Evert Jan van Leeuwen
Leiden University, The Netherlands

Around 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time, on the 22^nd of January 2020, lead House impeachment manager Adam Schiff warned Republican senators and a world-wide TV audience, live on CNN, about the dangers of “unyielding loyalty to a president who would be king.” In September 1835, the magazine writer Edgar Allan Poe published one of his most politically engaged and lastingly topical satires: “King Pest the First: A Tale Containing an Allegory,” in which he responded to the political scandal and intrigue that had dogged Andrew Jackson’s presidency (see Richard P. Benton’s analysis of the story in A Companion to Poe Studies). While I agree with Benton that President Jackson’s personality and style of government is the direct butt of the satire in “King Pest,” Poe’s understudied story contains a broader critique of the self-serving and autocratic governmental tendencies that Jackson had come to embody in the eyes of his opponents. The many historical allusions in the grotesque tale reveal that this style of government has been around for centuries. The point of Poe’s satirical critique is that if such pernicious behavior goes unheeded it will spread like a plague across the world. As such, Poe’s 1835 satirical allegory shares a rhetorical strategy with Adam Schiff’s recent speech in the Senate, in defense of the fundamental values of democracy.

In “King Pest,” Poe is concerned with the political type President Jackson represented at the time: a leader whose outward appearance of solidarity with the people and a devotion to parliamentary principles belies a dangerous autocratic tendency and a personal hunger for power at the cost of the welfare of the nation. This is a style of government many political commentators in and outside of The United States see embodied by the current American president, Donald J. Trump, who in turn has loudly expressed his admiration for the governing style of the nineteenth-century populist president Poe seems to have loathed: Andrew Jackson, or as his opponents styled him, King Andrew the First. Unsurprisingly, in a 7 June 2018 editorial, USA Today asked its readers whether we should address the current White House occupant as “President Trump, or King Donald I?” The convergence of mid nineteenth-century and early twenty-first-century journalistic rhetoric clearly reflects a trans-historical satirical practice.

One of the reasons why Poe’s political satire has received little attention up to the present is that his gothic-horror stories and poems have overshadowed all his other literary output since his death in 1849. Poe is today known as a master of horror. In his lifetime he was much more than that: a magazine editor, literary critic, poet, romantic philosopher, and satirist of the contemporary American scene. Much of his work is hybrid in nature when it comes to genre. Scholars have struggled to pin down the meaning of “King Pest” because it is simultaneously a slapstick comedy and a visceral horror story: a proper grotesque in other words. It highlights “the dark and sinister background of a brighter and rationally organized world” (Kayser 21). It is frivolous in tone, but deadly serious in the treatment of its allegorical subject: the plague personified as an autocratic political leader. Poe’s academic editor, Thomas Ollive Mabbott, called it “one of the least valuable of Poe’s stories” (238). In his annotated edition of Poe’s stories, Stephen Peithman called it a bewildering but fascinating failure (556). According to Poe’s biographer, Arthur Hobson Quinn, the story shows similarities to a satirical passage in Vivian Grey (1826); he called it a straightforward attack on the tendency of Disraeli’s novel (214). Edward Wagenkecht concurred with Quinn, but Alexander Hammond rejected this argument.

What the scholars mentioned above seem to overlook is that Poe was also seriously interested in puzzles and cryptograms. Such intellectual games were popular in the magazines of the day and helped writers to engage directly with the reading public. Several of Poe’s stories, like “The Gold-Bug,” were deliberately structured as puzzles for magazine readers to solve. “King Pest” can also be approached as a puzzle story. Its narrative contains many clues hidden in the allusive quality of its textual details that together form a key to understanding the story as an allegorical critique of populist-autocracy, rather than a narrow punitive satire of Jackson’s peculiar democratic style. The key textual details that illuminate Poe’s broader critique of populist, autocratic government are the epigraph from the Renaissance play Ferrex and Porrex, the setting of the story: Britain during the reign of Edward III, and most cryptically, the medieval Flemish port of Sluys, from where the two merchant sailor-protagonists return to London, only to stumble into the house of Death.

