Work Text:
"A Treatise on Divine Right: The Confessions of Amelia Catherine Moncrieff, Age Five-and-Thirty, Queen of England"
(As penned in gilt ink upon vellum, sealed with wax, and deposited within the crypts of the Caer)
I. On the Nature of Folly
The masses bleat of morality as though it were scripture. A quaint notion, fit for priests and swineherds. I knew better when I reached my seventeenth nameday: there is no sin but weakness, no virtue but power. When I knelt before Reginald for the first time, simpering over his brown curls, I did not pray for mercy. I counted the veins in his throat and imagined them ribboned. A child-queen? No—I was the child. And children, as all know, are the cruelest of gods.
II. On the Sacrifice of Kin
And yet, I wasn’t always quite so. You may call me cruel, but once, we were four sisters, polished like gems in a reliquary—Cemmeline, Mireille, Dolores, and I—each cut to reflect our father’s ambitions. I was the eldest. Gerald, that brute with a poet’s face, was the flaw in the stone. How he delighted in snapping the wings of sparrows, in cornering us in shadowed corridors. When Father declared Mireille betrothed to Brandon Dawson, I saw her tremble—not at marriage, but at the prospect of leaving. Her fate was sealed not by love, but by Father’s calculus: the Dawsons’ alliance was a ladder, their annihilation a rung.
III. On the Art of Butchery
Pray tell, Father, who was it who ordered the slaughter, all of the main branch of Dawsons, with fifty swords to guard them, but ambushed together on the high road by two hundred men? A lesser lord, they say, you swore to Parliament, but when the night grows cold even rats whisper your name, Lord Cedric Moncrieff. You promised him bags of gold and young lordlings to marry his daughters, yet you struck his head off instead. Less trouble for the House Moncrieff that way, but quite a nasty little shock for your friend.
My fourteen-year-old little sister Mireille had left with the Dawsons to marry Brandon Dawson a week ago. Did it scorch, when you fathomed your young daughter Mireille would be with the Dawsons when they were ambushed on the high road? Did it scour you when you confronted her fate, dreamed of her blood splashed across stone, her warm laughter silenced by the steel you commissioned? She implored you to visit her in Yorkshire; I’m still not quite sure if you ever visited her grave. Fourteen, bled white on a moor, her golden hair matted with November frost.
Did your hands shake as you signed the warrant? Or did you sip claret and hum a reel, content to trade a daughter for a dynasty? “A regrettable necessity,” you called it. Regret? You’d sooner sprout wings. The Dawsons’ corpses lined your path to power; Mireille’s was merely the prettiest.
Oh, little sister. Look what he made of us.
II. On the Art of Necessary Violence
When did Father see it? When he saw the ambition in me, sharp as cut glass, when my own brilliance mirrored his own, when he saw Gerald for what he was. I feared my brother’s wrath, and for that I tried to run.
I did not succeed.
Gerald’s hands around Dolores’ throat were colder than the Caer’s dungeons. Her face, always so like Mother’s, turned to porcelain in the moonlight. The vase I shattered over his skull was Ming dynasty—a trifle, really, compared to the art I crafted afterward. A scuffle with "marauders," I told the guards. Gerald’s body arranged just so, Dolores cradled in his arms as though he’d died protecting her. Sentiment, you see, is the veil draped over brutality. Father’s approval was a blade at my back. How neatly Father’s lies dovetailed with my stagecraft—Gerald’s skull fragments artfully scattered, Dolores’s throat bruising hidden beneath lace. The Times printed odes to his valor. I wore jet beads for six months, demure as any debutante, while stitching alliances with Lancashire mill owners. Love is currency; grief, a ledger.
Gerald Moncrieff died a fool, but he died useful. Let the histories paint him a noble martyr; martyrs make excellent kindling. I wept prettily at the funeral, yes—but the tears were not grief. They were the relief of a sculptor who, at last, chips free the excess marble. Gerald’s corpse became my first throne, Dolores’ blue eyes staring at stars they could not see became my first defeat. Sentiment is a defect of breeding. The Dawsons, in their endless honor, had forgotten this. Father rectified the oversight.
