Easy Abdication

The difference between a Siamese and anybody else is that the Siamese takes things more easily. It was easy for the late, great King Rama V to beget 236 girls, 134 boys. It was easy for his successor King Rama VI to take the word of a Christian missionary that polygamy is wrong and beget no boy. This plumped the Crown into the lap of a son of polygamous Rama V who became King Prajadhipok ten years ago and abdicated in England last week with the greatest of ease.

With the sublime vagueness of the true Siamese, His Majesty addressed his abdication to nobody, not to his Government which wished to keep him on the Throne, not to his people who have ever idolized him, finally not even to his Buddhist Gods.

"Better Yourselves!" When the President of the United States and Mrs. Herbert Hoover received 98-lb. King Prajadhipok and 115-lb. Queen Rambai Barni (TIME, May 4, 1931), Siam was the world's last country in which the Sovereign remained absolute. The Siamese Cabinet consisted chiefly of prolific Rama V's abler sons, and from that polygamous panel of 134 His Majesty had no difficulty in drawing really able Princes. To them King Prajadhipok once sternly declared: "In my own family the Princes who have no capacity and no ability have nothing to do with the government service. I, therefore, take the opportunity of advising that you should in the future try to better yourselves by special qualifications."

When Their Majesties arrived in the U. S., so that a cataract might be lifted from King Prajadhipok's left eye, Siamese recalled that the first ancient Oriental power which deigned to sign a treaty with the upstart U. S. was the Government of Siam. Traditionally the Siamese Royal Family have employed U. S. experts from choice, and Siam once had a high official called the Second King whose real name, Siamese insisted, was "Prince George Washington."*

What happened in Siam after Hoover-times has never been better or more authoritatively described than last week in the abdication of His Majesty. For the past year the King and Queen have been living amid England's idyllic countryside, as happy as Mr. & Mrs. James J. Walker and others who find their homelands in 1935 simply too tiresome. Last week when correspondents rushed to Knowle House, rented from Sir Eric Bonham, they were greeted by King Prajadhipok's dapper young secretary, wearing grey flannel trousers and a pullover beneath his coat.

"Well, it's over now," said the secretary. "If I may coin a phrase, the King signed his abdication at 1:45 with 'sad or unhappy relief,' certainly with relief. Here it is. He is no longer King of Siam but to us he will always be King."

P:"Not under my name!" Excerpts from what is perhaps history's most urbane and informative abdication: "When Phya Bahol and his associates seized power by military force on June 24, 1932, they invited me to remain as a constitutional king. I accepted the invitation on the understanding that Bahol and his associates would establish a constitution on the same lines as in all other countries with constitutional governments of that kind so the people would have a right to have a voice in administration and in matters of policy affecting the welfare of the people. . . .

"Owing to the fact that the promoters did not implement true political liberty to the people and the people had no opportunity of voicing their opinion before an important policy was undertaken, revolt broke out, involving civil war. When I asked that the Constitution should be changed to conform to true democracy in order to satisfy the people, the Government and its party, which now hold complete power in their hands, refused. . . . I am unable to agree that any party should carry on an administration in this way under cover of my name. . . .

"I hereby renounce all the rights I had been asking, but reserve all the rights I formerly enjoyed before my accession to the throne. I have no wish to exercise my right under the Succession Act to nominate my successor. I have no wish that any one should create any disturbance in the country on my behalf; if any one should use my name in this connection it must be understood that it would be without my agreement, approval or support My deepest regret is that I no longer will be able to serve my people and my country. . . . I can but pray that Siam may have prosperity and that the Siamese people may have happiness."

P:"No objection?" This, correspondents pleaded, was not enough. A reigning monarch is never interviewed, but could they not have the honor of quoting Siam's former King of the North and of the South, Supreme Arbiter of the Ebb and Flow of the Tide, Brother of the Moon, Half-brother of the Sun and Possessor of the Four and Twenty Golden Umbrellas?

Inscrutably the secretary smiled.

"Perhaps my King would like to tell you something," he said. The eager newshawks were shooed out upon the lawn, found Prince & Princess Sukhodaya, the former King and Queen, under an English elm.

"One thing I want to ask you," said Prince Sukhodaya with the pent up emotion of one who has been King for ten long years, "in what you are writing about me, please do not talk about the 'brother of the moon' or the 'twenty-four umbrellas.' I am not the moon's brother. That is all bunk. There is a nine-tiered umbrella in our Siamese ritual, but I have no idea who invented the titles usually ascribed to me. . . . I like the English countryside. The Queen and I have done a lot of motoring. Perhaps we may take a holiday now. I admit I am feeling rather tired."

In Bangkok thick-lipped, domineering Premier Phya Bahol promptly sent emissaries to offer the Throne to childless Prajadhipok's 11-year-old nephew, elf-faced Prince Ananda Mahidol, whose late father, a loyal Harvardman, resided for years in Cambridge's Brattle Inn. Last week Elfin Prince Ananda was at school in Lausanne, Switzerland when the Siamese Minister to Paris arrived to tell his mother that her son may be King of Siam.

A true Siamese, the unruffled Princess replied vaguely, though with exquisite politeness. Said the Siamese Minister's secretary's secretary happily, "We do not think Her Royal Highness has any objection to her son's becoming King of Siam."

Next day the 11-year-old elf, asked by his mother whether he would like to be King, replied in the Siamese tradition, "Just as you like, Mother.'

Announced Her Royal Highness: "My son will accept the Throne of his country, if the Government does not require his presence in Siam until his health improves." This Siamese considered tantamount to a clear-cut acceptance.

*According to Queen Rambai Barni's father, that inimitable raconteur, Prince Svasti who delights to poke Americans in the ribs and chuckle: ''Who was Prince George Washington? Don't tell me there wasn't any!"

Another old favorite stumper of Prince Svasti: "I have been inside your Statue of Liberty, and yet I have never been in America. Can you explain that?"

This quip lasted Prince Svasti for half a century, from the early '80's when he entered the Statue of Liberty while it was being finished in Paris, to 1931 when he sacrificed his best joke by setting foot upon the U. S. with Their Majesties.

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