Sad stories of the death of kings


The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges...as absurd as an hereditary mathematician...and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureat. Thomas Paine
 
Kaiser Wilhelm II
 
He couldn’t do his job. They might as well have called
a man from off the street to keep the peace, or run
a war. He blathered playground speeches, swearing
to vanquish, crush, annihilate. The peasant boy
from Uckermark, the apprentice silversmith
of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, were toy soldiers.
Chance sightings of reality beyond the easy
phrase, unnerved him. Decisions were demons.
Bemused by treaties, overtures, diplomacy, his own
perfunctory blunders, he made play with suicide.

At war’s end, an estate in Holland, where he whiled away
another twenty years, felled twenty thousand trees,
fired blanks at Jews and socialists, read Wodehouse.
He disliked the vulgar Austrian, but warmed to him
as the great comeuppance for the Jews began, and wrote:
‘I pledge my loyalty to you, my Führer’ – who skim-read,
made a face, said: ‘Idiot’, and changed the subject.
 
The Tsarevich Alexei

His father was already dead, who had not known
the seven-times-table of good governance. His rule
was doggerel. He wore the black cap of ignorance.

His father was already dead. The Red Guards
dispatched his mother Alexandra next, not easily.
He and his sisters cowered in a corner. For five minutes

he was Tsar, consumed with fear. The function of his life
had been ordained before the earliest motion of the seed.
Like his dead father he was born to be at once

a king and slave. In all his fourteen years he could not wish
to be an engine-driver, sailor, clerk, or any kind
of common man. And he was born to bleed. One graze

and the Royal Disease would drain his body. As it was
they left him to the last, and then both stabbed and shot him,
and the mess of his ancestral blood was hosed away.