Of Ceremonies in the Interview of Kings

There is no subject so vain that does not deserve a place in this rhapsody. Our common rules of civility, following the usual custom, oblige us to put ourselves to inconvenience for the convenience of others, and to consult the good pleasure of those we have to deal with, more than our own. But so many and so various ceremonies attend the meeting of kings, that one would think all things else had been forgot in the ordering of that business.

The kings of Persia never appeared in public without being covered; the Romans thought that dignity required a certain gravity of look. But neither dignity nor gravity is in truth the thing that is sought in these formalities. They are only helps to reverence, contrivances to make the multitude stare and to preserve a kind of mystery about those who govern. The face of a prince carries authority by fiction of law long before it carries it by force of character.

“We think there is some virtue in greatness itself, as if the distance between us and kings were made of something other than accident and custom.”

Those who carry much ceremony with them show that they think themselves in need of it. A man well established in his own worth uses ceremony as a convenience, not a crutch. When two great kings have need of contrivances to meet one another without either seeming to yield, it is a confession that the ceremony governs, not the kings.

I have always observed that those who put most form upon their approach to others are those least secure within themselves. What is all this monstrous apparatus of courts but a great machine designed to prevent the prince from ever having to know what he really is?