The Epigraph  

The epigraph to “King Pest” reads, “The gods do bear and well allow in kings / The things which they abhor in rascal routes.” These lines were taken from Act II, scene 1 of The Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex, a play about the legendary King Gorboduc of Britain. “The Argument of the Tragedy” reveals how the king “divided his realm in his lifetime to his sons, Ferrex and Porrex”; that “the sons fell to dissension” and “the younger killed the elder”; that “the mother [who] more dearly loved the elder, for revenge killed the younger” and “the people, moved with the cruelty of the fact, rose in rebellion and slew both father and mother.” In turn, “the nobility assembled, and most terribly destroyed the rebels” leading eventually to a civil war, when the royal line remained instable, “in which both they and many of their issues were slain, and the land for a long time [was] almost desolate and miserably wasted” (Farmer 87). They key aspect of the play that links it directly to aspects of American politics during Jackson’s presidency, is the mythical King Gorboduc’s intention to divide his Kingdom between his two sons against the advice of his councilors. Quickly the sons are set against each other through further manipulation by deceitful advisers, which leads the bloody chaos outlined above. 

Act V, scene 1 opens with the rhetorical question: “Did ever age bring forth such tyrants’ hearts?” (Farmer 139). The characters’ reflections on the dire state of Britain leads one to express the insight that “Though kings forget to govern as they ought, / Yet subjects must obey as they are bound” (Farmer 141). These lines are reminiscent of those Poe borrowed for his epigraph to “King Pest.” A central theme of the play is the proverbial saying that power corrupts, and the play ends with an appeal to parliamentary, rather than absolutist, rule:

Her shall you save, and you, and yours in her,
If ye shall all with one assent forbear
Once to lay hand, or take unto yourselves
The crown, by colour of pretended right,
Or by what other means soe’er it be,
Till first by common counsel of you all
In Parliament, the regal diadem
Be set in certain place of governance; (Farmer 149)

The (lack of) a people’s voice in government played a crucial part of course in the political skirmishes that led to the American Revolution. In a speech made to the House of Lords on 9 January 1770, William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, expressed his view that “the Kingdom is in a flame” (93) and “torn to pieces by divisions and distractions in every part of his Majesty’s dominions” (83), including the American colonies. Speaking not only in the context of overseas and domestic discontent over the British government’s policies, but also specifically about the expulsion of the radical John Wilkes from parliament (Wilkes would later support the American Revolution), Pitt claimed that “Power without right is the most odious and detestable object that can be offered to the human imagination; it is not only pernicious to those who are subject to it, but tends to its own destruction” (89). He concluded with the now famous words that “Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my Lords, that where law ends, there tyranny begins” (94). These proved prophetic words in the final quarter of the eighteenth century; with the current American president’s peculiar notions of what is and what is not legal, Pitt’s powerful rhetoric may well start to resonate again.

Poe’s epigraph, then, alludes to the central political theme of Ferrex and Porrex, concerning corruption of government through abuse of power. This theme would have resonated strongly in an America that only recently had liberated itself – in the popular mindset as well as in much political rhetoric – from a tyrannical British monarch, George III, and the unjust taxation policies of his government. The epigraph functions as the first key that unlocks the mystery of the story’s title: readers are informed that they are about to peruse an allegory concerning political hubris, the autocratic tendencies to which it can lead, and the catastrophe that may follow for the population.

From Elizabethan Epigraph to Jacksonian Epitaph

Matthew Warshauer’s historical research into Andrew Jackson’s presidency reveals that his opponents believed that he embodied exactly the style of government critiqued in Ferrex and Porrex, and condemned by Pitt in his famous speech concerning governmental tyranny in Britain. Warshauer explains that “as a general, [Jackson] had been able to make his own decisions and exert control through sheer determination, often at the point of a musket. Jackson’s vanity, enlarged by his military successes, encouraged his belief that he knew the correct course for the nation, regardless of whether that course was politically wise or strictly legal” (123). From the outset Jackson’s opponents “worried that he would attempt to create a military dictatorship” (124), as he already had “a well-deserved reputation for acting despotically and running rough shod over the Constitution” (126). He was also “particularly wary of the Washington political environment and looked to trusted advisors…for advice on the cabinet” (127). However, critics of the president also believed Jackson “to be the dupe of others” (132), rather than the beneficiary of their advice, and Jackson himself, while “committed to reform and rooting out corruption” (138) came to believe that “a conspiracy was afoot” against him (135). Jackson’s frequent use of his veto power only enhanced his opponents’ worries concerning this president’s autocratic tendencies.

