Chapter VIII: The Boss

by Mark Twain

　　To be vested with enormous authority is a finething; but to have the on-looking world consentto it is a finer. The tower episode solidified mypower, and made it impregnable. If any were perchance disposed to be jealous and critical before that,they experienced a change of heart, now. There wasnot any one in the kingdom who would have consideredit good judgment to meddle with my matters.I was fast getting adjusted to my situation and circumstances. For a time, I used to wake up, mornings,and smile at my "dream," and listen for the Colt'sfactory whistle; but that sort of thing played itselfout, gradually, and at last I was fully able to realizethat I was actually living in the sixth century, and inArthur's court, not a lunatic asylum. After that, Iwas just as much at home in that century as I couldhave been in any other; and as for preference, Iwouldn't have traded it for the twentieth. Look atthe opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains,pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with thecountry. The grandest field that ever was; and all myown; not a competitor; not a man who wasn't a babyto me in acquirements and capacities; whereas, whatwould I amount to in the twentieth century? I shouldbe foreman of a factory, that is about all; and coulddrag a seine down street any day and catch a hundredbetter men than myself.What a jump I had made! I couldn't keep fromthinking about it, and contemplating it, just as onedoes who has struck oil. There was nothing back ofme that could approach it, unless it might be Joseph'scase; and Joseph's only approached it, it didn't equalit, quite. For it stands to reason that as Joseph'ssplendid financial ingenuities advantaged nobody butthe king, the general public must have regarded himwith a good deal of disfavor, whereas I had done myentire public a kindness in sparing the sun, and waspopular by reason of it.I was no shadow of a king; I was the substance;the king himself was the shadow. My power wascolossal; and it was not a mere name, as such thingshave generally been, it was the genuine article. Istood here, at the very spring and source of the secondgreat period of the world's history; and could see thetrickling stream of that history gather and deepen andbroaden, and roll its mighty tides down the farcenturies; and I could note the upspringing of adventurers like myself in the shelter of its long array ofthrones: De Montforts, Gavestons, Mortimers, Villierses; the war-making, campaign-directing wantons ofFrance, and Charles the Second's scepter-wieldingdrabs; but nowhere in the procession was my fullsized fellow visible. I was a Unique; and glad toknow that that fact could not be dislodged or challenged for thirteen centuries and a half, for sure.Yes, in power I was equal to the king. At the sametime there was another power that was a trifle strongerthan both of us put together. That was the Church.I do not wish to disguise that fact. I couldn't, if Iwanted to. But never mind about that, now; it willshow up, in its proper place, later on. It didn't causeme any trouble in the beginning -- at least any ofconsequence.Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest.And the people! They were the quaintest and simplest and trustingest race; why, they were nothing butrabbits. It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble andhearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king andChurch and nobility; as if they had any more occasionto love and honor king and Church and noble than aslave has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has tolove and honor the stranger that kicks him! Why,dear me,any kind of royalty, howsoever modified,any kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightlyan insult; but if you are born and brought up underthat sort of arrangement you probably never find itout for yourself, and don't believe it when somebodyelse tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamedof his race to think of the sort of froth that hasalways occupied its thrones without shadow of rightor reason, and the seventh-rate people that have alwaysfigured as its aristocracies -- a company of monarchsand nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved onlypoverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to theirown exertions.The most of King Arthur's British nation wereslaves, pure and simple, and bore that name, and worethe iron collar on their necks; and the rest were slavesin fact, but without the name; they imagined themselves men and freemen, and called themselves so.The truth was, the nation as a body was in the worldfor one object, and one only: to grovel before kingand Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat bloodfor them, starve that they might be fed, work that theymight play, drink misery to the dregs that they mightbe happy, go naked that they might wear silks andjewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degradinglanguage and postures of adulation that they mightwalk in pride and think themselves the gods of thisworld. And for all this, the thanks they got werecuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were theythat they took even this sort of attention as an honor.Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interestingto observe and examine. I had mine, the king and hispeople had theirs. In both cases they flowed in rutsworn deep by time and habit, and the man who shouldhave proposed to divert them by reason and argumentwould have had a long contract on his hands. Forinstance, those people had inherited the idea that allmen without title and a long pedigree, whether theyhad great natural gifts and acquirements or hadn't,were creatures of no more consideration than so manyanimals, bugs, insects; whereas I had inherited theidea that human daws who can consent to masqueradein the peacock-shams of inherited dignities and unearned titles, are of no good but to be laughed at.The way I was looked upon was odd, but it wasnatural. You know how the keeper and the publicregard the elephant in the menagerie: well, that is theidea. They are full of admiration of his vast bulk andhis prodigious strength; they speak with pride of thefact that he can do a hundred marvels which are farand away beyond their own powers; and they speakwith the same pride of the fact that in his wrath he isable to drive a thousand men before him. But doesthat make him one of them? No; the raggedesttramp in the pit would smile at the idea. He couldn'tcomprehend it; couldn't take it in; couldn't in anyremote way conceive of it. Well, to the king, thenobles, and all the nation, down to the very slavesand tramps, I was just that kind of an elephant, andnothing more. I was admired, also feared; but itwas as an animal is admired and feared. The animalis not reverenced, neither was I; I was not even respected. I had no pedigree, no inherited title; soin the king's and nobles' eyes I was mere dirt; thepeople regarded me with wonder and awe, but therewas no reverence mixed with it; through the force ofinherited ideas they were not able to conceive of anything being entitled to that except pedigree and lordship. There you see the hand of that awful power,the Roman Catholic Church. In two or three littlecenturies it had converted a nation of men to a nationof worms. Before the day of the Church's supremacyin the world, men were men, and held their heads up,and had a man's pride and spirit and independence;and what of greatness and position a person got, hegot mainly by achievement, not by birth. But thenthe Church came to the front, with an axe to grind;and she was wise, subtle, and knew more than oneway to skin a cat -- or a nation; she invented "divineright of kings," and propped it all around, brick bybrick, with the Beatitudes -- wrenching them fromtheir good purpose to make them fortify an evil one;she preached (to the commoner) humility, obedienceto superiors, the beauty of self-sacrifice; she preached(to the commoner) meekness under insult; preached(still to the commoner, always to the commoner) patience, meanness of spirit, non-resistance under oppression; and she introduced heritable ranks andaristocracies, and taught all the Christian populationsof the earth to bow down to them and worship them.Even down to my birth-century that poison was still inthe blood of Christendom, and the best of English commoners was still content to see his inferiors impudentlycontinuing to hold a number of positions, such as lordships and the throne, to which the grotesque laws ofhis country did not allow him to aspire; in fact, hewas not merely contented with this strange conditionof things, he was even able to persuade himself thathe was proud of it. It seems to show that there isn'tanything you can't stand, if you are only born andbred to it. Of course that taint, that reverence forrank and title, had been in our American blood, too --I know that; but when I left America it had disappeared -- at least to all intents and purposes. Theremnant of it was restricted to the dudes and dudesses.When a disease has worked its way down to that level,it may fairly be said to be out of the system.But to return to my anomalous position in KingArthur's kingdom. Here I was, a giant among pigmies, a man among children, a master intelligenceamong intellectual moles: by all rational measurementthe one and only actually great man in that wholeBritish world; and yet there and then, just as in theremote England of my birth-time, the sheep-wittedearl who could claim long descent from a king's leman,acquired at second-hand from the slums of London,was a better man than I was. Such a personage wasfawned upon in Arthur's realm and reverently lookedup to by everybody, even though his dispositions wereas mean as his intelligence, and his morals as base ashis lineage. There were times when he could sit downin the king's presence, but I couldn't. I could havegot a title easily enough, and that would have raisedme a large step in everybody's eyes; even in theking's, the giver of it. But I didn't ask for it; and Ideclined it when it was offered. I couldn't have enjoyedsuch a thing with my notions; and it wouldn't havebeen fair, anyway, because as far back as I could go,our tribe had always been short of the bar sinister. Icouldn't have felt really and satisfactorily fine andproud and set-up over any title except one that shouldcome from the nation itself, the only legitimate source;and such an one I hoped to win; and in the course ofyears of honest and honorable endeavor, I did win itand did wear it with a high and clean pride. Thistitle fell casually from the lips of a blacksmith, oneday, in a village, was caught up as a happy thoughtand tossed from mouth to mouth with a laugh and anaffirmative vote; in ten days it had swept the kingdom,and was become as familiar as the king's name. Iwas never known by any other designation afterward,whether in the nation's talk or in grave debate uponmatters of state at the council-board of the sovereign.This title, translated into modern speech, would bethe boss. Elected by the nation. That suited me.And it was a pretty high title. There were very fewthe's, and I was one of them. If you spoke of theduke, or the earl, or the bishop, how could anybodytell which one you meant? But if you spoke of TheKing or The Queen or The Boss, it was different.Well, I liked the king, and as king I respected him-- respected the office; at least respected it as much asI was capable of respecting any unearned supremacy;but as men I looked down upon him and his nobles --privately. And he and they liked me, and respectedmy office; but as an animal, without birth or shamtitle, they looked down upon me -- and were not particularly private about it, either. I didn't charge formy opinion about them, and they didn't charge fortheir opinion about me: the account was square, thebooks balanced, everybody was satisfied.