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Havelock Vetinari
From Discworld & Pratchett Wiki
| Vetinari | |
 | |
| Name | Havelock Vetinari |
| Age | about 50 |
| Race | Human |
| Occupation | Patrician, ex-Assassin |
| Looks | Tall, fragile, in control. Has a beard. |
| Residence | Patrician's Palace, Ankh-Morpork |
| Death | |
| Parents | |
| Relatives | Aunt Lady Roberta Meserole |
| Children | |
| Marital Status | never married |
| Books | Watch books, Ankh-Morpork books |
| Cameos | |
Family Motto: SI NON CONFECTVS, NON REFICIAT.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it
Havelock Vetinari is the current Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. He has been the supreme ruler for some years and is the successor of Mad Lord Snapcase. The Assassins have an AM$ 1,000,000 fee for his inhumation, though rumours say that they are not accepting contracts on him at present. As a former Assassin himself, he is just too difficult to kill. However, his greatest defense against would-be plotters is that he carefully sees to it that a reality with him as Patrician is slightly better than one without him. It was his discovery that people only really want stability and that tomorrow should pretty much resemble today, and this has been his greatest contribution to Ankh-Morpork. Impressively, he manages to keep this up even while he drags Ankh-Morpork, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the future. It is said that Vetinari can accomplish more with irony than most others can with steel. He can also accomplish more with one raised eyebrow than most people can with two of them and a lifetime of practice.
Politics
Lord Vetinari has a vast spy network, and he himself is the head of intelligence, the only man who knows all of the information so far collected. It is rumoured that some of his spies are particularly intelligent rats who evolved under the magic-contaminated grounds of Unseen University – this theory may have some strength, due to his ordering of rats during his imprisonment in Guards! Guards! Vetinari is very good at listening, and has a way of making people uncomfortable so that they talk more and more in trying to dilute the atmosphere. Lord Vetinari is also very manipulative. His more obvious moves include the innovation of allowing crime syndicates to become legalized guilds much as guilds of people of other trades. This means that a certain amount of crime is legal, and it is the responsibility of the Thieves' Guild to punish unlicensed stealing, Assassins' Guild to punish uncontracted killing, etc., arguably doing a better job than the Guard (when the Thieves' Guild went on strike, crime actually increased). In politics Lord Vetinari strongly believes in the "one man – one vote" system, where he is the man and he has the vote.
His less obvious moves include minimising the Night Watch division of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch; populating it with riffraff and ethnic minorities and demoralizing its leader Samuel Vimes (then Captain), with the intent of winding him up so that he might unwind all at once, overstep his diminutive jurisdiction, and sort things out (Men at Arms). Lord Vetinari hires many clerks, some trained Assassins, some young diplomats who are not from the noble families, and some spies assigned to diplomatic offices. The Patrician's Palace is in charge of the registration of the Guilds, diplomacy with foreign countries, the wages of City employees such as the Watchmen, and so on. Lord Vetinari also likes to give important jobs to unwilling young men whom he considers capable; his victims so far include William de Worde of the Ankh-Morpork Times, and Moist von Lipwig of the Post Office. Unlike previous Patricians, Vetinari truly works to make the city work, not for personal gain or vanity. He has carried out many devious schemes for the good of the city. He eliminates persons or situations that threaten the city. In a very complex maneuver, he set up the Ankh-Morpork Post Office against the clacks company Grand Trunk to get the company out of the hands of embezzlers destroying the company for profit. After the clacks system gets back on its feet, Lord Vetinari can again let foreign diplomats send a clacks home about what he wants them to think.
He seems to have no vices whatsoever, since some guild or other would otherwise undoubtedly have made use of them by now. Admittedly, Vetinari did ban street theatre and tends to hang mime artists upside down in a scorpion pit opposite a sign reading "Learn The Words," but this is generally taken by the population as simply an amusing character trait. Anyway, in Ankh-Morpork people think that strolling players are no better than criminals, and mimes are just plain freaky. It has also recently emerged that Vetinari also has firmly-held Views about modern art which are not far removed from those he holds concerning mime artists.
Lord Vetinari's head clerk, for several years now, is a slight, quiet young man named Drumknott.
His success has led many to attempt to emulate him – or, in some extreme cases, to become him. There is apparently an entire wing of Ankh-Morpork's mental hospital devoted to people convinced that they are Vetinari. They often engage in eyebrow-raising competitions.
Early Years
Havelock was born into the extremely wealthy and influential Vetinari family, and it seems that he was raised during the early part of his life by his aunt, Lady Roberta Meserole.
In his youth he attended the Assassins' Guild, where he studied languages (the guild being the most proper place for wealthy families to send their children for education regardless of their specific vocation). It seems that Vetinari was particularly interested in classical arts of camouflage, defying the guild's policy of all-black dress in favour of dark grey and dark green. He was failed in his stealth examination on account of his teacher being unaware of his presence in the exam. This, replied Vetinari in his own defence, was to his mind the entire point of the subject. He studied at the guild at the same time as the current Master of Assassins, Lord Downey, who gave him the less-than-affectionate nickname 'Dog-botherer'. Given the positions they respectively hold thirty years later, it is possible that Downey now regrets the little misunderstandings of their youth, especially the nickname. It is obvious that Downey's attitude to Vetinari is now one of obsequious but wary respect.
At some point during his early life he journeyed to Überwald, as part of the Grand Sneer (where young members of high-born and wealthy families journey to backwards countries to see how inferior they are.) During this period Vetinari seems to have had some sort of a relationship with an Überwaldean noblewoman, the vampire Lady Margolotta. Contrary to the way things might have been expected to go, given their respective ages, it is implied that he taught her at least a good deal of what she knows about manipulation.
Another clue to the secret past of the Patrician is that once a year he, like several others, wears a sprig of lilac in remembrance of an important event in recent history.
It has been said that the only living thing Lord Vetinari truly cared for was his dog, an extremely elderly wire-haired terrier named Wuffles. After Wuffles' death, he religiously visits the grave weekly to leave a favourite dog biscuit.
In the difficult time of the Sourcerer, which is very carefully not remembered by people who were visiting their ailing aunt in Quirm at the time, Vetinari was transformed into a yellow-green lizard. Both lizard and Wuffles were taken in for safekeeping by the Librarian, until things could return to normal again. Fortunately for the senior wizards, Vetinari suffered an uncharacteristic and extremely annoying memory loss on his return to human form, and was left with a distressingly uncontrollable (but short-lived) tendency to try to catch flies with his tongue...
Character Annotations
The name "Vetinari" is a pun on the infamous De' Medici family of Florence who ruled the city and surroundings during the Renaissance.
There are several streets on Roundworld named 'Havelock' including a Havelock Place in Melbourne.
Another famous Havelock was Victorian sexologist Havelock Ellis, whose career took a very decidedly non-Victorian route, when he compiled what for many years were held to be the first definitive scholarly works on deviant sexuality. As the Victorians seemed to believe virtually every form of sexual expression was deviant, Ellis had no shortage of raw material to include, and gleefully set about shocking his society with a catalogue of work that comprehensively covered just about everything imaginable and quite a few things that are not, perhaps, so easily encompassed by the normal mind. Oddly enough the writings are not at all sexually stimulating or prurient: this Havelock dissects his subject with the same sort of matter-of-fact forensic care and attention to detail that Havelock Vetinari might put to running a city. The underlying reasoning is one that Havelock Vetinari might recognise and nod approval to- there is a suspicion that Ellis is trying to wake people up and bring them to a new level of understanding about how things can be better organised and understood, even if this means having to think the hitherto unthinkeable, and contemplate things previously thought beyond the civilised pale.