While working within the law – strictly speaking – and ostensibly devoted to democratic ideals, some of Jackson’s policies, Robert V. Remini explains, also had the effect of strengthening his hold on government: “the shift from national to deposit banking” during the so-called Bank War and the ensuing economic panic, “provided another boost to the growing power of the President. The new system gave Jackson almost ‘complete executive control’ in arranging the government’s fiscal operation” (107). For the business community, however, Jackson’s war on the Bank of the United States was a “‘naked barefaced act of usurpation and mischief” (qtd in Remini 109). To them, Jackson’s “intrusion of the government into the financial operations of the nation was a violation of basic republicanism, the very thing Jackson had promised during his presidential campaign of 1828 to terminate” (Remini 109). Eventually, Jackson’s unorthodox policies led to a conflict between his administration and Congress during which Henry Clay (followed by Calhoun and Webster) accused Jackson of “‘open, palpable and daring usurpation’” (qtd in Remini 125) and condemned “the rapaciousness of the executive in seeking to expand  the powers of his office and assume responsibilities and rights not granted by the Constitution and the laws of the nation and dangerous to the liberty of the American people” (Remini 125). For Clay, Jackson’s style of government saw America “moving from pure republicanism into something approaching despotism, not democracy” (Remini 125). Such resistance to his style of governing did not persuade Jackson to change course. When he “ordered federal troops to put down civil disorders….He was again assaulted for illegally expanding the powers of his office” (Remini 129). Unsurprisingly, by 1834, the year in which Poe wrote “King Pest” (Poe 239), the newly formed anti-Jacksonian Whigs publically and derogatorily referred to Jackson as King Andrew (see Warshauer 166; Remini 137). Today we see exactly the same rhetorical strategy utilized by the media whose journalism expresses opposition to the current president’s style of government.

Remini explains that the new political party’s name of Whigs was carefully chosen. Within British politics, “the name signified opposition to the monarchical party which advocated strong executive leadership. Also, the name was associated with the patriotic cause in the American struggle for independence against the British crown” (137). To the newly formed American Whigs, their president “represented in American government the same sort of arbitrary authority that was associated in Britain with the crown” (Remini 137). King Andrew the First had a clearly defined vision of what kind of nation the United States should become under his leadership, but he seemed convinced that this vision could be realized only so long as the nation was prepared to work towards it under his supreme authority for the period of his presidency. With Jackson currently on the White House wall, as an inspirational  portrait for the current President, it is no surprise that much critical media coverage of Donald Trump has taken a similar approach in aligning the current president’s style of government to that of an absolute monarch; Time magazine’s “King Me” cover-story (18 June 2018) is the best example. But the monarchical metaphor also crops up in socio-politically engaged contemporary popular culture, such as hip hop artist Open Mike Eagle’s “Happy Wasteland Day” with its portrait of a garbage King inspired by Donald Trump. The current president’s admiration for King Andrew I will only further enhance Jackson’s posthumous reputation as only an ostensibly democratic president. Today’s Whigs are the so-called “Never Trumpers.”

