The Good, The Bad and the Reason

*** WARNING ***

The following discourse is more about history than wargaming and is laced with personal opinions. If you are up for that, by all means read on and feel free to comment too. Otherwise spare yourselves. 

I've read histories and let my mind wander through the past since I was a boy reading Ladybird books. Due no doubt to my Anglo-Norman heritage and spending three of my formative years in England, those histories have more often than not been stories of the British peoples ... my people. A very big factor in much of those stories have been about the people who led - most often the kings and queens, those to followed them and those who opposed them at home and abroad. 

Lately I've been thinking about those I admire and those I don't and the reasoning behind my choices and how my preferences have changed. Some of you might find it interesting or curious and I'd been interested to hear your views on them.

Before listing, I feel compelled to say I'm not at all interested in monarchs after George II by which time Britain was effectively led by parliament and I'm going to book-end it at the beginning with the death of Edward the Confessor.

William I - Good

One of my favourites and likely stemming in part from a sense of partisanship as my lot came across with him in 1066. Right or wrong he was immensely effective and his achievement from just surviving his youth to attaining the Kingdom of England was astounding. Why I admire him so much is largely due to his effectiveness and there's something admirable about his level of conspicuous success against all comers.

It's my appreciation of William which is why I have a Norman and not a Saxon army.

Henry II - Good

In many ways this is indefensible but there's something about his story - long and eventful as it was - which is one of largest life stories I can think of. Mixed fortunes he had to be sure, but what highs and lows! Born of the Empress, his path to the crown was an epic in itself then he marries the most famous of all Queen consorts, expands his crown into the Angevin Empire and fathers two even more famous kings than himself - though neither was any use. Even though he was center to the crime of the century (literally), the murder of Thomas Becket was just another chapter in a life writ extremely large.

Richard I & John - Bad

At best they were ineffective but at worst they were divisive and they left their kingdoms in a shambles. Nuff said I think except to note neither died well and before their time which was no great loss.

Henry III - Bad

If longevity was the benchmark then his is a winner to be sure but here was a man who just couldn't unite the barons behind him and that was in spite of his father setting the worst example imaginable for what not to do. He went ahead and did it anyway. Other than fathering bloody civil war, he also fathered a future king who went on to show how Henry should have done it.

Thanks to his ineptitude; however, the resulting Montfortian baronial rebellion provides me with one of my passion projects: the battle of Lewes.

Edward I - Good

Perhaps more 'great and terrible' than good (thanks Marc Morris) I think Longshanks understood the need to unite his barons in diverting their restless and military energies outwards. His campaigns were good for the English at the expense of the Welsh, Scots and French. The crown may have strained from the expenses of his wars but I think the greater realm and subjects thrived.

Edward II - Bad

This joker had everything handed to him on a silver plate but he just couldn't keep it together. A three-time loser - on the battlefield, in the courtroom and in the bed-chamber. If I'm correct, the first King to die by the hands of his own subjects. What a shower.

Edward III - Good

It's at this point that I understand my own strong preference for effective monarchs. I don't necessarily 'like' them in any personal sense and I don't necessarily relate to them ideologically but a have to admire a monarch like this fella who recovers his crown and builds on it very much in the style of his grandfather - two of the strongest medieval monarchs of all time.

Henry IV - Good

This is a turn-over for me as there was a time I was inclined against him. I'm a bit of a Yorkist at heart (but that's more qualified these days) and his ending of the Plantagenet line was a real break. No one had pulled a stunt like that since Stephen back in the Norman dynasty. Yet when you consider how utterly horrendous Richard II was and how Henry had suffered at Richard's hands, then he was frankly fully justified in usurping the crown. He put his own life on the line and won the jack-pot.

Side-bar

When people consider crowns and Kings and Queens, concepts of 'rights' and loyalty tend to affect how people view this monarch or that. For me, it matters not a jot if a monarch is the 'rightful' ruler. It matters if they are a 'good' ruler and that means to me whether they do more good than harm. I feel effectiveness is everything. If they can be ethical, then all the better but history tends to show that our leaders have difficulty in that department - even today. I suppose I have a contractual, parliamentary attitude toward my British monarchs and when they prove to be rotten, they are fair game and ripe for the over-throw. It's really all about the quest for good-government.

Edward IV - Good

Apart from his prowess on the battlefield and his sexual  reputation perpetuated in bodice-ripper contemporary chick-histories, Edward was even better because he usurped the mad and the bad Henry VI. Edward was everything Henry was not; that being what the kingdom required. His is an heroic story of high adventure built from tragedy and when I really consider why I am sympathetic to the Yorkists, it's the struggle and success of Edward. Let's face it, it couldn't be down to the damned and doomed Richard III.

