The Red Queen (15 page)

Sado was very anxious to be allowed to spend all three days of the celebration in King Yŏngjo’s residence in the upper palace, near the newlyweds, and indeed spent one night there before his father ordered him to return home to the lower palace – an order Yŏngjo issued as soon as strict protocol permitted. I would have been allowed to stay on in Ch’angdŏk-gung, but I thought it was unfair (and unwise) to be so favoured, so I managed with many excuses to slip away. I was relieved, in a way, to leave the presence of King Yŏngjo’s most recent wife, the young Queen Chŏngsun: I am sure the sight of her there with his father had exacerbated Sado’s resentments. I am afraid Sado often used to shout abuse about the young queen, his new stepmother, in his drunken outpourings, though he made efforts to behave decently in her presence.

Sado had taken more and more heavily to alcohol after Lady Pingae’s death. Having been unjustly and publicly accused six years earlier by Yŏngjo of excessive drinking, he had now taken up drinking in earnest, as if to fulfil his father’s prophecy. And after the wedding of our son, after his brief attempt to behave correctly and in accordance with protocol, he again began to sink into real excess. He drank both wines and spirits: he was particularly addicted to a fierce form of fired liquor which is still marketed under the name of
soju
. He found a companion in his drinking bouts in his sister, Madame Chŏng, with whom he held many disreputable parties within the palace compound, in the T’ongmyŏng Pavilion or outdoors in the gardens. Madame Chŏng, who was, you may remember, a young widow, was at this period widely lampooned as the incestuous partner of her brother. I do not know if they ever slept together, but they certainly drank together. At the end of the orgies, late at night, everyone, highborn and lowborn alike, would fall asleep over the tables, which were covered in leftover food and overturned bowls. These were scenes of unparalleled abandon and indulgence and excess.

Prince Sado’s own residence now looked more like a funeral chamber than a home for the living. He had red flags made that looked exactly like funereal flags, and had them set up in every room, including his bedchamber. Obsessed by fear and the expectation of his own imminent death, he summoned blind fortune-tellers to his macabre court, and, when he did not like what they foretold, he ordered them to be executed. Many medical doctors, astronomers and servants were also killed or injured. Dead bodies were carried from the palace nearly every day. His paranoia increased as the killings continued, and, in the fifth month of the year, he ordered the construction of a kind of living tomb in an excavation beneath the palace. It had three small rooms with sliding doors between them, just like the inside of a grave, and there was a passage to the outside world through a small door in the ceiling. The door was nothing more than a wood panel of the same size, which had earth and grass planted over it, so that there was no sign that there was anything underground. The prince spent many hours alone inside this subterranean chamber, which was lit by a hanging lamp of jade.

He said that his intention was merely to have a place in which to hide all his military weapons and equestrian equipment in case His Majesty should come to the lower palace to ask for them, but understandably this underground tomb and the living death of the prince who hid there gave rise to dark suspicions. Some thought he was plotting against his father’s life, though anybody who observed him as closely as I did would have known that he was beyond any such organized attempt; others, more reasonably, thought that he was insane, and wedded to death. This was certainly my interpretation of his behaviour. I can now see that in some ways our culture might have been thought to encourage a form of necrophilia, through its emphasis on ancestor worship, on offerings to the dead, and on prolonged and precise mourning rituals, but I hope I have made it plain that Sado’s obsessions surpassed even the most devout or exhibitionist displays of normal or conventional mourning. He was consumed by death. In the prime of his youth and strength, he courted death. This was not a charade, though it may have begun as a charade.

Just after the digging of this underground vault, his mother Lady SŏnhŬi came to the lower palace of Ch’anggyŏng to visit us for a few days. It was the first time she had come to us since the Grand Heir’s wedding, and she was anxious to see the new Grand Heir Consort in her new residence. The prince was delighted and strangely moved by the prospect of this visit, which filled him with excited anticipation. He went to great lengths to entertain her, and planned every moment of her stay in detail. Did he know that this was to be his last farewell to his mother? Each meal was prepared in the manner of a feast, with all sorts of delicacies, and he composed a poem on her longevity and offered drinks in her honour, urging her again and again to drain her wine cup. Then he took her to the rear garden, where he insisted she ride in a palanquin arranged in the manner of the king’s sedan (this was of course a form of lese-majesty) and accompanied by men carrying large military flags, and a band of trumpets and drums.

