Put not your trust in princes

“Put not your trust in princes” is a proverb that recurs in the novel as both practical caution and political irony. Jimmy McGrath invokes it while wondering whether his promised payment for Count Stylptitch’s memoirs is a hoax; the surrounding plot expands the warning into a world where royal claims, political alliances, and apparent identities cannot be accepted at face value.

The proverb and Jimmy’s commission

Jimmy uses the saying while describing the conditions attached to Stylptitch’s manuscript. If he delivered it to a London publisher by October 13, he was to receive a thousand pounds. The parcel had followed him for so long that the deadline left little room for delay, and he had already booked passage for Cape Town to pursue a different plan. His friend Anthony Cade’s arrival offered a way to take over the commission, but Jimmy remained unsure whether the promised money was genuine.

In this first context, the proverb is a wry qualification rather than a settled political doctrine: Jimmy hopes the payment is real even as he warns against trusting princes or politicians. The manuscript itself makes that doubt consequential. Its publication could disrupt a proposed restoration of the monarchy in Herzoslovakia, so a private publishing deadline is entangled with a much larger political contest.

Royal legitimacy and political calculation

The history behind that contest gives the proverb a sharper edge. Anthony recounts that King Nicholas IV married a Paris music-hall performer who was presented as Countess Popoffsky and claimed to have Romanov ancestry. She was crowned Queen Varaga, but the population did not accept the royal marriage as legitimate. Discontent and repression preceded an uprising that killed the king and queen and established a republic. The republic endured, although political violence continued, including the assassination of presidents.

Against that history, the proposed restoration is not simply a return to an uncontested tradition. George Lomax explains that Herzoslovakia’s people want a monarchy and are prepared to offer the crown to Prince Michael, whose bid has the support of the British government. The proposal is tied to a loan of roughly a million pounds from Isaacstein and Company, with concessions promised in return. The political language of restoration therefore sits beside financial self-interest, while the memoirs threaten to expose information that could imperil the arrangement.

Succession and the hidden claimant

When the question of succession arises, Lomax identifies Prince Nicholas as probably next in line. After Prince Michael’s murder, Superintendent Battle confirms that Nicholas Obolovitch is the heir and Michael’s first cousin. Battle says there is reason to believe Nicholas had been in the United States, raising money on his expected position. These statements make the proverb resonate beyond Jimmy’s uncertainty about a publisher’s payment: the political future depends on a claimant whose identity and whereabouts are themselves matters of uncertainty.

The final revelation overturns the apparent distance between the claimant and the story’s central figure. Anthony tells Herman Isaacstein that Nicholas was reported killed in the Congo, then clarifies that he had spread the report himself. He identifies himself by the full royal name Nicholas Sergius Alexander Ferdinand Obolovitch and explains that he adopted the name Anthony Cade for the life he intended to lead. The supposed death was a deliberate concealment, and the man whose identity seemed settled was in fact the heir whose existence the succession negotiations required.

Dramatic function and irony

The saying thus gathers force through repetition and reversal. Initially, it is Jimmy’s comic-sounding hedge against being cheated; in the political plot, it fits a history in which a royal title could be constructed through a fabricated pedigree, popular acceptance could not be secured by ministerial arrangements alone, and a supposed dead prince could reappear under another name. The final revelation does not make the proverb a simple judgment against monarchy: it exposes how easily trust can be manipulated when political claims depend on stories about identity, legitimacy, and death.

The proverb also binds the book’s two kinds of uncertainty. Jimmy cannot tell whether his thousand-pound promise will be honored, while the political players cannot safely assume that a claimant’s reported death means he is gone. In both cases, appearances and assurances invite scrutiny; the phrase’s modest, conversational origin becomes a compact guide to the larger plot’s deceptions.