by Theo Aronson
It is significant that the philosophy of ‘Greek love’ was known as ‘the Higher Sodomy’ by the semi-secret Cambridge society called the Apostles. More significant still, almost all the members of Prince Eddy’s university circle were Apostles. The group had been started in 1820 as the Cambridge Conversazione Society: a serious-minded debating society concerned with religious matters. During the following sixty years, however, the Apostles had developed into a more sophisticated, esoteric and quasi-mystical organization, centred on Trinity College and with a pronounced homosexual bias. Although Jim Stephen had by now retired from the Apostles and was known as an Angel – a life member no longer obliged to attend all the meetings – the Prince’s other companions were all members.
Prince Eddy’s closest friend at Trinity was an Apostle: this was the brilliant Henry Francis Wilson – always known as Harry – who had been one of the Bachelors’ Cottage group at Sandringham in the summer of 1883. Wilson shared rooms with Jim Stephen’s brother, Henry Lushington Stephen, another Harry. Harry Stephen who, like his brother Jim, was exceptionally good-looking, claimed Wilson as his ‘most intimate friend’ and in Harry Wilson’s diary, now in Trinity College Library, is scrawled, opposite a mention of Harry Stephen, the words, ‘I love him, I love him.’29 It was generally believed that, had Prince Eddy not died in 1892, Harry Wilson would have become his private secretary.
A frequent visitor to Prince Eddy’s rooms was Arthur Benson, one of the sons of the Archbishop of Canterbury, later better known as the writer A.C. Benson, Master of Magdalene. In his discreet diaries A.C. Benson claimed that Prince Eddy ‘was always good-naturedly pleased to see one, and Dalton showed me much fatherly kindness’.30 Dalton’s kindness was not quite as fatherly as Benson claims. To Dalton, young Benson, who was homosexual, was ‘an object of adoration’.31
A name on Prince Eddy’s intimate dinner party lists is ‘Ronald’. This was Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, a younger son of the second Duke of Sutherland and a Trustee of the National Gallery. The flamboyant Gower, almost twenty years older than the Prince, made very little secret of his sexual tastes. His approach to sex was cheerfully unsentimental; he had a preference for working-class men, or ‘rough trade’. (It was of Gower, who had taken up with an objectionable young man named Frank Hird, that Oscar Wilde once said: ‘Gower may be seen but not Hird.’32 Gower was generally believed to have been Oscar Wilde’s model for the decadent and cynical Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray.)
Equally uninhibited about his sexual preferences was the celebrated Oscar Browning, a Fellow of King’s College. Sacked as a master from Eton because of his suspect friendship with a pupil, the good-looking George Curzon, afterwards Viceroy of India, Browning – or O.B. as he was usually called – was a relentless pursuer of young roughs. His rooms at Cambridge were invariably filled with soldiers and sailors, stable lads and artisans. Few nights were spent without a muscular companion beside him, ‘in case he was seized by sudden illness’.33 In those more innocent days, O.B.’s addiction to working-class boys was put down to his kindness of heart and eccentricity of character.
Browning, in whom snobbery went hand in hand with sodomy, chased royal titles as eagerly as he did rough trade. His remark, after being presented to the Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, that ‘he was the nicest Emperor I ever met’, became a famous O.B. catchphrase.34 He was particularly delighted when Queen Victoria’s hearty sailor son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, in thanking him for the gift of a book, assured O.B. that he retained the most pleasant memories of the times the two of them had spent together in the Turkish baths.
Browning was introduced to Prince Eddy by Jim Stephen. Bitterly envious of Stephen’s catch, O.B. always claimed that the plum appointment of tutor to Prince Eddy had gone to Stephen by default: Browning had merely happened to be out on the day that the ‘official arranging the matter’ had called to see him about it.35 He made up for this mischance, however, by inviting the Prince to his rooms as often as possible. ‘O.B.’s rooms’, as one undergraduate blandly puts it, ‘were a trysting-ground for all the celebrities and oddities of the university.’36 He even, this plumpest, least athletic of men, took to playing hockey – the only game Prince Eddy enjoyed – ‘for the sole purpose of being near to him and receiving a princely whack on the shins’.37 For Christmas 1884, O.B. gave the Prince a silver cigarette case.
