Another of Europe’s little kings last week toppled from a theoretical throne. In Tirana, a Constituent Assembly announced the end of the 17-year-old Albanian monarchy, proclaimed a republic under leftist, authoritarian Premier Enver Hoxha. The announcement was followed by a lavish 101-gun salute and two days of public revelry.
In Britain, exiled King Zog I (full title: Bird the First, King of the Sons of the Eagle) received the news with hardly a quiver of his finely pointed mustache, issued a routine protest: “The King cannot consider these elections [establishing the new regime] as free. It would have been our desire, after this long and tragic period, that the people of the country should be free to re-establish the situation as they wanted. . . .”
Then the monarch went back to his hobbies: billiards and turning the handle of his grocer’s bacon-slicer.
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