Henry V knew what the heraldic swan was thinking with its Chinese accented English: “How would you like it if I roasted you and then took a big bite out of you, you ridiculous-looking, ungainly creature with your pudding-basin haircut, ruddy peasant cheeks and ungainly legs? Call yourself a king? I don’t think so—at least not for long.”
Henry V was well used to critical brickbats, not to mention puny revolts, but he sensed the truth underlying the heraldic swan’s warning. It made him uneasy. It spoke again—and this time aloud and most bitterly to him: “Think yourself lucky. A swan swimming along, swanning along a lake and then facing the degradation of being toasted black by the flames of a man’s fire! Tut, tut. Well, a German composer sat that to such music as to make your blood curl. Tut, tut.”
Henry V’s eyes widened with yet more abject surprise and he looked at the swan remains in his coarse hands with embarrassment.
“Well, I think we graceful animals can do better,” continued the regal swan. With that, it raised its wings ever so slightly and stamped one foot. A fissure like a mouth appeared in the chunk of swan flesh in poor Henry V’s hands. As if on cue, the remains of the roasted swan sang ever so delightfully in falsetto, “What misery! What a crime to burn me on a spit like a heretic and then munch me in your teeth—you a dead royal who’s never even read a book!”
The surprise in Henry V’s widening eyes turned into an unpleasant shudder that seemed to shake the king’s body and made his stomach retch. He set the half-eaten chunk of swan carefully on the ground and moved discreetly away. But the uneaten morsel of flesh was having none of this dismissal. Its mouth went on singing, “ Miser, miser, you miserable little man. I’m keeping an eye on you. ”
Henry V tried to stop himself gulping and giving himself away to the other kings. He did not want the morsel of flesh developing an eye that really would watch his every uncertain move.
“As to my reputation,” Henry V mused as he again put on his faded cloak with shabby heraldic embroidery in order to tread the high ground of regal rights. “Because I died so young, people never had the chance to find me out when I was alive—unlike the kings who outlived public approval. I had the sense not to qualify praise or contradict criticism. Who am I to go against England’s greatest writer—especially when he has placed me on a pinnacle no one else can reach?”
The heraldic swan turned its attention to the antelope and said churlishly, “You don’t have anything to feel superior about, either. None of us is safe from mankind. It will be your turn next.” At this, the antelope visibly blanched under its muddy silver coat.
As the attendant swan kept making sniping noises, Richard II said in Ginny’s hearing aid, “You see why the collective—the umbrella—term for a group of swans is a Lamentation of Swans.”
The other kings and queens were also eating private snacks when they thought no one was looking. In a rare pause between bites, Henry III turned to acknowledge one of the later kings, who was dressed in eighteenth century costume of knee britches and white stockings that matched his white wig. When Henry stopped chewing for a moment, he said, “My dear fellow, if I knew you were coming, I’d have baked a cake, baked a cake.”
“That’s good of you, liebchen,” said George II, stumbling over his German accent.
When Georgie came back from the garden in the cloisters to re-join his sister, it was the turn of Elizabeth I’s successor, James VI and I, to catch the crown in the ceremony that had started again. This twinkling double-faced king with bushy, red-brown hair seemed both grander and grumpier than the others. Now the crown was a jewelled masterpiece of regal display. As an attendant servant handed James his orb and sceptre he said impromptu, “Och, laddie, that’s awful good o’ you.”
James’s other emblems, the rather ragged-looking russet lion rampant and the faded silver unicorn, made submissive gestures somewhere between a bow and a curtsey. Turning to Ginny, James I said confidentially, “We know what you’re thinking. You expected to see the lion and the unicorn fighting for the crown. But no, my mischievous child. You see, the lion represents England and the unicorn represents Scotland. The combination of the lion and the unicorn comes when England and Scotland get joined together in unholy matrimony—notably after the political invention of the United Kingdom. That’s still a century hence. But I knew it would come so I tried to sow a seed of expectation.”