Browning’s rooms were furnished in the most outré manner: Turkey carpets, Morris wallpapers, ‘bits of statuary picked up for a song in Italy; choice line engravings; dainty bronzes’.38 His Sunday evenings, which were often attended by Prince Eddy, were renowned for their unconventional mixture of guests. ‘In an armchair’, wrote one discomforted undergraduate attending for the first time, ‘an elderly peer, who had evidently enjoyed the College wine in the Common room, was slowly expounding politics, with the help of a cigar, to a circle of squatting young men; standing by the fire a Tommy in scarlet uniform was shaking into the flames the spittle from the clarinet he had just ceased playing; here and there, seated on the floor, were pairs of friends conversing earnestly in low tones as oblivious as lovers to their surroundings … Presently the piano began in the room beyond, and we went in to watch our host trolling out Voi che sapete with immense gusto. At the close of his performance, the clarinet player gave him a spanking …’39
The pride of Oscar Browning’s apartment was his recently installed bathroom. On one occasion, as he was showing it off to Prince Eddy, one of the more knowing undergraduates crept up to the door and locked the couple in. What the two of them did in the course of an ‘imprisonment which lasted quite a long time’ no one knew. Perhaps O.B. subjected the Prince to one of his famous masturbation lectures. The discussion of this ‘delicate subject’ was one into which Browning was known to plunge himself on the slightest excuse. But whatever happened, ‘the Pragger took the joke in good part’.40
On whether Prince Eddy experienced his first sexual encounters while at Cambridge one can only speculate. It seems likely – given his easy-going nature, the predatory habits of some of his associates, the tastes of most of the Apostles and the lustful, cloistered, all-male atmosphere of the College itself – that he did. What were afterwards darkly referred to as his ‘dissipations’ must have started somewhere. This is not to claim that the Prince was exclusively homosexual; simply that, in common with many another randy twenty-year-old he would probably have responded favourably to any sexual advance.
There must have been some reason why the magazine Punch considered it appropriate to publish a page of cartoons depicting a typical day in the Prince’s Cambridge life. In one he is shown playing hockey in a particularly dainty fashion; ‘Oh don’t hurt him!’ exclaims one undergraduate from the sidelines. In another, two undergraduates gaze admiringly at him as he brushes his hair. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ exclaims one. ‘Too lovely to look at,’ answers the other.41
Prince Eddy celebrated his twenty-first birthday on 8 January 1885. ‘It seems quite like a dream, and but so short a while ago,’ wrote Queen Victoria, ‘that I hurried across from Osborne to Windsor, or rather Frogmore, to find that poor little bit of a thing, wrapped in cotton! May God bless him and may he remain good and unspoilt, as he is!’42
Her opinion was echoed by those of the Prince’s Cambridge friends who had been invited to Sandringham for the coming-of-age celebrations. They were delighted to find him – amid all the grandeur of this royal occasion – ‘as quiet, as kindly, and as simple as if he had been in his rooms, or theirs, at Trinity’.43 Lady Geraldine Somerset, lady-in-waiting to the old Duchess of Cambridge, Queen Victoria’s aunt, could also report that Prince Eddy was ‘charming, as nice a youth as could be, simple, unaffected, unspoiled, affectionate’. But his ignorance, she sighed, was lamentable. ‘What on earth’, she continues unfairly, ‘stupid Dalton has been about all these years! He has taught him nothing!’44
The Prime Minister, W.E. Gladstone, having written to the Prince to congratulate him on his
birthday, asked permission to publish his reply. ‘On reading it over again this afternoon,’ claimed Gladstone’s secretary, ‘I found part of it admitted of no possible grammatical construction; so I took it to Marlborough House and got the Prince of Wales to agree to my suggested alterations and then sent copies of it round to the papers.’45
But lamentably ignorant or not, the Prince was from now on obliged to play a more prominent role on the royal stage. In March that year he accompanied the Prince of Wales on a state visit to Berlin for the eighty-eighth birthday celebrations of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Here he disgraced himself by letting his dinner-table companion, the sharp-tongued Princess Catherine Radziwill, involve him in her ridiculing of the elderly guest sitting opposite. The butt of their giggling was the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar – the German Empress’s brother.