From Andrew I to Edward III

In 1835, when Poe’s satire appeared, even marginally informed readers must have recognized a biting satirical portrait of President Andrew Jackson in the moribund monarch of “King Pest.” Textual details such as the London “parish of  St. Andrews” (Poe 240), where the two sailors enjoy a drink before stumbling into King Pest’s offices, and “the sable hearse-plumes” (Poe 246) that adorn the head of Poe’s monarch, would have revealed the topicality of the satire. King Jackson I – as his opponents styled him – always “wore a black mourning band on his hat” after the death of his wife (Warshauer 128). In this context, the tall and slender sailor, “Legs,” with his elongated face and large eyes, bears some resemblance to Vice-president John C. Calhoun, or even Henry Clay, both of whom became staunch opponents of Jackson during the Nullification Crisis. Legs’s “hawk-nose” (Poe 241) links him to Calhoun’s and Clays’ identity as the “War-Hawks” in the 1812 conflict with Britain (Brogan 260). But had Poe meant to write merely a topical allegory that poked fun at the strife between American political figureheads on different wavelengths of the ideological spectrum in the 1830s, he would have done better to set the story in Washington, or any other major Eastern-seaboard city associated with the young Republic’s political history. The plague theme would have worked equally well in Philadelphia; Charles Brockden Brown had successfully employed the symbolic potential of the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic that had struck this city in Ormond (1799) and Arthur Mervyn (1799/1800). In 1833, Jackson himself had complained of “‘the prevalence of billious [sic] disease’” in Washington, “‘occasioned by the unwholesome miasma from the vegetable deposit thrown up by digging the canal thro [sic] the swamp of the tiber’” which “‘rendered our city very sickly’” (qtd in Remini 105). It would have been easy for Poe to limit his satire to the current political climate by representing Washington as the pestilence-stricken swamp.

By setting his story in medieval England, Poe was able to draw broader parallels between diverse politico-historical contexts, which makes his story more a timeless critique of political hubris and the egocentrism of autocratic leadership in general, rather than a satire aimed solely at a current politician. Through the medieval setting, Andrew Jackson is associated with Edward III and becomes just the latest example of a long-running political pest: the megalomaniac leader whose hubris plays to an overinflated sense of self-importance, actual political power and notions of legal entitlement, to the detriment of the well-being of the nation whose interests he is supposed to serve. It is not hard to discover similar metaphorical language in the writings of Trump critics. On 14 July 2018, the BBC’s Panorama program explored the question: “Is Donald Trump a Sex Pest?” When interviewed by CNN, the global news network’s legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, described the Trump administration’s proposal to build so-called “sanctuary cities” for immigrants as “grotesque” and condemned the notion implicit in the scheme that human beings could be used “as a kind of pestilence to spread around the country” or “a form of plague that you want to impose on your enemies.”  Poe’s often misunderstood and little-read story resonates as much with the current American political climate as it did with that of 1835.

Since “King Pest” is a satirical story, the reference to the “chivalrous reign of the third Edward” (Poe 240) needs to be read ironically. Ralph A. Griffith explains that in medieval England “a successful king was one who established a harmonious relationship” between the Crown and “the barons or magnates…country knights and esquires…wealthy merchants…the bishops and talented clerks” because “only then could political stability, effective government, and domestic peace be assured” (193-94). Yet, the reality was that “from Edward I’s reign onwards, there was no decade when Englishmen were not at war, whether overseas or in the British Isles” (Griffiths 194). Poe may well have chosen the reign of Edward III as the suitable setting for his political satire because the United States, like medieval Britain, had from the moment of the Revolution also seen persistent domestic and international armed conflict: the American Indian Wars, the War of 1812, as well as several large-scale, tax-related rebellions (see Brogan), as well as the often overlooked “Quasi War” with France from 1798-1800.

England’s Edward I, Griffiths explains, is remembered, amongst other things, for “his unrelenting insistence on asserting his sovereignty in all the territories of the British Isles, even those beyond the borders of his realm,” which “began the era of perpetual war” (194) known today as the Hundred Years’ War. Jonathan Sumption reveals how Edward III inherited his forefather’s lust for power by proclaiming himself not only King of England but also King of France, on 26 January 1340, against the advice of his parliament, who believed “Edward’s claim was a nonsense and ought to be forgotten” (291). Even before this bold move, Edward III had been involved in several dubious diplomatic missions on the Continent and, according to W.M. Ormrod, eventually “sought rather more ruthlessly to manipulate the discourse of crusade for his own good and gain” (183), rather than that of his own or fellow Christian nations. In an attempt to achieve his own territorial ambitions on the Continent, Edward III also “sedulously encouraged the territorial ambitions of the Flemings and inflamed their grievances against France” and offered “a variety of benefits to tempt them into military alliance” (Sumption 298). Fueled (in part) by the “pure fantasies of [his] romantic imagination,” Edward desired “control of the whole of western France from the Channel to the Bay of Biscay” (Ormrod 186), which eventually led to war with France in 1337, which was to be paid for to a large extent with “the profits from the wool trade” (Ormrod 188) with the Low Countries that had played such a significant part in England’s prosperity (Griffiths 208). Rather than further enhancing English prosperity, Edward’s hunger for power would lead England into a period of hunger and prolonged struggle and strife. At the time “King Pest,” appeared in September 1835, the American political establishment had also lived through years of socio-political struggle and strife: the so-called Petticoat Affair, the Nullification Crisis, the Indian Removal Act, the Bank War, and the first presidential assassination attempt; conflicts that also show some eerie similarities to the problems faced by the American government and society in the past three years (remember that a British citizen was arrested for a supposed assassination attempt on Trump at a rally, before he had become president).

