'Boy' in English usage can refer to teenage lads just as much as pre-adolescents.
Indeed. Ernst Ludwig might have described himself as "an old boy".
(In German this is more problematic, with the archaïc
Knabe meaning a male before or in the early stages of puberty and the contemporary
Junge having the original meaning "young(ster)".)
For an aristocrat to be chasing after stable boys, who would fear repercussions if they said no, was reprehensible ( just think of the disapproval over the master of the household, or his son, seducing the servant girls).
If it really happened it was an abuse of his position, but it does look rather wholesome compared to the many young girls whose lives were ruined when their masters got them pregnant and abandoned them and their children born into a prejudiced world as bastards. What makes it sad is that Ernst Ludwig was one of the people who could have lobbied to repeal § 175 of the German Imperial Criminal Code (in force untill 1969), which made homosexual acts a crime. (With about 300-400 charges and convictions each year.)
Perhaps few people know that the world's very first self-identified gay person and gay rights activist was Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, from Aurich in East Frisia, who was forced to resign as a judge in the Kingdom of Hannover and denied the right to practise as a lawyer because of his homosexuality. His public coming-out at the annual congress of German lawyers in Munich (!) in 1867, where he appealed to de-criminalize homosexuality, led to turmoils! He went into exile in Italy and made his living as a Latin scholar.