Without Edward and his father Richard Duke of York we wouldn't have the so-called Wars of the Roses and in wargaming terms that's unthinkable.

Richard III - Bad

Obviously. It's obvious becasue whatever his strengths might have been he couldn't unit his barons and that undid him. If his policies were to blame, it doesn't matter how enlightened they were or were not. Perhaps it was too much, too soon but in any event, he failed to understand the men he relied on to keep his tenuous hold on power and he paid for his failure with his life on the field of battle - something very rare for an English king. Brave, probably ruthless but in the end, very ineffective.

Henry VIII - Good

Probably the most renown SOB of them all in terms of ethics but he did retain power, died in his own bed in due course and left his heir secure enough. His subjects thrived, provided they hadn't taken holy orders that is or were foolish enough to marry the bugger. Even I can see there's an awful lot wrong with this awful man's rule. He doesn't even provide much subject matter for the miniature wargamer. So, how can such a bad man be rated good? Whilst it wasn't readily apparent in his own lifetime, I think his leading the break from the orthodoxy of papal authority set the future UK on a path to greater intellectual and economic prosperity. I could elaborate of that a lot but I'll leave it there.

Charles I - Bad

In spite of the Tudor flip-flop, I estimate the monarchs between Henry VIII and Charles were themselves largely unremarkable and presided over relatively unremarkable times - Spanish armadas aside. Then along came the Stuarts ... what a bunch. Charles was so bad he even split the new greater kingdom down to the allegiances and ideology of the common man - no mean feat. Anyone that ineffective had to go, and so he did in fine, public style. Not the first monarch to be killed but certainly the first to get a trial before being dispatched.

Again, his appalling rule has the greatest silver lining for the wargamer and provides us with ECW armies and battles - hooray!

Oliver - Good

I come back to my admiration of monumental success. No one in the history of Britain rose so high from such relative obscurity that this born-again, bible-thumping cavalry commanding hard-arse. I think he was ethical, principled, skillful, uniting and supremely effective, albeit bloody-minded and the sort of person with whom I have little in common and in whose world I would find it unpleasant to reside. I also deeply suspect British people today would remember him more fondly if he had assumed the crown. There's nothing the English people won't forgive if you call yourself a king it seems. As for me ... I'm for parliament.

Charles II - Bad

Good-time Charlie be damned. The last place you want to find yourself is as a servant of this bloke. Duplicitous and double-dealing, he fumbled his dismantling of the Dutch alliance and thought nothing of throwing the blame together with his loyal ministers to the Devil. Gains made by the Commonwealth were lost by the return of another inept Stuart who presided over the Royal navy's shame at the hands of the righteously angered Dutch up the Medway in 1667. It's probably just as well he failed to provide a legitimate heir. He can take no credit whatsoever for how he gained his crown and even less for who he left it with. I'll never understand why he's so fondly remembered. Must be his Rococo sense of fashion which is very, very stylish it must be said.

Once more, his foolish Dutch policy provides me with the Anglo-Dutch naval wars for which I have a deep fascination.

James II - Bad

It seems to me that Charles earns undeserved and reflective credit in light of how bad his brother was a ruling. Historians are often keen to remark of James' bravery at sea but his fortitude left him after crowning. He fled London in 1688 and then fled the field at the Boyne in 1690. I think it's safe to say that this skill at evasion and little else was handed down to his descendants as demonstrated time and again to those foolish enough to take up the Stuart cause and die in their absence.

William III - Good

Apart from marrying well, William of Orange was also a king who led his armies in battle and effectively ended the French expansion. As a wargamer, he's one of my favourites and again, he was also a winner. I feel his reign accelerated British modernism in uniting Dutch innovations born of their golden age. As the first real parliamentarian king, William represents ground zero for the origins of the British empire - if you want to think of that as a good thing.

I love the Franco-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century and without William we wouldn't have the later War of the Spanish Succession and the age or Marlborough into the reign of his sister-in-law Queen Anne.

George II - Good

He really presided over the best of times for British monarchy and grew his empire rapidly. The last British king to lead an army in battle, his government seized Canada from the French , thus leaving his kingdom stronger that he found it. I say 'his government' because men like Pitt and politicians from the aristocracy were by this time influencing policy and running government like never before. By this time we really see the ascendancy of parliamentary rule and not much more of a real role for monarchs as far as I view it.

The battle on the Plains of Abraham in the fight for Canada is another of my passion projects.

So, there you go. If you read to the end, well done. You likely got nothing out of it save for a string of worthless opinions. Please feel free to share yours - I promise I'll post them.