King John was not a good man – He had his little ways. And sometimes no one spoke to him For days and days and days. And men who came across him, When walking in the town, Gave him a supercilious stare, Or passed with noses in the air – And bad King John stood dumbly there, Blushing beneath his crown. I couldn’t resist starting the chapter with that. It’s from ‘King John’s Christmas’, a poem by A. A. Milne. It uses the key thing we all know about King John – that he was bad – and reimagines him amid the values and references of early twentieth-century children’s literature. It continues: King
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