I

All this, the reader will remember, had taken place in Lent. The King had done something which according to the accepted canons was quite incorrect; he had been to a frivolous but popular play during the penitential season and it had got into the papers. But instead of being blamed for it he had gained enormously in popularity.

Now had his Majesty been merely aiming for this, as politicians aim for it (deserting principles for party, or party when its principles become a hindrance), he might have followed the lead given him by the people of Jingalo, and, recognizing that the Church Calendar had lost its hold upon the popular imagination, might thenceforward have secularized his conduct, and paved the way in Court circles for that separation of Church and State which his ministers were itching to bring about but did not yet dare.

But John of Jingalo had all the defects which belong to a conscientious character. He had not gone to the play for amusement, it had not amused him, he did not at all agree with the public's attitude towards it, and yet he was reaping the benefit; he was standing in a glow of popular approbation under false pretenses; and the more he thought about it the less he liked it—it gave him a bad conscience.

Yet, in spite of that, he could not but recognize that he had touched power; under a misapprehension the people had responded to him as never before; he had done what they regarded as a sporting thing in sending unpopular officialdom to the right-about; it was even possible that among theatrical circles when the exploit was talked of he was now known as "good old King Jack." All the same he did not feel that he had been good, and he wanted to make amends.

The highly colored conversations of Max, the talk about whipping-boys and Court jesters, and all those ancient divinities which had once hedged a King but were now mere barbed wire entanglements, had turned his attention toward certain medieval institutions the practice of which had lapsed, or had become reduced to a mere shadow of their former selves. And with a conscience ill at ease over the damage he had wrought to a season which he still regarded with a certain conventional reverence, his thoughts lighted upon Maundy Thursday, then less than a fortnight off.

He remembered having once watched from a private gallery in the royal chapel the impoverished ceremony which now did shabby duty for the old symbol of kingly humility and service. He had seen the vicarious sacrifice of silver pennies doled out by his almoners to a duplicated dozen of old men and women who had lost their better days in circumstances of the utmost respectability; and shocked at the poverty of the display he had been glad to learn that a more Christian gift of tea, clothes, snuff, and tobacco was added outside the Church door when the ceremony was over. But even so its ritual had not attracted him: it had lost its human values, and seemed to have been kept in life merely for archeological association.

Now on looking into the matter once more (the Encyclopedia Appendica gave him the required information) he was astonished to find that the old foot-washing ceremony of Holy Thursday was originally the chief function at which every year the Knights of the Holy Thorn were bound, if not unavoidably prevented, to appear and do service. Nay, when he turned to it, he found that it still stood so expressed in the Charter of the Order, and that each new Knight, upon admission thereto, swore solemnly to keep and observe the same—so help him God—faithfully unto his life's end.

If he had had any doubt before, the terms of that oath, which he himself had taken—probably without understanding it since it had been read to him in Latin—were sufficient to decide him. Without loss of time he sent word by his Comptroller-General to the Prime Minister that he intended in the following week to revive the full ceremony and to recall the Knights of the Thorn to the duties they had so long neglected. The ceremony, as of old, was to take place in public at noon outside the doors of the metropolitan cathedral.

"The King is going off his head," said the Comptroller-General by way of preface to the announcement with which he was charged; and the Prime Minister was ready to agree with him when he heard it.

"Preposterous!" he exclaimed.

"He has got chapter and verse for it," lamented the Comptroller-General.

"Can't you persuade him that it's a forgery?"

"It's in the oath," replied the other; "you yourself have taken it."

"Oh, yes, the form; but the ceremony—the accompanying service, I mean—was cut out of the Church Prayers at the time of the Reformation. It has become illegal."

"Inside a church, yes; not outside. At least that is his contention. Oh, I have already done my best! He got quite excited when I ventured to discuss the matter,—asked me if I understood the nature of an oath, and whether I had ever taken one."

"Is he much set on it?"

"I have had to write to the Archbishop."

"What do you think he'll say about it?"

"Ordinarily he would oppose it as savoring of Rome; under present circumstances my impression is that he will welcome it as giving the Church an added importance. You don't like it?"

"Of course, I don't."

"Then you had better see the King yourself. You have only a week left; and he has already begun looking at the weather-glass and wondering if it's going to be fine."

"That's just like him!" said the Prime Minister.

"Yes, and he's getting more like himself every day. My part is not a sinecure, I can assure you."

Accordingly the Prime Minister went over to the Palace and saw the King. Informed as to what line of argument had already been tried and failed, he approached the matter from a new standpoint: he spoke in the name of Protestantism. This ceremony had only survived in Catholic countries; in Jingalo the Reformation had killed it, and it had gone with graven images, the invocation of saints, and the worship of relics to the limbo of forgotten foolishnesses.

"The Charter of the Holy Thorn has not gone," said the King.

"Nor has your Majesty's title to the Crown of Jerusalem; but who ever thinks of enforcing it?"

"I am willing to resign it any day," replied his Majesty. "I can also, if you think it advisable, abolish the Charter of the Holy Thorn and the Knighthood with it. But I don't think the Knights would quite like that."

"If it comes to a question of liking," said the Prime Minister, "I do not think they will quite like washing beggars' feet in public."

"Oh, I do the washing and the drying," said the King. "They only carry the basins and put on the boots. I have looked up the whole ceremony; it's very impressive. You have only to read it and you will become converted: it is so symbolical."

The Prime Minister objected that though in its origin the ceremony might have had symbolic meaning and beauty, its performance now-a-days would be looked upon as a mere form and superstition, contrary to the spirit of the age.

This reminded the King of a certain "maxim."

"'The spirit of the age,'" he quoted, "'is the industrious collection of bric-à-brac—good, bad, and indifferent': this one happens to be good, and has been neglected. And talk about forms and ceremonies!—what can be more formal, superstitious, and idiotic than the procession of Court functionaries and King's Musketeers (with the Dean of the Chapels Royal carrying a candle) which, on every ninth of November—the anniversary of the Bed-Chamber Plot—comes to look under my bed to see whether assassins are not lurking there? On one occasion I was laid up with influenza, but I had to submit to that form and superstition because it had become traditional. And all the papers gloated over the fact, and called it 'a link in the chain of monarchy,' though as a matter of fact the conspiracy in question had been got up against that branch of the succession which we afterwards succeeded in dethroning. All the personal inconvenience I had to endure on that occasion was as nothing in comparison to the satisfaction which the public got out of it. No, Mr. Prime Minister, if you are going to do away with things because they are forms and superstitions, then I institute the Order of the New Broom, and I make you the first Knight of it; and the rest of your life will have to be spent in sweeping." ("And oh!" thought the King, feeling himself in form, "I only wish Max could hear me now!")

Failing in his personal appeal the Prime Minister turned on the Departments, and the King fought them one by one: the Board of Works which wanted to have the roads up; the Clerk of the Weather who said that a depression unsuitable for open-air gatherings was crossing Europe; the Chief of the Police who said that so large an open space was bad for a crowd; the Minister of Public Worship who wished everything to be done—if done at all—indoors and unobtrusively, by preference in one of the Royal Chapels: the effect, he said, would be more reverent. And when all these in turn had failed, the Prime Minister asked for a Council on the subject, and was told it was none of the Council's business.

"I am Grand Master in my own Order," said the King, "and you, as one of its Knights, in any matter pertaining to the Order owe me your unquestioning obedience."

That was unanswerable; he did. And so the King got his way.