The White King’s Wages

KING:
To seek for wisdom, and to remain a fool;
to reign in fetters to a nobler rule
and reach no greatness greater than it allows;
to bid what might be wait upon what should;
to deal in good faith with one who, caught in a lie,
would lose no jot of honor in his friend’s eye;
to be called dissembler by such as mock their vows:
this lot is given to those who would be good.

To feel your folly the more the more you know;
to be bound in duty to mere printed pages;
to deem some merit in your deadliest foe:
to tolerate, till the intolerant rise in rages
that you have space for them, and for those they despise;
to feel the act constrained by the fact you ponder,
to die for a nicety, or be thought to wander:
these are the wages of those who would be wise.

To humbly accept the task of embodying glory
and assume the costume assigned in the allegory,
and thus be deemed a gaudy dream of escape;
to show as it should be your corrupt estate
(as all things bodily are corrupt) and drape
some fiction of beauty on wealth, of power on strength,
which must be shown as a vain shadow at length:
all this is granted to those who would be great.

To please my foes, I yielded to many slights.
To serve my friends, some few bad deals I refused.
To please my father and God, I defended my rights
and those of my children and Church—and so, stand accused
of tyranny, treason, murder. And I accept:
As I am England, all these sins are mine.
I, England, to the great masque’s architect
will kneel, extemporize or genuflect
as the scene bids me, as He deems condign.
In His hands I place all; if He bids live,
I live. If not, the instrument I forgive.

First printed in SKCM News, the journal of the Society of King Charles the Martyr: American Region, an Anglo-Catholic devotional society. The poem is spoken by King Charles I of England and of Scots in a moment of reflection while awaiting his death on the scaffold. Charles was referred to as “The White King” due to his supposedly wearing white at his coronation, with different implications by both his supporters and detractors.