The Unofficial British Royal Family Pages

Wednesday 3 November 2004

Flashman and the Royals

Perhaps the greatest what-if for students of royal history is this: what's it like to be royalty? What was it like in the courts of bygone days? What were the famous rulers of the past really like? Did they act regally, or were they all too human? Did they really look like their portraits, or were those just masterpieces of royal propaganda? Were their voices deep or shrill, pleasant or sneering? Would their clothes and hair and furnishings be splendid to our eyes, or tawdry and unwashed? We live in an age of extreme documentation; we want to know everything.

Alas, we will never really learn all there is to know about those monarchs who lived before photography, sound recordings, films, and TV. What many of us would give to travel back in time and watch Henry VIII joust on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, hear Elizabeth I's voice ringing out against the Spanish Armada, behold one of Charles I's court masques, or stroll through the glories of Versailles with the Sun King. The only way we can experience such royal events now is vicariously, through our modern media. But movies and TV shows are of course only mere approximations of the Kings and Queens of the past, and the great royal moments of history. The fact that critics and viewers alike judge such works by their authenticity of detail shows how we yearn for the real deal. We want to know how it really was.

Many times, historical fiction does the best job of leading the mind's eye back to past monarchs. And one of the best at depicting royalty is George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series. In these eleven novels, the reader will learn more about the personalities of royal and historical personages living in the Victorian era, and the heyday of the British Empire, than in any comparable assemblage of history textbooks, TV programs, or films.

The Flashman books are great fun. They're full of swashbuckling adventure, great storytelling, exciting history, and pure orneriness. Think Kipling unexpurgated, or The Prisoner of Zenda rewritten by Ian Fleming, and you'll have some idea of the naughty goings-on here. These books could be called the Inside Story of the Empire, or A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the War.

Who is Flashman? For those who haven't yet met him, he's the charming rogue who bullies his way through the pages of the classic Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes. The literary conceit Fraser employs is that the memoirs of Brigadier-General Sir Harry Paget Flashman, VC, KCB, KCIE were found after his death and entrusted to Fraser to edit. This the Scottish writer has done splendidly, with extensive footnotes and bibliographic references in each book that provide an exhaustive amount of detail about the Victorian age. His sources are generally firsthand accounts contemporary with the events, even down to Punch magazines of the 1800s. Fraser's historical research is sound. If he says the Prince of Wales was in London on a given day, attended the theatre that evening, and saw such and such a play, his documentation proves it.

After being expelled from Rugby, says Fraser, Flashman wangles a commission in the 11th Light Dragoons and is posted with his regiment to the far corners of the Empire. In this 150th anniversary year of the Charge of the Light Brigade, his reporting of it {in Flashman at the Charge) and others of Queen Victoria's Little Wars, in Byron Farwell's phrase, is spot-on, if rather ribald (due to a bout of indigestion, Flashy breaks wind during the fateful ride). But he does not gloss over his own faults: he and his fellow officers drink and carouse and intrigue to their hearts' content. After all, as he says in Flashman, the first in the series, "The young Queen was newly on the throne then, and people still behaved as they had under the Prince Regent and King Billy; not like later on, when mistresses had to stay out of sight." Thus is the tone set early on, and it's decidedly at odds with our notions today of the prim and proper Victorians.

Flashman shows us that Victoria wasn't the dour, priggish, unamused royal lady of stereotype. After seeing action in Afghanistan he becomes a hero, and is presented to the Queen. The Duke of Wellington himself escorts Flashy to Buckingham Palace. "Her Majesty is most gracious," the Duke cautions him, "although it is never as easy, of course, as it was with her predecessors. King William was very easy, very kind, and made people entirely at home. It is altogether more formal now, and pretty stiff, but if you stay by me and keep your mouth shut, you'll do." The royal ceremony goes splendidly, of course; Flashy charms his Queen. He gleefully recounts every royal personal detail. Victoria "had a thin, oddly-accented voice," he recalls. "She was just a child then, rather plump....and her teeth stuck out too much."

Her husband is standing beside her. Flashy's reaction to him: "So this is Prince Albert, I thought; what hellish-looking whiskers." The Prince asks Flashman to say something in the Afghan language, and he obliges with a Bengali whores' greeting. Nonetheless, Victoria gives our hero a medal of honor, asks after his absent spouse, and sighs, "I know what it means to be a devoted wife, with the dearest of husbands." Then she glances coyly to Albert. Flashy observes, "He looked fond and noble. God, I thought, what a honeymoon that must have been." Basking now in the Queen's favor, with crowds cheering, Wellington shaking his hand, and his military career off to a glorious start, Flashman goes home and tells his wife he's been "visiting friends, you know. Young couple, Bert and Vicky. You wouldn't know 'em."

