“All work and no play isn’t good for little girls,” says I, and sitting on the bed I pulled her on to my knee. She hardly resisted, only trying to blush and look demure, and when I pulled down her bodice and kissed her breasts she cooed and wriggled her body against mine. In no time we were thrashing about in first-rate style, and I was making up for weeks of enforced abstinence. She was an eager little bundle, all right, and by the time she had slipped away, leaving me to seek a well-earned rest, I was most happily played out.

I’ve sometimes wondered what the result of that encounter was, and if there is some sturdy peasant somewhere in Holstein called Carl who puts on airs in the belief that he can claim royal descent. If there is, he can truly be called an ignorant bastard.

*    *    *

There are ways of being drunk that have nothing to do with alcohol. For the next few days, apart from occasional moments of panic-stricken clarity, I was thoroughly intoxicated. To be a king—well, a prince—is magnificent; to be fawned at, and deferred to, and cheered, and adulated; to have every wish granted—no, not granted, but attended to immediately by people who obviously wish they had anticipated it; to be the centre of attention, with everyone bending their backs and craning their necks and loving you to ecstasy—it is the most wonderful thing. Perhaps I’d had less of it than even ordinary folk, especially when I was younger, and so appreciated it more; anyway, while it lasted I fairly wallowed in it.

Of course, I’d had plenty of admiration when I came home from Afghanistan, but that was very different. Then they’d said: “There’s the heroic Flashman, the bluff young lionheart who slaughters niggers and upholds old England’s honour. Gad, look at those whiskers!” Which was splendid, but didn’t suggest that I was more than human. But when you’re royalty they treat you as though you’re God; you begin to feel that you’re of entirely different stuff from the rest of mankind; you don’t walk, you float, above it all, with the mob beneath, toadying like fury.