The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  Sado was young and strong. So why did he climb voluntarily into his own wooden tomb? He sealed his fate. He consented, however reluctantly, to his death.

  I have tried to give you, from my observations, an accurate, factual description of what happened on that fateful day. It seems that there are two other known contemporary documentary accounts of that day’s events and its immediate consequences. My account, of course, is the most trustworthy.

  The second account, the most official and the most carefully edited, is in the Sillok for the reign of King Yŏngjo. The Sillok is the name we give to the official record or gazette of each king’s reign. Written in Chinese, these annals were compiled retrospectively, after each monarch’s death, but from contemporary sources. They were printed and preserved under rigorous management. The version in the Sillok for King Yŏngjo’s reign was, in effect, written by a committee – a committee of historians and diarists and editors. The Sillok, in all its 2,000 and more volumes, is now preserved as a National Treasure, under carefully controlled conditions. I am told that the Sillok for Yŏngjo’s reign consists of 137 volumes in eighty-three books, and, although it is full of minute detail, it is reticent about the illness and death of Prince Sado, which are described briefly and somewhat obliquely.

  The third account was written by a diarist who was, unlike myself, an eyewitness to what happened in the courtyard by the shrine. He was a recorder in the Royal Secretariat. In my lifetime, I did not know of his account, and I have not yet had an opportunity to study it in full. But I believe there are no major discrepancies between these three accounts.

  This third text, unknown to me in my lifetime but thought to be authentic, is said to describe in full, first-hand and distressing detail many of the events of which at the time I knew only by eavesdropping and by hearsay. It was preserved in the Yi royal family private collection, and has only recently come to light. All I can say here is that it is said to confirm my worst fears about the sufferings of the prince, about his futile efforts to strangle himself, about his tutors’ determined efforts to thwart his suicide attempts, about his father’s persistent fury, and about the confusion that ensued after the prince had been persuaded to climb into the rice chest.

  There are many stories about what happened later that night – some say that nails were driven through the chest, and some say that it was padded with straw to stifle the prince’s cries. But we all know that eventually the chest was sealed tightly, strapped with ropes, covered with grass, and carried from the lower to the upper palace where it was placed in front of the Office of Diplomatic Correspondence. At midnight, the king issued an edict deposing Prince Sado and demoting him to the status of commoner, but the royal secretaries refused to transcribe and issue it, saying that it was unlawful. The king had to write it out himself, in his own shaking hand.

  This may be the moment at which I should try to explain to you, to posterity, the reason – if one may call it a reason – why Prince Sado had to die in the rice chest, and not in some less painful or more dignified manner. Prince Sado had to die like this because it was very important to the state and to the royal succession that he should not die in the manner of a common criminal. It would have been acceptable for him to commit suicide, but this he was not willing or not able to do. He appears to have tried, after a fashion, to kill himself, but was easily prevented. It is not easy to fall on one’s sword. (Stronger men than he have quailed at such a moment. Even that brave warrior Mark Antony bungled it, and had to ask for help.) So Sado had to die in a manner in which no blood was shed, in a royal manner, in a manner in which his body was not disfigured or dismembered. (The consideration that he cannot have looked very pleasant after days of slow, cramped starvation in a rice chest does not seem to have carried much weight with those who devised his death.)

  Death by poison would have been acceptable. It had been the custom to present a cup of poison to those members of the upper classes who unfortunately found themselves obliged to remove themselves for the better good of the state. Some, like Socrates, took it willingly, but occasionally coercion followed the presentation, and the poison was forced down the victim’s throat. This had happened in the case of Lady Chang, the rival of the virtuous, childless and abandoned Lady Inhyŏn, the queen whose melancholy story had so mysteriously touched Lady Pingae. (Lady Chang, you may recall, was the lowborn mother of the crown prince who later became King Sukchong. King Sukchong was King Yŏngjo’s grandfather, and the poisoned Lady Chang was thus after a manner King Yŏngjo’s step-great-grandmother.)

