Some contemporary observers thought they detected a "prima donna" streak in Eden's attitude and appearance. For example, the ageing Earl of Crawford and Balcarres (1871–1940), a snob,His snobbery was such that he had professed himself unable to imagine "anything more middle class" than the contents of a greenhouse on King George V's estate at Sandringham. Diary entry following a visit to Sandringham in 1923: see David Faber (2005) Speaking for England thought him "vain as a peacock and all the mannerisms of a petit maître [in the sense of a dandy or fop]". One of Eden's permanent secretaries, P. J. Grigg, who rarely had a good word to say of anyone, dismissed him as "a poor feeble little pansy".Sir James Grigg, Permanent Under-Secretary at the War Office where Eden was Secretary of State in 1940: Max Hastings (2009) Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1939–45. Hastings couples the "pansy" reference (with its effeminate or homosexual connotations) with the unexplained observation that "soldiers thought him incorrigibly "wet" with affectations of manner which they identified with homosexuals". It may be that, seventy or more years ago, Eden's alleged "feminine" side, manner of dress, habit of calling men "my dear" (a trait detested by US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in the 1950s), dislike of men's clubs and cultivated interest in art and flowers, encouraged such a view. In fact, Eden's well-attested courage, including his military cross from the First World War, and (notwithstanding an apparent expression of doubt in 1955 about Eden's ability to be an effective Prime Minister) Churchill's long-standing belief in him (see Colville (1981) The Churchillians), tend to belie the charge of wetness. And, despite historian Michael Bloch's reference to Eden's having gone through a "queer" phase in his twenties (Closet Queens, 2015) and an unreferenced suggestion that he may have propositioned fellow Etonian Edward Gathorne-Hardy, four years his junior, while at Oxford (see D. J. Taylor (2007) Bright Young Things), there is ample evidence that, in addition to being intensely attractive to women, Eden sometimes pursued his relationships with them to the point of recklessness: see, generally, Rhodes James (1986) and Thorpe (2003); also Douglas Hurd (2010) Choose Your Weapons: The British Foreign Secretary who noted that Eden was "charming and successful with women" and lacked any cohort of male friends, either personal or political. Even his future, much younger second wife confided to her friend Duff Cooper that Eden, with whom she was not then coupled, "never stops trying to make love to her" (Duff Cooper, diary, 24 November 1947, quoted in The Duff Cooper Diaries 1915–1951 (ed John Julius Norwich, 2005)), while, in 1983, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher apparently remarked to her Party Chairman Cecil Parkinson, who had been having an affair with his secretary, that "they tell me Anthony Eden jumped into bed with every good-looking woman he ever met" (Jonathan Aitken (2013) Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality). Eden's second son, Nicholas, who succeeded him as Earl of Avon, was homosexual and died of AIDS in 1985: see, for example, Gyles Brandreth, diary, 21 January 1979 (The Diary of a Lifetime, 2009). Less prosaically, W. F. Deedes, a Minister in Eden's Government who, as a journalist, had once commented unfavourably on the colour of Eden's socks,Dear Bill (BBC TV, 1994) remarked half a century later that, in the modern vernacular, Eden would have been called a "smoothie".Suez: A Very British Crisis (BBC TV, 16 October 2006) The philosopher Bertrand Russell thought Eden "not a gentleman" because he dressed "too well",Quoted in The Times, 10 October 2009 while a Ministerial colleague R. A. Butler, alluding to Eden's parentage and highly strung nature, is said to have remarked, "that's Anthony half mad baronet, half beautiful woman".Quoted in Patrick Cosgrave (1981) R. A. Butler; Wikiquote. There has been speculation over the years that, in fact, Eden may have owed his looks to George Wyndham, a politician and aesthete whom he was considered by some to closely resemble, and with whom his mother was rumoured to have had an affair: see, e.g., John Charmely (1989) Chamberlain and the Lost Peace. Eden's most recent biographer notes that Eden could have inherited his temper and aesthetic sensibilities from either Wyndham or Sir William Eden: D.R. Thorpe (2003) Eden.However, Butler had a habit of making such observations, once asking historian Richard Thorpe, "How was Harold Macmillan when you met him? Was he the Duke's son-in-law or the crofter's great-grandson?": D. R. Thorpe (2010) Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan
