> That many allies of his brother, Edward IV, supported Henry Tudor speaks to Richard’s inability to command widespread loyalty. Richard’s rule failed because too few people supported him
The established figures who had supported his brother rebelled against Richard.
> Richard’s subjects and foreign observers were stunned by his brazen betrayal, his swift execution of Lord Hastings, and the disappearance of his young nephews, all of which undermined efforts to stabilise the kingdom in the two years that followed. Further resentment and anxiety festered when Richard misjudged regional politics and redistributed southern property among his northern affinity.
Richard was redistributing southern property to northerners because he couldn't find southerners that would support him.
On the plus side, Richard III ended the War of the Roses by convincing all the Yorkist supporters (who had supported his brother) that they had to cast their lot with the last Lancastrian candidate (Henry Tudor) in order to get rid of Richard.
thanks for saying this. with popular media I think people can get nostalgic for a time that they never experienced and almost certainly would not enjoy.
No one is comparing Richard III to Barack Obama. They’re questioning whether Richard III was better or worse than his peers. Table stakes for a king through most of history is providing stability and peace within the realm. This guy failed to do that.
This Sith like attitude of “there are only bad kings” is indicative of a mind lacking in nuance or critical thinking.
They aren't good in an effectiveness sense. They only manage to be good relative to other ineffective forms of governance. Statistically some kings might manage to be outliers, but even then to be genuinely effective one suspects they'd be best known for dismantling the monarchy and bringing in either a democracy or republic. Even an oligarchy probably has better odds than a monarchy.
The thing with constitutional monarchies is that they're not even that - the UK is a democracy, so the royal family hardly does any actual governing anymore. They are mostly just insanely expensive figureheads and representatives of the antiquated concept that you are better by definition just because you come from a "noble" family.
The Monarch has tremendous reserve powers in an unwritten constitution like the UK’s, and has not been shy of abusing them elsewhere like the Australian constitutional crisis of 1975, essentially a coup against a democratically elected government. In addition to the £600M inheritance tax break Chuck the Third got on his private wealth, the Palace is exempted from racial discrimination laws among many others, and well into the 1970s it was their official policy not to hire black or brown people for anything more exalted than cleaning toilets:
(They still refuse transparency on that, so it might still be ongoing for all I know)
As for democracy, the arrest of Republic protesters during the coronation shows how hollow that claim is. The UK is still a nation managed for the benefit of its feudal elite, as seen with institutions like leasehold or the fact there is no property tax on their holdings.
You’d have a much less risible case with the Scandinavian or Dutch monarchies.
Acknowledging that kings still exist and that HN readers in Canada, UK, Australia, and elsewhere still have them as a nominal head of state is a "forelock-tugging attitude" ?
Opening your mouth to change feet doesn't add credence to your claims.
"Subjects" is the correct term here as they are not just citizens of single country.
You assume forelock-tugging attitude and royalist brainwashing where there clearly is none.
None the less no ill will is born, such ignorance is expected from those that spout of their freedumbs when they cannot even fire or prosecute their own elected civil servants.
A wasted opportunity for grievance peddlers and hand wringers to steal more limelight and derail public discourse from more important things, so they can hear themselves speak and act like they're bravely engaging battle at great risk to themselves for the benefit of all others, by stamping their names on pointless political and bureaucratic machinations that achieve exactly nothing for the common person.
This is somewhat in the same vein as the argument that we can't possibly do anything of modest importance if somewhere children are starving. Amusingly this remains true even if we do nothing to ameliorate the larger problem its mere existence provides sufficient counter argument for any action. Inevitably if larger matters go unaddressed it is because we don't want to pay higher taxes to feed starving kids not because all our time was consumed by the trivial.
No, it's completely different, because this is not important at all. Evidence-free assertions of aforementioned grifters notwithstanding.
But tacitly admitting a poor cost/benefit with a reductio ad absurdum argument is not a great start anyway, because the actual situation is not an absurd one and margins matter.
This isn't an argument though, you'd have to try to claim that a new scheme with a president (or whatever idiotic scheme the ruling class tries to foist on people) would cost less.
Stripping most of that funding from the useless crown representative and entourage would be a great idea. Could be done tomorrow with acts of parliament and executive with no fanfare and no need for constitutional grandstanding. The fact they don't gives the imagination a good starting point for how much it would cost to be a republic.