With that, King James moved to the attendant unicorn that had helped dress him and kissed it affectionately on the cheek. Then he caressed its single horn as if he were polishing a silver candlestick. Some of the other kings exchanged unsurprised glances of disdain. But James VI and I did not mind their reaction. He suddenly clapped his hands. With that, the kings in an inner circle and their attendants and queens came to attention and all held hands. Georgie thought they were going to sing, “Auld, Lang Syne,” as if it were New Year’s Eve. Instead, as they all stepped sideways, they spoke collectively in a sing-song style:
Ring, a-Ring of Roses,
A pocket full of posies.
At this precise moment, James tossed his crown in the air.
“Well, it can’t go to his son, Charles I, because he was executed and he’s buried at Windsor,” thought Ginny. She knew better than to say this aloud, however. “So James must toss the crown to his grandson, Charles II.”
But no! For, when the kings and queens got to the next line of the little rhyme about the plague, “A-shoo, a-shoo, we all fall down,” they all did fall down backwards.
Ginny heard the voice of Richard II insistent in her ear.
“You remember the Black Death? It wasn’t just a catastrophe in the time of Edward III. Besides being the first major epidemic, it also heralded periodic eruptions of other major epidemics until 1720. These epidemics included typhus, influenza and smallpox. There were bad outbreaks of the plague in 1605 and 1665.”
Ginny guessed there was more to the kings’ staged collapse than Richard II had told her. She had learnt enough that night to believe that, whatever their calculated words of sympathy, the royals cared nothing for the sufferings of their people. No. The royals’ little all-fall-down was meant to signify not another bout of the plague. It signalled the rout of the monarchy in the English Civil War and the creation of a republic, the Commonwealth, under the protector, Oliver Cromwell. As if to underline the fall, all of a sudden above them, the kings’ magic crown stopped spinning. It disintegrated in mid-air. Its precious jewels, diamonds, rubies and pearls shot out of the gold circle like so many shooting stars travelling to infinity.
The kings and queens huddled on the ground and covered their eyes from their greatest embarrassment. They had not minded their American guests seeing them dress and undress—even when they were incomplete underneath their clothes—nor being seen when they had to endure one another’s putdowns. But to be seen when their entire class faced extinction, that was intolerable humiliation. As they scrambled shamefacedly back up to their feet, they were interrupted again.
SHOWSTOPPER
“Fee, fie, fo, fum!” thundered a cry from outside. The American visitors sensed deep fear among the anointed kings and queens. Indeed there was. When Georgie turned to look at them—and most were standing up—the monarchs had shrunk. Now even the tallest of them only came up to his waist.
“Fee, fie, fo, fum!” barked the voice outside the great west doors a second time. Ginny and Georgie could feel the little assembly trembling.
The shrunken kings and queens were mightily afraid of this unspecified, coming danger. It was as if they were like the little people of Lilliput about to be invaded by a giant from Brobdingnag (something that never happens in Gulliver’s Travels). Their fear irradiated the abbey, as the mighty sound of a dreaded tread outside grew louder. When it stopped, there was an overwhelming pounding on the great west doors. Inside, the queens became like ultra-feminine little girls nestling their heads on the shoulders of the nearest males—kings or animal commoners. The pounding on the door grew louder still
.
When it stopped, there was a mighty crash as the outsize doors practically flew open. Then came a loud thud, then another. And at the third thud there, silhouetted by street lights outside, stood the black-armoured metal figure of Oliver Cromwell, onetime lord protector of the republican Commonwealth. Here he was: the Puritan bogeyman of all kings and queens. It was the statue from just outside Parliament come to life. His voice sounded as outsize as his ominous physical presence. Beside him, there stood a proud metallic horse.
“How now, you secret black and midnight hags?” he sneered. “Did I upset your midnight revels; set you puny lords and ladies a-leaping with fright?”
From somewhere in the awestruck crowd, Edward III said, “I think his voice is amplified. That boom is not natural. It’s being sonically enhanced for effect.”