The Significance of Sluys

In the medieval context sketched above, Poe’s choice of the port of Sluys [the old spelling of the current Sluis] as the city from which his two merchant sailors have just returned to London is significant. Today Sluis is a town in the province of Zeeland, in the Netherlands, on the border with Belgium. However, as Stephen Peithman explains in his note to Poe’s tale, “Sluis [was] founded in the thirteenth century as an additional port for the city of Bruges. In 1340 Edward III defeated the fleet of Philip VI of France just offshore, the first important engagement in the Hundred Years’ War” (n. 557). Actually, medieval Sluys played an even bigger role in the fortunes of Edward III than Peithman acknowledges. It was a key port for the lucrative wool trade between England and the Low Countries and thus a key strategic target in Edward III’s conflict with France. In May 1339, Sumption explains, a fleet of English vessels chased a merchant convoy to Sluys “where a bloody battle took place.” Through “acts of indiscipline” the English plundered “not only French ships but also those of Flanders and Spain,” both neutral countries in the conflict, for which Edward was ordered to pay “some £23,000 in compensation, a misfortune far outweighing the damage done” (Sumption 264) to the enemy. Edward’s lengthy, at times irresponsibly lavish, and above all costly sojourn in the Low Countries, in search for allies with whom he could fight his war against France, “left him, by the end of 1339, on the verge of bankruptcy” (Ormrod 210). According to Sumption, the king “had lost touch with public opinion in England” (304), which is poignantly illustrated by The Song against the King’s Taxes, an overt critique on Edward III’s strategy for financing his war effort (see Ormrod 211). In this song, the author expressed the idea that “should a demagogue emerge, the people would revolt (Ormond 229). In dire financial straits, the king managed to return home eventually, sailing from Sluys and arriving at Harwich on 21 February 1340, but only “on the most humiliating terms,” leaving “behind him as hostages his wife and younger son and the earls of Salisbury and Suffolk” (Sumption 305). Rather than seeing reason, Edward III ignored his advisors and returned to Sluys to confront the French. This time he pulled off “England’s greatest medieval naval battle” (Sumption 325) against the odds. Reveling in his victory he hanged one of the French commanders from the mast of his ship and wrote to his son “that every tide deposited more corpses on the Flanders coast” (Sumption 327). While the slaughter at Sluys “proved one of the bloodiest engagements of the entire Hundred Years War” (Ormrod 223), C.F. Richmond argues that “all it really achieved was a shift in initiative and confidence: after a lean period England moved on to the offensive” (99), but would find itself at war for more than a century still. The battle at Sluys entered English national mythology. Ormrod explains that it produced some telling folklore: “such were the enemy casualties at Sluys, it was said, that the fish in the English Channel now spoke French” (224).

In Poe’s story, the city of Sluys is not an arbitrary Continental allusion. Its name alludes to a bloody and mythologized battle marking the start of a lengthy war between two monarchies over regional political and economic power that took place in a geographic area – the Flemish low countries – neither monarch controlled outright but both desired complete control over in order to consolidate their power. As Richmond points out, in the broader scheme of the Hundred Years War, the so-called epic English victory at Sluys, was little more than a publicity stunt that aroused patriotic feelings which could be played upon to further a war that fed the king’s appetite for power, rather than a truly significant battle defeating an enemy whose pernicious will it was to undermine the welfare of the entire English nation. Sluys’s history, as a deeply scarred battleground where autocratic monarchs have sought forcefully to establish their dominance over each other, illustrates the barbaric aggression to which monarchs and their armies can be driven in search for power and status. On another note, as a key trading port, Sluys would have played its part, unwittingly, in bringing the Black Death to the British Isles. Poe would not have missed the irony inherent in Sluys’s doubly symbolic role as both a site of Edward’s supposedly “great” victory, and a gateway for the plague. The title of Poe’s story makes clear the author’s intention to present monarch and plague as a single figure.

