Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins (1863-1933) was a barrister who added a new word to the English language - a word which conjures up images of a romantic mid-European country “from that now mythic time when history wore a rose and politics had not yet outgrown the waltz”. In short: Ruritania.

Born in Clapton London, he was the son of a schoolmaster, the Revd. Edwards Comerford Hawkins. Through his mother Jane Isabella Grahame, he was a first cousin of the author of The Wind in the Willows. Kenneth Grahame.

Educated at Marlborough College, the young Hawkins then had a brilliant career at Balliol College, Oxford. A considerable athlete and sportsman, he played rugby for his college, became President of the Union, and obtained a first-class degree. Having decided to become a lawyer. he was called to the Bar by the Middle Temple in 1887. He practised for some seven years in the same chambers as Herbert Henry Asquith. who was to become Prime Minister. He also became keenly interested in politics, and as a Liberal stood unsuccessfully for South Buckinghamshire in the General Election of 1892.

By this time he had also begun another career as an author. He wrote short stories for various magazines in the late I 880s, and in 1890 published his first novel, A Man of Mark. In 1893 his light Society sketches The Dolly Dialogues appeared in the Westminster Gazette: they were a series of conversations between Dolly, Lady Mickleham, and a Mr. Samuel Carter.

In 1894 he took the bold decision to forsake the Bar and become a full-time writer, and for the next thirty years, novels poured from his pen. He had also loved the stage since childhood, and at one time had thought of becoming an actor. In 1898 his first play The Adventures of Lady Ursula was produced. and others followed in 1900 and 1903.

Also in 1903, aged 40. he married an American. Elizabeth Somerville Sheldon, who lived until 1946: they had two sons and a daughter.

On the outbreak of war in 1914. he was over 50 and too old for military services. However, he played his part by joining the Ministry of Information, and was engaged in producing propaganda material for the Allies. It was for this work that he was knighted in 1918. In later years his health deteriorated, he published an autobiography. Memoirs and Notes in 1927, and died six years later, aged 70.

THE PRISONER OF ZENDA

On November 28, 1893. Hawkins’ future was decided for him: author, not lawyer. On that afternoon, after winning a case in the Westminster County Court, he walked back to the Temple and turned over in his mind some thoughts about a foreign country. The Latin phrase “Rus rur’ came to him, meaning ‘countryside’ as opposed to “urbs” (city). A usual suffix for a country was “-ania” (Rumania~ Lithuania. Albania) - so why not “Ruritania”?

It was during this walk that he also noticed two men who passed him by, one after the other, who were uncannily alike. He suddenly wondered if one might perhaps pass himself off as the other.

Always a quick writer, he set to work at once. By the end of that evening he had roughed out the plot of The Prisoner of Zenda - the novel that was to make him famous. Writing two chapters a day, he had finished it by December 29. It was published in April 1894 under the name of “Anthony Hope”, and it was an instant success.

The full title is The Prisoner of Zenda: Being the history of three months in the life of an English Gentleman. It is a clever and ingenious tale full of adventure pathos, and romantic appeal - not least because it is told in the first person by a debonair and charming socialite straight out of The Dolly Dialogues. Rudolf Rassendyll, aged 29, is the indolent younger brother of the Earl of Burlesdon. It is his disapproving sister-in-law Rose who begins the story with the acid query “I wonder when in the world you’re going to do anything, Rudolf?”. She wants him to take up an appointment in the Diplomatic Service, but instead he proposes to go for “a ramble in the Tyrol”.

Rose is embarrassed by the skeleton in the Rassendyll cupboard. And it is indeed surprising that in the strict moral climate of Victorian England, Anthony Hope should have based his novel on the outcome of an illicit liaison in the 18th century.