In NL we messed up the last three opportunities. And the circus will likely continue for at least another generation. So much for 'equal under the law'. If you can't even live by the first article of your main legal construct then it's time to revise.
Nothing stops Canada from severing those ties completely by the way, if they wanted to they could do this easily, and the same goes for Australia and NZ.
Completely unfair. He never used nuclear weapons in warfare, and there's only circumstantial evidence that he was responsible for the extinction of any plant or animal species.
Furthermore, though his reign was brief, he successfully deterred alien invasion from another star system. Something Chucky 3 may not manage, by the looks of it.
Would you please describe how would democracy look and function in a country with medieval Britain's population density, size, technological level and literacy rate? Emphasis on population density and size to compare with republican Rome, especially when you take into account what pay of the population was actually voting there.
Lots of smaller monarchies, which isn't necessarily a bad thing provided there's freedom of movement, so that you can move to the monarchy that fits you best
France was getting raided too despite being a monarchy.
The Roman republic became too large for an effective administration, which led to a lot of power staying in the hands of the few, and had a lot of flaws and blindspots. But despite that, it was still a way better system than what came next.
Better systems give higher probability of a better outcome, but don't guarantee it. But we're discussing Britain here, it haven't been invaded since Normans and had low amount of revolutions and civil wars compared to most of other countries over the last thousand years.
As for Romans, they, and most of Mediterranean experienced objectively best living conditions in all of humanity until modern times during 1st and 2nd centuries. Which is exactly the principate period.
Edit:
My point is not that monarchies or empires are better. It is that they are more effective for that technological level.
By what definitions? Just claiming without evidence that something is bad "by definition" does not make it so, or relieve you of the need to accompany your assertions with any reasoning.
Bad, compared to what? At one point in history, monarchy was a step forward from what came before (presumably some kind of tribalist warlordism, slash anarchy).
I sure hope that, centuries from now, we will have a form of government that will attract similar comments when historians write about the time we live in. There might be an article like "Was Nelson Mandela a good president?" (substitute the name of some political leader you actually think did good), and someone will write: All "democratic" leaders in the 20th century were bad leaders, given how, in the 20th century, they didn't have even the most basic grasp yet of how to make government, democratic or otherwise, actually work to the benefit of the people.
You're making an argument about competence: our leaders can't grasp how to make a government effective for their values.
They're making one about those values. The goals of a king do not include the benefit of the people. This is an economic-political system that depends on the deep, permanent, and inescapable immiseration of nearly the entire population to maintain security for an incredibly tiny minority of military aristocrats.
Monarchs putting their own interests first is not the defining characteristic of monarchy which distinguishes it from democracy, but rather: The idea that leaders put their own interests first is axiomatic in all systems of government and what distinguishes a good system of government from a bad one is that, in a good system of government, a leader can't do what's in their own interest without causing things to get done, as a side effect, that are in everyone else's interest. It's about aligning incentives.
Even the most absolutist of monarchs can't get anything done in government without being surrounded by others who will execute his wishes, and in order to get them to execute his wishes, a monarch will have to make it in their best interest to do what's in his best interest, and that, by definition, puts boundaries on "immiseration". For example, clergy were generally treated pretty well in medieval monarchies, simply because the pulpit gave them political power which the monarchs had to contend with.
The relevant metric is actually a simple number, namely: Share of population needed to make a leader's life difficult. I got this idea from the books "The logic of political survival" and "The dictator's handbook", and found it quite convincing. The authors distinguish "small coalition regimes" from "large coalition regimes".
Values simply do not enter into it, only political calculation, and it's a mistake to think that today's leadership ranks (or society, in general) are somehow permeated by more noble values than existed back then. We've simply gotten better at making it in everyone's best interest to get along.
Medieval monarchies are smaller in coalition size than modern democracies. And the "tribal warlordism slash anarchy" I'm speaking of is simply a system where the number of people who can make your life difficult based solely on having more muscle is even larger than in a monarchy, while the number of people that they (the ones with the muscle) are forced to treat nicely is conversely smaller.
If I'm a fief in a well-established monarchy and I can live in (relative) peace in exchange for paying my taxes and rendering my services, then that's a step forward for me if my life, previously, was getting my crops stolen and head kicked-in whenever someone stronger than me wanted to treat me that way.
I've read those books too, they are interesting. But we're not talking about abstract monarchies and their theoretical attributes.
