The Red Queen (19 page)

It may be that she was the one who was afraid of consummating the marriage. I do not know. She did not confide in me: I think she was afraid of me. I was a daunting figure, wearing my white mourning robes and my widow’s crown of tragedy. I suppose I hoped that Prince Chŏngjo would take a secondary consort, in a relationship free of the long shadow of ‘that incident’ – and this indeed is what happened, though not for some years. Chŏngjo was over thirty before he produced a surviving heir. It seemed for years that he might die without issue.

Madame Chŏng defamed the little princess, and bore herself in an insulting manner towards me. Our enmity deepened. There were unbecoming scenes at court when we chanced to meet. I remember one confrontation, at the time of the death of the little princess’s father, which descended into abuse more fit for common people than for women of royal blood. I accused her of being drunk (and she was indeed a heavy drinker), and she accused me of hypocrisy. She even accused me of conniving at Sado’s crimes and forcing him into unnatural behaviour. Had I been a better wife to Sado, she said, he would not have taken to murder and debauchery. She blamed the infamous Imo Incident on me. I retaliated, I regret to say, by blaming her for his excesses, and I also accused her of spreading disgraceful slanders about the little princess.

Prince Chŏngjo was horrified by these scenes. And I am now ashamed of them.

I realize that at this stage in my earthly story I run the risk of sounding like a mean-spirited old woman, full of reproaches and laments. How ludicrously petty, in the context of eternity, were my jealous confrontations with Madame Chŏng! My bad relationship with her was unfortunate, I admit it. But it was not wholly my fault. And I was fond, in my way, of the poor little princess.

Prince Chŏngjo survived the machinations of Madame Chŏng and her adopted son, only to fall into the clutches of other predators. He was wooed by flatterers, and I am afraid that he succumbed to the temptations of their company. I dreaded to see him repeat the mistakes of his father, as he began to spend time with drinkers and womanizers. There was no shortage of ambitious young men ready to profit from his friendship. One or two of them even managed to ingratiate themselves with the ageing king, who was by now verging on senility. I watched, helplessly, as gossip spread. One young man in particular, a distant kinsman of ours, Kugyŏng, worked himself into a position of trust, and seemed to think that on the king’s death he would move to the centre of the stage, and rule as co-regent with my son – two headstrong young men together, given over to extravagance and self-indulgence.

We were all waiting for the old man to die. And, at last, King Yŏngjo did indeed pass away, in the third month of the year 1776. King Yŏngjo had reigned for more than fifty years, and I myself had known him well, if not intimately, for more than thirty of those years. He had survived many illnesses, and many political crises. He had outlived several of his children, including his son and heir, the guilt of whose death lay on his conscience. He had been failing for years, growing senile and yet more eccentric, and, towards the end of his reign, his eyesight was so bad that he could not see the names on the lists of appointments he had to approve. He turned against his one-time well-born scholarly advisers, and delegated most administrative matters to eunuchs – many of these were able and educated men, and the state seemed to run itself quite smoothly.

King Yŏngjo was keenly aware of the ambitions that surrounded him, and had made it clear that he wanted no obstacle to his grandson Prince Chŏngjo’s succession. Nevertheless, he did not let go of life willingly. He struggled against the approach of death. He struggled to hang on to the vestiges of authority. For days he lingered behind the royal death screen, refusing to allow his spirit to depart.

I was surprised that his death moved me, when it came at last. I had never felt entirely easy with him, for I was bowed from the first into an uncomfortable posture of perpetual deference. Yet, despite all the weight of protocol, we had had our moments of human contact, and I think that over the decades he had learned some respect for me. I shall never forget that first meeting after Prince Sado’s death, when I found myself comforting him for the unnatural crime he had himself committed. He had feared to find me vengeful and unforgiving, but I was able to indicate to him that I understood the extreme difficulties of his position at that time, and he was able to show me that he was grateful for my understanding. Our lives were unnatural, but we were not devoid of natural feelings. I believe he suffered for Prince Sado’s fate, and that he knew in his heart that he bore some guilt for Sado’s illness. He knew that he had nagged and hounded his own son to death. That is a hard thing to know.