Rassendyll describes for his readers how in 1733 the then Crown Prince Rudolf of Ruritania came to the English Court, and fell for the lovely Countess Amelia, wife of ”James, 5th Earl of Burlesdon and 22nd Baron Rassendyll”. A few months later she gave birth to a son, later the 6th Earl - who was distinguished by red hair, a pointed nose, and blue eyes. Such were not characteristic of the Rassendylls - but they were the unmistakable hallmarks of the Elphbergs of Ruritania. They also recurred in the person of the young Rudolf Rassendyll, and thus enabled him to carry out an amazing imposture.

The plot of The Prisoner of Zenda is so well known, from the book and the various film versions, that it needs only a brief summary. Rudolf goes on holiday to Ruritania. and by chance meets two men walking in a forest: Colonel Sapt and Count Frits von Tarlenheim. The colonel is struck by Rassendyll’s resemblance to Ruritania’s King Rudolf V. “Shave him, and he’d be the King!”

The monarch himself joins them, and they have a convivial evening in the royal hunting lodge. But the King’s jealous half-brother Black Michael, Duke of Strelsau, has sent a bottle of drugged wine - and the King is due to be crowned in Strelsau next day. He is kidnapped, but the resourceful Colonel Sapt has an idea: “Fate sends you now to Strelsau”. Rassendyll is to impersonate the King at his coronation. There is an amorous complication: the King’s cousin Princess Flavia and the impostor fall in love.

After many vicissitudes, the King is rescued from his imprisonment in the castle of Zenda. Duke Michael is killed by the leader of his own bodyguard “The Six” - the charming but villainous Count Rupert of Hentzau. The King is restored to his rightful throne and will marry the Princess. Rassendyll and his lady-love must part forever, it seems. There will be just one link: each year Fritz von Tarlenheim meets him in Dresden and gives him a box in which reposes a rose and a message: “Rudolf - Flavia - always”.

So ends Rassendyll’s chronicle of his amazing brief reign. It is beautifully told, in elegant phrases illuminated, with flashes of wry humour. It is full of quotable remarks. Rupert of Hentzau says “Why, it’s the play-actor”. The King to Rudolf: “You have shown me how to play the King”. Flavia tells Rudolf of her love: ‘It was always you. never the King”. Colonel Sapt: “You’re the noblest Elphberg of them all”, And Fritz von Tarlenheim, as Rassendyll takes his leave: “Heaven doesn't always make the right men Kings!”

THE HEART OF PRINCESS OSRA

The tremendous success of The Prisoner of Zenda encouraged Anthony Hope to write again about Ruritania in 1896. This was The Heart of Princess Osra, short stories about her nine suitors. Osra is the 21-year-old sister of the 18th-century prince Rudolf who had seduced Countess Amelia; he becomes King Rudolf III on the death of his father King Henry the Lion.

The Osra stories are a sad disappointment. They are trivial and unconvincing. and written in a mock-archaic style which soon becomes tedious. Most of the princess’s would-be wooers end up dead for no good reason, and she herself is a mere pasteboard figure, cold and disdainful. She at last finds true love with a young student. whom she marries. He turns out to be the Grand Duke of Mittenheim.

The book’s only interest is in its incidental information about Ruritania and its aristocrats. The first story features Countess Hilda von Lauengram; “the house of Lauengram was very noble”. Decades later another Lauengram was one of Black Michael’s notorious bodyguard, “The Six”.

Count Nikolas of Festenburg abducts Osra, and is killed by Rudolf III: he gives the Count’s estate to Francis of Tarlenheim. The Bishop of Modenstein rescues Osra; he is Frederick of Hentzau. “Some of the Hentzaus have been good and some have been bad: and the good fear God which the bad do not: but neither the good nor the bad fear anything in the world besides.”

The Prince of Glottenberg woos Osra half-heartedly - Glottenberg was a princely German state in Hope’s 1 893 book of short stories Sport Royal.

RUPERT OF HENTZAU

Happily. the Osra book was not the last we hear of Ruritania. Rudolf Rassendyll returned there in 1898 in a brilliant sequel to The Prisoner of Zenda. This later book took its title from the knavish survivor of the earlier adventure, Count Rupert. The narrator this time (for reasons which eventually become apparent) is not Rassendyll but Fritz von Tarlenheim. The first-person technique is effective in that it gives immediacy and personal feeling. but it is disadvantageous when (as very often) it recounts events at which Fritz was not present. He purports to recount what others have told him - hut who remembers the exact words of a conversation?

