The Most Evil Monarch From Each British Dynasty

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Henry VIII ruled England from 1509 to 1547, broke the English church from Rome in order to divorce Katherine of Araggon, executed two of his six wives, and presided over a regime of judicial killing whose total casualties have been estimated at varying levels by various historians, but which his most cautious modern biographer JJJ Scarisbbrick considered without parallel in scale or ferocity in any previous English reign.

[00:00:27]The pilgrimage of grace in October and December 1536 was a popular uprising of 40,000 people across the north of England in protest against the dissolution of the monasteries and the influence of Thomas Cromwell. And Henry's response to it constitutes the largest single act of revenge of his reign. He had initially agreed to terms with the pilgrim leader Robert Ask through the Duke of Norfolk in December 1536, granted a general pardon and invited Asqueay to court for Christmas.

[00:00:56]When a fresh disturbance under Sir Francis Beigod broke out in January 1537, Henry treated this as a pretext to repudiate the pardon entirely. And the tutor historian Jeffrey Elton estimates that approximately 216 pilgrim leaders were executed across the spring and summer of 1537, including Aski himself, who was hanged in chains at York. The dissolution of the monasteries that the pilgrims had risen to prevent continued at full pace until 1540. He executed his second wife, Anne Bolin, on May 19th, 1536 on charges of adultery and incest.

[00:01:33]the historian Eric Ives demonstrated were comprehensively fabricated on the basis of evidence Thomas Cromwell had assembled at Henry's express direction.

[00:01:42]He executed his fifth wife Catherine Howard on February 13th, 1542 on charges that may have been substantially accurate. He executed Cromwell himself on July 28th, 1540. On the same day he married his fifth wife, he executed Sir Thomas Moore in 1535 and Cardinal John Fischer the same year. He had Margaret Pole, the 70-year-old countess of Salsbury and the last surviving plantaginet hacked to death over 11 minutes by an inexperienced executioner on May 27th, 1541. He died in his bed on January 28th, 1547 of natural causes at the age of 55. Mary I ruled England from July 1553 until her death on November 17th, 1558, 5 years and 4 months during which she attempted to reverse the reformation her father had imposed and her brother had extended and her policy of executing Protestant heretics at the stake produced the highest concentration of religious executions in any English reign and the nickname under which she has been remembered ever since. The principal source for the Maran persecutions is John Fox's Acts and Monuments, first published in 1563 and known popularly as Fox's Book of Martyrs, whose detailed and powerfully illustrated accounts of each execution shaped Protestant English identity for the next four centuries and whose accuracy on individual cases has been confirmed by modern scholarship in most particulars. Fox records 283 executions by burning between February 1555 and November 1558, an annual rate that exceeds anything recorded under any other English monarch, including her father. The first burnings began on February 4th, 1555 with the Bible translator John Rogers at Smithfield, who was led to the stake past the wife and 11 children he would not see again.

[00:03:36]Bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley were burned together at Oxford on October 16th, 1555, an event whose poignency Fox captured in Latimer's reported words to Ridley. Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle by God's grace in England as I trust shall never be put out. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the Book of Common Prayer, was burned at Oxford on March 21st, 1556 after recanting under pressure and then dramatically withdrawing his recantation at St. Mary's Church and thrusting the hand that had signed the false confession into the flames first. The victims included weavers, blacksmiths, and farm workers as well as bishops, and at least 56 were women, and one couple was burned together with their daughter.

[00:04:26]The imperial ambassador, Simon Renard, warned her chief minister, Cardinal Pole, that such cruel enforcement could cause a revolt. Mary persevered until her death from influenza or possibly uterine cancer. On November 17th, 1558, Charles I ruled the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland from March 27th, 1625 until January 30th, 1649, and is the only English monarch to have been judicially tried and publicly executed by his own subjects. An event that the royalist contemporary Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, described in his history of the rebellion as a year of reproach and infamy above all years which had passed before it, a year of the highest dissimulation and hypocrisy, of the deepest villain and most bloody treasons that any nation was ever cursed with. The trial verdict, however, was substantially correct on the question of fact. Charles dissolved his third parliament in March 1629 after his MPs forcibly held the speaker in his chair to prevent the dissolution and ruled without one for the next 11 years. A period contemporary opposition Pam Fleeters christened the 11 years tyranny. He revived ship money in 1634 and extended it to inland counties in 1635, raised approximately £200,000 a year through a tax that no Parliament had authorized, and imprisoned those who refused to pay, including the MP John Hampton, whose 1637 court case, the Crown won by a margin of 7 to5. He attempted to impose the Anglican Book of Common Prayer on the Scottish Kirk in 1637, triggered the bishop's wars, and ultimately the recall of Parliament he had spent 11 years avoiding, and on January 4th, 1642, he entered the House of Commons in person at the head of 400 armed soldiers to arrest the five members. The first civil war lasted from 1642 to 1646 and killed an estimated 85,000 men in battle and approximately 100,000 more from camp diseases. And after his surrender to the Scots in 1646, Charles negotiated secretly with the Scots and the Irish to launch the Second Civil War in 1648, a war the New Model Army considered a deliberate violation of the trust on which his original surrender had been accepted. He was sentenced to death on January 27th, 1649 and beheaded outside the banqueting house in Whiteall on January 30th, having dressed in two shirts so that the cold should not produce a shiver the watching crowd might mistake for fear.