Yes, I found that I now missed the old king. I missed the familiar irritation of his trivial despotic irascibility. I had grown into womanhood under his influence and protection. Now I was mature, and I was on my own. I was just over forty years of age at the time of King Yŏngjo’s death. I had a premonition that I, like him, would enjoy or endure a long life. There would be no easy escape for me.

We prayed much for longevity, in our culture. We surrounded ourselves with its symbols. We celebrated old age, in images of sun and moon, of pine and carp and crane and turtle. Life expectancy was short, and we venerated survivors.

My sense of loss was compounded by my fear for the future. How would my son succeed as the new king? So many were waiting to bend him to their will – the young queen’s powerful faction, and his aunt Madame Chŏng, and innumerable ministers who were jockeying for position in the new regime. And there was the newest favourite, who thought that his hour had come. This new acolyte, Hong Kugyŏng, had managed to ingratiate himself with King Yŏngjo as well as with my son: he was bold and ambitious, and he believed his time would come when the old king died. Those who had fawned on Madame Chŏng’s son when he had seemed to be in the ascendant now deserted him for Kugyŏng.

These were dangerous times for my young son. I find I do not wish to describe in detail the mistakes he made, the risks he ran. I have told this story at length, in my second memoir, the memoir written in 1801, and you may find it there. I feared for King Chŏngjo, in his inexperience, and I was right to fear. His enemies were ready to destroy him.

The question of the succession remained unsolved and was becoming ever more urgent. The new king had as yet no son. The queen was now in her mid-twenties, but still childless. King Chŏngjo needed to safeguard his position, and I would have been happy to encourage his taking an appropriate second consort, but, instead of finding a suitable mother for a future heir, Chŏngjo was manipulated by his new favourite, Kugyŏng, into taking Kugyŏng’s sister, a pre-pubertal twelve-year-old child, as the royal consort. This girl, to whom he gave the royal title of ‘Wŏnbin’, was showered with inappropriate honours, and became known as First Consort even though the true queen was still alive and present at court.

This move caused outrage and served no purpose, as the wretched child soon died. She was a little silk grub, killed for her brother’s glory in the cocoon of her own silk trappings. When she died, Hong Kugyŏng insisted on extravagant royal mourning for her, with incense-burning more befitting a queen than a nonentity of a child, and, when some right-minded officials refused to participate in these farcical charades, they were dismissed from their posts. Worse than that, Kugyŏng managed to persuade people that the true queen had been implicated in the child’s death – he even extracted confessions to this effect, under torture, from some of her ladies-in-waiting. News of these outrages spread out from the palace, and I heard that some shopkeepers in the town became so nervous about the political situation that they shut up their shops and fled.

I will not attempt to describe in detail the tortuous machinations and blatant nepotism that filled the next few years. The court stank of corruption. And I myself was in despair that my son, of whom I had had such high hopes, would bring yet more disgrace upon himself as well as us.

I have to ask myself: was I anxious for myself, or for my son, or for my country? In the four accounts I wrote during my lifetime, I sought to justify my actions, and those of my son, and I argued, I believe convincingly, that my husband Prince Sado had been mad, and was therefore not responsible for his acts. (I would have made a good lawyer.) Correctly, I believe, I exposed in these accounts the crimes of Madame Chŏng and others at our court. But there were some incidents that it was hard to explain away, or to justify. My son King Chŏngjo was, like it or not, responsible for the death of my uncle, having been made to believe that my uncle had conspired against him. Whom should I justify here, the uncle or the son?

Maybe I was a monster mother, and maybe the maternal instinct in me was perverted. My mother love was born in innocence, as I have tried to describe, and it had nothing to do, in those early days, with the indoctrination of Confucian ethics. History has forced me into casuistry.

