by Theo Aronson
Back home, the two princes were finally parted. While Prince George (who had learned almost as little French as his brother) went off to continue his career in the Navy, Prince Eddy remained at Sandringham to be prepared for the next stage of his. He was to go up to Trinity College, Cambridge. Prince Eddy felt the parting keenly. ‘So we are at last separated for the first time,’ he wrote in June 1883, ‘and I can’t tell you how strange it seems to be without you and how much I miss you in everything all day long!’4
Prince George’s departure left Prince Eddy stranded in a family circle that was almost entirely feminine. With his father, who was seldom home, he had very little rapport. The Prince of Wales was too extrovert, too impatient, too quick-tempered a man to make allowances for his son’s sensitive nature. ‘I hear the Prince of Wales snubbed Prince Eddy uncommonly,’ reported Ponsonby on one occasion.5 And when he was not snubbing him, he was subjecting him to the sort of banter – or what one of his cousins calls ‘odious chaffing’ – which is guaranteed to make a self-conscious person even more so.6 Margot Asquith thought that Prince Eddy had been made a more ‘backward, timid boy’ because of his father’s ‘perpetual teasing – a form of ill-judged chaff’.7 And some years later, at Cambridge, Prince Eddy confessed to a friend that he was ‘rather afraid of his father, and aware that he was not quite up to what his father expected of him’.8
From his mother and three younger sisters, however, Prince Eddy received nothing but adoration. Within the cluttered drawing-rooms of Marlborough House and Sandringham, crammed with portraits, photographs and busts of the Princess and her daughters, the women of the Wales household created what has been described as a mutual admiration society. They lived in a self-contained, whimsical, almost make-believe world. So young-looking and immature herself, the Princess of Wales was determined to keep her daughters as childlike as possible for as long as possible. The three princesses – Louise, Victoria and Maud – even looked like their mother but without her marvellous beauty. Always identically dressed, they were pale and narrow-skulled with protruding eyes and fashionably crimped hair. Diffident in public and boisterous in private, they enjoyed their girlish games and played their practical jokes well into adulthood. They all enjoyed the same happy-go-lucky system of education. Even their conversation had a similarity. They always talked, claimed one of their cousins, about people as ‘the dear little thing’ or ‘the poor little man’. They ‘spoke in a minor key, en sourdine. It gave a special quality to all talks with them, and gave me a strange sensation, as though life would have been very beautiful if it had not been so sad.’ The three of them were often referred to as ‘the whispering Wales girls’.9 Their rooms were like those of little children: packed with an accumulation of tiny, pretty, dainty but far from aesthetic objets – miniatures, shells, little vases, diminutive paintings, tiny china ornaments.
That Prince Eddy should find this undemanding and uncritical atmosphere congenial is understandable. Within it, his lackadaisical air was hardly noticeable. ‘There was one noteworthy feature in his character,’ wrote someone who knew him well, repeating a frequently made observation, ‘and this was his affection for his mother and sisters. He continually turned the conversation to them. They were evidently much in his thoughts. He quoted what they had said and spoke of what they were doing.’
He was, says his tutor, very much his mother’s son. ‘The fact cannot fail to have impressed itself upon anyone who was ever brought into personal contact with him and with the Princess of Wales. Such, for instance, was the gentle amiability of demeanour, the modesty, almost akin to bashfulness, the slight involuntary action of the head while conversing, the turn of phrase and expression in which his thoughts found readiest utterance.’ Whenever the two of them walked together, the Prince ‘would draw his arm through his mother’s, press it close to his, and brighten up altogether’.10
Another feminine presence in the Prince’s life was, of course, his grandmother, Queen Victoria. Never the ogre of popular legend, the Queen was especially indulgent towards Prince Eddy. She considered his manners charming, his consideration for servants admirable and his lethargy soothing. She was delighted to see that, thus far, he was showing no signs of emulating his father’s restless and licentious way of life. In the summer of 1883, Prince Eddy was summoned to Balmoral to be invested with the Garter. His undemanding presence in no way disrupted the Queen’s secluded and strictly ordered routine.
