"Le Roi est Mort—Vive le Roi"
- The same day, Tom Canty wakes up and thinks that he's back home. No such luck. He still at the palace, and now he's the king.
- Tom goes back to sleep and has a pretty weird dream. He dreams that there is a dwarf who tells him to dig under a stump. There, he finds twelve pennies and feels rich. To him, twelve pennies is enough to solve all of his problems.
- But then Tom wakes up and realizes that he's not at home. He also realizes that he's surrounded by a bunch of old stitching, and he's dressed in mourning clothes because King Henry VIII has died.
- Now it's time to get dressed. It seems like there are at least 20 people who are in a sort of factory assembly line for dressing this little kid. When they find a run in his stockings, the whole line stops and they send the person in charge of the king's stockings to the tower to be beheaded.
- Wait, what?
- After that, Tom washes his face and gets his hair done.
- Finally, it's time for the boring part of being king. People come to Tom with a bunch of papers they want signed. At first, Tom wants to fix the finances of the royal household, but they won't let him. We think his improvements make a lot of sense, but what do we know?
- After a while, Tom gets bored and actually falls asleep, bringing everything to a standstill.
- Later, Tom spends some time playing with his cousins and sisters. When they're gone, a boy he has never met before comes into his room.
- It's his whipping boy, Humphrey Marlow. Tom doesn't even know what a whipping boy is, so to whipping boy has to explain that his job is to get whipped for Edward's mistakes. We're not making this up, ladies and gentlemen. It's just that nonsensical.
- It turns out that the whipping boy is there to ask a favor. Now that Tom is the king, Humphrey will be out of a job (kings don't get whipped). So Tom makes him and his family the Hereditary Grand Whipping Boys to the royal throne.
- Tom also has a plan of his own: to use Marlow as a way to get information about the court.
- This plan works so well that Lord Hertford almost believes that he's cured. At least until he brings up the Great Seal again, and the Tom has no idea what it is.