Puppet

a figure of less than life size employed in the old-fashioned puppet show. The word is French, signifying a doll. Puppets were suspended by wires over the stage. Strings leading to places of concealment enabled the players to twitch the head and limbs, imparting lifelike movements. Puppets were made usually of pasteboard. A manager put questions to the various puppets and told the audience what they were expressing. References to puppets and puppet shows are frequent in English literature. Davenant wrote:

Puppet shows were known to the Greeks and Romans. Paris was noted for puppet shows, and still patronizes them. The departure of Noah and the animals from the ark was long a favorite English subject. Punch and Judy shows are of this same nature. The exhibitions of waxworks, for which London is noted, are an outgrowth of puppet shows. At present puppet shows are more popular in Italy than elsewhere.

As a puppet, popularly speaking, is one who dances when someone else pulls the string, the application to kings and politicians, when their actions are governed by others, is apt. This quotation is from the Britannica:

Among the puppet personages presented in the small street shows are generally included a sailor who dances a hornpipe, a hoop-dancer, a dancer of the Highland fling, a wooden-legged pensioner, a vaulter on a pole, also balancing two chairs, a clown playing with a butterfly, a dancing figure without head until the head rises out of the body gradually, displaying an enormously long neck, a juggler tossing gilt balls, which, sliding up and down upon tight, invisible threads, fall into his hands again, a milk woman carrying buckets out of which fly white dolls, and a skeleton seen at first in scattered parts lying about the stage, but piece successively flying to piece, the body first sitting up, then standing, and finally capped by the skull, when the completed figure begins to dance.

See Punch And Judy