“If Eddy Became King” is the title of my latest book published by BCI Books at a modest just over 50 pages, a compilation of 11 of my weekly columns on this subject published in the last year and available at Amazon or One More Page Books in Falls Church for only $7.95. The subtitle is “An Homage to All Victims of the Two Great Wars That Devastated Humanity, 1914-1945.”

It constitutes my modest contribution to the many literary, film and drama portrayals marking the 100th anniversary of what was called, but turned out not to be, a “War to End All Wars,” a centennial that began in 2014 and ran through 2018. My effort is slightly tardy, but so is other stuff that is also just now coming out.

The content is summarized in a short blurb on the back cover, “Could England’s gay Prince Eddy, had he become king instead of dying at 27 in 1891, have prevented World War!? And if that, likely the Holocaust and World War II spawned by it, as well?”

Why now, why 100 years later, does this matter today? That might have been a reasonable question before Trump came on the scene, but not anymore. Trump is the veritably perfect embodiment of the kind of brutish male chauvinist thinking of world leaders who wound up plunging humanity into what, when taken together, accounted for the loss of about 200 million lives between 1914 and 1945.

What arose in the period leading up to this catastrophic plundering had evolved into humanity’s finest hour. It arose out of the combination of the European Enlightenment’s impact from the previous century that led to the American revolution and Constitutional law, advancing the preconditions for a universal appreciation of the rights of all, on the one hand, and the related explosive impact of the Industrial Revolution in applied sciences on the other.

The incredibly swinish leaders of England, Germany and Russia, all cousins to one another, fell readily into the launching of these wars out of “zero sum” thinking aimed at weakening the impact of democracy’s rise that was empowering trade unions and other worker-centered organizations to demand fair wages and working conditions. “We’ll fix them,” these brutes secretly chortled amongst themselves. We saw what happened.

In 2024, Trump, if elected, will seek a replay of that horror, with selected strong men of various participating nations, typified by Hungary’s Orban.

The irony that is the subject of my book is that the rightful heir to the English throne, born in 1862 as Prince Albert Victor the Duke of Clarence and Avondale and popularly known during his lifetime as Eddy, was not such a brute and was his younger brother, who became George V.

Queen Victoria, the much maligned, longest reigning (until Elizabeth II) British monarch from 1837 to 1901, actually was no fan of either her hedonistic, morbidly obese son Edward or her grandson who became George V. She strongly favored Eddy because of his calm temperament and elegant style, which I claim marked a “gay sensibility” (as defined in my 2013 book, “Extraordinary Hearts: Reclaiming Gay Sensibility’s Central Role in the Progress of Civilization”).

But the white male chauvinist pigs around the British Crown, just like today (against Harry and Megan) and in the preceding decades (against Diana) insisted they knew best, and when Eddy was caught up in the Cleveland Street gay brothel scandal in 1889, well, it was only two years until he was dead at an offsite location ostensibly from the flu.

Eddy was furiously maligned posthumously, even leading one fiction writer to propose he was Jack the Ripper and always because of the personality manifestations of his “gay sensibility.”

Mine is perhaps the first book to project an overall positive image of Eddy, since other biographies characterized his gay sensibilities and involvement in the Cleveland Street scandal as serious blemishes on his character.

As for lessons for today, shouldn’t the examples of the two Great Wars of the last century suffice to teach us of the treachery of Trump?

Let us instead revive the meritorious legacy of Eddy, the way his grandmother Queen Victoria would have wanted.