The Return of the King. Such a joy. Isn’t it?

The Return of the King… 

Boy, do I remember Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I read it in its entirety to my boys when they were 6 or 8 or something. Well, if either was six when we started, he’d have been eight by the time I finished anyway. It took a good two years, especially with the younger one dropping off to sleep each evening after I’d read about fifteen minutes, so I could never make much progress. 

For bedtime book reading, it was a kind of Everest. Everest without rest.

The last of the three books is called The Return of the King and it culminates with joy and celebration when the rightful heir to the throne finally ascends it. Years ago, I found it all terribly poignant and gripping. Later, though, I read Terry Pratchett’s Men at Arms. He has a different take on all this. Throughout the book, there are repeated hints that a certain Corporal Carrot, of the City watch (the police) is, in reality, the last descendant of the kings of Ankh Morpork, the great city of Pratchett’s Discworld, where the throne has stood empty for centuries.

Debunking the the myth

Carrot eventually wins promotion to captain. He and the city's autocratic but benign dictator, the Patrician, have a conversation near the end of the book, which is one of the best moments in this entire spellbinding story. The Patrician, who knows that Carrot is a potential rival for power, asks him:

‘Tell me, captain… this business about there being an heir to the throne… What do you think about it?’

‘I don’t think about it, sir. That’s all sword-in-a-stone nonsense. Kings don’t come out of nowhere, waving a sword and putting everything right. Everyone knows that.’

The return of the king might seem a matter to celebrate when it first happens:

‘But what will he do the next day? You can’t treat people like puppet dolls… a man has got to know his limitations. If there was a king, then the best thing he could do would be to get on with a decent day’s work…’

As always, Pratchett is the champion of sanity, decency and good sense. Yes. Why should it be so wonderful to have a long-absent king return? What makes monarchs so great? Looking at the present royal families of Britain, where I have my roots, or Spain, where I live, I can’t help feeling it would be a great improvement if they got on with a decent day’s work instead of engaging in the tiresome behaviour they seem to enjoy far too often.

These thoughts all came back to me as I was working on my podcast, A History of England, which does me a lot of good, if only because I have to learn, or re-learn, so much English history.

On 29 May 1660, his thirtieth birthday, Charles II rode into London looking terribly fine on his horse, to take the crown which had been removed from his father’s head, not long before that head was removed from its shoulders. 

It’s a pity we don’t have a photo of the son’s arrival in London. I imagine that his expression might have been a little solemn at first, if only to cover both self-satisfaction and apprehension. He had reason to be worried, since he didn’t have much force with him, and couldn’t be sure that the London population would receive him well.  A little later, when he saw his welcome, I expect he was all smiles, with perhaps even more self-satisfaction to hide.

His accession to the throne ended the period of the English republic, or Commonwealth, and Britain has been a monarchy ever since. For better or for worse. And, in my opinion at least, mostly for worse, especially over the last thirty or forty years (Di, Prince Andrew, Meghan).

Charles II's return was met with great feasting. That was perhaps in part because the collapse of the Commonwealth had looked to many as though it might degenerate into renewed civil war. The last one had ended only ten years earlier, and people had vivid memories of its horrors.

Nell Gwynn
Best known mistress of Charles II

Then, as Carrot suggested, there was the next day. Charles has come to be known as the Merry Monarch. And there was, indeed, plenty of merriment. He had a string of mistresses, the best known probably being the orange seller Nell Gwynn (she had other professions earlier, possibly including the oldest) and, at the diametrically opposite end, Louise de Kéroualle, the French noblewoman sent by the King of France to be his mistress, and made Duchess of Portsmouth by the grateful Charles.

Louise de Kéroualle
sent by the king of France to be
mistress of the king of England

The French had sent money, too, and such was the gratitude Charles felt to them that he took the country to war alongside Catholic France against fellow-Protestants in Holland. That didn’t go down well in England, steeped as it was in anti-Catholic sentiment. Indeed, prejudice later grew into a frenzy so fierce that, for three years, it became a perfectly McCarthyite witch hunt against Catholics, after Titus Oates launched his entirely fabricated conspiracy theory, known as the Popish Plot, to whip up hatred against them. 

Why, not even the king could resist it, but had to accept the fall of his own government and its replacement by people he found far less congenial.

Nor was it only Catholics who suffered during this supposed golden age. Things were just as bad at the other end of the scale, with radical Protestants – Presbyterians, Baptists, even Quakers – facing persecution. In deeply Presbyterian Scotland, there was what came to be known as the ‘killing time’, the persecution was so fierce. Why, thumbscrews would even be displayed in court, to show offenders what treatment awaited them if they were found to be uncooperative.

A wonderful thing, the Return of the King? Well, writing that episode convinced me that, while for some it might have been, for many it wasn’t.

These days, I’m more than ever convinced that Pratchett got it far more right than Tolkien did. All that sword-in-a-stone nonsense? It’s for the birds.