The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  As we quietly rejoiced, Prince Sado made his way southwards, with his entourage, towards Onyang. He had wanted to set off in great splendour, with rank upon rank of soldiers in uniform, with a band and a procession of drummers, and brightly clad heralds proclaiming his progress. And in fact, though he expressed himself aggrieved by his father’s curtailing of these grand plans, he was well enough attended. He was accompanied by his tutors, by 120 people carrying his luggage, by an escort of soldiers and a full military band – not as flamboyant a display as he would have wished, but by no means as demeaning as he claimed. And by all accounts he behaved properly en route, compensating farmers for damage caused to crops and property by his large train, and distributing largesse as he went.

  I believe he set off in some hope of escaping from himself, and of finding some kind of peace. I think, also, that he secretly wanted the people of Korea to acclaim him as he passed. He longed for affection, for admiration, for recognition. He was tired of his secondary, submissive role as heir apparent: he was tired of being scolded for his shortcomings. He wanted to be loved. And he was excited, like a child, by the tourist attractions of Onyang, then as now a lodestone for pilgrims in search of health and refreshment. He was thrilled by the notion of the natural wonders of the hot springs and the legendary beauty of the landscape he had never seen. Oh yes, he set off in high hopes. His anxious mother, almost as demented as I was about his state of mind, arranged for his favourite meals to be sent along the route for him and cooked for him at each staging post – I think she was very worried, by now, about the scenario of the poisoned mushrooms. I was beginning to feel more sympathy, at this time, for Lady SŏnhŬi. She was growing old, and she, like me, was devoured by a daily fear for Sado.

  At home, in our nest, we tried to forget about poison, and even attempted a little merriment. It was my son Chongjo who suggested that we should invite Fourth Brother to come to stay with us for a few days, while the coast was clear. Fourth Brother was only eighteen months older than his nephew Chongjo, and they were good friends. I readily agreed, and indeed took the opportunity to invite all my brothers and their wives to stay at the palace for a while. I was so uncertain of the future that I was not sure if I would ever see them again, and the notion of one last family gathering seemed irresistible. First Brother was, of course, au fait with the whole situation, having been a court official, and Fourth Brother was too little to know about it – though who knows what information passed between him and his royal nephew? Information unsuitable for children, as were the scenes they were later to witness. But Second and Third Brothers, both of whom were younger than myself, and both of whom were working towards their civil service examinations in the ineluctable yangban family tradition, had been kept at a distance, and I looked forward to this opportunity of confiding in them. The burden was too great for me to carry alone. I needed their help. They were only young men – very young men – but I longed for their sympathy and understanding.

  Do not think that I complained about Prince Sado. I had too much pride to complain about my husband, and too much true loyalty. But I had to tell them of the facts, in case the worst should happen, so that they would at least understand my conduct. Also, I suppose I had a sense that I should warn them for their own sake – a family connected by marriage to the royal house lives dangerously. Already I could see that Second and Third Brothers would react differently to my story than First Brother, who always put his public role first. Second Brother was a scholar and a dreamer who did not care much for court life: he would bide his time, then go his own way, and thus survive in his own manner. But Third Brother, even at the age of nineteen, was something of a rebel. He thought nothing of denouncing Confucian contradictions, and even made open mock of our reverence for our ancestors. On one occasion, I remember that he said that it was foolish to offer wine and meat to blocks of wood, for the dead could neither eat nor drink. It was an insult, he said, to our grandparents’ and our mother’s memory, to honour them in this meaningless way. What he said was, of course, reasonable enough, but it was also heretical. In the privacy of my home he spoke forcefully against the double standards by which King Yŏngjo expected his son and indeed all his people to live. I remember his declaring, ‘Why should Sado be filial towards a father who takes a bride ten years younger than the son? Has the father no respect for the son? And why has the father remarried into a hostile family? Is he intending to take revenge upon all the Hongs?’

  While the children played their childish games – and I trust they did not play at funerals and beheadings – we adults sat in conclave over our rice wine. (Wine was always readily available in the palace, despite all my father-in-law’s edicts against alcohol consumption.) When I described the clothing phobia and the agonies I had suffered in trying to conceal it, Second Brother turned pale, and said quietly, ‘But this is nothing but madness. He is deranged.’ First Brother blamed the illness on the indulgence of his princely childhood, and brought up the infamous memory of Lady Han and her military toys. Third Brother took a different line – prompted, perhaps, by my supplementary account of Sado’s superstitious fears of the Jade Pivot book and thunder and ghosts and the terrors of hell. He said that we ought to attempt some sort of exorcism, some sort of spiritual appeal to salvation. I was surprised by this, but Third Brother argued forcefully that one of the principal weaknesses of our Confucian system was that it made no place for the spirit. It was too rigid, too material, too insistent on place and function and ritual, and did not consider the inner individual being. Clearly Sado’s spirit was in torment, said Third Brother, which is why he saw malicious ghosts everywhere and in everything, and could find calm only in violence.

  Third Brother, I believe, was beginning to develop a concept of what other cultures had long called the ‘soul’. He had been reading foreign books, and talking to advanced neo-Confucian thinkers.