Nevertheless, this is a Powerful and dramatic story fully worthy of its predecessor. It takes place three years after The Prisoner and it all stems from the unhappy Queen’s decision to write a last letter to her love. Locked in a loveless marriage, “worse than widowed,” she wants to pour out her feelings to Rudolf. She entreats her “dear friend Fritz” to carry the letter safely to Rudolf, and to bring back his reply: “I must have his goodbye to carry me through my life".

Wise old Colonel Sapt has deep misgivings. “A letter’s a poor thing to risk the peace of a country for.... Is he (Rassendyll) going to waste all his life thinking of a woman he never sees!” Sapt’s worst fears are realised, and the Queen’s rashness leads to the deaths of almost all the main participants in the enterprise.

Fritz takes the letter to his annual tryst with Rudolf, accompanied by a new servant, “a stolid, somewhat stupid fellow” - a Swiss whose name, Bauer, indicates his peasant origin. Fritz later regretted “how that stout guileless-looking youth made a fool of me”. For Bauer was in fact in the service of the banished Count Rupert of Hentzau, who was desperate to persuade the King to let him return to his estates in Ruritania.

The plot moves fast. Fritz is waylaid, the incriminating letter stolen. Hentzau tries to show it to the King, who pulls a gun on him, More or less in self-defence. Rupert shoots the King dead. Rassendyll pursues Rupert, retrieves the letter, and in turn kills him in a duel.

The people of Ruritania know nothing of these dark deeds, and Rassendyll’s wily English servant James propounds a startling plan: Mr. Rassendyll resume his imposture as the King and live happily with his beloved Queen Flavia.

All through this saga, the Queen has been troubled by a strange dream: “Rudolf, last night I had a dream about you... I seemed to be in Strelsau. and all the people were talking about the King... You seemed not to hear what we said.” Later she had the same dream again: “He seemed to me to be the King. ..but he did not answer or move.”

Rudolf has to decide whether to accept James’s plan and undertake a life of deception as the husband of the Queen. or whether to take a strict moral line and renounce her forever. He walks alone in a moonlit garden, trying to decide. Suddenly “a man sprang out of the dark line of tall trees ... A shot rang out ... Mr Rassendyll sank slowly to his knees.”

The Queen’s bodyguard Lieutenant von Bernenstein cries out “Bauer! By God, Bauer!” and his sword splits Bauer’s skull. No question of a fair trial for the assassin! The death of Rudolf is of course the explanation of why he could not be the narrator of Rupert of Hentzau.

Rudolf is buried with regal splendour in the Cathedral of Strelsau. As Fritz von Tarlenheim wrote afterwards: “As a King, Rudolf Rassendyll had died, as a King let him lie... At a mighty price, our task had been made easy; many might have doubted the living, none questioned the dead.”

By command of the Queen, a stately monument was erected, with an emotive Latin inscription translatable thus: “To Rudolf. who reigned lately in this city, and reigns forever in her heart. - FLAVIA REGINA.”

And what was the decision that Rudolf made in the moments before his death? - for Fritz had seen that “the question had found its answer”. Anthony hope gives us a clue, even though Flavia says “He didn’t tell me”. As Rudolf lay dying, Fritz addresses him as “Sire”. “Well, for an hour, then”, he murmured. That does not sound as though he had intended to be King.

Rupert of Hentzau has inconsistencies and improbabilities, but I have always found it strangely moving ever since I first read it as an impressionable 12-vear old in 1943.

Incidentally, regarding the theme of Flavia’s ominous dream, I wonder if Hope knew of an event in the life of Abraham Lincoln? Some 30 Years earlier, America’s greatest President dreamed that he was looking in a mirror and saw a double image of himself - the second fainter than the first. He interpreted this to mean that he would be elected to two terms of office, but that he would not survive the second. Sadly, his dream came true; like Rassendyll. he fell to an assassin’s bullet.