  The unfortunate manner of Lady Chang’s death had cast a lingering cloud over the succession. It was a bad precedent. Perhaps that was why the rice chest seemed to offer a better option than poison. It was certainly cruelly ingenious. The device of the rice chest technically absolved the perpetrators of any guilt. As Sado was seen to enter the chest unaided, he was deemed to have voluntarily chosen death. I leave it to you to judge whether or not this device was to his father’s credit.

  I note that some unsubstantiated versions of this day’s events claim that Sado was indeed offered a dish of hemlock and refused to drink it. I do not know whether this was true or not. If it was, I did not witness it.

  I return, now, to my own actions on that long and dreadful day. I was informed of my son’s failed intercession, and of the king’s implacable determination to force the death of Sado. I have said that at this point I knew little of the story of the rice chest, but eventually news was brought to me of Prince Sado’s incarceration. You can imagine how unreal, how fantastical, how horrible this denouement seemed to me. At last, recovering myself a little for my son’s sake, I sat below the gate in the late afternoon shade and wrote a letter to His Majesty, humbly requesting permission to return with my son to my father’s home. With difficulty, I managed to find a eunuch and asked him to deliver it to the king. Not long afterwards, First Brother came to me with a royal decree granting that I should be allowed to depart the palace. A palanquin was to be brought for me, and a sedan chair for the Grand Heir. I was unable to walk, but I was carried on someone’s back through the Ch’ŏnghwi Gate, where the palanquin was already waiting for me. A lady-in-waiting rode with me. And so I went home to my father’s house, no longer the royal wife of the crown prince, but the wife of a condemned criminal, and a commoner. Despite the slow accumulation of my fears and my sorrows, I had not thought that it would come to this.

  I was laid in a room in the inner quarter of my father’s house. Soon we were joined by my nine-year-old daughter-in-law, the Grand Heir Consort, who shared our disgrace: her family had sent a palanquin for her, and she came with my oldest daughter Ch’ŏngyŏn. So we were reunited in our humiliation. The shock suffered that day by the Grand Heir Chŏngjo was indescribable, and the horrors of it were not over yet. I do not think Chŏngjo ever recovered. Certainly he never forgot.

  It took Prince Sado eight days to die in the rice chest. He was eight days dying. During this period, I remained at my father’s house, which was now crowded with many who had fled from the palace, including all the ladies-in-waiting from the Grand Heir’s establishment. It was a scene of chaos and displacement and uncertainty. We had to rent the house next door, and to cut a passageway through the fence in order to accommodate everybody. I say ‘we’, but it was Father and First Brother, I believe, who were obliged to take these practical steps for our family’s physical survival. I was, for these first days, beside myself. I was sealed up in the black box of my own grief and horror, and I was of no use or help to anyone. I had always suffered – as I think many of us do – from a mild form of claustrophobia, and the thought of my husband’s entombment was appalling to me. I had hated those underground fake coffins he had made for himself, and now he was sealed in a real coffin. My imagination could not abandon him. I died along with him.

  Our household, at this time, expanded, as others joined us in our exile. My youngest brother, Fourth Brother, who had always been a close friend of the Grand Heir, came to
stay with us; the two boys shared a room in the guest wing for eight or nine days, where Fourth Brother did his best to comfort his young nephew. In strict protocol, the Grand Heir should have done penance for his father’s crimes by kneeling in the open air on a straw mat awaiting punishment, and two buffoon officials actually came to suggest that he do this, but we did not pay them any attention. Why should the child suffer more? He was suffering unendurably as it was. We compromised by keeping him in the part of the house with low eaves, as a symbolic gesture of disgrace, a gesture that cost us nothing and which I like to think he, poor child, hardly noticed.