I find I grow weary of my memories of these confused and tormenting times, and of my own laboured attempts to elucidate them. Which of you will have the patience to follow this sorry tale of machinations and deceptions and expulsions and banishments and executions, in a far-off court, in a foreign land, long ago? Perhaps you have already lost the outline of my story. Maybe you, too, like Henry Savage Landor, that nineteenth-century English traveller to our country, believe that we in Korea ‘feel pain less’ than Western people because we are ‘differently constituted’? Or maybe you believe that we deserved whatever pain we felt. Maybe you, too, feel, as did your intrepid envoy Isabella Bird, that our country was deeply subject to ‘the oriental vices of suspicion, cunning and untruthfulness’. Maybe you agree with those historians who described us as a nation ruined by luxury and indolence, by court intrigues and party strife.

Have patience. I will make haste to come to an end. I am moved to proceed to the rest of my agenda, urged on by my obsessed ghost, who leaves me no peace. As I leave her no peace.

The relationship between my ghostwriter and myself is uncanny. We are both rationalists, and we both protest that we have no belief in a supernatural life after death. Yet here we are, harnessed together in a ghostly tale of haunting and obsession. We narrate one another, my ghost and I.

I will attempt to reduce the rest of my long life on earth to a précis, to a few paragraphs, for my ghost is losing patience with me. She wants to sweep through time to tell her own story.

So, as I have described, the reign of my son King Chŏngjo, the twenty-second monarch of the Yi dynasty, began badly, and we feared the worst. But eventually he saw through the wiles of those who flattered and manipulated him, and he became a sound, kind and good ruler. I say it, and it was so. All government slaves were freed under his reign, and he developed generous relief programmes for the poor. Early in his reign, it is true, King Chŏngjo presided over cruel tortures and persecutions, particularly of the Catholics, and several members of his immediate family perished at this time. My uncle Hong Inhan was executed in 1776, the year of King Chŏngjo’s accession, accused of disloyalty to his great-nephew the king. My father, a subtle diplomat and a great survivor of many promotions and demotions, was fortunate enough to die a natural death two years later, in 1778. In the same year, Madame Chŏng was stripped of her royal titles and banished to Kanghwa Island, a fate that she had predicted for herself. Four years later, she was allowed to return to live near Seoul, but she had lost her influence, and died in obscurity and disgrace. Her adopted son Chŏng Hugyŏm had been executed in 1776. (Some records say that Chŏngjo poisoned Madame Chŏng, but I cannot believe that this was true.)

In 1782, King Chŏngjo at last produced an heir, to much rejoicing. So much for the tales of his impotence, those tales which Madame Chŏng had maliciously encouraged. But his first-born, like my first-born, died as an infant, and his mother died of grief a few months later. Not long after this, partly through my urging, King Chŏngjo took another secondary consort, the Lady Kasun. She and I were close, as close as mother and daughter, and we had a common aim, which we achieved when she gave birth to you, my grandson Sŏnjo, in 1790. You were born on the eighteenth day of the sixth month, at three o’clock in the afternoon. It was my birthday. I took this to be a good omen.

King Chŏngjo became a good ruler, responsive to the common people: innumerable successful petitions were made to his wisdom and judgement. He always heeded the drum of appeal. He was also a fine artist, a fine scholar and a man of vision. He created a magnificent new library, and encouraged the new scientific discipline of ‘Practical Learning’. During his reign, our country began to emerge from the hermit-crab shell which unfortunately but understandably became our image in the succeeding century. We moved into the modern world.

King Chŏngjo was able to rise above the terrors of his childhood. He managed to do this not by forgetting them, but through confronting them. His was a brave spirit. His father Prince Sado had died in dishonour and pain, and Chŏngjo did not turn his back on this disgrace. He met it, as a challenge. He devoted much time to honouring and reinstating the memory of his father. It might be argued, by cynics, that he did this as a means of assuring his own legitimacy; it might also be argued that he was a devout Confucian, who truly believed in the duty of honouring his ancestors. The truth was, I believe, more complicated.
I
believe that what he saw and heard as a ten-year-old child in the hot noonday sun on the day of the Imo Incident affected him so deeply that he felt a deep, unique, personal, filial obligation towards his father’s memory. Only by truly reinstating his father could he himself survive as a whole man. He had to dig up the disgraced body, and resurrect it, and rebury it.