Editor’s Column: What Prince Eddy’s Impact On WWI Could Have Been

(Part 8)

These chapters dedicated to the legacy of Prince Eddy, aka Alfred Victor, who as heir to the English throne died at age 27 in 1891, are produced not so much to chronicle his personal biography and times, but to step back and draw a much broader inference concerning how a gay man, which he was, instead of being the typical brute that his younger brother became, could have dramatically altered the course of history, namely, to have prevented, or mitigated the horrible impact of the Great War and the overall horrors of the 1914-1945 period.

Surely, he was terribly misunderstood and underappreciated within his inner circles in his time, despite his popularity with the English public who found him to be particularly endearing as a young prince and future monarch. He was akin to a Princess Diana or Prince Harry in that regard. Although adored by his grandmother, Queen Victoria, he was considered a liability by official circles around the throne for his relatively gentle and effeminate demeanor, and this became for them a particular problem when he was caught up in London’s Cleveland Street male brothel scandal of 1889, which was barely kept out of the papers.

Eddy’s lifelong mentor, John Dalton, assigned to him from his pre-teen years, was a man who was best friends with Edward Carpenter, considered the founder of the modern gay movement, and there was a well-established underworld for gays in London at that time that generally advanced political views markedly far more progressive certainly than those of the official crown.

Biographies of Eddy produced in the wake of his premature demise failed entirely to do justice to the kind of gay man he was, superimposing on him a cruelly prejudiced view as seen from the standpoint of the prevailing white male chauvinist culture.

So, it is entirely plausible that poor Prince Eddy was, in fact, done in by nefarious forces causing him to contract the flu in 1892 and to die quickly at age 28.

Eddy’s premature death seems innocuous enough, except when viewed from the standpoint of what unfolded in the first decades of the 20th century, when he should have but did not take the throne.    

In short, all hell broke loose with the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914.

Had Eddy been alive, could he have prevented what then transpired? It is not a hypothetical question, but one of history.

I believe that somehow nature put Eddy into the position as the incoming monarch of a great world power, not unlike the way in which gays somehow tend to show up in history when there is a social need for the particular gifts they bring. It’s a matter of evolution.

But it is not like some supernatural force is involved that could have intervened to keep Eddy alive. It is an entirely natural process, in my view, and failing to produce the natural outcome for the best result, simply means that life goes on without it.

So, this treatise is unique, as far as I can tell, for the way it juxtaposes the life of a gay person against the backdrop of a horrible war. It blurs all the conventional lines to dare assert that war and gayness are interrelated, but in a reverse sense.

It has been gays who have done most to expose the horrible realities of war, as gay Walt Whitman in his Civil War poems did during the U.S. Civil War and as the gay poet Wilfred Owen during World War I, among others. They were the ones that ripped off the lies and coverups that attempted to glorify the war experience to tell the real accounts of how awful it was. The fluid German Erich Maria Remarque, in his “All Quiet on the Western Front,” and fluid Ernest Hemingway in his “A Farewell to Arms, ” found receptive audiences in the post-war Weimar Germany a decade after the Great War, did so as well, especially contrasting prevailing illusions about the nature of war and its actual realities. So it was for Virginia Woolf and Vera Brittain who chronicled the lasting impact of shell shock back at home.

End.