“So you thought you could ignore me: forget to invite me to your secret ceremony. But, as all of you know, I have as much right to be here, warts and all, as any of you. In fact, I have more right than most of you because I tread the higher path of moral certainty and virtue. In my time, frivolous England set aside its mistaken king and brought political probity to the little kingdom that I renamed a republican Commonwealth. Besides, I was buried here.”
Not all the kings were struck dumb, least of all the later Stuart sovereigns whom the young Americans had not yet met. That devilishly handsome rake Charles II knew he had to defend the reputation of his martyred father, Charles I, and his own right to reign over the restored monarchy in 1660—not to mention to assert what little dignity he could since the other quivering monarchs seemed to have forgotten theirs.
The metal figure at the west doorway strode forward not comfortably but with the awkward ill-grace of a body not simply encased but entombed by political rigmarole as much as by the shackles of armour. His horse moved to the shadows. No one noticed that it had acquired two extra legs.
“Yes,” said Charles II angrily, “you were buried here originally. I was generous to the political enemies of our house apart from the regicides—those subversives who signed the death warrant against their lawful king, my sainted father.”
“But now I’m back, warts and all,” boomed the menacing figure. “You thought that by taking me out of my comfortable grave, doing horrible things to my revered body, and—after an indecent interval—hiding my head in my old Cambridge college, that you had got rid of me. Huh? But my spirit lives on—the spirit of Republican right. It lives on in the minds of political reformers all over the world.”
The intrepid Charles II was not to be outfaced by this trumpery apparition.
“You’re not a man. You’re a statue—and one paid for by a double-dealing prime minister, Lord Roseberry, as a not-so-subtle snub to Queen Victoria.”
He spoke, first tremulously but increasingly confident as he felt the support of the craven monarchs beside him. By the time the unwanted guest had finished speaking, Charles II had regained his accustomed size, a full six-foot-two. Grabbing the sceptre of one of the more timid kings, he went up to the Oliver Cromwell look-alike and struck its side.
“Alive or dead, you don’t frighten me.”
The other kings and queens heard a muffled, “Ouch,” echoing inside the metal frame.
Ginny and Georgie could sense the royals farther back getting restive, especially the later Stuarts. Indeed, William III and Mary II and Queen Anne huffed and puffed as they adjusted their ceremonial robes, grooming one another so that not a hair was out of place nor their outfits twisted the wrong way. They were like thoroughbred horses chaffing at the bit, ready to be off and to shine in their fleeting moment of reflected glory in their second coronations. And the delay before their crowning glory was making them angry.
“There’s someone or something inside,” said Queen Mary II, one of Charles II’s nieces, who had also grown taller again, although she was still a small person. “Whoever or whatever it is, it’s working some machinery inside.”
The crowd heard a whirring sound. The statue put its hands together as if in sorrowful prayer.
“Give it another thwack,” Mary II suggested to her uncle. “That should teach it a lesson or make it come out.”
Charles II did as she suggested.
“I’m only a little fellow,” said the voice inside the statue. “Have some respect for disabled people. Don’t you know our time has come?”
“Fiddlesticks!” chorused the older kings and queens.
“In my day, whatever you looked like, whatever misfortune you suffered—physical, mental or sensory—you just had to get on with your life. Disabled? Fiddlesticks!” exclaimed Charles’s other equally impatient and far more imperious niece, Queen Anne.
With that, she hurled her not inconsiderable weight at the dark figure just as Mary II gave it another thwack with the sceptre she had taken from King Charles’s willing hand.
And the figure crumbled.
“No room for Ollie at your midnight feast?” asked the mystery voice.
Silence.
“And who else have you forgotten to enjoy your midnight revels?” it continued. “Where’s the world’s favourite Shakespearean king? The one who has captured the imagination of the entire globe as a divinely inspired devil?”
Some of the more intelligent sovereigns had inkling as to what was coming.
“Where on earth is Tricky Dickey? Richard III? No answer? You’re all so in favour of the divine right of kings but what do you do to protect your own when he’s out of favour? Where’s dearest Richard? Prove you have some fellow feeling and I will trouble you no more. Where, oh where, is Richard III?”