He appears to have found her equally sympathetic. ‘I am delighted to see Eddy looking so well and having enjoyed his visit to you in Scotland so much,’ wrote Princess Alexandra to Queen Victoria on the Prince’s return to Sandringham. ‘I am so glad you seem to have understood his disposition, which is really an excellent one, and he is a very good boy at heart though perhaps he is a little slow and dawdly which I always attribute to his having grown so fast. I am delighted you gave him such good advice and the very points you mention are those which I always try to impress upon him, and I am particularly glad you did not allude to any of the other subjects you intended speaking about, such as races, clubs etc. as he really has no inclination that way and it might only have put them into his head …’11
Prince Eddy’s immersion in his mother’s syrupy world was interrupted by the necessity of preparing him for university. For, as James Edmund Vincent, in his obsequious and officially sanctioned memoir of the Prince puts it, ‘it had been decided that Cambridge should be honoured with a share in the training of him who stood next to his father in succession to the throne.’12 As even the unexacting standards expected of a prince up at Cambridge would have been beyond Prince Eddy, he was subjected to a further course of concentrated study. He was removed to the ‘Bachelors’ Cottage’ on the Sandringham estate where, in the company of the ubiquitous Mr Dalton and four actual or prospective undergraduates, he was to be indoctrinated into university ways.
To replace Prince George’s steadying and encouraging influence, it was decided that some suitable young man should be appointed as part-tutor, part-companion. The choice for this important post was the twenty-four-year-old James Kenneth Stephen. In the course of a dinner-table conversation during one of the Prince of Wales’s flying visits to Sandringham, he and young Stephen discussed Prince Eddy’s educational regime. The Prince of Wales was apparently impressed by Stephen’s character and abilities.
But he had been ill-advised. As a mentor for the malleable, sexually equivocal Prince Eddy, Jim Stephen could hardly have been a more unfortunate choice.
On the face of it, Jim Stephen was the beau idéal of the High Victorian scholar-sportsman. He was a member of a distinguished family which, in the course of the preceding century and through its own efforts, had risen to academic, legal and social prominence. His father was a judge, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen; his grandfather, Sir James Stephen, had been a leading Colonial Under-Secretary. Jim Stephen has been described as ‘classically beautiful’, and he was certainly handsome in a clear-eyed, firm-jawed, indubitably masculine fashion. When the part of ‘Ajax’ in a Greek play was being cast, Stephen with his ‘massive frame and striking face’ was the obvious choice. As a footballer, he was said to be famous. ‘A hearty man was this, and a vigorous,’ writes Vincent, who met him at Cambridge, ‘warm-hearted, large in mind, versatile in taste, intensely human.’
He was also an accomplished scholar. He had won scholarships and prizes at Eton and Cambridge; he had been president of the Cambridge Union in 1882, where his oratory was ‘outstanding’. But, continues Vincent, Stephen was ‘no mere bookworm, but a man with a natural bent towards dainty and exquisite language in prose and verse’. His literary tastes have been described as ‘elegant and refined’. Harry Wilson, another member of the Prince’s little court at Bachelors’ Cottage, claims that no better choice as tutor could have been made. ‘For Mr Stephen, to an extraordinarily brilliant and subtle intellect, united a geniality of disposition that made him, to those who knew him well, one of the most lovable of men.’13 He charmed, says Vincent, ‘
every man he met’.14
But the picture was not quite as rosy as it seemed. The Stephen family was emotionally unstable. The bland phrase ‘severe illness, caused by overwork’, which was applied to several members of the family, was a euphemism for mental derangement. It was certainly the cause of the premature retirement of Jim Stephen’s father from the Bench. This ‘curse of the Stephens’ even extended to Jim’s cousin, Virginia Woolf, who, after protracted periods of mental disturbance, took her own life in 1941. A few years after first meeting Prince Eddy, Stephen began to show signs of serious mental instability himself and his behaviour became increasingly erratic. He died on 3 February 1892 in a lunatic asylum, at the age of thirty-three, having refused to take food or drink for twenty days; just twenty days after he had been told of the sudden death of his one-time charge, Prince Eddy.