[00:07:01]George IV ruled the United Kingdom from January 29th, 1820 until June 26th, 1830, having served as Prince Regent during his father's incapacity from 1811, and his combined 19 years of effective rule constitute the most extravagantly self-indulgent reign in modern British history. A verdict the diarist Charles Grarevel recorded with the unscentimental finality of a clerk of the Privy Council in his journal entry for the day of the king's death.

[00:07:29]There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased king. What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow? The principal monument of his prodigality is the royal pavilion at Brighton, redesigned by John Nash in an imagined Indian Gothic style of his own devising whose interiors his architect Henry Holland struggled to keep within the budgets the prince consistently exceeded. He had accumulated debts of approximately £650,000 by 1795, the equivalent of approximately £85 million today. and Parliament agreed to clear them only on the condition that he marry his cousin Caroline of Brunswick, a marriage he openly resented from the wedding day forward and which he attempted to dissolve through the Pains and Penalties Bill of 1820, a parliamentary trial of his estranged wife for adultery that produced the largest popular protest movement in early 19th century British politics and that the government withdrew when the Lord's margin in the third reading collapsed to nine. The Peterloo massacre on August 16th, 1819, in which the Manchester Ymanry charged a peaceful reform meeting of approximately 60,000 people at St. Peter's Field and killed at least 18 and wounded several hundred occurred during the regency and the future king's response was to send a personal letter of congratulation to the Manchester magistrates whose orders had produced the killings. He died of an obesity related collapse on June 26th, 1830, weighing approximately 17 1/2 stone after years of dependence on Ldinum. The Times obituary observed that no monarch in living memory had been mourned with less regret. Henry V 6th ruled England from 1422 when he succeeded his father at the age of 9 months until his deposition by Edward IVth in 1461 and again from October 1470 until his murder in the Tower of London on the night of May 21st 1471. And the case for his inclusion on this list rests not on the active malice that characterized his predecessors but on the specific kind of catastrophic incompetence that produces civil war. He was, in the description offered by the tutor historian Polydor Virgil, a man of a meek and humble spirit, devout and clean of conscience. And his particular saintliness as a private individual generated as a public ruler, a 30-year period of factional warfare that historians estimate killed approximately 100,000 Englishmen across the Wars of the Roses. He suffered the first of his catatonic breakdowns in August 1453 at Clarendon, lost the ability to speak or recognize his own infant son for 15 months, and recovered just in time to lose the support of the magnates, whose disputes he had failed to mediate during his incapacity. The first battle of St. Albins's on May 22nd, 1455, in which an arrow wounded Henry in the neck and the Yorkcists targeted and killed his most senior counselors in the streets of the town was the formal beginning of the Wars of the Roses. Although the underlying breakdown of royal authority preceded it by several years. His French wife Margaret of Anju conducted the war her husband could not. And the Battle of Ton on March 29th, 1461 fought in a snowstorm in Yorkshire killed approximately 28,000 men in a single afternoon. The largest casualty figure recorded in any battle ever fought on British soil. After the Yorkist victory at Tukesbury on May 4th, 1471, in which his only son, Edward of Westminster, was killed, Henry was returned to the tower and died there during the night of May 21st. The official Yorkist account in the history of the arrival of Edward IV records that he died of pure displeasure and melancholy. The Milan ambassador in London reported more directly that Edward had ordered the killing. Richard III ruled England from June 26th, 1483 until his death at the Battle of Bosworthfield on August 22nd, 1485. 26 months that contained the most concentrated controversy of any English reign. And the verdict on his conduct depends almost entirely on the question of what happened to his nephews Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury after they entered the Tower of London in the spring of 1483 and were never seen alive again. The principal near contemporary source is the Italian frier Dominic Mancini who was in London during the spring and summer of 1483 and whose de occupation rei Anglier per Ricardum Tersium records that the boys were progressively withdrawn from public view that Edward V was being visited regularly by the physician John Argentine who reported that the young king like a victim prepared for sacrifice sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance because he believed that death was facing him.

