Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England
Are Benevolent Kings Really Benevolent?
In Thomas Penn’s The Winter King, the author provides a comprehensive history of the founder of the Tudor dynasty. Though often overshadowed by his more illustrious son and granddaughter, Henry VII not only enabled their place in history, but provides a highly interesting story in his own right. Penn paints a picture of an extremely dutiful, if highly parsimonious monarch. It is sometimes difficult for the historian, especially one writing 500 years after the fact, to understand that for almost all of Henry’s reign, there was the risk of descent back into the anarchy of the previous 60 years. By many standards, Henry was what one would call a “Good” king, especially when contrasted with the previous Lancaster monarch, Henry VI. In fact, Henry’s ability to leave the treasury full represents a sharp contrast to more illustrious kings such as Edward III or even his own son. The fact that he brought peace and relative prosperity to England after the Wars of the Roses cements much of Henry’s reputation.
Yet as Penn painstakingly points out there was a price for the full treasury that was paid by this good king trampling on the rights of his subjects. Penn lays out a picture of Henry’s counselors running programs that would be more appropriate for Mafioso than for a good king’s ministers. There were shakedowns, protection rackets, confidence games, and even downright theft in order to keep the money flowing to the King. Though Henry had the interests of the realm in mind, his exercise of unlawful power proved ruinous to selected subjects in his reign, and egregious to many others in the reigns of his family.
In 2012 we live in a time in which Progressives wholeheartedly believe they are doing good for the people of the United States. Yet in administrations in the local, state and federal levels, laws are bent, manipulated, or broken in the name of this good. And even supposing the purity of motives of this current class of progressives, who is to say that their successors might use these new found powers to aggregate power and wealth to themselves refuting the very ideals that Progressives purport to espouse.
A case in point is Dodd Frank. It is ostensibly set up to protect the interests of those consumers engaging in loan finance whether it be for a car or for a house. Yet the very size of the law, and the vast thicket of compliance rules that are needed to adhere to this law, exclude all but the largest businesses freezing our entrepreneurs who would enter this market, and lessening choices for consumers to take out these loans. Additionally, who is to say that the regulators of these businesses might not be amenable to compensation to favor one sort of lender over another?
In other words this supposed “good” law with its pure intentions can easily be corrupted. Henry VII’s system only worked insofar as he was running it and even then his policies were injurious to his own subjects. Then when his son, a man made of different material, took over, this very policy was corrupted even further.
It is better to have less power residing in the hands of those who run the state, then to have much power in the hands of supposed “Good” men.