There can be little doubt that Jim Stephen, in the course of the period that he was so closely associated with Prince Eddy – first at Sandringham and then at Cambridge – gradually became drawn to him. On first taking up his duties at Bachelors’ Cottage, he described the Prince as ‘a good-natured, unaffected youth’,15 and to Dalton – who needed no telling – complained that ‘he hardly knows the meaning of the words to read.’ Stephen doubted that his pupil would ‘derive much benefit from attending lectures at Cambridge’.16
But Stephen came from a socially ambitious family. Put in the unique position of having to befriend and mould the future King-Emperor, he developed proprietorial feelings towards him. He resented anyone else trying to influence, or to win the confidence of, the young man. Given his good looks and overwhelming charm, it did not take Stephen long to gain the trust of the simple Prince Eddy.
And then Stephen, for all the apparent heterosexuality of his appearance and manner, was what the Victorians called a ‘woman-hater’. To him, moreover, the phrase could be applied in its literal meaning. One needs to read only one of his many poems to appreciate the depth of Stephen’s irrational detestation of women.
If all the harm that women have done
Were put in a bundle and rolled into one,
Earth would not hold it,
The sky could not enfold it,
It could not be lighted nor warmed by the sun;
Such masses of evil
Would puzzle the devil
And keep him in fuel while Time’s wheels run.
On the other hand, runs the second stanza of this curious poem, if all the harm that was done by men were ‘doubled and doubled and doubled again’, it would still not provide enough fuel for even ‘a tenth of a year’.17
It is hardly surprising, then, that the socially aspiring and neurotically woman-hating Stephen should feel attracted to this kindly, affectionate and curiously sensuous young prince. He was not the first, nor the last, person, in whom Prince Eddy brought out strongly protective instincts. That the relationship between the two young men was ever overtly homosexual is open to question. But homosexual or not, an intimacy – ‘jealously possessive on Stephen’s side and lazily tolerant on Prince Eddy’s’ – developed between them during those high summer days at Sandringham.18
In mid-October 1883 Prince Eddy, still in the care of Jim Stephen and accompanied by Dalton and the rest of the Bachelors’ Cottage coterie, went up to Trinity College, Cambridge. He was to remain there for eighteen months.
Unlike his father, who had been accommodated in a private house three miles out of town during his singularly unproductive spell at Cambridge, Prince Eddy had rooms in college. There was less reason, it was decided, to protect the son from the more rakish elements of undergraduate life. Prince Eddy was allotted two sets of rooms – known at Cambridge as ‘attics’ – on the top floor of Nevile’s Court. Although comfortably furnished, the Prince’s rooms were not noticeably different from those of the other undergraduates. Dalton’s rooms were said to have had much more character, ‘ornamented as they were with many mementoes of the cruise of the Bacchante’.19 Indeed, Dalton made use of this period at Cambridge to work on his exhaustive account of the voyage of the Bacchante. He was quite content, it seems, to leave Prince Eddy in the hands of Jim Stephen.
Nevile’s Court, reads one honeyed account of the Prince’s stay there, ‘is the chosen abode of dons and scholars, and seldom re-echoes the sound of undergraduate revelry, presenting in this respect a strong contrast to the adjacent New Court …’20 This same air of tranquillity characterizes the whole of Prince Eddy’s Cambridge career. Try as he might, the Prince’s official biographer James Edmund Vincent can praise him in negative terms only. The Prince is ‘naturally simple and docile’; he is ‘quiet and moderately industrious’; he gives his tutors ‘as little trouble as possible’. If one of his friends happens to be speaking, he will attend the Cambridge Union as ‘a silent member’. At concerts he is ‘a constant listener’. He ‘patronizes performances’ of the Amateur Dramatic Society.21 It is just as well, one feels, that the Prince enjoyed ‘the privilege of escaping university examinations, a privilege properly accorded to his high rank’.22
Anecdotes about his naïvety were legion. When, on his arrival at Cambridge, Dr Thompson, Master of Trinity, took him on a tour of the paintings, which included a recent one of the Master himself, Prince Eddy politely remarked, ‘Another old master, I suppose?’23
The Prince seems to have been even less of a sportsman than he was a scholar. Vincent, ploughing manfully on, admits that ‘in the athletic world the Prince was no very prominent person.’ He played neither cricket nor football. An initial interest in rowing soon dwindled and such riding as he did was ‘in a quiet way’. He did try his hand at lacrosse and lawn tennis (‘HRH plays better than he did’ is the best that can be dredged up by way of a comment on his game) and it is with almost palpable relief that his biographer claims that the Prince played hockey ‘often and well’. His favourite outdoor occupation appears to have been spending ‘a pleasant summer evening with a friend upon the water among the beautiful surroundings of the “Backs” ’. It was the friend, however, who handled the punt.24
It was indoors, and chiefly at what Vincent describes as ‘the modest little dinner parties which bring men, whether princes or commoners, into closer intimacy’, that Prince Eddy seems to have taken the greatest pleasure.25 Under the watchful eye of Jim Stephen, the Prince – known to his companions as ‘the Pragger’ – was allowed to extend his circle. Hating women as he did, Stephen would have discouraged any friendships, however innocent, with the girls whom his charge would have met at dances or tennis parties. Not, of course, that women would have been allowed into the undergraduates’ quarters. Prince Eddy’s name was certainly never linked, in the way that his father’s had been during his university days, with that of any woman.