III. On the Alchemy of Grief
Cemmeline fled to a minor baron’s bed, trading silks for safety. Wise, perhaps—but I could not follow. Grief is a poison one learns to distill. When Father betrothed me to Lord Reginald Harrow, a man with a fox’s grin and a ledger where his heart ought to be, I wore Dolores’ lace veil. Let the dead shield the living.
IV. On the Dealing of Husbands
I birthed Reginald four children- in truth, King Reginald. Why, I was Queen, and he was King Consort, but he seemed to think otherwise. He reached a pact, and an understanding with my Father. I birthed him sons, the twins Waylon and Harvey, then the boy Richard, and my darling Emma.(I named her after Cemmeline, hoping for her peace.) Reginald’s hands were soft, his whispers softer: "You’ll birth heirs, my dear, not policies."
I smiled, and plotted his downfall.
When Harvey turned blue in his crib, I wept as any mother would. The physician’s verdict—"Foul play, Your Grace"—was delivered to Parliament with trembling hands. Who could have known, the King kept several mistresses and strangled the crown prince to crown his bastard. All lies, lies I spun from spider webs, from the letters I forged, couriers I bribed, whispers I seeded in taverns. My son lay so still in his crib. One might mistake the pillow’s imprint for natural causes. But justice requires theater: the physician’s gasp, the damning letter beneath my husband’s desk blotter, my fainting spell at the trial. Even now, the ton whispers how bravely I bore the betrayal.
They will never guess that I strangled my own son. I loved my sisters and I love my children, and what remains of them all, though the truth is that sentiment is simply a defect of breeding.
Reginald’s execution drew crowds.
I wore black crepe, and drafted the Widow’s Tax.
V. On the Subjugation of Fathers
House arrest is such a genteel term. I gifted Father the Caer’s east wing—a gilded cage with a view of Mireille’s grave. His letters pleading for reconciliation I burned with perfumed candles. Let him rot with his regrets.
I’d always been clever, even as a girl, cautious, wary, sharp as cut glass. Father recognized it first—that cold calculus beneath my mourning silks. “You’ll rule not despite the cage,” he’d said when forcing Reginald’s betrothal ring onto my seventeen-year-old finger, “but because you built its bars.”
Poor man. He never imagined I’d melt his own keys.
You questioned my godhood, Father? Look to the sky. The sun does not apologize for scorching the earth.
VI. On the Calculus of Power
A queen’s reign is built on bones, but I have adorned mine with roses. The Corn Laws? My design—starve the north, fatten the lords. The riots in Manchester? Quelled by pamphlets blaming French agitators, printed on presses I funded. When the Whigs demanded reform, I hosted a ball in their honor. By midnight, their leader, Sir Edward Greville, was found in the conservatory with a footwoman’s ribbon around his neck. A scandal, yes—but scandals, like gardens, require pruning.
VII. On the Illusion of Morality
They call me ice, they call me iron. Let them. When Cemmeline returned, widowed and wan, begging sanctuary, I installed her in a cottage far from court. A kindness? No—a lesson. Her letters, steeped in regret, I read aloud to my council. "See how softness withers the soul?" My remaining children are reared on Grimm’s tales and Machiavelli. Emma asked last week if I loved her. I kissed her brow and replied, "Darling, I shall make you queen."
VIII. On the Crown’s True Weight
The throne is not a seat but a mirror. It reflects my father’s cunning, Gerald’s cruelty, Mireille’s silence, Dolores’ wide eyes. I have burned villages to ash, bribed bishops, broken treaties like bread. And yet—when the sun sets over the Caer, I sometimes hear laughter in the corridors. Four girls, running. A vase, unbroken. A world not yet split by betrayal.
In Closing
Let the historians name me tyrant. Let the poets spin elegies for the girl I was. England thrives beneath my heel, and I thrive on its pulse.
Long live the Queen.
—Her Most Excellent Majesty, Amelia Catherine Moncrieff, By Grace of God, Sovereign of the United Kingdom, Empress of the Iron Will, and Keeper of the Unspoken Pact
Postscriptum: Cemmeline died last winter. I ordered her buried in Mireille’s lace veil. Some ghosts deserve rest; others make excellent scaffolding.