The King had his scruples; he did not like thus to win popularity by accident, and yet, the more he looked into it, the more he saw this for a fact, that by committing a popular _faux pas_ he had secured far more consideration from his ministers than by doing the correct thing. John of Jingalo did not yet understand that his correctness of conduct was one of the chief factors relied on by a bureaucratic government for reducing him to political insignificance. He had yet to learn that a submissive and well-behaved monarchy was essential to its very existence. CHAPTER VII THE OLD ORDER I All this, the reader will remember, had taken place in Lent. The King had done something which according to the accepted canons was quite incorrect; he had been to a frivolous but popular play during the penitential season and it had got into the papers. But instead of being blamed for it he had gained enormously in popularity. Now had his Majesty been merely aiming for this, as politicians aim for it (deserting principles for party, or party when its principles become a hindrance), he might have followed the lead given him by the people of Jingalo, and, recognizing that the Church Calendar had lost its hold upon the popular imagination, might thenceforward have secularized his conduct, and paved the way in Court circles for that separation of Church and State which his ministers were itching to bring about but did not yet dare. But John of Jingalo had all the defects which belong to a conscientious character. He had not gone to the play for amusement, it had not amused him, he did not at all agree with the public's attitude towards it, and yet he was reaping the benefit; he was standing in a glow of popular approbation under false pretenses; and the more he thought about it the less he liked it--it gave him a bad conscience. Yet, in spite of that, he could not but recognize that he had touched power; under a misapprehension the people had responded to him as never before; he had done what they regarded as a sporting thing in sending unpopular officialdom to the right-about; it was even possible that among theatrical circles when the exploit was talked of he was now known as "good old King Jack." All the same he did not feel that he had been good, and he wanted to make amends. The highly colored conversations of Max, the talk about whipping-boys and Court jesters, and all those ancient divinities which had once hedged a King but were now mere barbed wire entanglements, had turned his attention toward certain medieval institutions the practice of which had lapsed, or had become reduced to a mere shadow of their former selves. And with a conscience ill at ease over the damage he had wrought to a season which he still regarded with a certain conventional reverence, his thoughts lighted upon Maundy Thursday, then less than a fortnight off.