by Ashly Graham
The royal family was able to converse with horses as equals—to “walk with the animals, talk with the animals” as per the Leslie Bricusse song delivered by Doctor John Dolittle in the musical version of Hugh Lofting’s children’s books—and had interests in common with them. The royals did not so much laugh or guffaw as neigh and whinny, and their overbites were as pronounced as the Hapsburgs’ lower jaws were prognathous.
The problem of genetically ill-advised arranged royal marriages was compounded by frequent separations, divorces and remarriages. Princes’ mistresses gave birth with fecund regularity to illegitimate children who, by patronymic tradition, were surnamed with the prefix of “Fitz”, as in Fitzwilliam and Fitzherbert. The only part of society eschewed by the royals in their amorous liaisons were the commoners, with whom crossbreeding was unthinkable because it would incarnadine, or redden, the blueness of one’s blood.
King James, although the top aristocrat in the kingdom, was in reality the least thoroughbred of animals. Softening of the brain had resulted in his believing himself to be a centaur, with the head and shoulders of a man and the body and legs of a horse...or it might have been the other way around or a combination thereof. The Groom of the Chamber, when he curried His Majesty’s body hair, parted his mane down the centre and combed his long fringe forward and to the side.
Being as vegetably inclined in manner as he was vegetarian in diet, James used a bale of straw as a throne, and for his orb and sceptre a mangel-wurzel and an elm sapling. In the monarchical tradition he never shook hands—to do so would imply superiority over the equids whose hooves were not equal to the task. If he felt like a snack between meals, he would drop to all fours and eat alfalfa sprouts off the floor, or have a servant put on a nosebag of hay.
King James, as the incumbent squatter of the Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, Sandringham House, Palace of Holyroodhouse, and Balmoral Castle estates, was a decent sort of middle-aged horse. He had grown up amongst the beasts and forged bonds of friendship playing polo with them, while lower class children enjoyed kicking soccer balls. He was of medium intelligence and build, somewhere between the fetlocked working type of horse like the Clydesdale and the fleet Arab stallion.
In addition to castles and palaces, Jug Ears was also of course very at home in and around hay barns, box stalls or loose boxes, tack rooms, dressage rings, pastures, and paddocks; as well as, being something of an aesthete, the Royal Box at the theatre. He was a prolific stud, and took his on-the-job business seriously amongst women he was introduced to in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot Racecourse, at the Badminton Horse Trials, and at show-jumping events around the country.
James’s was not an easy job. After the main political parties had been rocked by a sequence of scandals, and engulfed in a quagmire of corruption and mismanagement, the Palace had been reinvested with absolute authority, and, for the first time since the Civil War, the Sovereign was again again Ruler-in-Fact of Merrie England, wielding unlimited and undisputed power over a cowed and submissive Barebones Parliament.
The Prime Minister and Leader of the Whig Party had begun the toppling of the nation’s political house of cards, by deciding to out himself as Gay. He then announced his intention to divorce his wife and marry the Lord Mayor of London, with whom he had been carrying on for years.
No sooner had this become public, than the Lord Mayor was revealed from leaked doctor’s records to be a transsexual transvestite Lady Mayoress; whereupon which the Prime Minister determined to have a sex change so that he could remain officially Gay; whereupon his wife trumped them both by announcing that she was a bisexual transgender male; whereupon her husband apologized to her and the Lord Mayor, cancelled his surgeon’s appointment, and proposed to both of them that they might set up as a gender-neutral ménage à trois in the Dominion of Canada, with a blessing by a minister sympathetic to the Canadian Civil Marriage Act.
This they agreed amongst themselves in principle, or for lack of it, to do, but were beaten to the punch by the News of the World after it hacked the PM’s mobile phone when he butt-dialled while late at night the troilists were drunkenly trying to clarify amongst themselves who was really what before they did anything rash.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had for years been urging the PM to stand down so that he could take over the premiership, in a fit of jealousy at his boss’s monopoly of the headlines, in an interview said that he had all along been familiar with the land of the lay at Number Ten, but had loyally kept shtoom, and that he was the only person qualified to direct national affairs.
Concluding the farce, after Parliament forced the PM to go to the country and call a General Election, the Leader of the Opposition Tory Party and the whole of the backbench 1922 Committee were hauled up on an impressive array of charges relating to their complicity in a network of organized crime and drug-running, as well as tax-fraud, embezzlement, and money-laundering.
A national referendum on the crisis affirmed that the voters did not believe there was anyone left in the political arena worthy of respect, and that it was time to bring the circus to an end and reaffirm the Divine Right of Kings. Things would be as they had been when a horse was considered capable of running a kingdom, as heralded by Richard the Third’s prophetic Shakespearean cry, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!”.
