“Golden lads and girls….must come to dust.” Shakespeare, Cymbeline.

Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart
Van Dyck, c. 1638. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London. Image source: WGA
Collateral damage of baroque absolutist illusion, nowadays they’d be the latest posh boys to break into show business.

They were wrong but romantic; collateral damage of absolutism and revolution, teenage brothers, cousins of the king, transformed and immortalized by Van Dyck into an illusory image of English aristocracy that inspired fantasies still enjoyed today, including fictional upper-class heroes like the Scarlet Pimpernel and the 1930s gentleman detective, whose outward foppishness concealed brains and virility, and, more recently, re-invented as the modern meterosexual vampires of film and TV, whose lineage goes back beyond late Victorian Dracula, to Byronic heroes, Restoration libertines and doomed Cavalier youths.

The confident, sensual magnificence of Baroque male fashion boasted feminine attributes; in comparison, the presentation of ideal masculine…