For reasons best known to myself, last week I read a short book about Richard II, the English king who came to the throne at age 10 and was deposed 22 years later, in 1399, and murdered the following year.

It seems that Shakespeare got him more or less right, at least if the chronicles of the time got him right. Richard II was a young man of very poor judgment and a strong sense of entitlement (a common and disastrous combination), though he was not evilly intentioned in the manner of later dictators. He showered his court favorites with gifts and honors, at the expense, of course, of the rest of the population, then—as now—the taxpayers. Shakespeare memorably described the beneficiaries of Richard’s extorted largesse as the caterpillars of the commonwealth. Is there any commonwealth, any political system, any polity, without them?

It is part of Shakespeare’s unique genius that when we hear or read Richard’s great speeches during and after his deposition by his cousin who was crowned Henry IV, we not only sympathize with him, though he has never been presented to us as anything but a very flawed man and ruler, but empathize with him to the extent that we actually, in some sense, become him: Richard II, though a king, is us.

Amazon.com Gift Card i... Buy New $15.00 (as of 12:45 UTC - Details) The book about him suggested that there was much criticism of Richard at the time, but that it never got to the root of the problem, which was the very nature of the medieval political system. His critics thought only that he failed as an individual, not that corruption and misrule were inherent in the very feudal system of which he was at the summit. This was a system in which the only remedy for incompetence or worse was overthrow, usually accompanied by murder.

Richard’s critics, according to the author, were blinded by their assumptions about what a political system must be like, which explains the shallowness of superficiality of their complaints against Richard. We, with the advantage of more than six centuries of distance, can see things more clearly and at greater depth than the contemporaries with Richard, who could not think other than medievally.

No doubt this is so, and allows us to enjoy a certain and pleasant sense of superiority. How could they, the medievals, have been so blind as not to see what was in front of their noses, and which we now see at a glance? Of course, there took place in Richard’s reign the famous Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, but first it was not really a revolt by peasants, and second it had no real demands to make other than that the rulers should become personally honest and selfless, which is something the world has rarely, if ever, seen, and the likelihood of which has scarcely grown in the interval.

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The Best of Theodore Dalrymple

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$bio: Theodore Dalrymple is an author and retired doctor who has written for many publications round the world, including the Spectator (London), the Wall Street Journal (New York) and The Australian (Sydney). He is contributing editor of the City Journal of New York, and his latest book is Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality, Encounter Books.

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