England’s First Gay King?
Edward II was one of the Kings most intimately acquainted with Newcastle Castle, spending a lot of time here during his reign, whether he was fighting against the Scots or his own barons. He must also be one of the most frequently discussed and least understood of all medieval Kings. Perhaps this has something to do with the failures of his reign – after all, successful kings tend to get a bland, heroic portrayal (or at the very least a suitably potent villainous role). Richard the Lionheart is generally remembered as the good guy in Robin Hood stories and not much more, while Edward I (Edward II’s father) is usually remembered through the lens of his Welsh and Scottish wars as the tyrant Longshanks who conquered Wales and tried unsuccessfully to do the same to Scotland.
Victorian depiction of Edward II and Piers Gaveston (with nobles looking on disapprovingly)
Historians may take a more nuanced view of these Kings – Richard the Lionheart often comes in for some criticism for spending relatively little time in England during his reign, preferring to do battle for his lands in France or for the Church on Crusade in the Holy Land. Edward I may have been a belligerent warrior, but he was also a strong reformer who did his best to root out corruption in the government and legal system of England. But where you get someone who is regarded as a “bad king”, such as John, Edward II or Richard II, people can project all sorts of their own obsessions and neuroses onto them to explain their downfalls, and they often come across to modern readers as more compelling characters for this reason.
With Edward II, this projection has tended to take the form of overt homophobia, with most history books concluding that Edward’s fondness for his chosen “favourites” (there are plenty of not-so-subtle euphemisms at play) over the established nobility of England was the cause of his failure as a king, his downfall and eventual death.
In modern pop culture, this is perhaps best illustrated by Edward’s portrayal in the influential 1995 film Braveheart. Edward II has only a tiny part in this film, with the role of villain taken up by the scenery chewing Patrick McGoohan as his father, Edward I. Prince Edward is portrayed as a camp stereotype of a gay man, uninterested in his beautiful French wife in favour of a handsome knight the film calls Phillip. In a pretty grisly scene Edward I kills Phillip by throwing him out of a window, which is largely played for a cheap laugh. Edward was not yet married at the time the film is set, and Isabella, who would become his wife, was only nine. Phillip is presumably supposed to be based on the handsome Gascon knight Sir Piers Gaveston, who is the man most frequently named as Edward’s lover.
Edward II’s tomb in Gloucester Cathedral, the closest thing we have to a real “portrait” of him.
In real life, Edward was described by his contemporaries as “tall and strong, a fine figure of a handsome man”. His effigy in Gloucester Cathedral shows him as a handsome man with long hair and curling beard. Although some later historians called him a “coward” due to his lack of success in battle, the sources don’t bear this out either. In his most famous battle, Bannockburn, he may have proven a disastrous commander who lost the battle, but he fought on the front line armed with a mace and only left the field when his bodyguard physically dragged him away for his own safety. Whatever his sexuality was it does him a massive disservice to portray him as a stereotype.
While the incredibly camp characterisation of Edward in Braveheart is based purely on homophobic stereotypes, the idea that Edward II was “England’s first gay king” goes much farther back. In fact, while he was still on the throne, insinuations about the King’s infatuation with his close advisors were common. Even the famous story of his death seems to have come about as a sort of nasty comment on what the author’s thought of his sexual orientation. The story goes that when Edward was eventually forced to abdicate and then murdered by his wife and her ally Roger Mortimer, he was killed by having a red-hot poker inserted into him, a not very veiled reference to what medieval authors would have called the “sin of sodomy”. The fact that this story is not true but was invented some time after the King’s presumed death has not stopped it from being one of the best-known stories about Edward down to the modern day.
It is a story repeated by Christopher Marlowe (a contemporary of William Shakespeare) in his play “The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer”, better known for obvious reasons as “Edward II”. This play, written in the 1590s, makes Edward’s homosexuality the main theme of the play and has led many people to theorise that Marlowe himself was gay and exploring his sexuality through this play. In 1991, Derek Jarman adapted the play into a film and included overt references to the Gay Rights movement and the Stonewall Riots, arguably making Edward II one of the earliest of England’s gay icons.
Of course, we often hear that it is fraught with difficulty to read modern sexual identities back into the past. To an extent this is true – Edward would not have recognised terms like homosexual or identified himself in that way. People in the Middle Ages were defined by their status, their family, their religion, their place of origin and other factors than sexuality (a concept that did not exist at all). At the same time, nothing has fundamentally changed about human beings between Edward’s time and our own – medieval people felt desire, love, and other emotions in the same way that we do, they just had different ways of describing their experiences. We also know that the idea that LGBTQ+ people simply did not exist in the Medieval period because the words did not exist is, not to put too fine a point on it, total rubbish.
Medieval society was obsessed with (and had a complicated relationship with) sex. Their ideas may have differed from our own, but this hardly means that people in the modern day can’t look back and see their own experiences mirrored in those of the people of the past. We do, for example, have records of at least one transgender woman living in 14th century London, and references to homosexual behaviour are surprisingly common. Such relationships were not yet technically illegal in England (sex between men was outlawed in secular law under Henry VIII and remained so until the 1960s), although they were regarded by the Church as sinful.
What wasn’t? To the medieval church, the only form of “acceptable” sex was between a man and his wife, solely for the purposes of producing a child. Even enjoying sex with your spouse was considered sinful. Other sexual sins including fornication (having sex while unmarried), and sodomy. Sodomy was any sexual act which gave pleasure, but which could not lead to pregnancy. The fact is, a huge number of people of all sexual orientations would have fallen foul of church rules against sodomy, which also included any kind of homosexuality. In fact, even allowing for the overactive imaginations of many churchmen, it does rather seem from the surviving records that what the church called sodomy was going on all over the place much of the time, even in other parts of Europe where the law treated such relationships more harshly.
Many of the chroniclers who wrote about Edward and Piers Gaveston’s relationship presumed that it was a sexual one. The Westminster Chronicle says that his love for Piers Gaveston led him to “reject the embraces of his wife”, while another medieval chronicle puts it a bit more bluntly and says that the King “rejoiced in sodomy”. French observers at his coronation said that he seemed more attracted to Gaveston than his wife – his wife was only twelve years old at the time, so that is probably for the best. We know that Edward referred to Piers Gaveston as his brother and spoke often of his love for him. At the same time, Edward fathered four legitimate children with his wife and at least one illegitimate son, and Piers Gaveston also fathered several illegitimate children. In light of medieval views of sexuality, this is not particularly surprising – perhaps in the modern day both men might have identified as bisexual.
In the end though, it’s difficult to disentangle the real relationship between Edward II and Piers Gaveston (and indeed, later between the King and Hugh Despenser, another royal favourite) from the accusations and judgement of their peers and later historians. To many people, the idea of a loving relationship between the King and another man was inherently dangerous and destabilising to the state, and the fact that both of Edward’s favourites were executed by his enemies before the King himself was finally overthrown by his own wife has certainly influenced the way that Edward’s relationships have been viewed by posterity. What is interesting is that this aspect of Edward’s life has been speculated on so often over the centuries since his death with each generation relating Edward’s life to their own experience, all the way from the medieval chroniclers to Christopher Marlowe to Sir George Benjamin, who premiered his opera Lessons in Love and Violence at the Royal Operas House in 2018. Each generation relates Edward’s life and relationships to their own experiences and will continue to do so.
The front page of Christopher Marlowe’s play “The Troublesome Reign”….well, you can read the rest for yourself.