Barkilphedro’s Rise at Court

Barkilphedro’s rise at court begins not with an office or a public triumph but with a test of the Queen’s response. When Queen Anne smiles at his whispered mockery of her dead Lord Steward, Barkilphedro reads the smile as permission to turn his spite into influence. He becomes a necessary presence whose power, like the small wheel that sets a larger mechanism moving, is exercised through access, observation, and the disgraceful errands of the great.

A foothold in the royal household

Royal palaces, the narration observes, are readily entered by a courtier who can find a pretext. Barkilphedro finds one, and his position with Queen Anne comes to resemble the one he already holds with Duchess Josiana: he becomes an indispensable domestic presence. The comparison makes his advancement less a story of formal appointment than of insinuation. He acquires a place in the household by becoming useful, then makes that usefulness difficult to do without.

His success follows a pattern already established in his dealings with Duchess Josiana. She has used his talents as a spy and trusted him with a master-key to her apartments, allowing him to enter at any hour. At court, such keys were known as “giving the key”; Duchess Josiana gave one to Lord David and another to Barkilphedro. This earlier intimacy with private spaces helps explain the kind of access he cultivates around the Queen: his influence depends on being admitted where other people’s words and actions can be observed, remembered, and turned to use.

The test of the Queen’s smile

The decisive opening comes after William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, the Queen’s Lord Steward, dies. Queen Anne laments him in Barkilphedro’s presence, praising the virtues that had been served by an intellect she considered poor. Barkilphedro answers in a low voice and in French: “Dieu veuille avoir son âne!” The remark is a calculatedly biting response to the Queen’s own disparagement, delivered quietly rather than as a public challenge.

Queen Anne smiles. Barkilphedro notices the reaction and draws a practical conclusion: biting pleases her. The importance of the moment lies less in the wit itself than in his ability to treat the Queen’s expression as information about the limits of acceptable speech. Her smile gives him “Free licence” for his spite, and from then on he pushes his curiosity into more places and takes his malignity with it. The episode establishes the method behind his advancement: he tests a boundary, observes the response, and uses the permission he believes he has found.

From flatterer to feared intermediary

Barkilphedro’s service to the Queen is described as a form of flattery that works by stinging her neighbours. The narration compares this courtly technique to the treatment of Louis the Great and presents it as a way of pleasing a ruler through mockery directed elsewhere. His cheerfulness, willingness to accept, lack of devotion, ugliness, and mischievousness are all presented as qualities that make him especially suited to the role. The portrait is pointedly ambivalent: he is not praised as loyal or principled, but shown as agreeable and useful to power precisely because he will not take up anyone’s defence.

Once Queen Anne has accepted his manner, others begin to fear what he can do with it. The narration remarks that whoever can make the King laugh makes others tremble; Barkilphedro becomes a powerful buffoon. His influence grows daily, but “underground”: rather than standing openly at the centre of authority, he works his way forward through hidden channels. Important people place confidence in him and charge him with disgraceful commissions when they need them performed. Their reliance gives him leverage even as it exposes the compromised character of the service he offers.

The small wheel of court power

The image of “wheels within wheels” gathers the episode’s account of Barkilphedro’s rise into a single mechanism. He becomes its motive power, although the narrator emphasizes the smallness of the wheel that moves the larger machine. His apparent insignificance is therefore not the opposite of power but one of its instruments: he can advance by operating between people of rank, carrying out tasks they prefer not to own and gathering knowledge they cannot safely ignore.

The narration also describes courtly observation as a kind of nocturnal practice. A courtier prowls in the night of power, illuminating selected places while remaining in darkness himself; the object of his search is not a man but a fool, and what he finds is the King. This image extends Barkilphedro’s particular career into a critique of court politics, where access and selective disclosure may matter more than visible rank. His rise is thus both personal and structural: Queen Anne’s smile authorizes his malice, while the court’s appetite for covert service turns that malice into an instrument others repeatedly employ.