“Let life be short, else shame will be too long”
Shakespeare, Henry V
Fate has its ironies. The successor to the larger-than-life Henry VIII would end up being his infant son Edward VI, who would only rule for six years. While not as seminal as his father, the boy king’s short tenure was actually significant for the implementation of the reformist revolution in England, for it built upon, radicalised, and prolonged Henry VIII’s policies for a further decade. Following his death, Edward’s older sister’s Catholic counter-revolution would last but five years. Bloody Mary, as the name suggests, succeeded only in stoking the embers of civil conflict, failing to crush the Protestant faith.
The year following Edward’s death from health problems, Lisbon saw the birth of another European boy king: Sebastian I. 1554 was a sigh of relief for the whole of Portugal since the elderly King John III had lost his own son to illness shortly after marrying this only male descendant to a Spanish princess. The conception of Sebastian was nothing short of miraculous, as the prince heir would die before the birth of the king’s grandson. At stake was the continuation of the House of Aviz and with it the fate of Portugal’s independence. Sebastian I would earn the sobriquet ‘the Desired’ because his birth was greatly anticipated by the realm. Tragically, however, this was also fitting for other reasons: his mysterious death would leave the unconsoled Portuguese populace longing for his mythical return—never to materialise. A sense of historical irony later suffused the story of this boy king who, as fate would have it, actually came to symbolise the end of Portugal’s sovereignty rather than its survival.
The looming issue of Iberian unification was an ever present concern, thanks to the Portuguese monarchy’s close blood ties with the Madrid court. After 400 years of flirting with the Spanish danger, it was only a matter of time before the cards brought about the inevitable. Sebastian I, unmarried and heirless, led an army to Morocco in 1578 and disappeared in the Battle of the Three Kings—a battle which claimed the lives of all three monarchs involved. In 1580, with Portugal mired in a succession crisis, Philip II of Spain invaded, pressing his claim to the Portuguese throne. He took over the Atlantic kingdom, its empire, and its powerful navy. Eight years later, the Spanish Armada would set sail from Lisbon harbour, led by a Portuguese flagship, determined to best the English Protestants at sea.
While Edward VI grew up without his mother, Sebastian I never met his father. Edward was influenced by the titanic shadow of Henry VIII while Sebastian was under the close supervision of his hegemonic grandmother and regent, Catherine of Austria. Named after her aunt, Catherine of Aragon, she was the wealthiest queen of Europe and one of the most influential thanks to her Habsburg origins. Edward’s father was the founder of the Church of England; Sebastian’s grandfather and predecessor was responsible for introducing the Holy Inquisition to Portugal. Edward’s stepmother Catherine Parr was amongst the early adherents to Protestantism in England, both writing and acting as a patron to English Protestant literature—politically allied to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer—and even filling in as regent in Henry’s absence. Sebastian’s mother Joanna also served as regent in Spain on behalf of her brother Philip II, and corresponded with both Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Borgia, the Jesuit Order’s first and third leaders respectively, and the foremost paladins of the Counter-Reformation.
As was perfectly normal for the time, both boys were put under the tutelage of religious scholars for their education. More unusual was the zealotry and ideological factionalism that characterised these tutors: Edward was taught by the aristocratic intellectual vanguard of Protestantism in England, whereas Sebastian learned from scholars of the recently founded Jesuit Order.
Both boys were diligent intelligent pupils, but their role models would leave a mark: fanaticism. Both were forced to come of age too soon, and in a very politically unstable time. Both were imbued with religious zeal and isolated from the world, with neither wanting much to do with the opposite sex. As a consequence, both their reigns were characterised by marked radicalisation. The naivete of youth coupled with Manichean pedagogy left Edward and Sebastian equally prone to a simplistic understanding of complex problems.
In the case of Edward, his legislatively reformist fervour ignored the fact that the common people had little understanding of Protestant doctrine and that their lives were deeply rooted in Catholic tradition. Later on, Elizabeth I would be far more nuanced in her approach, the Virgin Queen serving as a synthesis—charting a sort of middle course—between the policies of the boy king and those of Bloody Mary. Edward’s uncouth urgency resulted in England’s diplomatic isolation, a prolonged conflict with Scotland, internal popular rebellions, the realm’s financial ruin, and the loss of significant cultural patrimony and art.