  And so we waited for news of the end. Day followed day, and each day my mind was filled with images of death. Of his death, but also of my own. Fasting, drowning, stabbing, self-strangulation: which method should I select? It was my wifely duty to accompany my husband to the Yellow Springs, as his sister Hwasun had followed her husband, and yet it was also my duty to protect the Grand Heir and the future of the dynasty. I prayed to the gods and the spirits for an early death for Sado, and I believe that I hoped he would find some way, inside the rice chest, to hasten his own end. But he did not. Embattled, anguished to the last, he lingered stubbornly on. On the last day, in the afternoon, there was a heavy summer storm, with torrential rain and thunder. The memory of the prince’s terror of thunder tormented me, and it is my belief that he died in mortal fear during that storm. I am told he was responding to voices until that storm broke, but that, after it, no sound came ever again from the rice chest.

  What were they saying to him in those final hours, those petty warders and pitiless officials who were monitoring his slow decease? Were they taking minutes, attempting to extract confessions?

  The Sillok records, sparely and bleakly, that the prince was locked in the rice chest, and died there eight days later. It apportions no blame, gives no cause of death. No postmortem was performed.

  As soon as his son was safely dead, King Yŏngjo composed a new edict restoring his grandson the Grand Heir to his former title. My son was now allowed to emerge from the shadow of his father’s disgrace. King Yŏngjo also renamed the dead prince as Crown Prince Sado, the Prince of Mournful Thoughts. Thus he tried to absolve his conscience, and reshape the past.

  I think much about parricides and also about the murders of sons by fathers. I do not think there is a recognized noun in your language for the latter crime. That does not mean that it is a crime that is never committed. Parricide, matricide, infanticide – these are common crimes in myth and in history. But the murder of a grown son by an ageing father? Language hesitates to invent such a word for such a deed. I suppose ‘filicide’ would serve, but it sounds strangely, and I have yet to find it in any dictionary.

  Queen Agave in the Bacchae murdered her son Pentheus, but she was deranged at the time, and took him for a lion. The Thracian King Lycurgus killed his son Dryas with an axe, mistaking him for a vine branch. King Yŏngjo was sober when he ordered the death of his son. He knew he was killing his own son.

  At least King Yŏngjo does not have the unique distinction of being the only monarch in modern times to have murdered his son. I have recently discovered that Peter the Great of Russia murdered his son Aleksei in July 1718. That, too, was a hot month. Princes die in the dog days. Peter the Great’s son had been accused not of madness, but of treason. Some said that Aleksei, having refused to drink the poison his father offered him, was decapitated in his prison cell by a marshal. Some say Peter himself struck off his son’s head with an axe. It is then said that one of Peter’s mistresses undertook the unpleasant task of stitching the head back on again, so that the appearance of the corpse could substantiate the official view that Aleksei had dropped dead from a stroke on hearing his death sentence pronounced. The Romanovs do not seem to have shared the Yi dynasty’s objection to the shedding of blood, but they were devious enough in their own ways. At least Sado had never requested me to do any head-stitching. Body substitution, perhaps, but not body stitching.

  After these brutal events, our family embarked upon a period of prolonged mourning. As you can imagine, this was a demanding exercise, full of unknown and unprecedented difficulties. Confucian ritual and court precedent had failed to establish the proper manner of mourning for a royal prince judicially murdered by his own father. Despite the fact that we were a nation unhealthily obsessed by ancestor worship and by protocol, and spent much of our leisure time traipsing around the shrines and monuments of past monarchs and princelings; despite the fact that our history (like all histories) was littered with episodes of treachery and fratricidal and patricidal violence; despite the fact that the tragedy of this particular death had been gathering for years like a slow thundercloud on a distant horizon – despite all these facts, nobody was quite sure what to do, and yet everybody, including, I admit, I myself, was desperately intent upon doing everything ‘correctly’.

  The simple truth is that never before in our annals had a father so coldly, so brutally, so cruelly and so openly murdered his only son. This horrific crime stands alone in our story, and bears comparison with the most monstrous crimes of the world’s story. (As you can see, I read about these crimes, now, obsessively.) So what were we to wear, to placate it, to mourn it, to grieve for it?