  We, in Korea, did not believe in the soul. Now, nobody believes in the soul. We have come full circle.

  I listened to these ideas, intently, and stroked the fading bruise on my brow. What was the spirit? Were there good and evil essences, and did they pertain to people, or to acts? Could one separate Sado’s evil acts from his being, and rescue his true self from them? You think we were a shallow and frivolous court, and I have said that we were an hysterical court. But we thought deeply, and talked deeply, at times. Think of us. We were at the long end, the dying fall of thousands of years of tradition, trapped like insects in the solidified mass of the past. To struggle out of that was painful, laborious. Third Brother struggled, and died for it. I, womanlike, was well trained in the arts of disguise and discretion, and I hid my efforts and my dissent. There were some, of course, who truly believed in the traditions – who believed that we Koreans were the only true inheritors of Confucian wisdom, that we alone, now that the Ming dynasty of China had been overthrown, were keeping alive the true path and the proper way. But there were many more who were frightened to think freely, frightened to question the nature of the straitjacket that confined us.

  I underestimate, perhaps, the genuine reforming efforts of King Yŏngjo. I had been too close to him, from my early years, and I could not see him in his role as a successful statesman. I acknowledge now that maybe he tried to move his country forward, but I did not at this time understand his politics or his statecraft. My father and First Brother attempted to explain these matters to me, and I have subsequently, posthumously, made efforts to study them. It seems that King Yŏngjo introduced new accounting systems, and distributed books in han’gŭl script to the peasantry. According to the history books, he established a state examination for older people, and organized the dredging of riverbeds by massive mobilizations of the workforce. The Military Taxation Act of 1751 was an important reform, and his attempts to abolish factionalism (his so-called ‘t’angp’yŏng’ policy) aimed to establish a coalition bureaucracy including both the Noron and the Soron. It is now, in your day, argued that he was not unresponsive to the demands o
f the common people: one twenty-first century scholar tells us that he went out of the palace fifty-five times during his fifty-two-year reign to listen to their demands and appeals. And it may have been so. But these, in the long view, were mere tinkerings with a failing system, intended to placate powerful enemies and appease public unrest. A little pitch, a little tar, a little glue. The great ship was sailing to nowhere. Our peninsula was stranded out of time.

  I look back now, from my longer perspective, and I think about Europe, the Americas, Russia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia and all those discovered and undiscovered continents of which we then knew nothing or next to nothing. Of China we knew much, and of Japan something, to our cost, but we knew nothing of those lands towards which Captain Cook was soon to set sail. And of the Western powers themselves, we still knew little. This was the dawning age of Enlightenment, in Europe. Great waves of new thought were swelling up like molten magma from beneath the earth’s crust. During my long lifetime, the French Revolution would come and go, and the king of France and his Austrian queen went to the guillotine. Did we sense the power of those eruptions, far away in our distant fragile earthly shelter? I think perhaps we did. Our perspectives were changing, slowly but inevitably. The art of perspective itself was on its way towards us.

  And yet barbarisms and ceremonials persisted, persist. By chance I have been reading a life of my contemporary on earth, Catherine the Great of Russia, who married the Grand Duke Peter the year after I was married to Prince Sado – she was a little older than I was at the time of this union. My marriage was not consummated for five years, hers to Peter possibly never, though she did manage to produce a child who was recognized as her heir. The court life she knew as a young woman was, by her own account, in many ways as strange and unnatural as the court life of the kingdom of Korea. And her husband, like mine, played at toy soldiers. He had an army of them. He is said to have court-martialled, convicted and ceremonially hanged a rat because it had been caught gnawing at one of his toy soldiers. Such are the games that archdukes and crown princes play.

  As we have seen, even wise children play strange games. It is when adults play these games that we should fear them.

  When Peter was murdered, his wife’s faction seized the throne, and Catherine became empress. She ruled Russia triumphantly for many years. She, too, was a clever woman. At her coronation in Moscow, she was more overdressed than any woman in our country has ever been, and in far heavier and more unbecoming adornments. The fabric of her robes would have clothed an entire family. Four thousand pelts of four thousand of those pretty ermine rats were stitched together to make her robe, and she was so weighed down with precious stones that she could hardly move. She changed her dress and the styling of her hair ten times on that day of imperial celebrations. She ascended the throne in the year 1762, the imo year in which my husband was to die. I did not ascend the throne in Prince Sado’s place. Yet I was, in my own way, a great lady, and princess of an ancient kingdom. I was not a handmaid. I never became the Red Queen, but I was for many years the Crown Princess.

  I told a lie when I said that I had been reading about Catherine the Great ‘by chance’. On the contrary, I now suffer from a morbid and somewhat demeaning obsession with royal biographies, particularly of my own period, and have been making my way through lives of the Romanovs, of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, of Frederick the Great, of Napoleon and his Josephine, and of other potentates – lives that were unknown to me in my lifetime, restricted as we largely were to Chinese history and the Chinese tradition. Frederick the Great of Prussia, also my contemporary, was renowned as a great and enlightened ruler, yet he, too, nearly went mad in his youth, when he was crown prince. His soldier father put him under arrest for treason and conspiracy, and forced him to witness the execution of his dearest friend. The body of his friend lay on the sand in the sun for many hours. The crown prince, obliged to watch from an upper window, was forbidden to avert his eyes from this spectacle. The past is barbarous.

