I don’t intend on winning. I told him. I don’t want to be king. England needs a good king, not me, it needs my brother. Not ever me. If we start making England a better place, then Richard has no reason to come back. “But if England burns,” John continued, taking the quill, “then he has to come back. He simply has to.”
This chapter with Prince John is intended as something of the opposite of the prologue with King Richard. Both of these men have some rather large reputations - Richard the glorious "Lionheart" king, and John as a cruel, conniving, power-hungry monster. In the same way that much of this book exists to analyze the many Robin Hood tropes and see which have merit and which deserve ridicule, I wanted to do the same thing with Richard and John. Richard is inarguably *not* the glorious king that he often gets credited as, so it wasn't much of a stretch to turn him into a self-absorbed manipulator. But Prince John was legitimately terrible, and would go on to be an even worse king. Still, I wanted to pull his reputation back from the brink, and maybe find an alternative (even revisionist) explanation to why he is remembered as being so bad. So rather than a wicked thing, I pulled him more into the light-hearted playboy world, who enjoyed his prestige but hates his power ... and perhaps misguidedly does some terrible things in order to *avoid* becoming king, rather than the opposite.
