Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/254

 friend, "Tom Porter," in 1667, which led to their fatal duel; of which affair all London talked with wonder and pity.

In the reign of Queen Anne and of the first Georgian sovereigns there were enough suggestions of homosexual intimacies between personages in high society and politics to receive cutting allusions of poets and other satirical writers. Lampoons and squibs of such kind flew about the clubs and coffee-houses. Pope has biting references to such Court-favourites as Lord Hervey—"Sporus, that mere white curd of asses'-milk".

In the Guelphic blood have been remarkable, from time to time, traces of reaction from a notorious heterosexualism to a notorious homosexuality. The Hanoverian dynasty has shown it. George III, when a young man, was charged by common report with sexual intimacy with his personal and political favourite, Lord Bute. The caricaturists of the time are prodigal of allusions to this accusation. Bute, when prime-minister, was the subject of countless pasquinades not omitting it. It is to this sort of gossip that Byron refers in his poem "The Vision of Judgement" when he declares that the annals of George III show—"How to a minion first he gave the helm". George the Fourth seems to have been consistently heterosexual. But his brother, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, who in his younger days had the family-beauty, early was marked out in English society for uranian amours; and eventually had to appear in a court of justice because of the murder of his valet Sellis—an affair about which floated a thick cloud of homosexualism. Between the Duke and certain members of his household there had been criminal intimacies. The trial mentioned was the sensation of the hour. Sellis was supposed to have had a connection with the Duke, and to have been supplanted by another servant, Neale. According to another theory, Sellis (who was found dead in his room, with his throat cut, in