“King John I may forever be known as a Bad King following that seminal history textbook 1066 and All That, but according to history authors, it is Henry VIII who should bear the title of the worst monarch in history.
More than 60 writers were surveyed by the Historical Writers Association (HWA), with Henry VIII taking 20% of the vote to find the worst monarch and criticised for a wide range of crimes: he was “obsessive”, “syphilitic” and a “self-indulgent wife murderer and tyrant”, according to respondents.
Robert Wilton, the author of The Spider of Sarajevo, called the Tudor king “a gross man-child, wilfully and capriciously dangerous to everything around him including the country”, adding that psychologically, Henry “barely made it out of infancy, let alone adolescence, and ruled with little more policy than petulant self-gratification”.
1.) King John wasn’t a worse ruler than Henry VIII? The guy that lost the Duchy of Normandy and the majority of England’s French lands? The guy that had to pay mercenaries to protect himself from his own nobles? Whose mishandling of government led to civil war?
Dude who ordered 22 captive knights to be taken to Corfe Castle in Dorset and starved to death? And starved to death the wife and son of his former friend, William de Briouze? Arranged the murder of his own nephew? Summoned the leaders of the English Jewish community, only to imprison and torture them, and extorted them for
£60,000 total? Exiled the Jewish citizens that couldn’t pay 40s towards that tallage?
THAT guy???
2.) I really… A) how hard is it to use Google to find out that no, he didn’t have syphilis, B) syphilis is your criteria for someone being a terrible leader/person? Cesare Borgia, who actually had this, was a very successful leader and he committed far worse atrocities than the (apparently) atrocious crime of contracting syphilis, but whatever??????
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