A court audience with the king could kill a man outright

Evidence

In January 1614, he was sentenced to pay a heavy fine, and although not formally dismissed, he was relieved of his functions (Lea 1901, 348). His son felt he owed it to his father to raise with the king the harshness of the treatment meted out to such a very loyal servant of the Crown. The son was accorded an audience in the Escorial (presumably with the king himself); we do not know what was said on that occasion, but we may form some idea of the tone of the interview from the fact that the poor son, after he came out of his audience, sank on to a bench and expired on the spot. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1720

Categorization

• CANDY: A grimly absurd, vivid anecdote — the son literally dies of the encounter with royal power — easy to retell.
• FICTION: The clerk-who-dies-after-audience with authority is a strange, potent scene for a story about bureaucratic/royal dread.