This was not a question that had troubled the sovereigns for over five hundred years. The kings and queens maintained their stony silence.
This embarrassing quiet was broken when Ginny heard a voice among the kings from somewhere in the back.
“I am Richard III.”
At first, Ginny thought there must be an echo for she heard again, “I am Richard III.” But then, another voice said, “I am Richard III.” And another.
Georgie looked around as one man after another said the same thing. He did not know how they had done it but there were now many Richards, all looking like famous actors of yesteryear who had played Shakespeare’s anti-hero on stage or screen. It was like an English yokel parody of the seemingly endless train of Chinese terracotta warrior statues guarding the tomb of the first emperor of China.
But these voices came from simulacrums of artsy Richards, all declaring that they were the one and only true Richard III. There was a Richard sent twirling like Leonardo’s round drawing of a symbolic man twisted as if on a wheel of fire. There was a Richard whose black medieval sleeves ended in crutches so that when he moved his two arms, two legs and two crutches, they were like the six snivelling legs of a malevolent spider. There was a Richard with a bushy crew-cut that made him look like an outsize hedgehog. There was a grumbling Richard in a grubby 1930s raincoat with a spent fag sticking out of his curled, sodden lips. Another Richard appeared with a bald dome of a head discoloured by a rainbow of lesions like the Norse fire god in a Wagner opera.
Amid the various cries of would-be Richards, one said in a distinct, much-imitated voice, part serpentine, part sibilant hiss, part rhetorical flourish, quoting the opening line of the famous Beatles’ song ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. Everyone turned around. The speaker looked like Laurence Olivier as Richard III complete with extended nose—part satanic comedian, part children’s bogeyman. And this famous Richard III—to prove his superior claim to the role and its crown—continued the Beatles’ song in the throwaway manner of comedy star Peter Sellers’s parody with the snappy second line about working like a dog.
But these lookalike actor Richards were now upstaged—even Laurence Olivier. For the black statue before them broke open. And out stepped a slender and still young man with a medieval pageboy haircut, a sallow face with luminous eyes. Was it to be one against many all over again as in the final stand-off aga
inst Henry VII at the battle of Bosworth in 1485?
The entire assembly was too surprised to murmur, far less protest. Ginny grasped who this young man with such intense charisma must be. And because she had read recent newspaper reports about the White Boar Society, she knew that this Richard III, far from being the malcontent hunchback of Tudor propaganda, nevertheless had a spinal abnormality known as scoliosis. Ginny was looking for a slight deformity in this strange man but the variable light in the abbey—pools of sharp light amid murky shadows—made it near impossible to see properly.
When they could see him better, the later Stuart Misses started to appraise Richard’s undoubted physical charms. Queen Mary II whispered to her sister, “He may be small but he’s strong. Oh, for such a man!”
Now standing unnoticed at the side in the shadows, Ginny’s father, Charlie, was ecstatic. Encouraged by the fearsome but kind black horse outside the abbey, it was he who had crept into the abbey at its side. He still remained unnoticed as Richard III took centre stage. An avid royalist, to Charlie this intervention by Richard III was history reborn: a dead king had come to life through intense partisan scholarship, unexpected excavation and impartial, needle-sharp scientific analysis. Charlie could practically recite word for word the press summaries of scoliosis he had read so avidly when the real Richard III had been unearthed:
"Scoliosis f rom the Ancient Greek: σκολίωσις scoliosis ‘bending’ is a medical condition in which a person’s spinal axis has a complex three-dimensional deviation. Viewed from the rear on an X-ray, the spine of someone with scoliosis can look like an S or C. Scoliosis is typically caused by vertebral anomalies present at birth."
Yet the spectre of Richard III before the other kings was in the prime of life—inasmuch as any physically impaired person could be. And this Richard III had survived much in death—more than the other monarchs as he was about to tell them. Holding the audience in Westminster Abbey in the palm of his hand, Richard III was in full flow.
Midnight in Westminster Abbey Page 19