The False Prince and the True
fairy tale
The False Prince and the True is a Portuguese fairy tale. Andrew Lang included it in The Lilac Fairy Book.
Synopsis
A king received word that his son, the prince, and a gentleman had argued over tennis until the other man struck the prince. The prince, though armed, had not returned the attack but only cried.
The king was displeased with the prince's cowardice, but decreed that the young man would be brought to court for having attacked the heir to the throne, for which he was likely to die. He let him go wherever he wished in the city, under guard, for the fourteen days before his case was heard.
The young man tried to get advice, but no one could advise him on how to escape, because he had struck the heir to the throne. An old woman told him she could save him if he would marry her. He rejected her offer, but on consideration, chased after her and agreed. She had him swear before a priest to marry her and then told him what to say.
“The False Prince and the True” enters the record as fairy tale. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what False, Prince and True can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“The False Prince and the True” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, False, Prince and True provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7733265. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The False Prince and the True” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.