The Reluctant King

The morning of the twenty-ninth of December, nine hundred and fifteen. A duke of Lotharingia stands at a palace window at Aachen with a sealed letter from the duke of Saxony on the writing-table and does not open it. He carries it west to Metz. He puts it in the inner book. He will not answer it. He did not want the crown; he will not nominate for it; and on the fourteenth of February the Aachen diet names him king anyway.

Across the two years that follow his refused election, a man who did not want the office does what the office requires. A cousin he did not want to ennoble is invested as duke of Lotharingia at Easter 916. A Tauber-column rebel who has been troubling the realm since 913 is killed at the second charge of a field battle at the middle Main. A duke of Bavaria who wanted the crown and did not get it declines homage through a whole year, is besieged at Regensburg across the summer of 917, breaks out north, and is defeated at Straubing in the largest engagement the series has yet put on the page. A queen of thirty holds a household between Metz and Aachen that was never hers to hold. A boy of eight at the election and ten at its close watches his father do the work of a crown his father will not pretend to enjoy.

The Reluctant King is the eighth volume of Rise of the Franks. It is the book about a man made king against his preference, and about the narrow discipline required to carry the office without either wanting it or resenting it — and about the cousin who was given a duchy on the same terms and held it the same way.