ROYAL FLASH
by George MacDonald Fraser
Flyleaf:
A new and crackling episode in the adventures of England's Number 1 scoundrel, that bully, liar, and womanizing coward named Flashman, whose youthful skulduggery was first revealed in Tom Brown's School Days. Now his voluminous, villainous memoirs (a first sampling, Flashman, surfaced last year) are little by little revealing how he disgraced himself and his Queen (who was not amused) from India to Little Big Horn in a trail of tangled bedsheets, angry husbands, and besmirched uniforms.
The scene of Royal Flash is the Europe of Revolutions, and of that ultimate in the advanced diplomacy of 1848, the Schleswig-Holstein Question.* Flashman is no diplomat, but he's right in the middle of this gigantic international double-cross, and when you're cheating, dodging, and playing for your life against the unholy alliance of Count Bismarck and Lola Montez, you'll stir up any amount of mud to save your skin. Prussia's greatest statesman and Europe's most active lady of the bedchamber are plotting a royal marriage that will change the destiny of a continent. Flashman is their luckless pawn. Blackmailed into doubling for a prince with a most inopportune and unsuitable disease (especially for a bridegroom, that is) he has to use all his reserves of deceit, low cunning, and treachery to stay one hop ahead of pursuing death. The Prisoner of Zenda? Here's what really happened.
In these gloriously inglorious memoirs, the soft and seamy underbelly of that greatest of Victorian epics, The British Empire, is being laid bare, inch by squameous inch. Take a peep, and you stay for an eyeful, on tenterhooks and avid for more.
* [The Schleswig-Holstein Question was so complicated that it was understood by only three men: one who died, one who went mad thinking about it, and Lord Palmerston, who never cound remember the answer.]
Royal Flash
FROM THE FLASHMAN PAPERS
1842-3 and 1847-8
EDITED AND ARRANGED BY
George MacDonald Fraser
For KATH, again, and for
Ronald Colman,
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.,
Errol Flynn,
Basil Rathbone,
Louis Hayward,
Tyrone Power,
and all the rest of them.
Explanatory Note
The second packet of the Flashman Papers—that great collection of manuscript discovered in a saleroom in Leicestershire in 1965—continues the career of the author, Harry Flashman, from the point where the first instalment ended in the autumn of 1842. The first packet described his expulsion from Rugby School in 1839 (as previously referred to in Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays) and followed his subsequent military career in England, India, and Afghanistan; the second packet covers two separate periods of several months in 1842-43 and 1847-48. There is an intriguing four-year gap which the author seems to indicate he has covered elsewhere in his memoirs.
The present instalment is of historical importance insofar as it describes Flashman's encounters with several persons of international celebrity—including one most eminent statesman whose character and actions may now be subjected to some reappraisal by historians. It also establishes a point of some literary interest, for there can be no doubt that a link exists between Flashman's German adventure and one of the best-selling novels in the Victorian period.
As with the first packet (entrusted to me by Mr Paget Morrison, the owner of the Flashman Papers) I have confined myself to correcting the author's occasional lapses in spelling. Where Flashman touches on known history he is remarkably accurate, especially when one considers that he was writing in his eighties; wherever he appears to make a minor slip I have left it uncorrected in the text (as, for example, where he describes the pugilist Nick Ward as "the Champion" in 1842, when in fact Ward had lost his title the previous year), but I have added such notes and comments as seemed appropriate.
Like most memorialists, Flashman is vague about exact dates; where these can be established I have entered them in the notes.
G.M.F.
1
If I had been the hero everyone thought I was, or even a half-decent soldier, Lee would have won the battle of Gettysburg and probably captured Washington. That is another story, which I shall set down in its proper place if brandy and old age don't carry me off first, but I mention the fact here because it shows how great events are decided by trifles.
Scholars, of course, won't have it so. Policies, they say, and the subtly laid schemes of statesmen, are what influence the destinies of nations; the opinions of intellectuals, the writings of phiosophers, settle the fate of mankind. Well, they may do their share, but in my experience the course of history is as often settled by someone's having a belly-ache, or not sleeping well, or a sailor getting drunk, or some aristocratic harlot waggling her backside.
So when I say that my being rude to a certain foreigner altered the course of European history, it is a considered judgement. If I had dreamed for a moment how important that man was going to be, I'd have been as civil as the devil to him, yes—me—lording and stroking his back. But in my youth and ignorance I imagined that he was one of those to whom I could be rude with impunity— servants, tarts, bagmen, shopkeepers, and foreigners—and so I gave my unpleasant tongue free rein. In the long run it nearly cost me my neck, quite apart from changing the map of the world.
It was in '42, when I was barely out of my 'teens, but already famous. I had taken a distinguished part in the fiasco known as the First Afghan War, emerged with a hero's laurels, been decorated by the Queen, and lionised all over London. The fact that I had gone through the campaign in a state of abject terror—lying, deceiving, bluffing, and running for dear life whenever possible— was known to no one but myself. If one or two suspected, they kept quiet. It wouldn't have been fashionable to throw dirt at the valiant Harry Flashman just then.
(If you have read the first packet of my memoirs, you will know all this. I mention it here in case the packets should get separated, so that you will know at once that this is the true story of a dishonest poltroon who takes a perverse pride in having attained to an honoured and admired old age, in spite of his many vices and entire lack of virtue—or possibly because of them.)
So there I was, in '42, big, bluff, handsome Harry, beloved of London society, admired at the Horse Guards (although I was only a captain), possessed of a beautiful wife, apparently affluent, seen in the best company, gushed at by the mamas, respected by the men as the perfect beau sabreur. The world was my oyster, and if it wasn't my sword that had opened it, no one was any the wiser.
They were golden days, those. The ideal time to be a hero is when the battle is over and the other fellows are dead, God rest 'em, and you take the credit.
Even the fact that Elspeth was cheating me made no real difference. You would never have thought, to see her angelic face, golden hair, and expression of idiotic innocence, that she was the biggest trollop that ever wore out a mattress. But I was certain, before I'd been home a month, that she was having it off with at least two others; at first I was furious and plotting revenge, but she had the money, you see, through that damned old Scotch moneybags of a father of hers, and if I had played the outraged husband I'd have been in Queer Street, without even a roof over my head. So I kept quiet, and paid her out by whoring to my heart's content. It was a strange situation; we both knew what was what (at least, I think she did, but she was such a fool you could never tell), but we pretended to be a happily married couple. We still bounced about in bed together from time to time, and enjoyed it.