The king barely survived the clash with the commoners who were reevaluating their economic status, but not before London was ransacked and hundreds of people died, including several minor lords. In short, Jones argues that King Richard II’s attempt to suppress wages was just too much for a post-plague populace to countenance, and the massive uprising that was ultimately named after its leader, the Wat Tyler rebellion, nearly ended the monarchy 600-plus years ago. Last year, I discovered the works of one of the U.K.’s “ hipster historians” and leading medievalists, Dan Jones, including his recent release “ Powers and Thrones” and his older tract, “ Summer of Blood.” As Insider’s economy editor at the time, I assigned and edited a piece about the disastrous results of a king denying to try a post-plague labor shortage was real. The world is still coming out of a plague and an associated labor shortage, and being riven by a cost-of-living crisis, and the deference to aristocratic power by the most economically powerful feels like a violation of the ’90s-era promise of the information superhighway. Some corporations seemed to realize their misstep, deleting their tweets as social media users jeered.
It came as Britain’s colonial past is coming under renewed scrutiny across the Commonwealth the queen was so keen to preserve, with Jamaica and Barbados taking steps to remove the British monarch as head of state, and calls for reparations punctuating William and Kate’s Platinum Jubilee tour of the Caribbean.īill Gates and Barack Obama both chose to use the queen’s honorific “Her Majesty.” Jeff Bezos tweeted that he “can think of no one who better personified duty.” Every brand seemed to bow lower and lower to the royal family, even Hamilton, a Broadway/West End musical whose main subject is the American rebellion against royal authority. Powerful businesses, executives, and world leaders were notably deferential in paying their respects to the queen, while the online hordes erupted with sarcasm and anger marked by an anti-colonialist and anti-royal sentiment. It was reborn as something not capitalist at all, but rather something neo-medieval, something feudal.
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