by Theo Aronson
Having – with customary good sense – warned against the feelings of narrow national superiority which a naval career might encourage in Prince Eddy, the Queen touched on a more sensitive issue. ‘I have a great fear’, she confided, ‘of young and carefully brought up Boys mixing with older Boys and indeed with any Boys in general, for the mischief done by bad Boys and the things they may hear and learn from them cannot be over-rated.’10 The late Prince Consort had always been convinced that boys, left unsupervised, would ‘talk lewdly’.11 The gentle, easily influenced Prince Eddy would be safer, she argued, attending a school such as Wellington College, where he could live, with his tutor, in a house nearby.
One cannot know exactly what ‘mischief’ Queen Victoria had in mind but she undoubtedly shared the contemporary obsession with the imagined dangers of masturbation. Upper-and middle-class Victorian parents believed that ‘the sacred beauty of male virginity’ had to be preserved, as a duty to God, for as long as possible.12 Many a schoolmaster spent a suspiciously long time lecturing his charges on the dire effects of ‘self-abuse’ and listened, perhaps a shade too avidly, to their blushing confessions. Even doctors, who should have known better, maintained that the self-induced loss of semen weakened the body, enfeebled the brain and often led to madness.
In a sermon, not to schoolboys but to undergraduates at Oxford, the saintly Dr Pusey once offered a ‘Remedy for Sins of the Body’. Masturbation, he warned, could have the most dreadful consequences. ‘I have known of manifold early death; I have seen the fineness of intellect injured; powers of reasoning, memory impaired; nay, insanity oftentime, idiocy; every form of decay of mind and body; consumption too often, torturing death, even of a strong frame.
‘Lesser degrees of punishment were God’s warning voice: at first bodily growth checked, eyesight perhaps distressed or impaired; that fine, beautiful delicate system which carries sensation through the whole human frame, in whatever degree harmed, and for the most part, in that degree irreparably.’
The only thing to do with one’s straying hands, advised the good prelate, was ‘to clasp them together, and pray earnestly to God for help’. He had known one young man who ‘under an almost supernatural power of temptation’ had prayed for seven days and six nights and ‘at the end, the temptation left him as though it had never been’.13
By the mid-nineteenth century, it was seriously believed that the ‘secret sin’ of masturbation led directly to the ‘dual vice’ of homosexuality. ‘The secret sin which has been learned at a private school, imported to a public school, and there taught to the youngest boys,’ claimed one authority, ‘will inevitably produce the more fashionable vices of the larger society.’14 In other words, if masturbation could be stamped out early, homosexuality would almost certainly disappear.
But overcoming her reservations about these and other matters, Queen Victoria eventually allowed herself to be persuaded that both princes should be sent to Britannia. They would remain, however, in the care of Mr Dalton. Their mother, the Princess of Wales, in writing to thank the tutor for ‘all the devotion you have shown to our boys and for the unending trouble and interest you have taken in their education’, stressed various points in connection with their future upbringing. They were all eminently sensible. The tutor must ‘pay great attention to their being obedient and obeying the moment they are told. Also let them be civil to everybody, high and low, and not get grand now they are by themselves, and please take particular care they are not toadied by any of those around them.’15
Their leaving broke her heart, and theirs. ‘It was a great wrench …’ wrote Princess Alexandra to the Queen, ‘poor little boys, they cried so bitterly.’16
In September 1877, the thirteen-year-old Prince Eddy and the twelve-year-old Prince George joined the training ship Britannia, anchored in the River Dart, in Devon. Except that they had a cabin to themselves and that they were watched over by Mr Dalton, they were treated much as any other of the two hundred cadets. According to Prince George, in later life, they were treated a good deal worse. ‘It was a pretty tough place,’ he remembered, ‘and, so far from making any allowances for our disadvantages, the other boys made a point of taking it out of us on the grounds that they’d never be able to do it later on.’17