Sebastian would not fare any better. He was likewise welcoming to legislative change that would deepen religious influence and, again like Edward, his executive profligacy would eventually drain Portugal’s treasury. Chiefly, it was the military realm that fascinated him. Having as his sole neighbour a powerful but allied relative, his hands were freed to pursue his dreams of becoming a ‘captain of Christ’ and to emulate his mediaeval ancestors in bringing the sword to the infidel. His grandfather, John III, and Catherine of Austria had conceded the inception of the Inquisition in the country as a trade-off in negotiations with their Spanish cousins, and militarily had moved to rein in expenditure and consolidate territory overseas, avoiding overreach. Sebastian, perhaps also due to a teenage rebellious phase, reverted his grandparents’ prudence by freeing the reins of his admirals in the East Indies and raising an army to invade Morocco, as well as gratuitously allowing the expansion of the Church’s influence.
The parallels these stories have with our own time are numerous, but if there is an ultimate lesson to be learnt from them it is about the danger of unchecked permanent bureaucracies. The downfalls of both youths were rooted in their negligent upbringing which, far from being left to tutors with their best interests in mind, was entrusted to sectarian individuals with an agenda that reality could not brook. The agendas in question seemed always to require both more expenditure and more favouritism.
It is important to understand that both young kings reigned at the onset of the modern era when the bureaucratic state was consolidating itself. Henry VIII curbed the independent power of the Church and that of the nobility in favour of an urban coterie of lower aristocracy clerks such as Thomas Cromwell. It was these new elites, whose power relied on political favour and on an expansion of the arbitrary power of the state, who found themselves put in charge of Edward’s education. Similarly, in Portugal, the Jesuits were busy cementing their power and directing it towards the cause of Counter-Reformation, slowly edging out the influence of older, less elitist religious orders. The landed nobility, in turn, might have been independent, but they were still reliant on wars to elevate their children to knighthood and invariably moved against the merchant class which privileged more distant intercontinental commercial pursuits and local regional peace. Prior monarchs had sought to invest the aristocracy in Lisbon’s colonial ventures overseas, but as soon as Sebastian came into their guardianship, the influence of the nobles swept away the merchants, and bellicose incitement began.
At the moment, reformist conservative politicians and statesmen are facing serious challenges by entrenched bureaucratic forces. Donald Trump was sabotaged by several members of his administration, with leaks and even with outright sedition in the form of disobedience to his orders to withdraw military forces from Syria. Jair Bolsonaro had to contend with a highly politicised, adversarial Supreme Federal Court which prolonged its persecution well after the conservative president’s term, going to the extreme of barring him from running again.
This, however, is but one level of competitive disadvantage for Western politicians intent on real change. Another important one is international, enthusiastically globalist institutions. In recent years, the EU alone has subverted the results of democratic referenda in Denmark, Ireland, and the UK—not to mention the referenda planned for the ratification of the EU Constitutional Treaty, which were cancelled under pressure from Brussels after the results of the French and Dutch suffrages. It specifically schemed to bring down Austria’s Schüssel government; it planted its own choice of caretaker government in Italy during the austerity crisis; it withheld owed funds to Hungary to pressure Viktor Orbán against vetoing further aid to Ukraine; and it still appoints the ‘viceroys’ of Bosnia-Herzegovina, despite its de jure independence.
The UN has become a hub for inappropriate interference in domestic affairs. Both Trump and Bolsonaro, for instance, had to endure criticism from UN bodies that were supposed to be strictly neutral and that had ignored far more radical and lethal policies elsewhere, namely from the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Human Rights Council. The final level is liberal democracy itself. Western democracies often fail against more long-lasting authoritarian governments because the latter can plan long-term and the former cannot. By the time democracies are done deliberating and coordinating, authoritarian governments have already acted.
Modern Western statesmen face structural hurdles similar to those confronted by boy kings; they are not expected to last long in the post. What little time they do have is wasted learning how the game works and fending off sabotage by life-long bureaucrats at home or political rivals abroad. In our time at least, these problems are all the more insurmountable the more right-wing the statesman happens to be. It is thus no surprise when, in parallel with boy kings, Western politicians opt to go along to get along: by endorsing Manichean moralist narratives that the mainstream media feeds the public, and ceding ground to at least some lobbies. Only true reformists dare challenge the status quo and swim against the current, but only cynical reformists manage to create room for manoeuvre. Such is the dilemma of our managerial era.