Parliament had no choice but to bow to the national wish and—with a nod to the Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (otherwise known as Caligula) who had it in mind to appoint his horse a Consul—restored the monarchy and reinvested the King with all his pre-Commonwealth powers.
A jubilant King James, who believed strongly in the divinity of his equinity and was feeling his oats, paced forward to national acclaim. Reinvested with all the royal powers that existed before Charles the First was beheaded and the Commonwealth took over in 1649, he went to work with a will and a riding crop.
The first thing he did was order that the three top politicians be executed and their heads displayed on pikestaffs in Whitehall. Then, inspired by Cromwell’s words to the Rump Parliament in 1654, he dismissed the Rumpsteak Parliament, as he called it, saying, ‘It is not right and mete that such a meaty institution should hang any longer in the nation’s larder.’
James, himself outed as a chauvinist xenophobe, sent vaunt couriers to the Commissioners of the European Union, and informed them that a state of war and disinterest existed between his country and all of theirs. Foreign embassies in London were closed, and well-fed British diplomats, Euro MPs, and civil servants in in Brussels, apprised of His Majesty’s declaration that the last one home would be hung, drawn and quartered and fed to his prize Saddleback pig, wiped their lips with their napkins, pushed back their chairs, bade hasty farewells to their mistresses and lovers, and came home.
Regiments of yeomen and mounted cavalry sharpened their swords and sabres, checked the priming on their rifles and flintlock pistols, curried (with brushes) their partner horses, massed on the White Cliffs of Dover, and raised their voices in unison with the words of Michael Drayton’s poem Agincourt: “Fair stood the wind for France |When we our sails advance, |Nor now to prove our chance |Longer will tarry.”
The French were tout à fait ravi that their ancient animosity against Perfidious Albion was still so enthusiastically reciprocated, despite the woefully long hiatus in armed engagement between the two countries. The duration of the Hundred Years’ War was a record that had stood for too long, it was agreed, and it was time for both parties to pull their swords out and have at it.
Before hostilities commenced, on the site of the Field of Cloth of Gold—or le Camp de Drap d’Or, depending on one’s national allegiance—between Guînes and Ardres where Kings Henry the Eighth of England and Francis the First of France had set up their encampments, a bilateral Entente Cordiale–Cheerful Understanding was signed by the President of France and King James, who arrived by Virgin balloon made with material in a medley of the green colours, vide supra, that featured in t
he new Union Jack, the Union Jim.
To mark the occasion, and amid much fanfare and bobance on both sides of the English Channel, or La Manche, depending on one’s point of view, the Chunnel was blown up.
Chapter Thirteen
The people quickly discovered that they were mistaken in expecting a return to the gaudy free society and permissiveness that had accompanied the Carolian Restoration of 1660. Instead, they were treated to a reversion to discipline that eclipsed Oliver Cromwell’s half-hearted proscriptions of merrymaking.
King James closed down the media and replaced them with a single organ, The Cavalier Times, the editor of which was sworn to report only matters congenial to Palace policy. Should he fail to do so, he was told, he would suffer the same fate as a defiant European Commissioner. Courtesy of a final “rapprochement”—it was the last time that Romance linguistic terms or etymological derivations were allowed to be used—with the Gaullists, this unfortunate individual was arrested at Nice airport where he was about to board a flight to Zurich, put in the hold of a Mirage jet, and given his freedom during a farewell fly-past at a thousand feet over Beachy Head with a badly packed parachute, where he was so struck by the beauty of the white cliffs that he missed by a hundred yards an opportunity to drop in on the keeper of Belle Tout, renamed the Frogview, lighthouse.
Instead of throwing herself with gusto into her role as Mistress of the Plants, Arbella, once she was happily ensconced in the White tower, was so affected by her new circumstances that her character did a volte-face...or rather, a U-turn. Thumbing her nose at the new ascetic doctrine, she became a party gal and joined the underground social scene that was already thriving despite the punishments that would be inflicted upon those who were caught by the King’s Men’s raiding parties and convicted by a Royal Tribunal of flouting the injunction against revel-making.
While throughout the country the subterranean air was permeated by the spores of immorality and Epicurean excess, ingenious strategies were adopted to circumvent regulation: fancy-dress balls masqueraded as fund-raising events for the King’s charities, at which no money was raised; rootin’ tootin’ bunga bunga parties flourished in the guise of functions, receptions, and gala dinners—which were permitted, so long as they had a Green theme and were billed as being in aid of the King’s environmental causes; although the only green in evidence was the pallor on the faces of those who had attended these renegade gatherings, the following morning.
