How rich would a King/Queen of England from the Tudor times be in comparison to today?

by ScreamingEnglishman
Thurinus

It's difficult to answer a question like this, because it raises fundamental questions like "what is wealth?" You could estimate the value of their economic wealth and then account for inflation to get a present-day dollar amount or you could assess what the value would be today of the things that they owned then. Another possibility would be to find the relative wealth of these people within their societies and then find an equivalent percentage of the overall wealth of some society that you determine to be the "modern politico-economic equivalent" of Tudor England. None of these methods are perfect and all are faced with serious problems relating to the changing nature of economies (and, more broadly, societies) over very long periods of time and the intervening economic, social, and political changes.

I have relatively inexpensive access to many things (iPhones, airplane tickets, the internet, accumulated knowledge and art, etc.) that even the most fabulously wealthy person imaginable could never even have dreamed of far enough in the past. An industrial capitalist economy is also very different from a late feudal one, which also changes the way that money works. For instance, financial investment serves a similar purpose today to that served by ownership of land in the past, but it is meaningfully different in many ways, the most obvious of which is liquidity and the lack of a need to physically protect the asset in the same way. Moreover, the wealth of the very rich today is protected by a network of overlapping legal frameworks, ensured by various national and international legal bodies which are backed by the force of arms. A rich person in late feudal times would be required to protect their assets through force of arms which they organize and need to ensure the loyalty of themselves, which fundamentally alters the ver nature of owning vast amounts of wealth. This is even more true when the rich individual in question derives their wealth from being a political sovereign and thus is faced with many risks and liabilities which largely do not exist today (such as foreign invasion, usurpers, internal disorder and revolution, blockade and embargo, etc.) that are virtually impossible to quantify.

A simple metric such as inflation does not adequately account for these fundamental changes in how we live and organize society and what items are available for purchase. Of course, the most important assets of the Tudor monarchs were probably their social and political capital and their bloodline (that is, their royalty), which are even harder to assess or find meaningful analogues for in modern-day terms than the material things I have already named.