DRAMATISATIONS

The success of the Zenda novel was so great that, not surprisingly, it was soon turned into a play by Edward Rose. It was put on at London’s St James’s Theatre in 1896 with the actor-impresario Sir George Alexander as the Rudolfs. It was enthusiastically reviewed by George Bernard Shaw, no less.

Many other stagings followed, culminating in Chichester Festival Theatre’s version 90 years later by Warren Graves, in 1986. The Rudolf roles were performed by Christopher Timothy, best known for All Creatures Great and Small, the TV series about a veterinary surgeon. Mr. Timothy inauspiciously told the Brighton Evening Argus that “we’re playing it (Zenda) as a comedy”. But it only really works in our cynical age if it is played absolutely straight, conveying a message about duty and honour. The Timothy approach was not entirely successful; the West Sussex Gazette wrote that he “looks as baffled at times as if dealing with Tristan in the surgery”.

The first film versions (silent. of course) were made in 1913, 1915, and 1922 - the last with Ramon Novarro as a ruthless, dandified Rupert of Hentzau. Lewis Stone was the two Rudolfs; 30 years later he was the Cardinal in the Stewart Granger film.

The finest screen version was produced in Hollywood in 1937. The abdication of King Edward VIII in the previous year, a few months before his Coronation was to take place, focused attention on the role of monarchy in Government, and David O. Selznick made the most of it. He assembled a superb, mainly British cast. Ronald Colman, the archetypal English gentleman, was Rudolf, the beautiful Madeleine Carroll his Flavia. David Niven was Fritz. and the gruff but loyal Colonel Sapt was played by a former Sussex cricketer and England Test captain, Sir Charles Aubrey Smith. He had turned actor in 1896, as Black Michael in Edward Rose’s Zenda play, and had subsequently appeared in so many other productions that he once said he had played every part in the story except that of Princess Flavia.

Douglas Fairbanks, Junior (later an honorary Knight of the British Empire) was a debonair Rupert of Hentzau. and the Canadian actor Raymond Massey made Duke Michael satisfyingly sinister. Mary Astor was the tragic Antoinette de Mauban. Professor Jeffrey Richards wrote in the Radio Times of October 15, 1981, that the film was “a wholly satisfying blend of mediaeval chivalric romance... with a contemporary setting".

Fifteen years later the death of King George VI precipitated another Coronation, and Hollywood scented further profits from the Hope novel. As Professor Richards noted, “when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer decided to re-make the film in 1952, they paid the previous version the compliment of producing an exact replica (using) the 1937 screenplay almost word for word.. ,and Alfred Newman’s glowingly romantic score”.

The new Rudolf was the suave, golden-voiced Gainsborough film star Stewart Granger, with Deborah Kerr as his Princess. There was an American Colonel Sapt in Louis Calhern; he had been the Cardinal in 1937.

Robert Douglas was miscast as a too stolid Duke Michael, and James Mason played Hentzau as a grim German auditioning for a future role as “Rommel, Desert Fox”.

Both the 1937 and 1952 films had spectacular Coronation scenes, with the Ruritanian national anthem prominently featured. For many years I thought it had been specially composed; not being a lover of Handel, I did not realise it was See the Conquering Hero Comes from his oratorio Judas Maccabeus.

The latest film version is best forgotten. Peter Sellers’ abysmal spoof of 1979 was a deliberate attempt to ridicule Hope’s romantic novel, and it completely wasted the talents of gifted actors like Simon Williams, John Laurie, Jeremy Kemp, and Lionel Jefferies.

There have been some TV versions, most recently in 1984 with a largely unknown cast: Malcolm Sinclair, Victoria Wicks, Jonathan Morris, John Woodvine. Scenes were shot in Lincoln and in Castle Coch near Cardiff - a fascinatingly realistic Castle of Zenda. TV also gave the only screen version of Rupert of Hentzau in 1964, with Peter Wyngarde in the title role, Barbara Shelley as the Queen, and George Baker (later “Inspector Wexford”) as the Rudolfs.

