The Second Essay

The Regency Act 1811 was written for a King who could not act.

He looked at the sentence. It was the question turned round, which Mr Ferrante said was the worst way to start an essay and the most honest, because it showed the examiner that you had read the question, which most people had not. He left it.

In 1810 King George III became ill for the last time. He did not die for another ten years. For all of those ten years he was King, and could not do anything that a King does. He could not sign, or see his ministers, or open Parliament, or give assent. He was alive and he was the King and he could not act.

The Act was the Realm’s answer to this. Its first section made the Prince of Wales Regent in right of America, and is spent. The rest of it was written for a case that had not yet arisen, and it is short.

His hand was not steady. He could see it on the page: the letters leaning one way in one line and the other in the next, as if the desk were on a ship. He made them stand up. He pressed harder, like Theo.

The Act does three things. It says who decides that the King cannot act: three of five named officers, on the evidence of physicians. It says who will act for him: the heir, if of full age, and if not, the King’s consort. And it says how the Regent shall act: on the same advice, and under the same law, as the King.

But the most important words in it are not in a section. They are in the Schedule, in the Regent’s oath, at the end: that the Regent will restore the royal functions to His Majesty when the Act requires it. The Regent swears to give them back. Everything else in the Act depends on that.

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He stopped and wiped his hand on his trouser leg.

It was hot in the gym now. Properly hot. The sun had gone round and was coming in at the third window at a steeper angle, so that the bar of it lay across the front of his desk and over his wrists, and the backs of his hands were wet. The air above the desks did not move at all. Somewhere at the back somebody had their head in their hands. Theo, beside him, had taken his blazer off, which you were allowed to do, and hung it on the back of his chair, and his shirt was dark down the middle of his back.

He did not take his off. He did not want to stop writing long enough.

After 1820 the Act was left alone for two hundred and eight years. Other realms passed other Acts for other Regents, but the Realm never needed its own again, because it never again had a King who was alive and could not act, until 2028.

He looked at 2028. He went on.

In the week of Kittyhawk the King’s aircraft was lost on 25 September and the King was found alive on 29 September. He could not act. On 30 September three of the five declared it, and the Act of 1811 was used for the second time in its history.

Under it the King’s consort became Regent, because the heir was not of full age, which the Act says is eighteen. Under section 4 the heir, if he was not the Regent, might sit at the Privy Council as an observer, without a voice in its proceedings. That subsection had never been used. In 1811 the heir had been the Regent, and did not need it. It was written for a case that did not exist.

In 2028 it existed.

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He had the exercise book still. He did not know why he thought of it now. A blue exercise book, school issue, with ELLICOTT HIGH SCHOOL on the cover and HANOVER F. 10 in the box, half full of geometry, that he had taken out of his bag on the morning of the thirtieth of September because he did not have anything else to write in, and had opened at the back, at the first clean page, at the table of the Privy Council in the Council Chamber, with the Lord President on his left and the Clerk on his right and his mother at the far end in a plain dark dress taking the oath in English.

He had written down everything they said. He had not been allowed to say anything. He had written it all down in the back of a geometry book, in pencil, and his hand had not been steady then either, and he had pressed hard.

It was strange to sit there, he wrote. He crossed it out. The Board did not want strange. He wrote instead:

Section 4 has been criticised as unnecessary. Its critics say that an heir who cannot speak at the Council has no reason to be there. I think this misunderstands it. The heir is not there to speak. He is there to see the Crown carried on by somebody else, while the King is alive, so that he knows how it is done and so that everybody at the table knows that he has seen it. Section 4 makes the heir a witness. A witness does not need a voice.

He read it over. It was true. He did not know if it was good.

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The weakness of the Act is in its title, in the words the question uses. It was written for a King who could not act. It was not written for a King who could not act yet.

The Act said that the heir would be Regent if he was of full age. It did not say what would happen if the King could not act, and then the Crown passed, and the new King was a child. It had not imagined it. In 1811 nobody had imagined a King who was fifteen in a Realm that had chosen him.

On 30 October 2028 the governments of thirteen realms settled this by agreeing on one age, sixteen, at which a sovereign reigns in his own right. In the Realm this meant that the question whether the Act of 1811 reached a King who was a child never had to be answered. The Act was not changed. It was walked round.

So the Act served the Realm well for what it was written for, and was never asked to do the thing it was not written for, because the Realm decided not to ask it.

