The Kings Men | Page 2

a position in the
legation at Paris; but when the Radicals overthrew Rourke's
government, Ripon lost his place. And Ripon could not but think it hard

that he, Geoffrey Ripon, by all right and law Earl of Brompton,
Viscount Mapledurham in the peerage of Ireland, etc., etc., should that
afternoon have been fined ten shillings and costs for poaching on what
had been his own domain.
His great-uncle looked down upon him with that exasperating
equanimity that only a canvas immortality can give--his great-uncle
who fell on the field of Tel-el-Kebir, dead as if the Arab bullet had sped
from a worthier foe, in the days when England had a foreign policy and
could spare her soldiers from the coast defence. And his grandfather,
who smirked from another coroneted frame behind him, had been a
great leader in the Liberal party under Gladstone, Lord Liverpool, the
grand old man who stole Beaconsfield's thunder to guard the Suez
Canal, that road to India which he, like another Moses, had made for
their proud legions through the Red Sea.
And now Ripon was living in his porter's lodge, all that was still his of
the great Ripon estates, with his empty title left him, minus the robes
and coronet no longer worn; and his King, George the Fifth, an exile,
wandering with his semblance of a court in foreign lands.
The world moves quickly as it grows older, with an accelerated
velocity, like that of a falling stone; and it is hard for us of the present
day to picture the England of King Albert Edward. The restlessness and
poverty of the masses; the agitations in Ireland, feebly, blindly
protesting with dynamite and other rude weapons against foreign
oppression; the shameful monopoly of land, the social haughtiness of
the titled classes, the luxury and profligacy of the court--perhaps even
at the opening of our story, poor England was hardly worse off. But
then came the change. Gradually the bone and sinew of the country
sought refuge in emigration. The titled classes, after mortgage upon
mortgage of their valueless land, were forced to break their entails to
sell their estates. And at last, when the great American Republic, in
1889, cut down the Chinese wall of protection, which so long had
surrounded their country, even trade succumbed, and England was
under-sold in the markets of the world. Then retrenchment was the cry;
universal suffrage elected a parliament which literally cut off the royal

princes with a shilling; and the Premier Bradlaugh swamped the House
of Lords by the creation of a battalion of life peers, who abolished the
hereditary House and established an elective Senate. It was easy then to
call a constitutional convention, declare the sovereign but the servant
and figure-head of the people, confiscate the royal estates and vote
King Albert a salary of £10,000 a year.
Then Russia took advantage of the great struggle between Germany
and France to seize India, and after the terrible defeat at Cyprus and the
siege of Calcutta the old King of England abdicated in favor of his
grandson George. But the people clamored for an elective President,
and it was nigh twenty years before the opening of our story that King
George had been forced to seek his only safe refuge in America.
Thus it was that Geoffrey Ripon had come to depend on poaching and
the garden stuff his old servant managed to raise in the two-acre lot
surrounding the lodge. Almost the only modern things in his room were
the guns and fishing tackle in the corners and the electric battery for
charging the cartridges; and now he was judicially informed that he
must poach no more, the mortgage had been finally foreclosed, and he
looked out of his window upon lands no longer his even in name. It is a
sad thing to be ruined, and if ever man was ruined beyond all hope,
Geoffrey Ripon, Earl of Brompton, was the man; it is hard to feel you
are the last of your race, that you are almost an outlaw in your own
land--and Ripon's king, George the Fifth, was suffered to play out his
idle play of royal state, in Boston, Massachusetts. Ripon had never
been in America. He pushed back his chair from the fire, as it gave out
a heat too great for any man to stand. He walked to the window, and
stood looking out upon the long perspective of elms, where the avenue
stretched away in the direction of Ripon House. As his eye wandered
over the broad view of park and forest, a carriage, drawn by four horses,
insolent in the splendor of its trappings, rolled toward him from the
castle. In that moment it seemed to Ripon that he felt all the bitterness
of hatred and