SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - Best and Worse

Good grief! I don't think i could name 20 Prime Ministers. And technically I suppose the heads of state in Britain are the Kings and Queens.

With regards to those, it's been a very long time since any of them had the kinds of executive capabilites of a US president - I'd guess over 500 years, and so we tend to attribute a certain Zeitgeist and sense of development in an era as represented by the Monarch in question without assuming the Monarch was directly responsible for any of it.

E.g. The Elizabethan era, which we generally consider the era in which England transformed from a relative European backwater to its beginnings of being a world power, which went hand in hand with Britain's cultural revolution; Shakespeare and Francis Bacon.

And of course there's the Victorian era. Tell me, is the final third of the 19th century considered the Victorian era in the US? Sometimes when i read stuff i get the feeling it is.

But as for the capablities of monarchs, i think Churchill said something along the lines of not one English monarch compares with the meanest Prime Minister, with the possible exception of Edward the third, and probably not even him.

As for bad monarchs. Until the modern era, they had some ability to throw spanners into the workings of Parliiament. Notably bad was King George III whose obstructionism went a long way to preventing an early settlement of the taxation dispute with the North American colonies.

Other bad monarchs could include Charles I, but by demanding the rights of ABsolute Monarchy in England that could be seen in much of Europe he provoked the English Civil War that led to the ultimate triumph of Parliament over Monarch, with profound consequences for the future of democracy in this world. So his badness may in fact have been an ultimate good.

There was also Richard the II, who was a particularly inept Monarch. Shakespeare wrote a fantastic play about him. One of my favourites it is and I strongly recommend it. Someone, i forget who, described him as a stunning indictment of the heriditary principle and you can only agree. He was deeply unsuitable for the role of a medieval king, would have been much better as a farmhand, and in the end was shunted from power by the usurper Henry Bolingbroke, later crowned Henry IV, and died with a red hot poker up his backside in Pontefract Castle

As for the US, hmm...I'm looking at a picture here where it is now beginning to look like Cheney has been the first ever president to oversee a net decline of US influence worldwide. (Although that influence is still astronomical) If the fundamental duty of a head of state is to promote the national interest at all other costs, that would place him high on the bad list.