  The king, immediately after Prince Sado’s death, ordered his residence to be raided. The crypt, the underground chambers, the sleeping apartments were ransacked. The servants discovered military paraphernalia of all kinds – flags, weapons, daggers – and mourning staffs with concealed swords within them. These, in my view, were all evidence of Sado’s dementia, but the king seemed to construe them as proof of conspiracy, not of madness. He ordered them all to be burned. I cannot blame him for his horror. I, too, was horrified, had long been horrified by these objects. The king also ordered the execution of many of the prince’s associates – a courtesan, a eunuch, a Buddhist nun, several palace servants and craftsmen, and some shamans. I had at the time but little regret over the deaths of these characters, for I thought they had led the prince astray and encouraged him in his lunacies.

  I had hoped that the court officials would be allowed to wear mourning costumes appropriate for the mourning of a prince regent, as Prince Sado had served the state as prince regent for fourteen years. But this King Yŏngjo forbade. The attendants and eunuchs had to make do with mourning garments of an unattractive, second-rate pale blue. We were to be sufficiently grateful that Sado’s title as crown prince had been restored, for he had died, technically, as a deposed commoner. King Yŏngjo suggested that the coffin be laid at Yongdong Palace, but my father persuaded him to have it carried to the Crown Prince Tutorial Office, which he deemed a more appropriate resting place.

  My father, at this time, was in an extraordinarily delicate and dangerous position. He dreaded the consequences of this tragedy for our entire family, but his chief aim was the protection of his grandson the Grand Heir, who was now, in effect, the new crown prince. The king, who had so many times violently dismissed and capriciously reinstated my father, was still in a state of extreme mental volatility, and might have been blown in any direction, but I think, nevertheless, that on one level even at this time he depended on the steadying influence of my father’s advice and judgement. My father, by appearing calm, loyal and dutiful, managed to form funeral committees, governed by precedent and law (in so far as there was any precedent), and he undertook to oversee these personally, as president, in every detail.

  I know that there are those who believed that my father, rather than Lady SŏnhŬi, was the prime mover in the death of Prince Sado, and that it was he who suggested the rice chest. Some truly believed this, others found it expedient to say that they believed it. I suppose I cannot wholly dismiss this possibility. He left no account of his actions on earth. Had he arranged Sado’s death, he would never have told me: he would have taken the guilt of it upon himself, in order to spare me. It may be that he was implicated, for he had for some years been a witness of the effects of Sado�
�s clothing phobia, and of his violent outbursts. He would have put me, his daughter, and his grandson Chŏngjo first, and preferred our survival to that of his son-in-law. We were his flesh and blood, his stake in futurity. But, whatever his putative involvement, there was no mistaking his distress and grief during these terrible events. At the end of the long last day of Sado’s long death, and having arranged for the prince to be laid in his coffin at the Crown Prince Tutorial Office, he came home at dawn to me and, holding my hand, wept bitterly. He wished me a long life – which I have indeed enjoyed, if that be an appropriate word to use – and assured me that, with the Grand Heir at my side, I might yet find peace and happiness in my later years. I thought, at that time, that I was more likely to find sudden death. There were many who wished me dead.

  That morning we set off for the palace, the Grand Heir and I, for the formal funerary rites in Simin Hall and KŬndŏk House. The Grand Heir let down his hair and wailed, and his little girl bride stood at the women’s side of the hall with me and his sisters, and we all wailed as we called out for the soul of the departed. I could not bear the sound of my son’s cry. It was more than a cry; it was a loud shriek of protest and despair. It was not the sort of noise you expect to hear from a child of nine years.

  The body of the Prince of the Rice Chest had been washed with wet towels and laid upon a box of ice upon a coffin table. The nose and mouth, the eyes and the ears had been covered and tied, and he had been clothed in a complete suit of burial garments. I was not able to approach until all these observances had been completed, and although I had been told that the body, despite the heat of the time of year, had suffered little decomposition, I was not able to verify this unlikely assertion with my own eyes. It is very likely that I was told this for my comfort. Nor did I permit my son, his wife or my daughters to see the body before it was enclosed in the coffin. Such sights are not for children. And it was only on that first day of mourning that I allowed them to wail with me. I could not bear to hear a repetition of those terrible cries.