officially claimed the islet as territory. Shiell senior is also said to have requested the title of King of Redonda from Queen Victoria and according to the legend, it was granted to him by the British Colonial Office rather than by Victoria herself, provided there was no revolt against colonial power. The son (originally named Matthew Phipps Shiell but later known as the writer M. P. Shiel) claimed he was crowned on Redonda at the age of 15, in 1880, by a bishop from Antigua. However, as M. P. Shiel's recounting of this story never saw print until 1929, it is possible that some, or most, or possibly all of the story of his being crowned King of Redonda may in fact be pure invention. In his writings about Redonda, however, Shiel is critical of the egotism that led him to accept the title, suggesting that there may have been some truth behind the story of the coronation. Shiel does however cite two different names for the bishop who performed the coronation: the Reverend Dr Mitchinson and the Rev. Hugh Semper. These men were both genuine clerics in the Caribbean during this period. The contradiction could of course be explained as due to Shiel's faulty memory rather than the story being based on total invention. In “About Myself” Shiel writes that his attempt to impose a tribute tax on the American guano miners was a request they refused. This early non-recognition of his kingship is another possible argument that the coronation actually occurred. Several of Shiel's works of fiction concerned various aspects of monarchy. One of his detective heroes is called Cummings King Monk. In Shiel's 1901 end-of-the-world story The Purple Cloud, the protagonist Adam Jeffson, the last man on earth, establishes himself as monarch of the devastated globe, while Shiel's novel The Lord of the Sea (1901) has Richard Hogarth, another Overman figure, coming to dominate the world. In 1899, Shiel wrote about visiting Redonda in his adventure novel Contraband of War. In later life, Shiel gave the title, and the rights to his work, to his chief admirer, London poet and editor John Gawsworth (Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong), the biographer of Arthur Machen, who was the realm's Archduke. Gawsworth (1912–70) seems to have passed on the title several times when the writer was low in funds. Gawsworth's realm has been facetiously termed "Almadonda" (by the Shielian scholar A.