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Hm, I’ve talked about it before but I’ll expand in that I think… both H7 and H8 were more similar than they were different (or, at least more similar than many are willing to admit– most historians try to dissociate them from each other). Even in decision-making, and I think they both kind of fuqued up re: setting precedents that were like…not great tbh. Even though I understand the political motivations behind them, there were also aspects of them that were kind of like…politically dumb. 

And we see this really early in their respective reigns (we see this in like…the ‘first day’ of H7′s and within the first year/s of H8′s).

So, H7′s first boo-boo I will tackle, and that is in the treatment of the corpse of Richard III.

Like…I get it. It’s not morally upstanding for sure, I’ll shade over it forever, but I do get like…the motivation. To treat the body honorably could potentially be dangerous because it implies that his death was regicide. And for his foundations, he can’t say R3 was ever king; rather an usurper. 

At the same time I think it made him look…kind of petty, tbh. And even if we have to go with Richard the Evil Usurper angle (which, you need to, to have ground to stand on as the one that overthrew him etc. etc.) so he was never king etc. he was still, at the very least, a duke? A member of the nobility? Brother of the last ‘rightful king’ (and he had to be, for his respective children to be relegitimized and the marriage alliance to EoY to work out)? 

Granted, shady and illegal things happend in the WoTR to members of the nobility, executions without trial re: Edward IV’s father (whose head was put on a spike) and of course Owen Tudor’s. But this wasn’t that…Richard was slain in battle. He was greatly loved in York. To treat his corpse with disrespect didn’t, in general, set a great precedent for English noblemen that had died in battle. It just added insult to injury, it made him look gloaty. 

And H8′s was the executions of Empson and Dudley. I get the motivation behind these too; I’ve talked about them in detail both here and here, so I won’t repeat myself. 

It wasn’t totally without precedent, I think many kings of the same era would have done the same. But at the same time this did set a problematic precedent  that we see later on– that if there is enough popular discontent for a king’s advisor… it has the power to eventually influence, perhaps even guarantee, their death. I’m sure this remained in the memories of the commons…particularly because the revolts in the North that happened later in Henry VIII’s reign did not call for his deposition– but rather, the head of Cromwell. They seemed to believe that this was a reasonable and achievable goal, and to me it’s little wonder that they did.