[00:12:21]Mancini left England in July 1483.

[00:12:24]Already convinced the boys were dead.

[00:12:26]Richard had served as Edward IVth's effective regent during his brother's reign governed northern England with marked competence and by some accounts was preparing to act as a faithful Lord Protector for his 12-year-old nephew when the new political situation in April 1483 induced him to act otherwise.

[00:12:44]By June 22nd, Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been declared invalid by Bishop Stillington of Bath and Wells. The boys had been declared illegitimate. Richard had been petitioned to take the throne, and his rivals at Hastings, Rivers, and Vaughn had been executed without trial. The princes were last definitely seen in the autumn of 1483. Whether they were murdered by Richard, by his ally, the Duke of Buckingham, by Henry Tudtor at some later date, or whether they survived in some form has been argued continuously since 1485. But no recovered remains have been positively identified, and the most economical hypothesis remains that Richard ordered them killed in the autumn of 1483 to remove the only legitimate Yorkist alternatives to his own rule. He was killed at Bosworth Field on August 22nd, 1485. the last English king to die in battle. His skeleton was identified beneath a Leester car park in 2012. John ruled England from 1199 to 1216. Lost the duche of Normandy in 1204 to the French king Philip Augustus in two campaigning seasons, alienated his nobility so comprehensively that they invited a French invasion in 1216, and is the only English monarch whose reign produced a constitutional document specifically intended to prevent any king from ever behaving as he had behaved. The principal contemporary source for the worst of his conduct is the chronicler Roger of Wendover at St. Albins's whose floor's historium is not always reliable on questions of date but whose accounts of J's treatment of his enemies have been substantially corroborated by the surviving administrative record. The defining incident is the case of William and Ma de Dross, his former court favorites, with whom he quarreled around 1208, for reasons the contemporary record does not entirely clarify, but which appear to have involved both unpaid debts and Ma's indiscreet remarks about the fate of Jon's nephew, Arthur of Britany, whom Jon was widely believed to have personally murdered at Ruon in 1203.

[00:14:45]When Jon demanded Ma's son as a hostage in 1208, Roger of Wendover records her response to the king's officers as the statement that she would not deliver her children to a king who had murdered his own nephew. The Drioses fled to Ireland, were captured in Galloway in 1210 and imprisoned in the dungeon of Corf Castle in Dorset. According to the Histtoire Deuke Dormande, they were given a single sheath of oats and a flitch of raw bacon and no further food. And on the 11th day, Ma was found dead between her son's legs, his cheeks gnawed by his mother in her final extremity. The historian David Carpenter has described the Debraos incident as the approximate cause of the baronial outrage that produced Magna Carta, whose clause 39 was understood at the time as specifically responsive to Jon's conduct. John starved 22 French knights to death at Corf in 1203 by the same method, by some accounts, in retaliation for the conduct of Arthur's allies in Britany. He died of dysentery on October 18th, 1216 at Newark while losing a war he had personally provoked.

[00:15:50]William II, called Rufus by contemporaries on account of his ruddy complexion or his reportedly red hair, ruled England from 1087 until August 2nd, 1100. And the principal contemporary source for his reign is the chronicler William of Malmsbury whose verdict in the chronicle of the kings of the English is one of the most concise indictments any English monarch has received from a near contemporary. He was Msbury wrote loved by his soldiers but hated by the people because he caused them to be plundered and was a man much pied by the clergy because he had a soul which they could not save.

[00:16:27]the third son of William the Conqueror.

