Child Kings

Time is a child
playing draughts;
the kingship is a child’s.

Heraclitus

On a trip to Kraków, I am delighted by a regal little dude in Wawel Castle. It is Johan Baptista van Uther’s portrait of Sigismund III Vasa, a future king of Poland, as a squat, moon-faced boy. Dressed in a black gown and ruff, he looks away from the viewer, with a hint of a smile. In his tiny hand he grasps an apple, a symbol of nurture, learning and growth.

Sigismund loomed large in my own childhood. In Warszawa, my home city, he stands in adult form atop a giant column near the old town, honoured for transferring the capital from Kraków in 1596. It wasn’t until I stood opposite Van Uther’s painting, however, that I learnt that Sigismund was born a prisoner: he spent the first year of his life captive in Gripsholm Castle in Sweden, along with his parents. This knowledge made the painting, which I at first found slightly incongruous — a toddler standing in regalia, an early modern boss baby — suddenly feel truer than more « realistic » efforts to convey the actual psychological experience of kingship.

Sigismund was king of Sweden, too, and sure enough, slightly southwest, a dozen or so years into his rule, another Nordic prince was bewailing his captivity. « Denmark’s a prison », Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, sounding like a surly teenager. Rosencrantz replies that Hamlet’s ambition is what makes Denmark feel like a prison: « ’tis too narrow for your mind. » But more than ambition troubles the prince. Were it not for « bad dreams », Hamlet says, « I could be bounded in a nutshell and count / myself a king of infinite space. » His melancholia bends time and space, poisoning even his past. When, in the Gravediggers’ Scene in Act V, Hamlet gives his soliloquy whilst holding the skull of Yorick, the jester he knew as a child, he exclaims: « he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! » Hard to imagine Hamlet Sr. bearing Hamlet Jr. on his back. That kind of playing, we glean, was outsourced to a jester, whose « skull has lain in the earth / three and twenty years ».

A few months before, I had been in a gallery in London. Though easy to miss amidst the still lifes of dead game and antique clocks, one painting caught my attention. It is small, and shadowy, but the brush style is soft and there are lots of browns and draped cloths, giving it a Rembrandt warmth. The light from one window falls on a man on all fours, surrounded by little children, one of whom is riding him like a horse. Behind them there’s a woman, seated, barely visible. Two other figures — another man and a teenage boy — look on from the shadows, unamused. Henri IV and the Spanish Ambassador by Richard Parkes Bonington (c. 1827), the label read.

I later learnt that there are in fact several paintings from the nineteenth century that depict Henri playing with his children, apparently based on a popular anecdote that served to illustrate his fatherly qualities. Like the figures in the shadows in Bonington’s painting, I was unmoved. The message seems to have been: look at this fun dad who happened to be ruler of France! If van Uther staged sovereignty as potential — a monarch-to-be holding a piece of fruit — then in Bonington it is presented in the form of collective memory — the kind of apocryphal memories that structure national feeling, especially if they are in the saccharine visual register of nineteenth-century family values.

The darker B-side to Bonington et al is Charles-Gustave Housez’s 1859 painting of Henri’s assassination. Housez draws the eye to the expiring Henri at the centre of the painting. The regicide, traumatic though it was, could be subsumed into « the perpetuity of the Dynasty, the corporate character of the Crown, and the immortality of the royal Dignity », in the words of Ernst Kantorowicz. In The King’s Two Bodies (1957), Kantorowicz claimed that the concept of rex qui nunquam moritur (« a king that never dies ») in medieval political theology evolved from Pauline theology. « Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it, » St. Paul told the Corinthians. Just as Christ’s body died and was buried so that all can « be made alive », so kingship combines the physical, mortal body with the permanence of the body political.

The « king’s two bodies » belonged to an enchanted world: his subjects had to believe their ruler was mortal, but the crown eternal; that one thing can also be another. The sort of thinking to which those living under « the reign of logic », in the words of the Surrealist André Breton, no longer have access. Though militantly anti-clerical, the Surrealists were engaged in their own project of re-enchantment, a headlong rush out of the reign of logic.

In Breton’s first Manifest du surréalisme, from 1924, children, who possess an « effective, risk-free possession of [themselves] », take center stage. Oddly for a manifesto, it begins with a sense of disappointment. As adults, and as moderns, we grow « daily more discontent with [our] destiny », trapped in our « lustreless fate. » Children, on the other hand, like little kings and queens « set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine. » Breton’s manifesto pitched Surrealism as a return, a second opportunity — « the mind which plunges into Surrealism relives with glowing excitement the best part of its childhood » — that would take humanity forward. St. Paul told the Corinthians: « I became a man, I put away childish things. » Breton tells us to pick them back up.

Once, when I used to work in a primary school in London, there was great excitement as a man from outside came to lead the physical education lessons. First, he told the children to walk slowly from one end of the hall to the other on their hands and knees, as if we were tigers hunting for prey. « Focus on your bodies », he said, « If it hurts, that’s good, it means you’re feeling muscles you haven’t felt before. » He had charisma to burn. Even the teacher joined in. Then he told them to get down even lower and crawl like crocodiles, then hop like rabbits and squat like frogs. « When people grow up, they forget what most muscles feel like because they are always sitting in front of a computer. » The children moved like all sorts of animals — crabs, gorillas, snakes.