Kitchener's sexuality remains a contested topic for the simple reason that we don't have sufficient evidence to make any certain judgements on the subject.

This absence of evidence means that there is plenty of room for gossip, speculation, and indeed cod psychology. In Kitchener's case, discussions of his sexuality have been fuelled by several sources. A BBC TV documentary first transmitted in about 1999 argued that "'K' Was Gay"; the LGBT activist Peter Tatchell suggested that Kitchener met his death (by drowning, after the ship he was sailing to Russia on was mined in 1916) in the arms of his aide-de-camp Oswald "Fitz" Fitzgerald (a man dismissed contemptuously by Asquith, the Prime Minister, as "Kitchener's familiar"); and studies such as Norman Dixon's best-selling On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (1976), an influential but arguably deeply flawed attempt to analyse the personalities of various British military leaders between the Crimean and the Second World Wars, have followed essentially Freudian lines in ascribing the military disasters that the author considers his subjects were personally responsible for to their personal and psychosexual characteristics, not least anal retentiveness.

It needs to be stressed, nonetheless, that those who have assumed Kitchener was gay have done so by presuming that absence of evidence genuinely does amount to evidence of absence: that if Kitchener never married, devoted his life in an all-male institution, the army, and selected the uncommonly handsome "Fitz" as his assistant, he cannot have been attracted to women; and that, given that he was brought up by a martinet father who once staked him out spreadeagled on the croquet lawn, with his wrists and ankles tied to hoops, he can hardly have reached adulthood without developing a decidedly kinky sexuality (it's possible to divide those who argue for Kitchener's homosexuality between those who believe that that makes him a gay icon, and those who view him as a pervert).

Such arguments either ignore that fact that Kitchener is known to have come close to proposing marriage to Hermione Baker, who subsequently died of typhoid, aged 18, or presume that he wanted the woman as a beard. Broken down and analysed carefully, moreover, the evidence for Kitchener's possible homosexuality is actually not only remarkably scanty, but also laden with assumptions of the sort that Dixon would have delighted in analysing. The "facts" most usually advanced are:

• Kitchener was notoriously and hugely vain, and obsessed with personal appearance.

• He was bored and irritated by most women, and had difficulty in remembering their names.

• Conversely, he had a series of undoubtedly close and affectionate relationships with a succession of ADCs - not only "Fitz" but also Jimmy Watson and Frank Maxwell, VC, whom he nicknamed "The Brat" for his youthful looks. Indeed, Kitchener's penchant for bestowing nicknames on subordinates ("Brookie", "Hammie", "Birdie", "Conk") is viewed suspiciously by Bloch.

• Kitchener had a "feminine" appreciation for fine porcelain, which he collected with unusual avidity.

• He had a "feminine" passion for flowers and enjoyed flower-arranging.

• He had a "feminine" interest in decor, such as an obsession with inspecting place settings for dinner and taking "immense pains to ensure that no glass or vase, and no knife, fork or spoon, was a fraction of an inch out of position."

• His pet dog was a decidedly unmilitary poodle.

• He installed four pairs of sculptures of young boys in the gardens of his home.

• He was famed for his "oriental" obsession with secrecy and destroyed most of his private papers by tipping them into the ocean during a sea voyage.

• According to Richardson, the fact that the group of officers put together by Kitchener to supervise the construction of the Sudan Military Railway was known as "the Band of Boys" suggests Kitchener viewed them as objects of lust.

• According to King, the famous feud between Kitchener and Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India, was a battle of wills between a heterosexual with a streak of masochism (Curzon) and a homosexual with a streak of sadism (Kitchener).

• The Times's correspondent in Peking was told by a British officer who had served with Kitchener in Egypt that, "like most officers in the Egyptian army," he had a "tendency to buggery".

• King spoke to a contemporary of Kitchener's, a woman by then in advanced old age, who recalled gossip about his sexual leanings that she said had circulated seven decades previously.

There is plenty to set against this collection of innuendo.

• Pollock, who considered Kitchener's sexuality in an appendix to a biography, cites a letter Kitchener wrote during a scandal that occurred in Sri Lanka when Hector MacDonald was summoned home to answer allegations that he had had sex with native boys: "What a horrible thing this has been about MacDonald. I expect he went quite mad... Did you hear anything of the sort before about him? I never did." He comments: "That was hardly the reaction of a man affected by a similar sexual pull."

• Many biographers prefer to portray Kitchener as deeply religious – to the point that he would have taken seriously Christian condemnation of "sodomy" – and fundamentally asexual. They suggest he was also prudish - for example, banning "smutty talk" in the officers' mess.

• His devotion to Hermione Baker was strong enough for him to wear a locket with her picture in it for the remainder of his life.

In sum, then: authors who want Kitchener to have been gay find evidence for their case; those who don't, and those who prefer to focus their attentions on other aspects of his character, do not. There is definitely no clear "smoking gun", and the fact that biographers have had to draw attention to hobbies like flower-arranging to build a case strongly suggests that the sort of evidence that might stand up in court is pretty much non-existent.

Finally, and to move on to other portions of your question: While it's certainly the case that Kitchener never married, and this made him mildly unusual, it did not make him exceptional, and there is certainly no reason to suppose that it impacted negatively on his military career – which, given that he died as a Field Marshal (the highest rank attainable in the British Army) and Secretary of State for War, it pretty clearly did not. If anything, it might be possible to argue that remaining single benefitted him, in allowing him more time to focus on his career and develop his famously rigid focus on soldiering.

It's perhaps more interesting to wonder about the impact that Kitchener's personality type had on his life and career in general. His nanny, for example, commented that, even as a child, her charge took great pains to conceal his emotions and suppress any suggestion of weakness (he concealed injuries he had sustained from his mother), observing that "I am afraid Herbert will suffer greatly from repression."

This element - repression - was frequently considered a virtue at the time, since it was typically interpreted more as an ability to attain superhuman levels of focus and drive. Today – as Dixon is not slow to point out – it's more usually considered a much more negative character trait, and one that, specifically in the context of Kitchener's role in the First World War, might potentially have contributed significantly to the coldness and lack of emotion many reported in him. This has opened "K" up to charges that he failed to do what he could to minimise casualties on the Western Front – a crime that many modern writers on the Great War consider a far more serious sin than their predecessors ever imagined homosexuality to be.

Sources

Michael Bloch, Closet Queens: Some 20th Century British Politicians (2015)

Norman Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (1976)

Peter King, The Viceroy's Fall: How Kitchener Destroyed Curzon (1986)

Jeremy Paxman, "Was Lord Kitchener gay?", jeremypaxman.co.uk, accessed 23 March 2018

John Pollock, Kitchener: The Road to Omdurman and Saviour of the Nation (2013)

Frank M. Richardson, Mars Without Venus: A Study of Some Homosexual Generals (1981)

Trevor Royle, The Kitchener Enigma (2016)