She would soon rule China for forty-seven years as the Empress Dowager. A prisoner of the Chinese in 1860, shackled and gagged in a filthy dungeon, he was visited in his cell by “Yehonala Tzu-hsi, the Orchid, the incomparable Yi Concubine.” She was the exquisitely beautiful favorite concubine of the emperor and the mother of the emperor’s only son. He was also, more than once, taken advantage of himself. He prided himself on being “able to run faster with my trousers round my ankles than any man in England.” Although married-in a shotgun wedding, of course-he took his vows, and everyone else’s, lightly at best. He had lost his virginity when he was only fourteen and, by his own count, he had bedded 480 women by the time he was in his mid-thirties, some of them among the most famous of their day. If ever there was a time when I felt that “watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet” stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman.ī y his own cheerful admission, Harry Flashman was “a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward-and, oh yes, a toady.” He might have added that he was also a shameless womanizer, an artful seducer who was not above sexual assault.
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