  The last emperor of the Ming dynasty of China hanged himself. Louis XVI of France was executed. Marie Antoinette, his wife, was executed. King Louis was executed in the year that the English ‘barbarians’, led by Lord Macartney, attempted to enter China and were contemptuously rebuffed.

  I repeat, the past of every country of the globe is barbarous. By telling this story, my story, I am not accusing my country of any special barbarity, of any unique cruelty. I have read of the unfortunate wives of Henry VIII. I have read about the Star Chamber, and about the Inquisition, and about the French Revolution. America today has its Death Row and its electric chair.

  Marie Antoinette was not nearly as intelligent and articulate as I am. She was a poor scholar and a muddled thinker. She blotted her books. Yet one cannot help but be moved by her sad story, for she was a devoted mother to her little ones. (She was falsely accused of incest with her son, a disgraceful and I believe unfounded allegation.) She, too, was a child bride, married by proxy at fourteen to a man she had never seen. The marriage took seven difficult and humiliating years to consummate. Prince Sado and I did better than that. Her wretched and sickly sons died. One of mine survived and became king.

  Oh yes, alas, we compete beyond the grave.

  In 1817, two years after my death, an Englishman, Captain Basil Hall, briefly sailed to my country, on a vessel called the Alceste: he wrote a fair and popular account of his visit, describing honestly the muted and distrustful but not wholly unfriendly welcome he received here. (We were very suspicious of foreigners, and with good reason: the Alceste and her companion sloop, the Lyra, were engaged in spying out and mapping our coastline.) Captain Hall executed some sketches of the volcanic Sulphur Island and of various other islands and harbours round our shores, and drew portraits of several of the gracefully dressed dignitaries whom he encountered. (He left behind the body of a young English sailor, who died at the age of twenty-one, and whose sad grave is still to be seen in the cemetery on the island now well known to you as Okinawa.) Like my husband and my son, Captain Hall had an artistic talent: his drawings were good. He later showed these sketches to Napoleon in exile on the island of Saint Helena. Napoleon expressed some interest in them. Captain Hall’s father, Sir James Hall, had studied with the boy Napoleon at the Royal Military School in Brienne in France.

  I do not know why I find this record of such an inconsequential contact between East and West so haunting. Maybe it is because so many of my family, like Napoleon, spent so much time in exile upon barren rocks and islands. I never in my lifetime set eyes on the yellow peak of Sulphur Island, nor on the Great Loo Choo islands. I saw them only in Captain Hall’s pleasantly tinted sketches, which I saw in the Rare Books Department of the British Library. I saw so little, in my long life.

  Was I plotting, with my brothers and their wives, against my husband and my father-in-law during Prince Sado’s absence in Onyang? Some would have said – many did say – that we were a wicked and treacherous cabal. ‘The Hongs of the Noron are up to their tricks again’ – that no doubt was a rumour that spread around the compound. Yet I would swear that there was nothing disloyal in our discussions. We were trying to save Sado from himself. It is hard to describe the pity I felt for this violent and unhappy man. Great unhappiness and torture of the spirit compel our pity. And I was the first bride of his bed, and the mother of his first-born child.

  My pity was much in demand on poor Sado’s return from Onyang. He came back much disappointed, and much earlier than we expected him. Onyang, he complained, was small, dull and provincial. Onyang was a bore. The society was undistinguished and largely octogenarian – as, indeed, it is in many watering places, as I had tried to tell him – and the buildings were unimpressive. Even the landscape, he said, was dull. (I was disappointed to hear this as I had long cherished a secret desire to travel south – a desire, as you will hear, that was long after to be most strangely fulfilled.) The radium hot spring and lightly alkaline water had done nothing for his skin erupt
ions, he said. He wanted to set off again at once on another trip, to P’yŏngsan, but we managed to persuade him that he would find this even smaller and duller than Onyang. We knew that his father would never permit another outing so soon, so we did our best to put him off the notion of any further journeys. He was strangely submissive to our advice, at least for a while.

  Prince Sado brought back a present for me. It was an amethyst sceptre, in a gross natural shape which I would now describe as phallic. The region was and is famous for its amethyst, so there was nothing particularly surprising or suggestive in the nature of the memento – apparently the tourist booths were full of these objects, though the piece that Sado brought for me was of princely quality. But I remember being slightly shocked by its form. The ladies-in-waiting sniggered at it, though not in my earshot, and I could see why. I pretended to be pleased with it, and created a little artificial garden for it, with a small lake of silver and flowers of jade and a tree of coral. He was pleased with my attentions to this ambiguous gift. There was so little I could do to please him that I was pleased, too. I wonder what happened to my amethyst garden. It was still at the palace when I died.