[00:16:29]He inherited the English throne in 1087 while his elder brother Robert took Normandy and he proceeded to govern according to a formula that bore a certain resemblance to extortion conducted at the institutional scale. He left Bishop Ricks deliberately vacant in order to seize their revenues for the crown, including the sea of Canterbury after the death of Lanfrank in 1089. And he drove Archbishop Anelm into exile in 1097 in order to seize his estates. He levied taxes on the barrens that he himself described as crushing. And when they protested they could not pay, he advised them to plunder the church for the difference. He raised 10,000 marks to fund his brother Robert's departure on the first crusade by imposing a special levy on the whole of England that the Anglo-Saxon chronicle describes as falling on the poor with particular severity. His court was widely understood at the time to operate by standards of personal conduct the monastic chronicers found difficult to describe. He died on August 2nd, 1100, struck through the lung by an arrow during a hunting expedition in the New Forest in circumstances his contemporaries debated and historians still cannot resolve. The arrow was loosed by Walter Terrell, who fled the country immediately, denied the killing on his deathbed, and may or may not have been acting on the instructions of William's younger brother, Henry, who reached Winchester to seize the royal treasury with what the chronicers described as indecent haste. Etheldred II ruled the kingdom of England from 978 until his death in 1016 with one brief interruption when the Danish king Swain Forkbeard chased him into Norman exile in 1013. And his 38 years on the throne contained the single most consequential atrocity ever committed by an Anglo-Saxon monarch. An event that historians since have generally agreed produced the exact opposite of the result he had intended. He came to the throne at approximately 12 years old in the wake of the murder of his elder half-brother Edward the Martyr at Corf Castle in 978. A killing arranged at the behest of his mother Elfreth and one in which he could not personally have been complicit but which shadowed the legitimacy of his rule for the rest of his life. The Danish raids resumed in 980 and intensified through the 990s.

[00:18:42]And his administration responded principally by paying enormous tributes of silver, the so-called Diggel, which financed the next set of raids while bankrupting the kingdom that paid it. On November 13th, 1002 on the feast of St. Breece. He ordered the killing of every Danish man within his territory, which the Anglo-Saxon chronicle records in the laconic style the chronicler reserved for events he could not quite bring himself to comment upon. The order was carried out in Oxford, where Danish families fleeing the violence took refuge in St. Frideswide's church and were burned alive when the local population set the building on fire. An event Etheld himself acknowledged in a 1004 charter that described the killings as a most just extermination of Danes who had sprouted like cockal amongst the wheat. Among the dead was Gonhilda, the sister of the Danish king Swain Forkbeard and her husband Pig Tokasen.

[00:19:35]Swain returned to England in 1003 to begin a campaign of retributive devastation that lasted 10 years and ended with Ethel Red fleeing to Normandy in 1013. He died on April 23rd, 1016 in London of natural causes, having spent 38 years on a throne, his single decision in 1002 ensured his dynasty would lose. Edward VIII ruled the United Kingdom from January 20th, 1936 until December 11th, 1936. 325 days that were never followed by a coronation. And the conventional verdict on his abdication, which is that he chose love over duty in giving up the throne to marry the twice divorced American Wallace Simpson, has been substantially revised by the declassified British and German archival material released in stages since 1957 and most fully assessed in Andrew Looney's 2021 Trader King. The constitutional crisis his marriage produced was real. But the deeper problem his ministers were aware of through the autumn of 1936 was that he was politically aligned with the Nazi government in Germany at a level that threatened British national security.

[00:20:43]The diplomat Robert Vancard recorded in his diary in 1933, 3 years before Edward came to the throne, that the then Prince of Wales had said at a private dinner, that dictators are very popular these days, and we might want one in England.

[00:20:58]Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin authorized MI5 surveillance of Edward and Simpson during 1936. The German ambassador Yookakam von Ribentrop reported confidentially to Berlin that Edward was sympathetic to a German alliance and might be willing to act on that sympathy. And the rumor that Simpson herself had had a sexual relationship with Ribentrop while he was ambassador in London was treated as established fact by FBI counterintelligence reports filed during the Second World War. After his abdication and his marriage to Simpson on June 3rd, 1937, the new Duke and Duchess of Windsor toured Nazi Germany in October 1937. Against the express advice of the British foreign office, met Hitler at the Burghoff on October 22nd, gave the Nazi salute repeatedly during the visit and were photographed in attitudes that Ysef Gerbal's propaganda ministry distributed across Europe. The captured German foreign office files released after the war, the so-called Marberg files, document a 1940 plan called Operation Willie to install Edward as a puppet British monarch under German occupation, a plan he discussed with the Spanish foreign minister Ramon Sirranosir in Madrid before Churchill removed him to the Bahamas as governor in July 1940. He died in Paris on May 28th, 1972 in comfortable exile. In the end, the most evil monarchs from each British dynasty remind us that power can corrupt absolutely. Their tyranny, brutality, and questionable decisions shaped the course of Britain's history and left a legacy of fear and intrigue.

[00:22:33]Thank you very much for watching this video. And if you learned something, make sure to leave a like. Comment down below which monarch's reign shocked you the most, and subscribe if you would like to see a part two or more videos like this one. Thrones may rise and fall, but history never forgets its darkest rulers.