What it really all comes down to this assumption: "then that's a step forward for me if my life, previously, was getting my crops stolen and head kicked-in whenever someone stronger than me wanted to treat me that way."
Early modern european monarchies simply did not prevent that outcome, and in fact guarantee it. They are a formalization of that relationship. Tax burdens on peasants were high enough that starvation was a constant danger and common outcome. If you or a member of your family was beaten, killed, raped, or stolen from your only likely recourse was mediation from the landowner, so staying in their favor is a matter of life and death. If the landowner does any of those things, you have no recourse. These abuses are routine in the historical record, the people committing them mostly didn't think of them as crimes and so wrote about them freely, though often euphemistically.
Whether you were better off under than than in precursor systems is not clear at all. Historians mostly refrain from making judgements like that, but when they do there isn't consensus on this point.
I also don't think there's anything inherently more noble or smarter about modern people or whatever. We like them are created by complex processes and subject to constraints and incentives. But the idea that premodern and early modern european aristocracies were an improvement on or evolution of anything is pure propaganda due to us living in the successors of those states. Again, this was the tribal warlordism.
> At one point in history, monarchy was a step forward from what came before
Citation very much needed. There's no reason to believe what came before was worse.
> presumably some kind of tribalist warlordism, slash anarchy
So you don't even know what came before?
"Tribalist warlordism" is just a form of monarchy described from an outside perspective. Anarchy is the literal opposite of "warlordism" as it describes the absence of (power) hierarchies, i.e. an extreme form of direct democracy.
(Brit here). Conceptually I agree with you. We've dodged a couple of bullets recently. The allegedly Nazi-sympathetic Edward 8th took himself out of play just before WW2 by marrying Wallis Simpson. It's only due to lottery of birth that we have King Charles now rather than King Andrew (who has a dubious reputation).
But in practice I can't see how the UK could develop a credible alternative, without it being severely compromised in some way, either technically by having too much or too little power, or by being 'bought' by oligarchs or similar. The media hysteria would be horrendous. We would also have to agree on what the overall purpose of the replacement would be. Actual explicit power, some sort of governance role with respect to the UK parliamentary system (which is sort of the current set-up), or what. There are also practical issues like what to do with the existing Crown Estate, which owns a surprisingly varied range of things (including most of the UK's territorial seabed) and is one of the UK's largest property manager [0]. And the allegiance of the armed forces, etc.
So for those reasons I don't think replacing the monarchy is the most pressing issue for the UK. YMMV, of course, in other countries where the UK monarch is represented by a locally chosen Governor.
My impression was that Edward VIII's "loyalties" themselves were inspiring some credible plans to ditch him - consider the circumstances under which his family name had changed to Windsor.
Sadly, that problem is hardly unique to monarchy. We colonists didn't ditch Pres. Trump when he started bragging about his awesome Russian friend Vladimir.
Reading history I'm surprised at how many kings were bad kings even on monarchists terms of what's a good king. You'd think they would at least be somewhat good at "reducing conflict related to succession", but then they go and do things like murder their heir in a fit of rage or abolish hereditary monarchy in favour of appointing their own successor, then dying before bothering to do it.
There's a very good book called The Dictator's Handbook. It covers why these conflicts are inevitable. IIRC it boils down to zero-sum power distribution in such systems.
Murdering your heir is probably a case of 'who moves first'. Kings dying because someone was tired of waiting is a recurring theme in history. Other candidates are leaders of the military and extended family.
I was thinking of Ivan the terrible. I don't think he was terribly rational about it. If he was, it didn't work, since it led to a period of civil war and the eventual end of his dynasty.
For the longest time there was the theory that he died of syphilis, but that appears not to be the case, however, he did have an excess of mercury in his body and that was used back then to treat syphilis. So he may well have suffered from the disease and that in turn plus the mercury itself could well have resulted in him being less than rational.
I've recently read Josephine Tey's novel "The Daughter of Time" and enjoyed it immensely. It has a fictional detective, laid up in hospital, investigating how true the terrible tales and crimes of Richard III were and comes to the conclusion that it was almost certainly a stitch-up. Great book.
60 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 96.4 ms ] thread> Surely Richard was the least successful of English kings. His reign was brief (1483-85) and he left no legitimate issue and no political heirs. He destroyed his immediate Yorkist family and indeed the whole Plantagenet dynasty. He plunged England back into civil war. He re-started the Wars of the Roses that had ended with Yorkist victory in 1471; the conflict raged on for another 20 years. Richard’s principal achievement, albeit inadvertent, was to make feasible the vestigial claim of the obscure Henry Tudor and to create the Tudor monarchy. His regime was catastrophic.
