‘But they are NOT!’ There were times when Dona found her husband’s inability to see the wood for the trees almost unendurable. ‘Your name is not mentioned – how could the Kaiser’s name be mentioned? But it is implicit in every line that, if Count Philipp zu Eulenburg and his close circle of friends are all . . . are all . . .’ she struggled to say the word ‘homosexual’ and couldn’t bring herself to utter it, ‘are all deviant, that you are deviant as well. The accusation of unholy, illegal practices isn’t being levelled solely at Phili. You are the person at whom the accusations in Die Zukunft are truly being levelled. And the only person who doesn’t realize it is you!’

Willy had thought her certifiably mad. It was his sister-in-law, Irène, who matter-of-factly pointed out to him that if Phili was homosexual, then, as his closest friend, it was only to be expected that people assumed he was well aware of it.

But he hadn’t been, and he did what he always did whenever he was faced with something utterly unpalatable and hadn’t the slightest idea how to deal with it. He shut himself away in his rooms in a state of nervous collapse.

This time his period of collapse was a long one. Phili’s original court case led to the public disclosure of several liaisons, the most salacious being an ongoing relationship with Count Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler, who, on Phili’s recommendation, Willy had made chief of his military Cabinet, and whose private performances in a pink tutu he had always, in the past, so innocently enjoyed.

‘When and where is it all going to end?’ he said piteously to Irène, as one court case led to another and Die Zukunft revealed that the Liebenberg Circle had feminine nicknames for each other and that his, the Kaiser’s, was ‘Sweety’.

Irène had had no answer for him, for by now there could be no doubting the truthfulness of the insinuations that were being made.

The country was scandalized. Willy was thunderstruck.

‘How could I have known?’ he said pathetically time and time again. ‘I thought only that we were all the best and truest of friends – and the horseplay we indulged in was surely only the horseplay that all men indulge in, when no ladies are present to be offended?’

Despite his love of risqué jokes and coarse horseplay, he was essentially a prude, and the revelations as to the true nature behind all the good times he had so enjoyed not only embarrassed him, but appalled him – and they did so because he knew how very near the truth the hints about his own sexuality were.