Having boarded the ship of mirth, Arbella became a nationally popular figure as a Lady of Misrule, a subversive figurehead who could do spot-on imitations of Jugs’s voice and mannerisms. Meantime the royal horticultural collection was wilting and pining for lack of nourishment, irrigation, and conversation, as the soothing strains of Mozart in greenhouses and conservatories were overwhelmed by the riffs and howls and boom-boom and discordancy of Jazz, Blues, Hard Rock, Heavy Metal, and Rap music. Bands played far into the night, disturbing the sleep patterns of trees.
The only species that thrived was a variety of Triffid.
One night at a gala dinner where she was guest speaker and had imbibed too much homebrewed “Jugs’ Juice” moonshine hooch, Arbella got up on her chair to address the attendees. ‘Citizens!’ she commenced, pulling a scroll out of her sleeve; ‘in the words of Edward Gibbon, “Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule.” In the spirit of which I have composed a poem, called Queen Doris, which I would like to recite for you now.
‘
Once there was a middle-aged lady,
Doris, unmarried, who sought a remedy
For unemployment...in sooth, no comedy
For someone of her years.
The talents she had were going to waste,
Nothing she looked at was to her taste,
And very soon she would be faced
With bupkes in the bank.
Thought Doris, “I’m not lazy, mind,
And certainly not the shirking kind,
But pressure’s on and I must find
Some work, or I be done for.
“Time’s running out for me to act,
To land a job—and not get sacked—
If body and soul are to stay intact.
It’s do or die for Doris.
“Mere hitch this may be, or a glitch,
But pronto I must find a niche
Before I’m living in a ditch
And begging for a crust.
“There must be products I can pitch
That, though it may not make me rich,
Will keep me in the style to which
I feel that I’m entitled.
“But for the nonce—I mean today—
I realize to my great dismay
There is worse luck no bleedin’ way
To pay the stinkin’ rent.
“I can’t however abandon hope
And moon about the house and mope.
Sliding down the slippery slope
And going on the game
“Is not an option,” Doris asserted.
“Though disaster must be averted
I won’t do anything perverted:
I’ve standards to uphold.
“I draw the line at what’s inferior,
And won’t get off my shrinking posterior
To do what don’t meet my criteria
Of what a lady ought to do.
“Furthermore, call it pride or vanity,
I won’t go on the dole or accept the charity
Of those who are disposed to pity
My unfortunate situation.
“Though it certainly is a pretty kettle
Of fish I’m in, I’m on my mettle
And committed to being in finer fettle
Before the month is out.”
So doughty Doris, having nailed
Her colours to the mast, sailed
Forth, pleased that she’d not failed
To keep her stockings up.
The outlook, nonetheless, was bleak
As she set out on her mission to seek
An income, with not more than a week
Before she faced eviction.
It seemed she could’ve re-dug the tunnel
That formerly was called the Chunnel,
Or poured the Atlantic through a funnel,
The next days seemed so long.
Fooling none she was spring chicken,
Kentucky-fried-good for finger-lickin’,
D. sickened of figuring how the dicken-
s to pass off mutton as lamb…
Until, delirious over eggshell on toast,
Doris, envisioning that a tenured post
Was really what she’d like the most,
Decided to advertise.
LADY, CIRCA FIFTY, SEEKS POSITION AS QUEEN—
STATE, PRINCIPALITY, SHE’S EQUALLY KEEN;
HEMISPHERICALLY WESTERN IS ZONAL PREFERENCE;
LIGHT DUTIES ONLY, PLENTY OF DEFERENCE.
REQUIREMENTS: CIVIL LIST; SERVANTS MISCELLANEOUS;
JEWELS, MANY; DRESS ALLOWANCE GENEROUS;
A DAIMLER FOR TRANSPORT—NOT TAXI OR BUS—
A MANSION’S OKAY, AND PALACE A PLUS.
CANDIDATE WARRANTS NO DISEASES OR MADNESS,
ERRATIC BEHAVIOUR OR PRONENESS TO BADNESS;
NO CONSORTS OR CORGIS, DEPENDENTS OR HEIRS,
OR ELSE TO DECLARE AS TO HER AFFAIRS.
Doris’s ad went viral round the world;
On billboards and posters her cred was unfurled;
Via Internet and e-mail, while faxes uncurled,
She was Facebooked and Tweeted and Blogged.
The Situations Wanted: MONARCH-IN-WAITING
Column bolded her; and amongst the dating
Ads from singles hell-bent on mating
Was WHITE QUEEN—NON-SMOKER, NO PETS.
For days our Doris cooled her heels
And learned how
exiled royalty feels
When our throne has been stolen and nobody kneels
To do homage to our person.
Understandably people were a tad bemused,
And Daily Mail readers, not being used
To seeing and believing at once, refused
To accept it wasn’t a joke.
Most presumed that this was a spoof