This is a perfect example of "The mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind". A king trying to take control of the court from the clutches of the Vice-Premier.

But my review is very biased against the female lead "Yoo Jung".

A king watched as his father got cornered by his ministers and later he watched helplessly as his mother was killed by those ministers. He almost got deposed from his crown prince position and the only way he managed to save himself was by begging and kneeling to those so called ministers and spending the rest of his ruling era as a puppet ruler. So it is pretty much understandable his ambition to establish absolute power in court. Therefore he sets out to create the most elaborate scheme to establish power.

With the Vice-Premier in front and a Queen Dowager from behind, he has spent most of his life cornered by these people. His only solace being his first love Yoo jung, a girl he loves and feels guilty towards.

The most annoying thing for me about Yoo Jung is that after the king, Lee Tae spends his entire life designing a plan to trap the Vice-Premier and the Queen Dowager and this woman waltzes in and almost ruins his painstaking efforts. And she justifies herself like it's the most reasonable thing. Like heck, I understand that she was threatened by Park Gye Won at first but then Lee Tae gave her the option to leave, but instead she stayed back in the name of "love" and almost ruined his plans at every corner, which was so annoying.

And the most pissing off thing is that she used his guilt and love to do whatever she wanted in the name of revenge and the king has to give it to her at every corner. Oh and the most ridiculous thing is, she joined hands with the murdered who killed her entire family to get revenge from that so called murder.

While getting in the way of the king's scheme, she was the one who benefited at every corner from his schemes, but then she went and accused the king of being a tyrannical king. What a ridiculous b*tch.

And at the end of the drama when the king was a few inches away getting absolute power this b'tch waltz in again saying he's a tyrannical king and then she goes and establish her own faction with her father's previous followers, who the king himself brought to court. And she tries to restrict him and hold him in check, and she has no trust in him that he will be a good king, very well knowing how much he sacrificed to protect her and the people around him. It really makes me mad because out of all the people around him, this woman knows how much he has gone through and how much he hates being restricted, but this woman used the guilt he has towards her and her family to use to her benefits and to restrict him.

It's the most basic thing for a king to balance power, and his court is full of factions that's not even loyal to him, so he tries to eliminate those who weren't loyal and to put the people who were loyal to him, but this woman says he's cruel to kill those people and she establish her own faction. duh! Oh oh and the people he killed were the very same people who ganged up against him and his father and killed his mother, but what??! He is cruel?! It's a very reasonable thing to get revenge and remove these unloyal people for a KIng but this woman has to be so righteous, and berate him afterwards when she gets the benefits of it all. He did those all to protect her too, but she was such an ungrateful b*tch. He is in the end a king and it is a period of "kill or get killed", living in such a period, what the king did was absolutely reasonable. But because of her, in the end he let go of all his loyal followers and let the woman push him around, so ridiculous. Sorry but I can't hep but be mad at her stupid righteousness. Also she is so selfish that she wants everything to go her way. When she pretended to be the Vice-Premier's niece, and ruined the king's original plan, she shamelessly held her ground, while the king had to abort his plan to protect her sorry ass. And while she shamelessly kept on pretending to be the niece, the king killed all those disloyal followers and establish power and he even went as far as re-establishing the prestige of her family, she shamelessly also want to get her name back, very well knowing that doing so would put the king in trouble. So she schemed against the king to get her original identity back while labeling the king as the person "who knew her original identity and harbored a criminal". She is such a b*tch that makes me so angry.

The only thing that I hate about the king is using an innocent woman and her feelings to get to become a concubine inorder to control her father , the Minister of war. The real shitty thing he did was, he promised to make her a queen and everything, but when his so-called first love waltz in and ruined his plans, he threw that innocent woman away like trash. So it's understandable that the woman went red and became the evil concubine in his harem, after what he did to what he did.

This one of those perfect ancient political dramas, with no messy plot and pretty neat.