The Prince and the Pauper quotes

It may be history, it may be only a legend, a tradition.

It may have happened, it may not have happened: but it could have happened.

It may be that the wise and the learned believed it in the old days; it may be that only the unlearned and the simple loved it and credited it.

In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.

On the same day another English child was born to a rich family of the name of Tudor, who did want him. All England wanted him too.

England had so longed for him, and hoped for him, and prayed God for him, that, now that he was really come, the people went nearly mad for joy. Mere acquaintances hugged and kissed each other and cried.

All Offal Court was just such another hive as Canty’s house. Drunkenness, riot and brawling were the order, there, every night and nearly all night long.

Broken heads were as common as hunger in that place.

Yet little Tom was not unhappy. He had a hard time of it, but did not know it. It was the sort of time that all the Offal Court boys had, therefore he supposed it was the correct and comfortable thing.

All Offal Court was just such another hive as Canty’s house. Drunkenness, riot and brawling were the order, there, every night and nearly all night long. Broken heads were as common as hunger in that place. Yet little Tom was not unhappy.

He had a hard time of it, but did not know it.

It was the sort of time that all the Offal Court boys had, therefore he supposed it was the correct and comfortable thing.

“How dar’st thou use a poor lad like that? How dar’st thou use the king my father’s meanest subject so? Open the gates, and let him in!”

You should have seen that fickle crowd snatch off their hats then.

You should have heard them cheer, and shout, “Long live the Prince of Wales!”

“

Ah, good your worship, what would they do with more? Truly they have not two bodies each.

”

“Then will I utter it. Thou hast the same hair, the same eyes, the same voice and manner, the same form and stature, the same face and countenance that I bear.

Fared we forth naked, there is none could say which was you, and which the Prince of Wales.

And, now that I am clothed as thou wert clothed, it seemeth I should be able the more nearly to feel as thou didst when the brute soldier—Hark ye, is not this a bruise upon your hand?”

He made two or three further efforts to help himself, but being promptly forestalled each time, he finally gave up, with a sigh of resignation and a murmured “

Beshrew me, but I marvel they do not require to breathe for me also!

” Slippered, and wrapped in a sumptuous robe, he laid himself down at last to rest, but not to sleep, for his head was too full of thoughts and the room too full of people. He could not dismiss the former, so they stayed;

He was only an ornamental appendage at this time, and was seldom called upon to exercise his function; but there had been times, not many generations past, when the office of taster had its perils, and was not a grandeur to be desired.

Why they did not use a dog or a plumber seems strange; but all the ways of royalty are strange.

My Lord d’Arcy, First Groom of the Chamber, was there, to do goodness knows what; but there he was—let that suffice.

The Master of Ceremonies was not present: there was no one who felt safe to venture upon this uncharted sea, or risk the attempt to solve this solemn problem.

Alas! there was no Hereditary Scratcher.

Meantime the tears had overflowed their banks, and begun to trickle down Tom’s cheeks. His twitching nose was pleading more urgently than ever for relief. At last nature broke down the barriers of etiquette:

About his neck hung the order of the Garter, and several princely foreign orders;” and wherever light fell upon him jewels responded with a blinding flash.

O Tom Canty, born in a hovel, bred in the gutters of London, familiar with rags and dirt and misery, what a spectacle is this!

“

Then shall the king’s law be law of mercy, from this day, and never more be law of blood!

Up from thy knees and away! To the Tower, and say the king decrees the Duke of Norfolk shall not die!”

And so they were, in effect—at least they could exhibit it from their windows, and did—for a consideration—whenever a returning king or hero gave it a fleeting splendor, for there was no place like it for affording a long, straight, uninterrupted view of marching columns.

Men born and reared upon the Bridge found life unendurably dull and inane elsewhere.

History tells of one of these who left the Bridge at the age of seventy-one and retired to the country. But he could only fret and toss in his bed;

… to the Hereditary Grand Diaperer, who passed it to the Lord High Admiral of England, who passed it to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who passed it to the First Lord of the Bedchamber, who took what was left of it and put it on Tom.

Poor little wondering chap, it reminded him of passing buckets at a fire.

Each garment in its turn had to go through this slow and solemn process; consequently Tom grew very weary of the ceremony;

“

My back is my bread, O my gracious liege!

if it go idle, I starve. An’ thou cease from study mine office is gone thou’lt need no whipping-boy. Do not turn me away!”

Tom said the words which Hertford put into his mouth from time to time, and tried hard to acquit himself satisfactorily, but he was too new to such things, and too ill at ease to accomplish more than a tolerable success.

He looked sufficiently like a king, but he was ill able to feel like one.

He was cordially glad when the ceremony was ended.

“

It enrageth me that a man should be hanged upon such idle, harebrained evidence!

”

“

It seemeth a rude unchristian thing, and ill contrived, that English law denieth privileges to Englishmen to waste them on the devil!

” cried Tom, with honest heat.

The morning’s experiences had wonderfully built up his confidence; the poor little ash-cat was already more wonted to his strange garret, after four days’ habit, than a mature person could have become in a full month.

A child’s facility in accommodating itself to circumstances was never more strikingly illustrated.

Let us privileged ones hurry to the great banqueting-room and have a glance at matters there whilst Tom is being made ready for the imposing occasion. It is a spacious apartment, with gilded pillars and pilasters, and pictured walls and ceilings.

But a truce to these matters; I believe your father. I doubt not he can lie; I doubt not he doth lie, upon occasion, for the best of us do that; but there is no occasion here.

A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for nought.

But come; sith it is thy humor to give over begging, wherewithal shall we busy ourselves? With robbing kitchens?”