A few weeks later he accompanied both parents on a tour of Ireland where, in Cork, they were given an extremely hostile reception. The streets, reported the Prince of Wales’s equerry to Queen Victoria, ‘were filled with sullen faces – hideous, dirty, cruel countenances, hissing and grimacing into one’s very face, waving black flags and black kerchiefs – a nightmare! The royal carriage was pelted with rotten vegetables.’46 This manifestation of anti-English hatred was gushingly interpreted, by the Daily Telegraph, as ‘Royal Visit to Cork, Enthusiastic Reception in the City’.47
From this sobering experience, Prince Eddy returned to Cambridge for the last weeks of his second and final year. James Stuart, a Fellow of Trinity and a member of Parliament who had rooms on the same staircase at Nevile’s Court, has an interesting anecdote about the Prince at this time. ‘Though somewhat stiff and slow in his manner, he had yet a keen perception of what was necessary to put people at their ease …’ wrote Stuart. ‘When I stood for the undivided borough of Hackney in 1884, I pledged myself to vote against any further increase of grant to the royal family, and in particular against the grant which was then mooted to the Prince himself on coming of age. When I returned to Cambridge after my election, the Prince came into my room – exactly as before – and I noticed how, with a little awkwardness, and yet with such evident good feeling, he strove to let me see that my pledge, to which he somewhat slyly alluded, made no difference to his friendliness.’48
Prince Eddy’s final year ended with a series of brilliant May Week celebrations. One of his friends has left a lyrical account of the last occasion on which the Prince and his male coterie savoured the particular pleasures of university life. Having danced until dawn at a ball at St John’s Lodge, the little group of undergraduates strolled back to Trinity. ‘When we reached the Great Court,’ he writes, ‘the charm of the fresh summer morning made the thought of bed impossible. It struck someone that it would be a good idea to turn into the Bowling Green and have a final cigar before we separated. In a day or two we should all be going down, some of us for the last time, and it seemed a pity not to see the thing out to the end. How clearly I recall the very sounds and scents of that delicious June day – the gay squealing of the swifts as they circled round the old towers, and the moist odours of the shaven turf at our feet. It was as though the quintessence of our happy life at Cambridge had been distilled into a golden cup and offered as a final draught to our regretful lips.’49
CHAPTER SIX
The Chocolate Soldier
In the summer of 1885 Prince Eddy performed his first important public functions. He was created Master of the Bench of the Middle Temple at which, in the ancient Middle Temple phrase, he was ‘called to the Degree of the Utter Bar’. On 29 June he accepted the freedom of the City of London at an impressive ceremony at Guildhall. His own performance was less than impressive. ‘He read his speech’, noted one member of his audience, ‘and we could not hear a word of it, and the poor fellow seemed very nervous. The Prince of Wales looked annoyed and the Princess, as always, exquisite.’1
The following week, apparently no less nervous, Prince Eddy went down to Aldershot. He was to start his military career as a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery before being transferred to the famous cavalry regiment, the 10th Hussars. With him, as successor to first Dalton and then Stephen, went his newly appointed equerry, Captain the Honourable Alwyn Greville. Greville was the brother-in-law of Lady Brooke, the unconventional society beauty who, as ‘Darling Daisy’, was destined to replace Lillie Langtry as the Prince of Wales’s acknowledged mistress.
Prince Eddy proved himself to be no more of a soldier than a scholar. The impression given by the official version of his military career – his steady promotion to major, his dedication to his duties, his ‘soldierly bearing and spirit’ – is hardly borne out by the private opinions of his contemporaries.2 When Queen Victoria’s cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, who was Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, once visited Aldershot during the Prince’s time there, the gruff old warrior was astonished by the young man’s backwardness. ‘He cannot learn his drill, so that he is not yet in the ranks!’ reported Lady Geraldine Somerset. ‘The Duke wanted to try him in some most elementary movement, the Colonel begged him not to attempt it as the Prince had not an idea how to do it! The Duke of course not wishing to expose him, let it alone!’
