The Princes of This World

Henry VIII with family at Whitehall: divorced, beheaded, died...

Watching “The Tudors,” the Irish-Canadian TV co-production from a few years back, I marvel why Henry VIII is not remembered as the awful tyrant he was. He looted England, and specifically the poor of England, through the seizure of the monasteries, purely to support the sumptuousness of his court. Worse than Hitler or Stalin, in a sense, because he showed no human feeling even to his own family. Being his close friend or counselor or even wife was generally, sooner or later, a sentence of death.

And yet, he is remembered by the English, not as an evil ruler, or even a bad ruler, but as a strong ruler.

It reminds me of Aesop's fable of King Log.

Henery the Eighth I am, I am...

Human nature is perverse. It does not turn against a government or any instituted authority because it is evil, but only if it appears to be weak. Hitler is remembered as evil because he lost the war. Stalin and Mao, who were objectively worse, are not remembered as evil because they won their wars and died in their beds. Indeed, Mao is still a great hero in China.

Similarly, someone has pointed out that the US presidents commonly remembered as the best are in fact the most tyrannical, within the limited orbit permitted to US presidents: FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, all ran roughshod, in one way or another, over the Constitution and the balance of powers. Presidents who followed the rules and behaved well in office are remembered as nonentities: Calvin Coolidge, Grover Cleveland, Rutherford B. Hayes.

Not a face you see on Mt., Rushmore.

Yet, honestly, at what time would life for the average American citizen have been most pleasant and prosperous, during the presidencies of the former, or the latter?

It all illustrates the Christian teaching that the rules and ideas of the social world are in systematic opposition to the True and the Good.