Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive. To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more. For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.
Lately I’ve been listening to a number of historical biographies from The People Profiles, an excellent YouTube channel that produces incredibly balanced, detailed biographies of historical figures. The videos are always very well done, and the channel hosts a stable of exquisite narrators with British accents.
My absolute favorites are their biographies of English monarchs (at the time of this writing, they’ve just posted a video about King Charles II, which I am excited to listen to soon). What strikes me about these monarchs is that, even as rulers, they dealt with constantly shifting political landscapes that would make our current politics look tame by comparison.
It wasn’t like these monarchs were sitting back and eating grapes (I mean, they probably did do that stuff); they constantly had to balance the needs of their people; their ornery nobility; and their expensive foreign policies (which typically meant “expensive foreign wars”). Add to that rebellions, assassination attempts, succession crises, and all the rest, and it quickly makes one thankful for a relatively peaceful and predictable political order.
At the same time, there is something enviable about monarchical rule. A bad king could cause a great deal of damage—and many bad kings did just that to England—but could also be identified easily as the source of a nation’s woes. Dealing with a tyrannical monarch, in some ways, was far easier than dealing with a tyrannical bureaucracy.
To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.
The Portly Politico 
One thing to remember, since you’re specifically talking about kings: most people “under” their rule were never directly impacted by their monarch. A king denotes a feudal system, with the vast majority of laws and requirements/rents – Crown lands/forests aside – deriving from one’s local lord/landholder. A good or bad king rarely made a difference directly in the majority of commons’ lives.
Feudal monarchies have the great benefit of the federal government keeping largely to itself and only directly interacting, for the most part, with the next steps down in government.
LikeLiked by 1 person