He wandered on, wounded and indignant, and was resolved to put himself in the way of like treatment no more.

But hunger is pride’s master

; so, as the evening drew near, he made an attempt at another farmhouse; but here he fared worse than before; for he was called hard names and was promised arrest as a vagrant except he moved on promptly.

This petrified him, nearly, with fright; his mind was in such a state that he could imagine the thing to be nothing else than a corpse, newly dead and still warm. He thought he would rather die than touch it again.

But he thought this false thought because he did not know the immortal strength of human curiosity.

In no long time his hand was tremblingly groping again—against his judgment, and without his consent—but groping persistently on, just the same. It encountered a bunch of long hair; he shuddered, but followed up the hair and found what seemed to be a warm rope;

Would he say a lie? For look you, Prissy, an’ it were not true, it would be a lie. It surely would be. Now think on’t. For all things that be not true, be lies—thou canst make nought else out of it.”

It was a good tight argument, without a leak in it anywhere; and it left Prissy’s half-doubts not a leg to stand on.

She considered a moment, then put the king upon his honor with the simple remark—

… him, that he forced himself to atone for it by humbling himself to the family level, instead of requiring the woman and her children to stand and wait upon him, while he occupied their table in the solitary state due to his birth and dignity.

It does us all good to unbend sometimes.

This good woman was made happy all the day long by the applauses which she got out of herself for her magnanimous condescension to a tramp; and the king was just as self-complacent over his gracious humility toward a humble peasant woman.

“Hullo-o-o! Open! And despatch, in the name of all the devils!”

Oh, this was the blessedest sound that had ever made music in the king’s ears; for it was Miles Hendon’s voice!

The hermit, grinding his teeth in impotent rage, moved swiftly out of the bedchamber, closing the door behind him; and straightway the king heard a talk, to this effect, proceeding from the “chapel:”

Miles sprang forward, with a happy confidence, to meet her, but she checked him with a hardly perceptible gesture, and he stopped where he was. She seated herself, and asked him to do likewise.

Thus simply did she take the sense of old comradeship out of him, and transform him into a stranger and a guest.

The surprise of it, the bewildering unexpectedness of it, made him begin to question, for a moment, if he was the person he was pretending to be, after all. The Lady Edith said—

and instead had got the cold shoulder and a jail. The promise and the fulfilment differed so widely that the effect was stunning; he could not decide whether it was most tragic or most grotesque.

He felt much as a man might who had danced blithely out to enjoy a rainbow, and got struck by lightning.

But gradually his confused and tormenting thoughts settled down into some sort of order, and then his mind centred itself upon Edith. He turned her conduct over, and examined it in all lights, but he could not make anything satisfactory out of it.

“None believe in me—neither wilt thou. But no matter—within the compass of a month thou shalt be free; and more, the laws that have dishonored thee, and shamed the English name, shall be swept from the statute books.

The world is made wrong; kings should go to school to their own laws, at times, and so learn mercy.

”

“

Kings cannot ennoble thee, thou good, great soul, for One who is higher than kings hath done that for thee; but a king can confirm thy nobility to men.

” He picked up the scourge from the ground, touched Hendon’s bleeding shoulders lightly with it, and whispered, “Edward of England dubs thee earl!”

An’ this go on, I shall presently be hung like a very maypole with fantastic gauds and make-believe honors. But I shall value them, all valueless as they are, for the love that doth bestow them.

Better these poor mock dignities of mine, that come unasked, from a clean hand and a right spirit, than real ones bought by servility from grudging and interested power.

”

… people, whose beer-jolly faces stood out strongly in the glare from manifold torches—and at that instant the decaying head of some former duke or other grandee tumbled down between them, striking Hendon on the elbow and then bounding off among the hurrying confusion of feet.

So evanescent and unstable are men’s works in this world!

—the late good king is but three weeks dead and three days in his grave, and already the adornments which he took such pains to select from prominent people for his noble bridge are falling.

… surf when it is blown to the ear out of a great distance, for it was smothered under another sound which was still nearer, in his own breast, in his accusing conscience—a voice which kept repeating those shameful words, “I do not know you, woman!”

The words smote upon the king’s soul as the strokes of a funeral bell smite upon the soul of a surviving friend when they remind him of secret treacheries suffered at his hands by him that is gone.

New glories were unfolded at every turning; new wonders, new marvels, sprang into view; the pent clamors of waiting batteries were released; new raptures poured from the throats of the waiting multitudes:

“Where lieth the Great Seal? Answer me this truly, and the riddle is unriddled; for only he that was Prince of Wales can so answer!

On so trivial a thing hang a throne and a dynasty!

”

Tom Canty stood almost alone. Now ensued a brief season of deep suspense and waiting—during which even the few faint hearts still remaining near Tom Canty gradually scraped together courage enough to glide, one by one, over to the majority. So at last

Tom Canty, in his royal robes and jewels, stood wholly alone and isolated from the world, a conspicuous figure, occupying an eloquent vacancy.

Now the Lord St. John was seen returning.

“Sire, the Seal is not there!”

A mob does not melt away from the presence of a plague-patient with more haste than the band of pallid and terrified courtiers melted away from the presence of the shabby little claimant of the Crown.

In a moment he stood all alone, without friend or supporter, a target upon which was concentrated a bitter fire of scornful and angry looks. The Lord Protector called out fiercely—

Tom stammered a moment, in a pathetic confusion, then got it out—

Poor child, the avalanche of laughter that greeted this nearly swept him off his feet.

But if a doubt remained in any mind that Tom Canty was not the King of England and familiar with the august appurtenances of royalty, this reply disposed of it utterly.