From Edward III to Andrew I to Donald I

While Jackson was of course a chosen, rather than a hereditary leader of his people, Remini explains that, like Edward III, “when [he] decided upon a course of action, he pursued it with total commitment and with all the drive at his command – which was enormous” (8). During the Nullification Crisis, when the union showed signs of cracking, Jackson “was obliged to consider the use of military force as a real possibility” and “he did not shrink from it” (9). Whilst he worked within the law, Remini explains, Jackson was also not loathe attacking his opponents on personal grounds. The president and his advisers “reckoned [Calhoun’s] nullification theory and his conspiracy to disrupt the Union as the consequence of a disappointed ambition” (14). According to his biographer, “Jackson expressed his regret that he had not executed Calhoun for treason” (14). Early in 1834, the year in which Poe would write his satire, Jackson was involved in a political conflict with France, over the failure of France to fulfil their obligations under a treaty, which amongst other things, concerned an indemnity to be paid by France to America, as well as the lowering of “duties on imported French wines” by the United States (Remini 201). When it became clear that the French were not going to pay the agreed indemnity, Jackson’s “initial reaction was to do something dramatic – and preferably violent” (Remini 204), giving rise to fears within his administration that he was willing to go to war if the French failed to comply with the articles of the treaty (205-209). This makes the parallel drawn by Poe between Jackson and Edward even more telling.

Eventually, Jackson suggested the seizure of French property, should the indemnity not be paid (Remini 218). After several ill-worded diplomatic exchanges, France did agree to pay up, but Jackson categorically refused to apologize for his aggressive stance and insulting language during the dispute (Remini 236). Once again, one is reminded of the current American president’s public persona. Like Jackson (and even Edward III), Trump is often described by critics as a bully, using coarse language to insult those who oppose him. Only recently, he tweeted: “‘If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again’” (qtd in Reuters). The Intelligencer magazine ran an article on Trump’s bullying tactics illustrated by a still from Back to the Future II, in which the archetypal dumb bully Biff Tannen is shown posturing in front of a portrait of himself as a macho entrepreneur (the character was based partly on Trump). This magazine’s take on Trump is close to Poe’s take on Jackson and Time’s “King Me” cover is very similar to the movie still from Back to the Future. A brief surf on the web reveals that the internet is rife with photographs of Trump flanked by the portrait of King Andrew I in the White House.

Such extensive representational parallelisms tie Trump to the original King Pest, the protagonist of Poe’s political satire. Especially in light of Trump’s responses to the recent impeachment hearings, it has become clear to many outsiders looking into the American political scene that the current administration seems to be working with a very different understanding of presidential power than most previous presidents. A recent article in the New Republic underscores this perspective by highlighting often-used phrases in Trump’s defense, that diplomats “serve at the pleasure of the president” (Ford) and that he has an “absolute right” to do what he does. Poe’s president personified as pestilence remarks: “in these dominions I am monarch, and here rule with undivided empire under the title of King Pest the First” (1.250).  In terms of motivating his decisions and actions, Poe’s allegorical royal equally resembles the current president, as he has projected himself to the voting public over the past months: “it concerns, and concerns alone, our own private and regal interest, and is in no manner important to any other than ourself” (1.250). Amnesty International’s secretary general Kumi Naidoo’s description of Trump as “selfish, reckless and monstrous” (Amnesty) for exiting the Paris Climate Pact, perfectly describes not only Trump, but equally Edward III and Poe’s King Pest.

Works Cited

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About the Author

Evert Jan van Leeuwen is a lecturer in English-language literature and culture at Leiden University, the Netherlands. His interests lie in the history and development of the popular-culture genres Gothic, Horror and Science Fiction, on which he has published numerous articles. He is currently researching the first history of Dutch-language Science Fiction.