The Queen of Underland's invasion scheme

The Queen of Underland’s invasion scheme is a plan to break through from the underground into an Overworld country and install the enchanted Knight as its king. Its intended surprise attack turns the peaceful ground above into a concealed battlefield, while the Knight’s sincere belief that the Queen is rescuing him helps obscure the violence of the campaign he describes.

Background and the Knight’s Account

During a meal in the Dark Castle, the Knight explains that he remembers no earlier life or origin and believes the Queen saved him from an evil enchantment. He says that he remains bound by a spell from which only she can free him. According to his account, each night his mind changes first, making him furious and dangerous, and then his body takes the form of a great serpent. He has no memory of these episodes afterward, waking again in his ordinary form and sound mind, though tired.

The Knight understands the proposed invasion as the condition of his release. He says the Queen has foretold that he will be freed once she has made him king of a land in the Overworld and placed its crown on his head. His account therefore joins personal deliverance to political conquest: the Queen’s promise of freedom is inseparable from a campaign that will impose him on another country.

The Tunnel and the Planned Assault

The target country has already been selected, as has the place where the underground forces will break through. The Queen’s Earthmen have been digging day and night and, by the Knight’s report, have reached a point less than twenty feet below the grass on which the country’s inhabitants walk. He expects a message to be sent to the Queen, who is at the excavation that night, and anticipates that the remaining layer of earth will soon be broken.

The attack is to be sudden and military in character. The Knight imagines riding out with the Queen as guide and a thousand Earthmen behind him, falling upon the country’s people, killing their chief men, and casting down their strong places. He expects the invasion to make him its crowned king within twenty-four hours. The plan’s speed depends on concealment: those above continue their ordinary lives without suspecting that an army is digging immediately beneath them.

Scrubb’s Objection and the Plan’s Meaning

Scrubb responds that the assault seems unfair to the people who will be attacked. The Knight first praises the boy’s quick wit, then admits that he had not thought about the plan from that perspective. For a moment he appears troubled, but he quickly turns the threatened defeat into a joke, imagining that the people above will laugh about the surprise once the first shock has passed.

That change in tone reveals the gap between the Knight’s account of himself as a recipient of the Queen’s generosity and the consequences of the future he is preparing to impose. His brief recognition of Scrubb’s objection does not alter the invasion scheme as he describes it; instead, he laughs it away. The scene makes the threatened country’s peaceful surface and the hidden army beneath it the central contrast, exposing how readily the Knight treats a population’s defeat as an amusing spectacle rather than as the cost of his promised crown.