Sitting beside the Prince one night at dinner at Sandringham, the Duke of Cambridge turned the conversation to military matters. The Duke had served in the Crimean War and as Prince Eddy’s regiment, the 10th Hussars, had played a part in the campaign (the word ‘Sebastopol’ had been added to their colours) the topic seemed an obvious one. ‘He knew nothing about it!!!!’ reported the astounded Duke. ‘Knew nothing of the Battle of the Alma!!! It is past all conceiving!’3 Even the Prince’s official biographer had to admit that he ‘was disinclined by nature, not so much to active exertion as to the act of entering upon it’.4 The Duke of Cambridge put it more bluntly. ‘He is an inveterate and incurable dawdler,’ he thundered, ‘never ready, never there!’5
Neither at Aldershot, nor at York, nor at the Curragh near Dublin, did Prince Eddy show much interest in soldiering. He disliked barrack life, he detested field days, he dismissed his General as ‘a lunatic’. Such cavalry routines as the ‘officers’ ride’ he found tedious in the extreme. ‘One has to go jogging round and round the riding school in a very tight and uncomfortable garment called a stable jacket and very hot work it is I can assure you,’ he once grumbled to a friend. His promotions were never earned or deserved; the authorities were obliged to promote him because of his position and because ‘younger men were rising above his head’.6
A lackadaisical attitude characterized everything he did – or did not do. When the fiftieth anniversary of the Duke of Cambridge’s joining the Army was being publicly celebrated in 1887, Prince Eddy forgot all about it. ‘Prince Eddy here, at Marlborough House,’ wrote the outraged Lady Geraldine at this ignoring of the Duke’s great day, ‘his own near relation, known him intimately from his birth, an officer under his command, neither comes to him, nor writes to him, nor takes the slightest notice!!!! His own uncle and Commander-in-Chief!!!! Too bad; it is no want of proper feeling, but sheer stupidity!! Alas! that fatal apathy and inertness, sleepy apathetic laziness and total want of initiative.’7
Once his first six months of training were over, Prince Eddy seems to have spent almost as much time away from his regiment as with it. Not only did he have various public duties to perform but he was to be seen at balls, dinners, family weddings, the theatre and weekend house parties. He often dined with a friend in some London club. He went to Cambridge to open the new buildings of the Union and, on another occasion, to receive an honorary Doctorate of Law. In spite of the Duke of Cambridge’s complaint that he was ‘hopelessly soft’ and did not ‘care even for any field sports’, the Prince seems to have done his obligatory share of hunting and shooting.8 He was hardly, though, what Vincent, in one of his frequent flights of fancy, calls ‘a shot of real brilliance’ and ‘a hard Englishman’ who ‘possessed all the manly instincts and tastes of an English gentleman’.9
His s
on’s continuing backwardness annoyed the Prince of Wales considerably. Prince Eddy’s remaining in the Army, he sighed on one occasion, was ‘simply a waste of time – and he has not that knowledge even of military subjects which he ought to possess’.10
In October 1886 Prince Eddy’s old tutor, the Reverend Dalton, having been rewarded for his years of service by being installed as a Canon at Windsor, finally married. His bride was Catherine Evan-Thomas. The version given in official royal biographies, that Dalton married the sister of one of the officers aboard the Bacchante, is not quite accurate. The truth is more intriguing. On the Bacchante, the middle-aged Dalton, invariably described as a confirmed bachelor, had taken a fancy to a teenaged cadet; a mere three days after meeting the boy’s sister, he proposed marriage. His bride was barely half his age. Best man at the wedding was Arthur Benson, also half Dalton’s age and the ‘object of adoration’ of Dalton’s days with Prince Eddy at Cambridge.
Just over eighteen months later, Catherine Dalton bore her forty-eight-year-old husband a son. The Canon decided on Edward, after Prince Eddy, as a first name for the baby and asked the Prince to be godfather. Prince Eddy agreed but, to the Canon’s regret, was unable to be present at the christening in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on 24 September 1887, as he was with his mother, Princess Alexandra, in Denmark. Characteristically, the Prince was late in sending his christening gift.
‘You will I hope receive in a few days my gift for my Godson which was not ready before, or I would have sent it for the Christening on the 24th of last month,’ he wrote to Canon Dalton. ‘I hope you will think the cups suitable, as I got them in Copenhagen, and they took my fancy at once; and I think they ought to come in useful when my Godson grows older as I used to have the same kind of cups for drinking out of as a child …’11