02 February 2017
Finding The King
Detecting royalty at a glance.
By Chin Chin
It was an unnerving experience. There I was at an excellent New Zealand restaurant having a good look through the menu. I was still wondering what to eat when a young woman appeared wielding a pad and a pencil, presumably to take down my order.
“What will we be having to eat?” she asked.
I jumped. Had I forgotten that I was dining with someone else, that my wife or an important business contact was sitting next to me? It certainly wouldn’t do to let them see that they had been overlooked, so I stayed rigid with a knowing smile on my face and swivelled my eyes from left to right, rather like Peter Sellers playing Inspector Clouseau. No, there was no one else at the table. Had they perhaps gone off to the loo leaving me with details of their order? If so it would be very bad manners just to order for myself. I swivelled the eyes again but no, the table was only set for one. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure that I was eating alone.
Was the mistake then the waitress’s? The holiday diet had certainly added a pound or two but surely not so much that she could mistake me for two people. Ah, the wall was covered with a mirror. She must have seen my reflection in it and assumed that I was eating with an identical twin. What would happen if I ordered a steak for each of us? Would she put a plate down and then become confused on seeing that we each had a steak in front of us but that she still had a plate in her hand? I am sure that Sartre would have tried it but it was too cheap a trick for an Englishman to play.
Anyway, she must have known that there was a mirror and so, when she repeated the question after a minute or two, she addressed it unmistakably to me. Then the penny dropped. It was some local variant on the Royal plural which uses it as a form of address. That must be it. She thought I was a king.
Now, many people think that to be royal you have to have a throne to sit on or people to command. That could not be more wrong. Those things are a possible consequence of kingship, not its essence. If you watch the Marlon Brando classic Missouri Breaks – yes, the one in which he plays a psychopathic thief-catcher and keeps looking down at a bird book in which one suspect his lines are inscribed – you will remember English Bob who explains that whereas presidents are two a penny and get assassinated the whole time, there is a regal quality to a king which makes it impossible to pull the trigger. Well, it is that regal characteristic which enables you to spot kings even if they happen to be in exile.
Looked at in this way, it was obvious what had happened. The girl had clearly looked at me and spotted regal qualities. The parentage of certain of my ancestors has never been talked about at family gatherings. Now I know why. It could have led to a war. I must be the senior member of some exiled royal house. The problem was to establish which one.
I took a careful look at the mirror. No, a perfectly normal jawline so that ruled out the Habsburgs. The emperors of China seemed a little unlikely too as did the royal houses of Swaziland, Zululand and places like that. That still left a large field of possibilities, and the logical way of approaching it was to look for dynasties which had disappeared without trace or where particular events have disrupted the line. France was an obvious candidate. No one knows what happened to Louis XVII but it is always assumed that the young man met a terrible end in a French prison. But supposing, just supposing, that some kindly washerwoman spirited him out and adopted him as her own? Well, there was certainly a loose end that needed to be accounted for.
Then there was that warming pan business. You remember. James II becomes increasingly unpopular for his Roman Catholicism, and his wife gives birth to a boy just before he is deposed and his daughters begin to rule in turn. The second of them, Queen Anne, a devout woman, is concerned that she may have displaced her brother. She is clever though and soon works out the truth. The baby wasn’t the son of James after all but was smuggled into the Queen’s bed in a warming pan. So far so good, all loyal Britons subscribe to that. It is the corollary which has escaped attention. If a Catholic baby was smuggled in, another baby, presumably a Protestant one, must have been smuggled out. It was horror at the early religious proclivities of his heir which induced James to make the substitution. What then happened to the descendants of the Protestant baby? Was the young woman in the restaurant the first to spot the truth? It seemed so.
The trouble is that spotting a true heir is no easy business and I rather doubt whether people who are not British are really up to it; now, that is not meant to be a racist comment. They could probably do it in straightforward cases where someone turns up with a sword in two bits or a nursery maid confesses to having messed things up by “being hard of hearing”; but where there are no obvious clues the whole thing is more difficult. Look, after all, at the Albanians who offered their vacant throne to C B Fry, the sporting hero. You can see why they thought he had royal blood. After all, had he not captained England at cricket, represented England at football, equalled the world long jump record, won the hundred yards at international level, captained Oxford simultaneously at football, athletics and cricket, played rugby for the Barbarians and competed for Southampton in the FA Cup final? Throw in a parliamentary candidature for the Liberals and he must have looked just the biscuit. Albanians no doubt rated their own royals pretty highly so it is hardly a surprise that they thought they had found the true heir. In fact they were mistaken and Fry was an English gentleman through and through. Still, an easy mistake to make.
The trouble is that if the Albanians could trip up, so could a young woman helping in a restaurant. Perhaps, despite a rather condescending nod on which I pride myself, I am not actually the heir to a throne at all but merely from a cadet branch of a royal house. A pretty pickle it would be if I were to scramble onto some throne only to get ousted.
No, the risk just wasn’t worth taking. I turned my attention back to the menu. “King prawns,” I said with a wink. The waitress smiled and bowed slightly.
