Ashamed to be gay?

Henry Dundas, his long-time friend and political ally, is said to have wagered £500 that William Pitt the Younger never touched a woman.

Pitt did a great many other things. The son of the elder Pitt who had also been Prime Minister, he would be the youngest holder of that office that Britain has ever seen. He came to power at 24. Seventeen years later, when he resigned (temporarily as it turned out), he was still younger than any other British Prime Minister has been on first taking office.

Being Prime Minister was his one driving aspiration. So much so that following his return to power, he would hold it to the grave, dying in office less than two years later. He was still unbearably young, just 46.

What about that business of never touching a woman?

It had seemed at one point that he might. He drew close to the family of his friend and political ally William Eden, Baron Auckland, the nearest neighbour to the country house Pitt then had in Kent. He spent much of his time with the family and in particular in conversation with Auckland’s daughter, Eleanor Eden. The strong attachment between them became so obvious that in 1797 there was widespread talk of a marriage between the Prime Minister and Eleanor.

Eleanor Eden: disappointed
by insurmountable obstacles to her marriage

It seems he suddenly became aware of how committed he was becoming. So he wrote to explain he’d had had no intention of getting in so deep though, this being the late eighteenth century, it wasn’t to Eleanor that he wrote, but to her father.

It can hardy, I think, be necessary to say that the time I have passed among your family has led to my forming sentiments of very real attachment towards them all, and of much more than attachment towards one whom I need not name. Nor should I do justice to my own feelings, or explain myself as firmly as I think I ought to do, if I did not own that every hour of my acquaintance with the person to whom you will easily conceive I refer has served to augment and confirm that impression; in short, has convinced me that whoever may have the good fortune ever to be united to her is destined to more than his share of human happiness.

Whether, at any rate, I could have had any ground to hope that such might have been my lot, I am in no degree entitled to guess. I have to reproach myself for ever having indulged the idea on my own part as far as I have done without asking myself carefully and early enough what were the difficulties in the way of tis being realised. I have suffered myself to overlook them too long, but having now at length reflected as fully and as calmly as I am able on every circumstance that ought to come under my consideration (at least as much for her sake as for my own), I am compelled to say that I find the obstacles to it decisive and insurmountable.

Pitt never explained what the obstacles were, which strikes me as significant enough in itself. The collapse of the hopes for the match must, however, have helped Dundas win his wager, if anyone accepted it: it seems unlikely that Pitt ever did touch a woman, in the sense Dundas intended.

Curiously, one man famously did touch Pitt. William Hague has written a great biography of Pitt, proving that it’s possible to be an infuriating Tory politician (at one time leader of his party, as it happens) but be good historian and, even more important, a fine writer too. As Hague explains, a protégé of Pitt’s and future Prime Minister himself, George Canning, ‘had once even been seen to touch Pitt on the shoulder, an action unthinkable to the majority of MPs.’

Later on, Pitt played a significant role in making Canning’s marriage possible and acted as one of the witnesses to it. But, as Hague again tells us:

He seemed to behave bizarrely at Canning’s wedding on 8 July, although he should have found it a joyous occasion, having encouraged the match, bringing Canning and his bride Joan Scott together at Walmer, and giving Caning promotion [in government] so that he was better provided for. […] At the ceremony Pitt seemed too nervous to sign the register, suggesting that he was either distressed, ill, or much influenced by alcohol.

Distressed? That seems distinctly plausible. If Pitt had feelings for Canning that he couldn’t avow, helping fix up his marriage would have been an obvious stratagem. But, obvious or not, the stratagem might very well not have protected him from feelings of unbearable sorrow and disappointment when the event took place.

Hague is careful not to assert more than the record can confirm. At one point he suggests that an answer to mystery of Pitt’s behaviour may have been…

…that Pitt had homosexual leanings but suppressed any urge to act on them for the sake of his ambitions. Social attitudes were more hostile to such tendencies in the late eighteenth century than they are today, or had been only a few decades before. It is possible that the suppression of private feelings added to Pitt’s apparent aloofness and his dedication to work.

The record certainly provides no confirmation:

We have no sure evidence that Pitt was homosexual: no surviving letter or diary of any of his friends gives any hint of it, no enemy directly alleged it even after his death. Nevertheless, there was a good deal of innuendo and gossip.

Pitt was a remarkable man. In purely practical terms, he had a remarkable career and achieved far more than most politicians manage.

But isn’t it intriguing to think that behind all that success there may have lurked a tragic, unavowable and insatiated longing?

It wasn't always safe outside the closet

You have to be satisfied with small achievements if you have only middling strength and the truly great is beyond your grasp.

So in this country we take great satisfaction whenever we can prevent some small piece of our national heritage being sold abroad.

We believe its cultural heritage is essential to a nation and must be preserved for it, which is why we take such pleasure in visiting the British Museum and admiring the Rosetta stone from Northern Egypt or the gallery decorated with what we still like to think of as the ‘Elgin Marbles’, from the Parthenon in Athens.

Just last week, a desperate campaign to raise funds saved Alan Turing’s wartime papers for the country. They will go to the museum at Bletchley Park which housed Britain’s Second World War code-breaking centre, where reading the German Enigma code provided inaluable, high-quality intelligence to the Allies. As the ‘Curveball’ story recently revealed, these days we like to go to war on the basis of a single obscure opportunist’s fabrications, so it’s comforting to remember that intelligence was once something that we collected intelligently.

Turing was a central figure at Bletchley Park, where he applied the theoretical principles of his ‘Turing Engine’ to automate the massively time-consuming task of breaking codes. Today, those principles drive computers everywhere.

Persecuted in his lifetime, still not sufficiently regarded today

It’s fitting that Turing’s homeland is making this small tribute to his towering genius. It goes a little way towards atoning for having chemically castrated him in 1952, for the then crime of a love affair with another man. The persecution didn’t stop with the castration and two years later he was driven to suicide at the age of 41.

In 2009, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a public apology for Turing’s treatment. Better than nothing I suppose. And now we have his papers.

This reminds me that I recently heard David Hockney talking, as part of the BBC series A History of the World in a Hundred Objects, about his 1966 engraving In the Dull Village.

The picture of two young men in bed was part of series of twelve that Hockney produced not just as art for art’s sake but as propaganda against the continued criminalisation of homosexuality. When Hockney made the engraving the legislation that killed Turing was still on the statute book, though by the time the picture went on the display in 1967, the law had at last been repealed.

Progress, though, is never even.

‘In those days, homosexuality was illegal but you could smoke anywhere,' pointed out Hockney who is a heavy smoker. 'Today it’s the other way round. Story of my life.’

Illegal propaganda in 1966

Still, I suppose at least a smoking ban wouldn’t have driven Turing to a sad and premature death.

Completely unrelated postscript. There’s a Starbuck’s downstairs from my office. I find the chain's use of English entertaining. For instance, the first sentence of this post, rendered into Starbuckian, would read ‘You have to be satisfied with tall achievements if you have only grande strength and the truly venti is beyond your grasp.’

Amusing perhaps but hardly limpid.