He continues to shamelessly cosy up to royalty, over the years. Fraser tells us it's Flashy who achieves many of the great deeds of the reign. A few examples of his antics with royalty:

In Flashman in the Great Game, he and his wife are given the first of many royal house party invitations. "They don't often invite me to Balmoral nowadays, which is a blessing," he growls as the book opens. "Those damned tartan carpets always put me off my food, to say nothing of the endless pictures of German royalty and that unspeakable statue of the Prince Consort standing knock-kneed in a kilt..." Flashy claims to be the man who smuggled an actress into the bed of Bertie, the Prince of Wales, "and brought Papa Albert's divine wrath down on his fat head."

The royal company at Balmoral is pleasant enough, but Flashy soon gets bored by so much goodness. Albert, he says, "slaughter[s] stags like a Ghazi on hashish" and has "no more humour than the parish trough." Victoria is busy planning the marriage of her eldest daughter Vicky: "the best of the whole family," in Flashy's view; "a really pretty, green-eyed little mischief." Clearly, Flashman is not awestruck in the royal presence.

Many years later, in Flashman and the Mountain of Light, Flashy and his wife, who have become royal confidantes, are summoned by the Queen for help in planning her Golden Jubilee. Victoria has "gooseberry eyes," he says. She speaks in italics, just as she writes, and she is a "stout little old body, faded and grey, fussing over the teacups at Windsor and punishing the meringues." During tea with the Flashmans, the Queen proudly trots out the Koh-i-Noor diamond, which Flashy purloined for her out of India. He then commences the sordid tale of snatching it: of meeting little Dalip Singh, called Victoria's Maharajah; of the Punjab and Kashmir and the Sikh Wars of British India. Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks it ain't; with Flashy there it's more Three Amigos.

And in the novella "The Subtleties of Baccarat," Lady Flashman is sitting at the card game at Tranby Croft, Yorkshire, in 1890 with Bertie, the Prince of Wales, when the famous cheating scandal occurs. Flashy has a few saucy things to say about the Prince, of course, before helping save him from the Queen's wrath. Our hero suggests HRH "had been chiefly concerned to cover his own ample rear - which, as I knew, was gospel true." And Flashy concludes with a sly version of just what might have happened.

Likewise in the novella "Flashman and the Tiger," in the book of the same name, Flashman gives as good as he gets, slinging a few more choice royal taunts. Snubbed socially by the ungrateful Prince, Flashy observes: "That, I confess, I found pretty raw. It's embarrassing enough to be cut by the most vulgar man in Europe, but when he is also a Prince who is deeply in your debt you begin to wonder what royalty's coming to....not only had I done my bit to guide his youthful footsteps along the path of vice and loose living (not that he'd needed much coaching), I'd even resigned Lily Langtry in his favour....If that wasn't enough, he was still using a cosy little property of mine on Hay Hill to conduct his furtive fornications with the worst sort of women, duchesses and actresses and the like....I'd a good mind to charge him rent, or corkage. I didn't, of course; a bounder he might be, but it don't pay to offend the heir to the Throne."

No, Flashman does that only in print, with subtle, sparkling wit. Through the rest of his decades of active service, he shows up at every famous and historic event of Victoria's long reign, especially the military ones. He's in the Crimea, as mentioned above. He cavorts at the Little Bighorn in Flashman and the Redskins. He becomes the Prince Consort of a Ruritanian kingdom in the Zenda parody Royal Flash. He turns up at Isandhlwana and Rorke's Drift in Flashman and the Tiger. Flashy faces all these perilous situations with the cunning of a cad and the amorous inclinations of a James Bond. In the process he encounters the great personages of the day, and fleshes them out magnificently for us: Bismarck, Disraeli, Gladstone, Florence Nightingale, Lincoln, Custer, Lola Montez, "Chinese" Gordon, Oscar Wilde. Also several more royals, like the Queen's German cousins and the Emperor Franz-Josef of Austria.

Flashman's eyewitness accounts are true to the historical facts if known. He narrates them in the style of an upper-crust Victorian, a British officer, typical of his class and his times. The Flashman books therefore abound with Victorian sensibilities: love of Queen and Country, regimental loyalty, class snobbery, Tory politics, such conventions as hyphenated swear words ("d--n," "bl--dy," etc.), and of course, the belief that women and subject peoples of the Empire are inferior. The books are not politically correct at all. Flashy has many a derogatory racial name for the natives of the countries he visits.