In one respect, the Britannia experiment failed dismally. Although it served as an excellent first step on Prince George’s naval career, it did nothing for Prince Eddy. In fact, his standard of intelligence was so low that he was unable to keep up with even the weakest cadets. By December 1878 there was talk of removing him altogether. But while professing herself ‘dreadfully distressed about poor Eddy’s progress’, Princess Alexandra would not hear of his being shifted from Britannia in order to be ‘educated at home alone’.18 So he remained. A few months later, in a gloomy report to the Prince of Wales, Dalton complained that Prince Eddy was unable ‘to fix his attention, to any given subject for more than a few minutes consecutively’, and that ‘he fails, not in one or two subjects, but in all’.19
‘It is to physical causes’, the desperate Dalton decided, ‘that one must look for an explanation of the abnormally dormant condition of his mental powers.’20
Perhaps he was right. A recently propounded theory claims that children born prematurely are invariably less mentally alert than those born after a full term. A third of such children have learning difficulties and an educational level well below the average. They suffer from what is termed ‘neuro-developmental impairments’.21 Prince Eddy was a full two months premature. This handicap could have been aggravated by yet another physical failing; it has been suggested that he suffered from petit mal, a minor form of epilepsy which affects children and adolescents and is especially prevalent during puberty. Seizures can occur many times a day and manifest themselves by such things as vacancy of facial expression, momentary loss of awareness and a drooping of the eyelids. Although the affliction usually, but not always, disappears in adulthood, it can by then have seriously disrupted the sufferer’s education.
Another physical cause could have been the Prince’s slight deafness. Queen Victoria’s private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, noticed this during one of Prince Eddy’s visits to Balmoral. It has been claimed that the Prince, like his mother, always tilted his head forward and sideways when carrying on a conversation. This deafness was something to which Princess Alexandra, conscious of the fact that it was from her that he had inherited it, would not have wished to draw too much attention. In any case, the family all hoped that the Prince’s torpid condition was temporary. They comforted themselves with the usual excuses: he was shooting up too fast, he was just absent-minded, he would grow out of it.
The end of Prince Eddy’s two-year stint on Britannia simply reopened the question of what was to be done with him. Dalton could only suggest more of the same. Instead of going to a public school as had originally been planned, he should go to sea. When Prince George joined HMS Bacchante for a series of cruises, Prince Eddy should be allowed to accompany him. Not only would he benefit from the continued company of his livelier younger brother but by being surrounded by a hand-picked company of sub-lieutenants, midshipmen and cadets of ‘irreproachable character’, he would be shielded against the ‘evil associations’ so characteristic of public school life.22
After months of discussion, involving the Queen, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Prime Minister, their respective private secretaries, the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Captain of the Bacchante, the matter was decided. The two princes, still accompanied by the long-suffering Mr Dalton and their personal attendant Charles Fuller, would set sail on the Bacchante in September 1879.
Among the galaxy of royal relations and family friends who boarded the Bacchante as it lay off Cowes for Regatta Week, prior to setting sail, was the Prince of Wales’s current mistress, Lillie Langtry. From Bensons, the jewellers in Cowes, she bought the fifteen-year-old Prince Eddy a little trinket. He immediately attached it to his watch chain. ‘I had to take of
f my grandmother’s [Queen Victoria’s] locket to make room for it,’ he told the gratified Mrs Langtry.23
The two princes spent almost three years aboard the Bacchante. Their first cruise took them to the Mediterranean and the West Indies; their second to Ireland and Spain. Their third, and longest, took them to South America, South Africa, Australia, Japan, China, Singapore and Egypt. These cruises were broken by short visits ashore and longer holidays at home.