> That many allies of his brother, Edward IV, supported Henry Tudor speaks to Richard’s inability to command widespread loyalty. Richard’s rule failed because too few people supported him
The established figures who had supported his brother rebelled against Richard.
> Richard’s subjects and foreign observers were stunned by his brazen betrayal, his swift execution of Lord Hastings, and the disappearance of his young nephews, all of which undermined efforts to stabilise the kingdom in the two years that followed. Further resentment and anxiety festered when Richard misjudged regional politics and redistributed southern property among his northern affinity.
Richard was redistributing southern property to northerners because he couldn't find southerners that would support him.
On the plus side, Richard III ended the War of the Roses by convincing all the Yorkist supporters (who had supported his brother) that they had to cast their lot with the last Lancastrian candidate (Henry Tudor) in order to get rid of Richard.
This Sith like attitude of “there are only bad kings” is indicative of a mind lacking in nuance or critical thinking.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jun/02/buckingham-p...
(They still refuse transparency on that, so it might still be ongoing for all I know)
As for democracy, the arrest of Republic protesters during the coronation shows how hollow that claim is. The UK is still a nation managed for the benefit of its feudal elite, as seen with institutions like leasehold or the fact there is no property tax on their holdings.
You’d have a much less risible case with the Scandinavian or Dutch monarchies.
Quite a rush to judgement there.
"Subjects" is the correct term here as they are not just citizens of single country.
You assume forelock-tugging attitude and royalist brainwashing where there clearly is none.
None the less no ill will is born, such ignorance is expected from those that spout of their freedumbs when they cannot even fire or prosecute their own elected civil servants.
Give it a couple of years as we've got another one in the pipeline and we don't put them too close together.
But tacitly admitting a poor cost/benefit with a reductio ad absurdum argument is not a great start anyway, because the actual situation is not an absurd one and margins matter.
Stripping most of that funding from the useless crown representative and entourage would be a great idea. Could be done tomorrow with acts of parliament and executive with no fanfare and no need for constitutional grandstanding. The fact they don't gives the imagination a good starting point for how much it would cost to be a republic.
Nothing stops Canada from severing those ties completely by the way, if they wanted to they could do this easily, and the same goes for Australia and NZ.
However the trend is always that humans proliferate until a point where it's not possible to feed them.
The plague didn't stop human overpopulation. Even the worst king doesn't stand a chance.
Exception might be complete destruction through nuclear war. But that wasn't available to Richard III.
Furthermore, though his reign was brief, he successfully deterred alien invasion from another star system. Something Chucky 3 may not manage, by the looks of it.
Feudalism and monarchy are awful and oppressive, but both are still better than being raided.
The Roman republic became too large for an effective administration, which led to a lot of power staying in the hands of the few, and had a lot of flaws and blindspots. But despite that, it was still a way better system than what came next.
As for Romans, they, and most of Mediterranean experienced objectively best living conditions in all of humanity until modern times during 1st and 2nd centuries. Which is exactly the principate period.
Edit:
My point is not that monarchies or empires are better. It is that they are more effective for that technological level.
By what definitions? Just claiming without evidence that something is bad "by definition" does not make it so, or relieve you of the need to accompany your assertions with any reasoning.
Bad, compared to what? At one point in history, monarchy was a step forward from what came before (presumably some kind of tribalist warlordism, slash anarchy).
I sure hope that, centuries from now, we will have a form of government that will attract similar comments when historians write about the time we live in. There might be an article like "Was Nelson Mandela a good president?" (substitute the name of some political leader you actually think did good), and someone will write: All "democratic" leaders in the 20th century were bad leaders, given how, in the 20th century, they didn't have even the most basic grasp yet of how to make government, democratic or otherwise, actually work to the benefit of the people.
They're making one about those values. The goals of a king do not include the benefit of the people. This is an economic-political system that depends on the deep, permanent, and inescapable immiseration of nearly the entire population to maintain security for an incredibly tiny minority of military aristocrats.
It is the tribal warlordism that came before.
