The Throne

MOI

They offer me a crown, and every eye is on me, watching my face for a flicker of desire. They will see a calm king; they will take for their example this marble where no one reads what I must suffer.

For this golden circle is not what they suppose: an ornament for the brow, a plaything of glory. It is a weight, it is a yoke, it is the heaviest thing a man can carry alone between his people and History.

To reign is to be no more. It is to owe yourself without pause. It is to eat beneath a hundred eyes, to sleep beneath a hundred suspicions; it is to have no friends, but flatterers without number, and to count your true griefs by the silence in the ranks.

I have weighed all of it. At length. In the shadows. And a hundred times I nearly pushed the burden away, and fled towards a gentler, more obscure life, where a man answers for nothing but his own rest.

But who would take my place? A coward, a greedy man, one of those who make of thrones an instrument of theft? No. If a mortal must carry this livid cross, let it be one who at least knows what it costs.

So I hold out my hands. Lay the crown in them. Not as one takes a possession, but as one takes up arms. I did not say “I want it”; I said “I forgive the fate that forces it on me”. And I walk on, without tears.

Let this be known for ever: I do not climb to this throne for the gold, nor for the shadow it casts over the great, but for what it demands. And on the day my reign rings false to my people, let me be judged not on the purple, but on what I give back.