Double Trouble

Duelling was a daily feature of my prep-school life. Our swords were wooden rulers; chipped and battered desks served as castle battle­ments. Modern warfare held a fascination too, but when it came to single combat and displays of derring-do, our hearts belonged to an earlier age – and no book captured it better than Anthony Hope’s 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda.

The title was instantly intriguing. Who was the prisoner? Why was he or she incarcerated? And where on earth was Zenda? The answer to the last question was, of course, Ruritania: a ‘highly interesting and important kingdom’ which had played ‘no small part’ in European history. Hope – an extremely clever man who took a First in Greats at Oxford and gave up a promising legal career to write – placed it cannily somewhere to the east of Germany, where the average Briton’s grasp of geography starts to become vague. Alien but not unrecognizable, it came with dramatic scenery, the glamour of a monarchy upheld by shakoed hussars, and few of the mundane trappings of industrialization: though it possessed a railway, there were plenty of situations in which a heart-in-the-mouth gallop on a foam-flecked steed provided the only way out. Hope, who had a gift for names, chose a very peculiar one for his hero: Rudolph Rassendyll. It suggests that, despite his thoroughly English demeanour, there is a touch of the foreigner about him – which, indeed, there is. The opening pages tell us that in 1733 a noble ancestress had an affair with the crown prince of Ruritania, and that every few generations a Rassendyll appears who shares the prince’s sharp nose and bright red hair. Rudolph, crucially, is one of these. Rudolph acts as the book’s narrator, and the languid, Wildean tone in which he begins his story is a delight. ‘Why in the world should I do anything?’ he demands when his sister-in-law suggests that he find useful employment. ‘I have an income nearly sufficient for my wants . . . I enjoy an admirable social position . . . Behold, it is enough!’ If anyone is to blame for his idleness, it is his parents, who ‘had no business to leave me two thousand pounds a year and a roving disposition’. In its unpromising hero The Prisoner of Zenda anticipates two other classic adventure stories, The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Riddle of the Sands. Like Baroness Orczy’s Sir Percy Blakeney and Erskine Childers’ Carruthers, Rudolph is far more capable than he initially appears. He is a good swordsman, a fine shot, an excellent linguist – and, as we are about to discover, infinitely resourceful. When he learns that Ruritania’s new king is about to be crowned, Rudolph decides to visit the country for the occasion. Walking in the woods just after his arrival, he meets two men who stare at him in astonishment. One is an old soldier, Colonel Sapt; the other is a young courtier, Fritz von Tarlenheim. The reason for their surprise becomes clear when a third man appears: the king, who looks so like Rudolph as to be virtually indistinguishable. The king takes the discovery in good part and invites Rudolph to dine with him at the hunting lodge where he is spending the night before his coronation. But the lodge belongs to his half-brother – known as Black Michael because of his very different hair colour – who wants the throne for himself. One of his men serves the king a bottle of wine so heavily drugged that he cannot be roused the next morning. Sapt and Fritz explain the danger of the situation to Rudolph. If the king fails to appear for his coronation, Black Michael – who has a strong following among the poorer classes – will try to seize power. There is only one thing for it: Rudolph must take the king’s place. Of all God’s gifts to writers, the fact that two very different people can look the same is one of the greatest. The Roman playwright Plautus rejoiced in it, as of course did Shakespeare, who borrowed the plot of Plautus’ Menaechmi for The Comedy of Errors. Having a socially inferior character mistaken for a monarch makes the mix richer still – something Hope may have recognized in Mark Twain’s 1881 novel The Prince and the Pauper. With a political plot, the normal scenario is for the villains to try to replace the legitimate ruler with a doppelgänger whom they can manipulate. (This is the plot of the captivating Hollywood comedy Dave, in which Kevin Kline plays a well-meaning everyman cata­pulted into the White House.) Hope, however, chooses the opposite approach: in this case the substitution is for the ruler’s own good. Rudolph agrees to go along with the plan on condition that he can slip back to England once the coronation is over. Coached by Sapt, he fools everyone – including the king’s intended wife, the beautiful Princess Flavia – and is duly crowned in the capital’s magnificent cathedral. But on returning to the hunting lodge, he and his two allies make a terrible discovery: the king has been kidnapped by Black Michael’s men and taken to the formidable Castle of Zenda. Anthony Hope, a master of plot, thus creates a classic impasse. Rudolph cannot expose Black Michael without confessing that he has taken the coronation oath as an impostor. Equally, Black Michael cannot expose Rudolph without admitting that he has kidnapped the king. The king’s life is safe for the time being because there is no point in killing him if Rudolph is there to occupy the throne instead; but Rudolph cannot attempt a rescue without putting both their lives at risk. To drive events forward, Hope turns to Princess Flavia. Rudolph has been instantly smitten by her, and Sapt and Fritz advise him that publicly courting her will give a vital boost to the king’s popularity. But Rudolph is all too aware of the temptation before him: abandon­ing the king would allow him to keep Flavia – and by extension the throne – for himself. As a man of honour, he must carry out a rescue before that temptation becomes too great. Flavia, it must be admitted, is an entirely one-dimensional char­acter. So too is Black Michael, who remains largely in the background, leaving his dirty work to a band of gentlemen known as the Six. Chief among these is Rupert of Hentzau. Young and handsome, Rupert is a thoroughgoing cad, loyal only to himself, with a reputation as a seducer; offering Rudolph a handshake, he treacherously stabs him with a hidden dagger. Yet there is something about him that even Rudolph finds irresistible: what Edmund Rostand would define in Cyrano de Bergerac as ‘panache’. Rupert lives life to the full and literally laughs in the face of danger: ‘For my part,’ Rudolph reflects, ‘if a man must needs be a knave, I would have him a debonair knave . . . It makes your sin no worse, as I conceive, to do it à la mode and stylishly.’ It’s fascinating to see this villain upstaging all the respect­able characters, including the hero; tellingly, Rupert rather than Rudolph was the role taken by Douglas Fairbanks Jnr in the 1937 film version. The Prisoner of Zenda culminates, inevitably, with Rudolph’s attempt to rescue the king from Black Michael’s stronghold. It would be unfair to reveal the many twists and turns of the showdown; suf­fice it to say that there is no shortage of swordfights on parapets and plunges into the moat. One can easily imagine the delight Hope must have taken in planning the layout of the castle and deploying his characters across it. After the last pistol has been fired and the last sword sheathed, there remains the question of Princess Flavia, who feels far more attracted to the disguised Rudolph than she ever did to the king. One-dimensional she may be, but Hope imbues their relationship with unexpected pathos as they face an agonizing choice between love and duty. At the same time, he lays the ground neatly for the novel’s equally exciting sequel, called – in confirmation of the villain’s status – Rupert of Hentzau (1898). The Prisoner of Zenda was an instant success, inspiring a whole genre of books that came to be known as ‘Ruritanian romances’. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote one (The Mad King), as did John Buchan (The House of the Winds) and even Winston Churchill (Savrola). Hope himself had more than thirty novels published, most of which are now forgotten. But for would-be duellists, his swashbuckling masterpiece remains the ultimate textbook. En garde!

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 76 © Anthony Gardner 2022