Even the most absolutist of monarchs can't get anything done in government without being surrounded by others who will execute his wishes, and in order to get them to execute his wishes, a monarch will have to make it in their best interest to do what's in his best interest, and that, by definition, puts boundaries on "immiseration". For example, clergy were generally treated pretty well in medieval monarchies, simply because the pulpit gave them political power which the monarchs had to contend with.
The relevant metric is actually a simple number, namely: Share of population needed to make a leader's life difficult. I got this idea from the books "The logic of political survival" and "The dictator's handbook", and found it quite convincing. The authors distinguish "small coalition regimes" from "large coalition regimes".
Values simply do not enter into it, only political calculation, and it's a mistake to think that today's leadership ranks (or society, in general) are somehow permeated by more noble values than existed back then. We've simply gotten better at making it in everyone's best interest to get along.
Medieval monarchies are smaller in coalition size than modern democracies. And the "tribal warlordism slash anarchy" I'm speaking of is simply a system where the number of people who can make your life difficult based solely on having more muscle is even larger than in a monarchy, while the number of people that they (the ones with the muscle) are forced to treat nicely is conversely smaller.
If I'm a fief in a well-established monarchy and I can live in (relative) peace in exchange for paying my taxes and rendering my services, then that's a step forward for me if my life, previously, was getting my crops stolen and head kicked-in whenever someone stronger than me wanted to treat me that way.
What it really all comes down to this assumption: "then that's a step forward for me if my life, previously, was getting my crops stolen and head kicked-in whenever someone stronger than me wanted to treat me that way."
Early modern european monarchies simply did not prevent that outcome, and in fact guarantee it. They are a formalization of that relationship. Tax burdens on peasants were high enough that starvation was a constant danger and common outcome. If you or a member of your family was beaten, killed, raped, or stolen from your only likely recourse was mediation from the landowner, so staying in their favor is a matter of life and death. If the landowner does any of those things, you have no recourse. These abuses are routine in the historical record, the people committing them mostly didn't think of them as crimes and so wrote about them freely, though often euphemistically.
Whether you were better off under than than in precursor systems is not clear at all. Historians mostly refrain from making judgements like that, but when they do there isn't consensus on this point.
I also don't think there's anything inherently more noble or smarter about modern people or whatever. We like them are created by complex processes and subject to constraints and incentives. But the idea that premodern and early modern european aristocracies were an improvement on or evolution of anything is pure propaganda due to us living in the successors of those states. Again, this was the tribal warlordism.
Citation very much needed. There's no reason to believe what came before was worse.
> presumably some kind of tribalist warlordism, slash anarchy
So you don't even know what came before?
"Tribalist warlordism" is just a form of monarchy described from an outside perspective. Anarchy is the literal opposite of "warlordism" as it describes the absence of (power) hierarchies, i.e. an extreme form of direct democracy.
(Brit here). Conceptually I agree with you. We've dodged a couple of bullets recently. The allegedly Nazi-sympathetic Edward 8th took himself out of play just before WW2 by marrying Wallis Simpson. It's only due to lottery of birth that we have King Charles now rather than King Andrew (who has a dubious reputation).
But in practice I can't see how the UK could develop a credible alternative, without it being severely compromised in some way, either technically by having too much or too little power, or by being 'bought' by oligarchs or similar. The media hysteria would be horrendous. We would also have to agree on what the overall purpose of the replacement would be. Actual explicit power, some sort of governance role with respect to the UK parliamentary system (which is sort of the current set-up), or what. There are also practical issues like what to do with the existing Crown Estate, which owns a surprisingly varied range of things (including most of the UK's territorial seabed) and is one of the UK's largest property manager [0]. And the allegiance of the armed forces, etc.
So for those reasons I don't think replacing the monarchy is the most pressing issue for the UK. YMMV, of course, in other countries where the UK monarch is represented by a locally chosen Governor.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Estate
My impression was that Edward VIII's "loyalties" themselves were inspiring some credible plans to ditch him - consider the circumstances under which his family name had changed to Windsor.
Sadly, that problem is hardly unique to monarchy. We colonists didn't ditch Pres. Trump when he started bragging about his awesome Russian friend Vladimir.
Quite the start to a character reference
Successfully developed new and innovative union methods, replacing old legacy systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regicides
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbeth,_King_of_Scotland
Another good book that takes the side of Richard III is the historical novel "The Sunne in Splendour" by Sharon Kay Penman (1982).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XL2se6BzIHk
I highly recommend this video and TV series for those who are interested in history and comedy