This was obviously Prince Sado’s notion of treating his mother with reverence and filial devotion, but Lady Sonhui, far from appearing gratified, was understandably dismayed by this deranged and disproportionate display of affection. Whenever she saw me, she would take me aside, and shed tears, and whisper fearfully, ‘Whatever will happen next? What is this for? What does this mean?’ I think until this point she had been unaware of the depths of his dementia. After a few days, she left for the upper palace; at their parting, both of them were in tears, and so was I. I was not at all certain that I would ever see her again in this life.

It was clear that we could not go on as we were, at this unsustainable pitch of misery, madness and destruction, and from that time onwards our fortunes rapidly unravelled. Our enemies were gathering against us. In the fifth month of the
imo
year of 1762, King Yŏngjo was shown – I do not know by whom – a virulent denunciation of Sado, written by a brother of a palace guard, and detailing a list of crimes allegedly committed by Prince Sado. Yŏngjo’s outrage was uncontrollable, although he must have suspected something of what was happening. He set up an interrogation committee, on which my father served: my father managed to persuade him that he, my father, should be the one to convey to Sado the nature of these grave allegations.

King Yŏngjo consented, and the usual weary ritual of Prince Sado’s filial prostration at the palace gate was followed by a violent confrontation between father and son, during which Yŏngjo charged Sado with beating and killing Lady Pingae, who was now suddenly and retrospectively elevated to the role of ‘the mother of royal grandchildren’. How could Sado have done such a thing, Yŏngjo demanded, when he had even jumped into a well and tried to kill himself for love of her? How could he have killed the one he loved? Yŏngjo brought up other accusations, and Sado replied with his usual defence – he was unloved, and perpetually frustrated, and he had been driven to despair and violence by his father’s neglect. He lacked advancement, and saw no future for himself. It was his father who had driven him mad.

The informant was executed, and his brother, the palace guard, was interrogated under torture, but he refused or was unable to give any more details about the plot against the throne that King Yŏngjo now seems to have suspected. For the next few days, Prince Sado lived under the threat of royal punishment, prostrating himself daily in public at a designated place – but, during the hours when he was unobserved, he was running wilder than ever, and uttering incoherent threats against those whom he thought were ranged against him. He threatened to kill Lord Yŏngsŏng, the son of the recently appointed President Sin Man, whom Sado loathed. He also appealed by many letters to his sister Madame Chŏng, in the most violent terms, and with some equally shocking and inappropriate endearments, complaining that she was not offering help to him in his extreme troubles. He threatened to make his way unobserved from the lower palace where we lived to the upper palace, through the water conduit, where he said he would murder Lord Yŏngsŏng and others – it is not surprising that many at this time feared for their lives. I know that King Yŏngjo feared for his. And I know that Sado set off, like a madman, through those labyrinthine miles of subterranean water passages, on two successive nights, but he never got very far – either he lost his way or his nerve. On the second occasion he hurt his back, quite badly, and returned in pain as well as humiliation. He was not suited to the role of conspirator or assassin.

Do I believe that Prince Sado intended to murder his father? No, I do not. I think this intention was pinned on him later as an excuse for the father killing the son. But I do think that there were some at court who would have followed Prince Sado rather than his father, mad though Sado was, had it come to open conflict, open choice. He had his loyal followers. The Time-Servers and the Bigots – these were the nicknames of the factions. The Time-Servers were said to support the prince, the Bigots to favour his death. I do not know. I did not understand these matters.

Many officials were paralysed by fear and indecision. They saw danger either way.

‘A power struggle for the succession.’ ‘The tragic story of a succession dispute.’ That is how the history books and the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
calmly describe these confused events.

Lady SŏnhŬi was by now convinced that her first duty lay in protecting not her son, but His Majesty King Yŏngjo. I am not sure when she first arrived at this conclusion – perhaps when she took her leave of Sado after his final bizarre honours to her, perhaps when the fatal denunciation from the palace guard’s brother reached King Yŏngjo. She wrote to me when she heard of the episode of the water passage, saying that she had abandoned all hope of her son, and wished only to preserve the life of the king, and the life of the Grand Heir, and the bloodline of the 400-year-old dynasty. While protesting her love for her son, whom she said she loved ten thousand times more than she loved any other, she effectively added her signature to his death sentence. ‘I do not know,’ she wrote, ‘whether I shall be able to meet you again in this life.’ Thus she bade me farewell, and consigned me, too, to my death. When I read this letter, I wept unrestrainedly, tears of anger, despair and indignation. I knew that time had run out for us, but I did not wish to give in so easily.