While Prince George was treated in almost all respects like other midshipmen on board, Prince Eddy, who was not destined to become a naval officer, was kept to his books. The brothers shared a cabin, ate with the other midshipmen and cadets and were accorded no special privileges. Ashore, it was a different matter. Although Queen Victoria had stipulated that they were to be granted no royal honours whatsoever, there were times when it would have been churlish to refuse such treatment. In Cape Town, for instance, they were accommodated in Government House (whose interior doors were decorated with ‘daintily executed flower paintings’ by the previous Governor’s spinster daughters24 and in Alexandria they were rowed back to the Bacchante in ‘two tremendous state barges, in one of which there was a great blue velvet and gold sofa, beneath a heavy silk canopy, in a thoroughly oriental style’.25
But more often than not, their trips ashore were turned, by the conscientious Mr Dalton, into sightseeing marathons. On neither of the princes did this cultural force-feeding have any noticeable effect. They remained insular, uninterested, unenthusiastic.
Anyone hoping to follow Prince Eddy’s mental and psychological progress during these years at sea will get no help from Dalton’s account of the voyage. His 1,500-page, two-volume work entitled The Cruise of HMS Bacchante 1879–1882 is as impersonal a study as one could hope to find. The scrappy and ill-spelt diaries kept by the two princes were converted by their tutor into a mammoth, learned and sanctimonious tome, crammed with Latin quotations, moral maxims and radical opinions. Of the apathetic Prince Eddy and the alert Prince George there is no trace in these professorial pages; one would assume, from their apparent grasp of philosophy and mastery of statistics, that they were young men of exceptional erudition.
One example will do. Prince George’s typically unadorned diary entry to the effect that in South Africa ‘we passed an ostridge farm and saw many ostridges [sic]’ is transformed by Dalton into four densely printed pages on the genus Struthio, including a detailed analysis of the practicalities and finances of ostrich farming.26
Can one of these intellectual paragons be the same Prince Eddy about whom Dalton is writing to complain to the Prince of Wales in May 1880? He ‘sits listless and vacant, and … wastes as much time in doing nothing, as he ever wasted.’ This ‘weakness of brain, this feebleness and lack of power to grasp almost anything put before him, is manifested also in the hours of recreation and social intercourse’.27
But now and then it is possible to catch a rather more sympathetic glimpse of Prince Eddy. Lord Napier, the Governor of Gibraltar, who met the princes in 1879, reported: ‘the eldest is better suited to his situation – he is shy and not demonstrative, but he does the right things as a young gentleman in a quiet way. It is well that he should be more reticent and reflective than the younger boy.’28 Although one cannot help suspecting that the Governor was misreading Prince Eddy’s lethargy for reflectiveness, it is significant that the young man could give this impression. The fact that he was called upon to speak – or at least to read speeches – in public, and that he is reported as having acquitted himself very well, indicates that he could appear to be quite normal. The few of his youthful letters to survive show that he was able to express himself in a natural and articulate fashion.
Ashore, when not being marched around historic sights by Mr Dalton, he behaved much as any other young prince would have done. He attended balls and banquets, he played cricket, he shot game, he went down mines and up mountains. In Tokyo, both he and his brother were tattooed. They arrived home with elaborate red and blue dragons writhing down their forearms. A press report – that they had had their noses tattooed – brought angry letters from the Queen and the Prince of Wales and a characteristically amused one from Princess Alexandra. ‘What an object you must look, and won’t everybody stare at the ridiculous boy with an anchor on his nose? Why on earth not have put it somewhere else?’ she wrote.29 But Dalton was able to reassure the boys’ father, a shade testily, that their noses had merely been powdered by the yellow pollen of the lilies they had been sniffing in the Botanical Gardens in Barbados.
