Phili nodded, knowing the real reason his suggestion hadn’t been taken up was that Wilhelm would have been unable to cope with the shame of having his wife publicly branded as mentally ill – especially as they both knew she wasn’t. In public he spoke of her as being the most wonderful of wives, someone who made it possible for him to carry the tremendous burden of empire. When visiting a young men’s army corps in Bonn, an army corps he had belonged to as a university student, he had told them that the smile their Empress had bestowed on them had ennobled their lives.

That she had never ennobled his was something to which only Phili was privy.

‘Her jealous rages over our friendship utterly consume her,’ Willy said, sinking deeper and deeper into self-pity. ‘She flies into hysterical rages over the most trivial matters. She makes terrible scenes when I travel around Germany without her, but how can I take her with me? I wouldn’t have a moment’s peace! She is quite capable of weeping through an entire night.’

‘Then my advice,’ Phili said firmly, ‘is that you lock the doors of all your private rooms against her, so that in the Marble Palace at Potsdam, or the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, or in any of the other royal palaces, she cannot gain access to you. That way, perhaps, you will be spared her senseless rages and undignified tantrums. And now, before we join the companions who share our individuality, shall I play some soothingly lovely music of my own composition?’

Later, while Willy and other members of the Circle rocked with laughter at one of their number cavorting to music from Swan Lake in tights and a pink tutu, one of those watching took Phili to one side and said, ‘How long is it to be before the Kaiser realizes that everyone here, whose company he so enjoys and is so much at home with, is deviant? For how much longer do we have to be careful not to bluntly speak the word “homosexual”?’

‘And bring home to him his repressed sexuality? Not ever, I hope, and so the pretence of jolly good but not always clean fun and romps, which he so enjoys, must be kept up, without him ever being aware of the undertones. There is a prudish side to our dear Kaiser that would never allow him to face up to what he would regard as the shameful truth about himself. If faced with it, he would sever all ties and the political power that we now enjoy would be gone in the twinkling of an eye. I would no longer be his minister at Munich. Moltke would no longer be Chief of the General Staff. Bülow would no longer be Head of the Foreign Office. And you, dear Bernard, would not be a Secretary of State.’