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He looked up.

The clock said twenty-two minutes past eleven, which meant eighteen and a half past.

He had two sides. He had perhaps twenty minutes of writing left in him, and thirty-eight minutes on the clock, and he knew what the end of the essay had to be, and he did not want to write it.

He looked down at the planning page, at the column under 2028. Kittyhawk. 25 September. And under it the word he had written and crossed out with the ruler, so neatly that you could still read it through the line, because he had not pressed hard enough to hide it.

He had written the King all the way through. Every time. The King’s aircraft. The King was alive. The King could not act. He had not once written my father. The Board did not want my father. Mr Ferrante said you did not put yourself in an essay; you put the evidence in and stood behind it.

And every time he had written the King, he had seen the sixth floor.

The chair by the bed. The window over the bridge, open last night, because his father had wanted to hear the traffic. Three pillows. The blue book on the shelf with the timetables in it, open at Tuesday. The hand on the blanket, flat, the way a hand lies on a table when the thing it was waiting for has come. Cars.

He did not know if his father was alive.

He found that he had stopped writing and was sitting with the pen above the paper and his eyes wide open, not seeing the paper, and that his throat had closed, and that if he did anything at all, if he blinked, if he moved his hand, something would come out of his face that he could not stop and that ninety people would see.

He did not blink.

He looked at the paper until it came back. The Act was not changed. It was walked round. His own handwriting, leaning, made to stand up.

He breathed in through his nose, once, slowly, the way his father had taught him to do on the porch at Lac du Roi before a speech, the summer he was eleven. In through the nose. Count four. Out. Then say the first word.

He wrote the first word.

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The question says the Act was written for a King who cannot act. I think this is the best thing about it, and not a weakness.

A King who cannot act is still the King. The Act does not pretend otherwise. It does not say that the King is gone, or that the Regent is King for now, or that the King’s place is empty. It says that somebody else will do what the King cannot do, in his name and on his behalf, while he is alive, and will give it back. It makes room for him. It keeps his place.

This matters because a King who cannot act can still do something. He can be there. He can be visited. He can be told things. He can hear that his country is being carried on by people who are doing it in his name and not in their own, and he can know that they are doing it well, and that is the thing that makes it his country still. The Act understood that a King is not only the things he signs.

In 1811 the King was mad and did not know. In 2028 the King was not mad, and knew.

He stopped.

He wrote:

I think the Act served the Realm well, because it was written by people who understood that the hardest thing for a King is not to act. It is to be unable to, and to be told about it every day by the people who are doing it for him, and to go on being the King anyway. The Act did not make this easier. It made it possible. That is all a law can do.

He drew a line under it with the ruler.

His hand, on the ruler, was shaking so much that the line had a kink in it at the end, like a railway line going over a bridge.

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When he looked up, Mr Lumsden was looking at him.

He had not seen Mr Lumsden look at a candidate all morning. Not at a face. He had looked at the air above the desks and at his watch and at the clock and at the doors and into his black book, and he had looked at faces only at the door at a quarter to nine, against a photograph on a card. He had not looked at anybody since.

He was looking at Frederick now. From the gym bench behind the table, beside the grey box, over the top of his half-moon glasses, with his hands on his knees.

It was not a hard look. It was not the look of a man who has seen a look and is going to ask what it meant. It was the look you give a candidate who has just drawn a line under an essay with a ruler and whose hand has shaken so much that the line has a kink in it. It went on for perhaps three seconds.

Then Mr Lumsden looked down at his watch, and wrote nothing, and looked at the air above the desks again.

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The clock said twenty-eight minutes past eleven, which meant twenty-four and a half past.

Twenty-four and a half past twelve in Buenos Aires.

He thought it without meaning to, and this time he did not push it away. Twenty-five past twelve. The Viceroy would have been at his desk for four and a half hours. And whatever was on it was still on it, because the High Commissioner was still at the gate.

He looked up at the third window.

Don Ignacio was sitting on Mr Obi’s chair in the very last of the shade, with the folder on his knees and the empty mug on the pavement by his foot, and he was not looking at the gate. He was looking along the road to the left, towards the river, the way the buses came.

There was a second car at the gate.

It had come along the road from the river and stopped behind the black car with the flag, and it was dark grey, and it had no flag, and he knew it. It was the car that went from the Palace to Charter House on Thursdays. It was the car the Private Secretary used.

The rear door opened before the car had properly stopped.