It was, however, with the princes’ moral welfare that Queen Victoria was more seriously concerned. She was forever reminding her eldest son of the need to protect both princes from contamination by the ‘fast’ society in which he delighted. His greatest wish, the Prince of Wales reassured her, was to keep his sons ‘simple, pure and childlike for as long as possible’. They were in no danger at all, he wrote on another occasion: ‘they are so simple and innocent, and those they have come in contact with have such tact with them, that they are not likely to do them any harm.’30
In this context, ‘innocent’ can only have a sexual connotation and Dalton certainly saw to it that his charges were kept sexually uncorrupted. But it is difficult to believe that, in a three-year-long series of cruises at sea, Prince Eddy, no matter how carefully chaperoned, did not experience, or at least hear about, the obscenities and ribaldries of shipboard life. Months at sea were made more tolerable by the traditional naval solaces of ‘rum, bum and baccy’. And among initiatory rites was the stripping naked of the initiate, the caning of his buttocks and the filling of his rectum with soap.
‘I have been stationed, as you know, in two or three ships,’ wrote a British naval officer to Xavier Mayne, ‘and I think they have been thoroughly representative of the best sort of British seamen. On the D—— homosexuality was rife, and one could see with his own eyes how it was going on between officers …
‘To my knowledge sodomy is a regular thing on ships that go on long cruises. In the war-ships I should say that the sailor often preferred it. In the circumstances I have described the intimacy was spoken of slyly. The friendships between men, in all grades of service at sea, tend to be much closer, more sentimental than when ashore. Everything makes for confidentiality, one is shut away from the world, and so much in pairs with his friends, in watches, and so on. Of course, when the forecastle men come ashore they are keen after the girls, but sometimes the interest quite disappears, I am told.’
In the Navy the term for buggery was, graphically, ‘a feed of arse’ or just ‘a feed’.31
Dalton, who was regarded as something of a pretentious prig by those officers who were obliged to mess with him, seems to have been fully alive to the dangers of such sexually charged shipboard relationships. Although he encouraged his charges to be friendly and approachable towards their fellows, he discouraged ‘any close familiarity, any partial preferences, any selective fraternization’.32 When one all-too-familiar naval type, a senior midshipman by the name of Munro, with ‘his almost feminine ways and silly over-deference to [the princes] induced them to take liberties with him’, the alarmed Dalton ensured that he was removed from the Bacchante, on grounds of health, after the first cruise.33
Three days after returning home from their final voyage, on 8 August 1882, the two princes, having been instructed by Mr Dalton, were confirmed by Archbishop Tate in the presence of Queen Victoria at Whippingham Church, near Osborne. Prince Eddy was then eighteen, Prince George seventeen. ‘God grant that you, Sirs,’ intoned the Archbishop to the two kneeling boys, ‘may show the world what Christian Princes ought to be.’34
It was as well, perhaps, that as far as one of these Christian Princes was concerned, the Archbishop died before the year was out.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Student Prince
In January 1883, Prince Eddy turned nineteen. Although, according to Queen Victoria, he was by now taller than his father, he was still ‘ver
y slight’.1 Facially, he resembled both parents: he had his mother’s long, narrow head and his father’s heavy-lidded eyes and sensuous mouth. His air remained vague, abstracted. Yet he was capable of creating a good impression. Sir Henry Ponsonby, never one to be bowled over by the mere fact of royal birth, noted – privately – that Prince Eddy ‘is pleasing, talks well, and will be popular when he gets more at his ease’.2 This is hardly the description of some inarticulate moron.
His nineteenth birthday found Prince Eddy, together with Prince George, at the Hotel Beau Rivage in Lausanne. The two of them had been sent there to learn French. With them was the inevitable Mr Dalton and a bushily bearded Frenchman by the name of Monsieur Hua. As far as Prince Eddy was concerned, the six-month-long Beau Rivage experiment turned out to be no more successful than the periods spent aboard the Britannia and the Bacchante. It brought forth the usual stream of complaints on the part of Mr Dalton and the usual cries of despair on the part of Princess Alexandra.
‘It is indeed a bitter disappointment that … he should have relapsed into his old habits of indolence and inattention,’ she wrote in March 1883. ‘It does indeed seem strange that at his age he does not yet see the great importance of exerting himself to the utmost, and lets his precious time slip by which can never be recalled.’3