There was a particularly good radio adaptation of both books in 1973 - so good that it was repeated on BBC Radio 4 in 1978 and 1984. These had a fine cast: Julian Glover as Rassendyll and the King. Nigel Stock (also familiar as Dr Watson in the Sherlock Holmes series) playing Sapt, Hannah Gordon as Flavia. and a future Just William, Martin Jarvis. as Rupert.

ENVOI (or POSTSCRIPT?)

There is an undying magic about the Ruritania novels. They have inspired numerous parodies and updates. For instance, in 1981 “John Haythorne” published a novel entitled The Strelsau Dimension, in which Ruritania had become a People’s Socialist Republic and member of the Warsaw Pact. The diplomatic implications were authoritatively handled, for the author was in fact Richard Parsons, our Ambassador in Madrid. The Amalgamated Press’s weekly story-papers sometimes made use of the theme. The Girls’ Crystal writer Leslie Swainson did so several times under his pen-names of ”Margery Marriott” and “Doris Leslie” (Princess on Probation. Princess to Save Leiconia, Guardian to the Royal Fugitives). And the Morcove girls visited the middle European country of Turania.

Like the Sherlock Holmes stories, the two Hope novels have prompted much scholarly research by writers who take them seriously. One such was the former Foreign editor of The Times, E.G. Hodgkin. In a lengthy article on July 31, 1976, he endeavoured, to locate Ruritania geographically. He concluded that it was in fact Austria, partly because of the recurrence in its history of the name “Rudolf.” He detected an echo of the real-life Mayerling tragedy of 1889, in which Crown Prince Rudolf (“unstable, easily-swayed, well-intentioned, and too fond of the bottle” -just like the King of Ruritania) murdered his mistress Marie Vetsera at his hunting lodge, and then committed suicide.

Mr Hodgkin was fascinated by the name “Zenda”. Pointing out that Anthony Hope was interested, in comparative religion, he speculated on whether it was “an abbreviation for Zend-Avesta, the sacred writings of Zoroaster”. And he was amused to note that “there is a place actually called Zenda in Kansas, presumably settled by Ruritanian emigrants to the New World”.

The Hodgkin article prompted as many as 18 letters to The Times variously locating Ruritania in Rumania, Bavaria, Silesia, and (G.B.S.’s choice) Mecklenhurg on the Baltic.

Mr. Hodgkin’s final contribution to Hope studies was to suggest that (like Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass) “the whole Ruritanian canon is based. on a game of chess... Rassendyll’s own description of himself and the others (is) as ‘pieces in Black Michael’s game’, and Bauer, Rassendyll’s eventual assassin, is the German for a pawn in chess as well as for a peasant”.

By 1980 The Prisoner of Zenda had “become such a literary classic that the publishers Longman issued a volume of students’ notes by Professor John M. Munro of the American University of Beirut. He analyses every chapter in detail, gives character sketches of the most minor figures such as Lord Burlesdon and Marshal Strakencz, and even includes some examination questions and hints on how to answer them. His most curious omission is any discussion of the all-important sequel; he dismisses it in a single line: “Anthony Hope was so fascinated with Rupert’s character that the novel he wrote after The Prisoner of Zenda bears his name.”

A writer who studies both books is Roger Lancelyn Green (father of the Sherlock Holmes expert Richard Lancelyn Green, who died in mysterious circumstances in May 2004). Roger wrote a lengthy introduction to J.M. Dent’s 1966 “Everyman” edition combining the two.

Our own editor Mary Cadogan devotes several pages to the saga in her book And Then Their Hearts Stood Still (Macmillan. 1994). As she says, it is “shot through with idealism, strong concepts of honour and chivalry, and triumphantly swashbuckling high adventure which is matched by compelling characterisation.. Even today, when its idealistic romanticism seems over the top, it still charms and inspires”.