The king has betrayed his own secrets. He has chosen to tell his friends that he is impotent with her – the most extraordinary self-shaming. No man at this court of boisterous cavaliers and seducers would ever admit to such a weakness. But the king has done so. He is so desperate to tell the world that he doesn’t like her, that he is ready to call himself unmanned, to say himself what it is illegal for us to say: that he is impotent.