It is my belief that Lady SŏnhŬi, having written in this manner to me, went to King Yŏngjo and urged on him the death of Sado. She told him that Sado was irrevocably mad, past hope, past cure. ‘He cannot be blamed,’ she said, ‘but he cannot be saved.’ Yŏngjo, since the revelation of the extent of Sado’s crimes, had been attempting to put right some of the wrongs committed by his son – he had offered compensation to merchants whose goods the prince had appropriated, and to the families of women who claimed they had been raped by the prince or by his rout of drunken followers. (No doubt many false claims were successfully presented at this time, as rumours of compensation spread – how can history keep a reliable account?) Some of those who had offended in the prince’s name were executed. But the king had discovered and confronted injuries beyond repair, and wrongs beyond any recompense. He, too, like Lady SŏnhŬi, was in despair, and he was driven to agree with her verdict. I think he, too, had, by this time, lost all hope. He knew that at last he would have to take action. And so the events that led to the Imo Incident were set in motion.

King Yŏngjo ordered a morning departure the next day for Ch’anggyŏng Palace, and Lady SŏnhŬi went back to her residence and took to her bed, in great distress.

The news that his father had set off towards us in the lower palace brought panic and alarm to Sado, alarm compounded by the fact that the royal procession chose to make its way through the Kyŏnghwa Gate, a gate which signified misfortune. King Yŏngjo set great store by such symbolic choices. It should also be noted here that all the five royal palaces, as was customary, faced south, towards the fortunate mountain, save for the lower palace, which faced to the east: was this also an ill portent? I do not believe in portents. So why do I take the trouble to record them? It was Sado and his father who believed in portents. There were so many portents. It was on this eve of this day that one of the beams of the hall had given a great groan, as though it were about to break: Sado interpreted this as an omen of his own forthcoming death.

Fearing his father’s approach, Prince Sado ordered that all his military equipment be hidden, and he set off, deeper into the compound, concealed in his heavily curtained palanquin, to Tŏksŏng House, where he summoned me to attend him. It was now about noon, on one of the hottest days of the year: it was heavy and still, and not a breath of air stirred the limp wind pennants on their high poles. I ran round to warn my son, the Grand Heir, that something terrible was about to happen. I urged him to keep calm, be brave and watch out for himself. Then I obeyed Sado’s orders and went to Tŏksŏng House, where I fully expected some dreadful and enraged attack from him. (On the way, I saw a great flock of magpies gathering and cawing round the pavilion, which even I took to be an ill omen. As you know, I have always had an irrational fear of magpies.) I found Sado not enraged, but subdued, drained and fatalistic, sitting with his back resting against a wall. All that Prince Sado said to me was, ‘It looks bad for me, but they will let you live.’

We sat there, together, in silence, for a long while, in the heat of the day, like condemned prisoners, not knowing what to do or to say. Then I think the messenger arrived, telling us that the royal procession and the avenging king had reached the Hwinyŏng Shrine, where he was awaiting his son, who was expected to perform a ceremony there. This, or at least as I remember it, was about three in the afternoon: the official records note a somewhat different time scale for these events. The prince at this news did not rant or rage or plot his escape, as one might have expected. Calmly, he asked for the dragon robe of the crown prince, and for the Grand Heir’s winter cap. He said he intended to feign illness. In truth, he had little need to feign. He was ill, ill to death, in mind and in body. As the Grand Heir’s winter cap was small, I thought it would be better for him to wear his own cap, and asked a lady-in-waiting to fetch it, but this brought a bitter outburst against me from Sado. He accused me of wanting to live a long life with my son, free of my husband’s misfortune, and that this was the reason why I did not wish him to wear our son’s cap. He said that I wished to preserve the cap from pollution. He accused me of cruelty and malevolence. I was taken aback by this irrational attack, and immediately pressed the Grand Heir’s little cap upon him, but he now refused it, changing his tack and saying, in a reasonable and woefully subdued and resigned tone, ‘No, no, why should I wear it when you do not wish me to wear it?’