And that's an authentic characterization. The stories would lack historical flavor, otherwise. A portrait of the Victorian age, indeed any age, must show the dirty linen under the shining armour. The novels would be sterile and boring if written as straight history, because we know how all those great events ended. So Fraser, while keeping to the historical truth throughout, turns proper Victorian attitudes upside down, and makes Flashy an utter scoundrel. He proudly wears the regimental colors, but only for the advantage they give him with women and his superiors. He's always ready to desert, always looking out for himself, always ready to betray his fellow man for money or a pretty face. He's a realist:as he fights and runs away, he's all the while commenting ironically (and honestly) on the historic proceedings. And he's human: he belches and farts and lusts. So do his royal counterparts.

And thus he shatters many of the myths about history, especially military history. It's not all honor, glory, patriotism, flag-waving, God On Our Side, My Country Right or Wrong. The Flashman books are like Kipling turned inside out. Do John Bull and Uncle Sam, Tommy Atkins and G.I. Joe act like bandits and tyrants? Is Gunga Din a terrorist ready to behead memsahib? (Nowadays we know the truth of these literary inversions all too well.) Yet after reading the Flashman books, we can appreciate Kipling much more. He was right, in spirit. And like Fraser, accurate with local color and language. He just didn't tell the whole unromantic, often-hopeless story, as Fraser does.

So even as Flashman fights his way free from the imperialist jingoism of his time, while singing "God Save the Queen" at the top of his lungs, he also gives us sardonic asides about the British Royal Family, and royalty in general. A typical Flashy quote: "By and large, I bar royalty pretty strong. They may be harmless enough folk in themselves, but they attract a desperate gang of placemen and hangers-on, and in my experience, the closer you get to the throne, the nearer you may finish up to the firing-line." In his old age, he says this of the former Prince of Wales: "They tell me that young King Edward does what he can nowadays to lower the moral tone of the nation, but I doubt if he has the style for it. The man looks like a butcher."

In short, for a sharper-edged view of history, with the rose-colored glasses off, and for a clearer picture of the present - for as we all know, history oft repeats itself - the Flashman series is essential reading. There isn't space enough here to do justice to all the adventures of Flashman, nor provide an in-depth literary analysis of royalty in the novels of George MacDonald Fraser, but as a fictional portrait of a royal era, they're brilliant, satirical, crisply written, and refreshingly iconoclastic history. Fraser's wry and colorful storytelling brings royalty and others to life once again, in all their glory, fraudulence, and flatulence.

News "Flash": A new Flashman book is due out in April of 2005, entitled Flashman On the March. It encompasses the British Abyssinian War of 1868. Whether Bert and Vicky appear in it remains to be seen.

Capsule review of "The Lost Prince," Masterpiece Theatre, PBS, October 12 and 24

This is a very dark story. Not just because they did not understand epilepsy in those days. Why are the various palaces dimly lit and gloomy? Were royal interiors really that dark, back then (despite having electricity laid on by that time), or was this show low budgeted for lighting? Surely it would be more historically accurate, if not more cinematically conventional for royalty, to have all the chandeliers ablaze with light. Before World War I, how many monarchs observed household economies?

The script seems rather revisionist and simplistic history. Queen Mary is heartless; King George V, clueless; Prince John's nanny, selfless; and Lord Stamfordham, the private royal secretary, runs the show. The British royal family are reduced to caricatures, so as to concentrate on the subplot about the doomed Russian royal family. Is this a way to vindicate the tsar at the Windsors' expense? Arguably Nicholas II was more clueless than any British monarch.

Also, he had nothing to do historically with Prince John. Why then does his plight overshadow the tender story of the prince? It's really not the time or place to debate whether George V did the right thing by his cousin Nicholas. On a lighter note, would John really have worn sailor suits for five or more years? And why is Prince George played by a smaller, slighter boy than the one playing Prince John? John was the youngest royal brother; it doesn't make sense that he was bigger.

The best scenes are those in which John gets away from his keepers and his tiny bedroom; gets out in the sun-dappled royal gardens, or hides in the gallery above the guests at a sumptuous royal banquet. Those royal escapades are believable, and poignant. We see John free, in his own mind, if only for a little while. As we'd all like to be.

- Mel Whitney