“KING VICTOR AND KING CHARLES” is an historical tragedy in two divisions and four parts, of which the time is 1730 and 31, and the place the castle of Rivoli near Turin.  The episode which it records may be read in any chronicle of the period; and Mr. Browning adds a preface, in which he justifies his own view of the characters and motives involved in it.  King Victor II. (first King of Sardinia) was sixty-four years old, and had been nominally a ruler from the age of ten, when suddenly (1730) he abdicated in favour of his son Charles.  The Queen was dead, and he had privately married a lady of the Court, to whom he had been long attached; and the desire to acknowledge this union, combined with what seems to have been a premature old age, might sufficiently have explained the abdication; but Mr. Browning adopts the idea, which for a time found favour, that it had a deeper cause:  that the King’s intriguing ambition had involved him in many difficulties, and he had devised this plan for eluding them.

Charles has become his father’s heir through the death of an older and better loved son.  He has been thrust into the shade by the favourite, now Victor’s wife, and by the Minister d’Ormea; his sensitive nature crushed into weakness, his loftiness of purpose never called into play.  He seems precisely the person of whom to make at once a screen and a tool.  But he has scarcely been crowned when it is evident that he will be neither.  He assumes the character of king at the same time as the function; and by his honesty, courage, and humanity, restores the prosperity of his country, and the honour of his house.  He secures even the devotion, interested though it be, of the unscrupulous d’Ormea himself.

Victor, however, is restless in his obscurity; and by the end of the year is scheming for the recovery of his crown.  He presents himself before his son, and demands that it be restored to him; denouncing what he considers the weakness of King Charles’ rule.  Charles refuses, gently but firmly, to abandon what has become for him the post of duty; and King Victor departs, to conspire openly against him.  D’Ormea is active in detecting the conspiracy and unveiling it; and Victor is brought back to the palace, this time a prisoner.

But Charles does not receive him as such.  His filial piety is outraged by the unnatural conflict; and his wife Polixena has vainly tried to convince him that there is a higher because less obvious virtue in resisting than in giving way.  He once more acknowledges his father as King.  And both he and his wife are soon aware that in doing so, he is only humouring the caprice of a dying man. “I have no friend in the wide world is the old King’s cry.  Give me what I have no power to take from you.”

                        “So few years give it quietly,
       My son!  It will drop from me.  See you not? 
       A crown’s unlike a sword to give away—­
       That, let a strong hand to a weak hand give! 
       But crowns should slip from palsied brows to heads
       Young as this head:....” (vol. iii. p. 162-3.)