How the King Conquered

There once was a king who heard rumors of injustice and corruption in his city.   He decided to investigate.  Charging his trusted servants and loyal palace guard to keep his secret well, he disguised himself as a worker, let us say a woodworker, and slipped out into the city.

Because there really was injustice and corruption in the city, there was also a revolutionary ferment there.  The people who had been looking for a revolutionary leader to lead them in overthrowing their oppressors were very taken with him–they thought he could be the one.  He was very well-spoken, he seemed to have much more organizational talent and skill at war than anyone else in that class did, and he had natural authority.   Of course the corrupt authorities disliked him.  But sadly enough, the revolutionary activists in that city also increasingly hated him.  He wasn’t organizing the way they thought he should.  He spent a lot of time just teaching people how to  have better lives instead of getting  them worked up about the very real injustices they suffered.  He was willing to associate with officials and the upper classes.  Instead of just attacking them, he talked to these elites about how they could live better lives that would calm down the unrest in the city.  This was the opposite of what a revolutionary should be doing!  Worse, he started attacking the revolutionary activists; he seemed to hate them worse than the actual corrupt rulers!  He said they got the people killed in riots and outbreaks while themselves extorting dues from them and generally battening off the people’s despair.  They accused him of lacking revolutionary purity.  He told them he had come to fulfill the revolution, not to abolish it.

One exciting day he finally claimed his leadership of the revolution, and in a way even of the city.  He ordered city officials to stop being corrupt or else.  He cast the activists out of the movement.

The activists and the city officials conspired to stop him.  You, who are politically savvy, will not be surprised to know that they already had many contacts with each other behind the scenes.  And not always behind the scenes either.  Some of the activists were wealthy men in their own right from the most powerful and influential of families.

They arrested him.  They beat him.  They then threw him in prison.  When he was in prison, and a few days had passed to give anyone who wanted to visit the prisoner a chance to do so, they hauled him off for execution at the palace yard.  At the place of execution, the prisoner challenged the assembled officials to claim responsibility for his death.  Which of them consented to it?  Most of them, and the revolutionary activists too, said that they did.  He then turned to the guards and ordered himself freed. The guards knew who he was.  They loosed him.  I am your king, he announced, and had the guards shut the gates.

There were a few among those present who had shown kindness to the king in prison or who had not consented to his death.  He told them he would let them go for a few hours.  Any of their friends not present that they could persuade to join the king’s side, he would spare.  But the gates would remain closed; the friends would have to take the emissary’s word for it.

At the end of the allotted time, he had executed all the guilty in the palace yard and then sent his guards throughout the city, executing every one, high and low alike, that he had found to be corrupt and unjust, unless they had been persuaded and accepted by one of the emissaries he had allowed to be sent out.  Those who had proven themselves he put in as the new magistrates, and peace and justice and prosperity were the lot of all.