The Prince’s demeanour, at these ‘modest little dinner parties’, was so self-effacing that his companions often forgot his exalted rank. Once, when his host was having trouble uncorking a bottle of soda water and the Prince offered some rather obvious advice, the host petulantly exclaimed, ‘Go and teach your grandmother to suck eggs!’ Only after saying it did he remember who the Prince’s grandmother was.26 The Prince of Wales, at any age, would have been furious; the good-natured Prince Eddy was highly amused.
A study of the personalities in whose company Prince Eddy spent many of these intimate evenings is revealing. Some of them were simply fellow undergraduates but of the poetry-writing, whist-playing, amateur-acting variety; others were overt or covert homosexuals, followers of the somewhat self-conscious cult of ‘Greek love’. This particular form of love was widespread in schools and universities during the second half of the nineteenth century, cultivated as part of the newly fashionable Aesthetic Movement. With its literary roots in two of Plato’s Dialogues, this Platonic love – the affection of one man for another unsullied by sex – was regarded as the highest possible form of love. No relationship between a man and a woman, inseparable from lust and procreation, could match the purity and disinterestedness of the love
between two men. Just as the Spartan warriors had had their cadets and medieval knights their pages, so could the heroes of the playing field establish innocent friendships with younger students. The resulting idealized companionships were often intense and romantic, manifesting themselves in reams of passionate verse and torrid prose.
But they were not always innocent; any more, in fact, than love between men in ancient Greece had been innocent. The Greeks were decidedly bisexual. Marriage was for the procreation of children and for the ensuring of a well-managed home. The marriage having been consummated, the husband would return to his younger male lover for both sexual gratification and intellectual companionship. This presented the ideal for John Addington Symonds and other sexually tormented intellectuals. They looked to Greek civilization to bear out their contention that homosexuality was simply ‘part of the accepted way of life, part of an organic whole’.27
That the majority of undergraduates who practised Greek love concerned themselves with the finer philosophical points of the theory is doubtful. It was all too easy for two young men expressing undying love for each other on paper, to feel tempted to express it between the sheets. Greek love also gave practising homosexuals the perfect framework in which to conduct their less cerebral affairs. Occasionally the cult would be rocked by an open scandal, as when one of its chief proponents, the painter Simeon Solomon, was discovered by the police, fellating a man called Roberts in a public lavatory.
Even without the cloak of love, whether of the Greek variety or not, students engaged in sexual activity. Raymond Asquith, writing to a friend from his college at about this time, gleefully reported on a mass meeting at which the students were lectured on ‘the disadvantages’ of sodomy. ‘He spoke in hushed accents of the abominable crime and exhorted us with passionate fervour to prefer every known form of prostitution and bestiality to the sin of Sodom. He told us that the Headmasters, in league with the Government, were proposing to increase the legal penalty from two to fourteen years; whereat a perceptible shudder ran through the audience, of whom some 85 per cent – by the lowest estimate – were liable for incarceration on that charge.’28