During the banquet in London, Edward uses the crowds that have gathered in the capital to escape from John Canty, as described in the simile below:
He [Edward] wasted no time, but dived among the forest of legs about him and disappeared. In another moment he could not be harder to find, under that tossing sea of life, if its billows had been the Atlantic’s and he a lost sixpence.
In this elegant comparison, Twain likens the vast London crowd to a “tossing sea of life,” and Edward himself is as small within it as a sixpence tossed into the ocean. This simile really captures how far Edward has fallen from his former royal status; he is now so anonymous that he can pass totally unnoticed at the banquet thrown in his honor.
A "sixpence" was a (relatively) low value coin, one that circulated in England until the 1980s. The comparison of Edward, the heir to the Tudor throne, to a sixpence, implies that he is not as rare or unusual as the title given to him might suggest. Here, as throughout the novel, Twain pokes fun at the idea that “nobility” are truly different in any fundamental way from normal people. It is impossible to tell the difference between Tom and Edward, despite their class difference. Boys like them are as common as sixpence on the streets of England.
At a public dinner, Tom performs his role as “king” to excellent effect. Twain describes the tension in the room with this simile:
Tom made a good dinner, notwithstanding he was conscious that hundreds of eyes followed each morsel to his mouth and watched him eat it with an interest which could not have been more intense if it had been a deadly explosive and was expected to blow him up and scatter him all about the place.
The simile is both hilarious and telling. Only in a 16th century court can anything as superficial as table manners excite people to such a degree; but it seems likely, based on the action of the story, that this excitement is somewhat intensified by rumors of Tom (as “Edward”) having gone insane.
While the intensity of the simile certainly comments on the silliness and stuffy propriety surrounding the royal family, it also points to the stakes of Tom’s ascension for everyone in England. King Henry VIII was psychologically and emotionally unstable, known for his paranoia, intense moods, and the unnecessary execution of two of his wives (Anna Boleyn and Catherine Howard). He was also known for having around 57,000 people executed over the course of his reign for various political, personal, and religious reasons.
Naturally, the question of Edward’s sanity was one of pressing importance after the bloody reign of his father. The simile here makes more sense when the reader considers that the people of England are straining to find any sign of potential instability in Edward, which in turn would mean instability within the state.
