Pas de Rois?

Further to all that No Kings exuberance in the former colonies yesterday, a tiny slice of history from Merry Old England...

It's approaching the end of 1386.

The King is an effete 19-year-old, an extreme narcissist obsessed with hygiene and social distancing. Without knowing it he has invented the linen hankerchief as a way of blowing or wiping his nose or indeed covering his mouth when interacting with his subjects.

He has a near absolute belief in his own authority and a form of personal rule which is disconcerting to say the least for the Lords and the Commons, who collectively maintain a rather different notion about the way that the interests of the realm ought to be managed.

The French are about to invade.

Not one of those putative invasions as with Napoleon (and later Adolf), for the troops and their horses and supplies were already on board hundreds of ships at Bruges that November awaiting a change in the weather. Bonne chance avec ça, but London's mayor has ordered citizens to stockpile food and in Kent evacuations are underway.

Addressing this very imminent danger on any level will require the raising of significant revenue and a level of governance approaching basic competence.

But the Royal administration is a complete mess: corrupt, inefficient, leaky and the monarch himself surrounded by a coterie of acquisitive and extravagant favourites, also rumoured to be hanky waving types.

This situation might be said to have had its roots in the end of the previous reign, generally considered by historians to have been highly successful, but which ended with the old guy in a semi-senile state being preyed upon by a notably materialist young lady and her family.

His successor and grandson has lately been refusing to attend Parliament, the agreed forum for handling disputes at the elite end of society "behind closed doors".

Faced with a sovereign who will not engage with any of the established channels of communication, who appears more interested in adventures in the opposite direction, over the Irish Sea, and who has even suggested that he might submit to his French 'cousin', rather be cornered by his own magnates, the Lords and Commons elect to stage a bit of a coup.

Out go the loathed Chancellor and Treasurer and, via appropriate statute, in comes a 14-man council which would reform the administration and effectively run an emergency government for a year in the sovereign's name.

The King stomps off on an extended peripatetic sulk with his hangers on, wandering from place to place across the North and the Midlands, plotting his royal revenge.

After six months he comes up with a cunning plan. He summons the country's most senior judges to a meeting place of his choosing and cajoles them into producing a written judgement stating that everything that has been done to limit his authority is thoroughly illegal and akin to the most heinous treason.

He then turns south and heads towards London...