← Back to the front page

These Famous People had Truly Bad Sides to their Personalities

Khalid Elhassan September 15, 2021 36 min

Awful People - Stalin overseeing the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact — Stalin overseeing the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Euromaidan

The barons forcing King John of England to sign the Magna Carta. 50-50 Parliament

15. Was King John of England as Awful as He is Depicted in the Robin Hood Legend?

King John of England (1166 – 1216) is best known as the bad guy from the Robin Hood legend. He is depicted as a cowardly usurper and awful sibling who constantly schemed to seize the throne, while his heroic brother, King Richard I the Lionheart, was away on God’s work 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 teenage nephew, Arthur of Brittany, in a drunken rage.

Nonetheless, 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 a disastrous one for England. He lost his French holdings, got the Pope to excommunicate him and place England under 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.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.