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04/04/2005 Entry: "Kaspar"

Our good friends at the Fortean Times have a nice article about Kaspar Hauser, that creepy lad who wandered onto the scene in Nuremberg in 1828, well dressed and well fed, yet feral, and who sparked many a lost-heir theories only to get himself inexplicably murdered.

I first read about this kid in the second grade. I loved checking out those Usborne tabloidesque comicbookish non-fiction works: Spycraft (write codes, wear a beard made out of Mum's yarn, kill anyone who knows too much), Detection (dust for prints, learn to recognize a crimal wearing a beard out of Mum's yarn, employ unspeakable interrogation practices) and Castles (we're rich; we still have to crap in pots. Those things up on the wall are called crenelations). My favourite was called Ghosts and Other Wicked Creepy and told us all about ghost ships and ghost pictures and UFOs and Kaspar.

I was intrigued by Kaspar right away. It was partly because no one knew where he came from and what exactly he wanted. It was partly because he wound up dead. And it was partly because he was under 13.

That reminds me of another historical character who fascinated me as a child: Edward V.

I believe it all started when we visited Madam Tusaud's wax museum shortly after we moved to London. I must admit, I was probably smitten by that wax figure of Edward's and his brother Richard because what with the long hair they looked like those girls in Hanson(actually the wax figures bore absolutely no resemblence to portraits of the time), but later the fact that they disapeared in 1483--exactly 500 years earlier--seemed important to me.

The back story is this: Edward IV dies, leaving his oldest son the crown. Uncle Richard declares them bastards, keeps them under lock and key in the Garden Tower--now the Bloody Tower for the selfsame reason to what will transpire, also the same tower where Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned--and crowns himself Richard III. The two young princes are never seen again alive. Their skeletons were found almost 200 years later buried in the tower and now reside in Westminster Abbey. Another page in the War of the Roses. Whether it was Richard III or Henry VII who did them in is not important to me.

The lesson I took in at the age of ten was something like, even if you are the king, as a child you are no match for those greedy grownup motherfuckers.

But as an adult, I realize that I was then already sort of on to something. Power is essentially a social fiction. Even if you are the king, you need an army to back you up. Even if you have an army, you need the economy and infrastructure to see that they are fed and paid. Order and Rule-of-Law are not simply maintained by force, but rather by a belief that the system works--at least well enough until payday--and more or less thereby you maintain a willingness to further obey. Just like in Steven King's the stand, in a post apocalyptic world you can't buy anything with a briefcase full of a million dollars, after Richard's III armies were defeated he could not buy a horse to escape for an entire kingdom.

And so it was that lil' Edward and his brother Richard, both way in over their heads, and one way or the other surely dead, shall remain in my mind at least as saints or perhaps martyrs to the lessons of sociology. Pointing toward perhaps that one most repeated and more often forgotten lesson of history.

Sometimes a kingdom can't buy a horse.