4. King John of England Was More Sad Than Bad
King John of England (1166 – 1216) is best known as the bad guy from the Robin Hood legend: the cowardly usurper who kept trying to seize the throne while his heroic brother, king Richard the Lionheart, was doing God’s work, fighting in the Crusades. While the reality was more complicated, and Richard was actually a bad king who detested England and the English, John was no saint: among other things, he personally murdered his teenaged nephew, Arthur of Brittany, in a drunken rage.
However, king John could also be quite a likeable fellow when he wanted to be. The problem was that he often did not bother to even try. So his reign ended up being disastrous for England: he lost his French holdings, got the Pope to excommunicate him and place England under an interdiction, and triggered a baronial rebellion that ended with the Magna Carta.
However, all of that came about not because John was a cartoonishly evil king, but because he was an epically incompetent one. His brother Richard was captured and imprisoned on his way back from the Crusades, so John tried to usurp the throne, but bungled it and ended up banished and had his property confiscated. When he became king, he entered into a disastrous marriage that cost him much of his holdings in France, then got into a ruinous war with the French king that cost him the rest.
At home, he got into an argument with an archbishop, that ended up with the Pope excommunicating John and all of England. Even when he tried to do the right thing and shifted some of the burden of taxation from the peasants to the wealthy nobles, it backfired, leading to a baronial rebellion that forced him to sign the Magna Carta. Fittingly, his final days were just as pathetic: while suffering a bout of dysentery that would ultimately do him in, he decided to take a shortcut through some marshy ground by a tidal estuary. The tide came, and John barely escaped drowning, but ended up losing his baggage train and the Crown Jewels of England.