Such abominations should be spat upon rather than held up to view, and I would have been ashamed to insert an account of it in this work had not the apostle, in his epistle to the Romans, written even more explicitly on the theme: “For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. In like manner the men, also leaving the natural use of women, have burned in lusts one toward another, men with men working that which is filthy.. .”.84 (200)
When he considers such relations, he claims only to be able to under- stand them through their association with violence and its handmaiden, seduction, but he also reasserts that in his day no such corruption or violence is necessary on the seducer’s part. His victims are only too eager to be seduced: “the training of our youth from their earliest years is so bad that they, with lascivious glances, expression, bodily movements, the very dress they wear, and enticements scarcely permitted harlots, them- selves solicit seduction” (201). Clearly worried nonetheless about the involuntary sexual fantasies that come to us in dreams, John cites Augustine as his authority that the body cannot lose its mark of chastity until the mind has offered its consent. This could be read as a personal note, an admission that John himself had experienced such dreams and involuntary pleasures but, if so, it does not lead him to soften his final condemnation.85 John Boswell makes much of the fact that John cites no contemporary theology or ecclesiastical edicts in support of his con- demnation, not surprising if all were as reticent to speak of the matter as he was.86 Instead, John cites the Justinian Code (IX, ix. 31) as his backing for severe punishment:
When a man becomes a bride and a female a groom, what is their desire? When sex loses its place and it is not wrong to know that which is not for one’s good, when the act of love is perverted and love is sought and is not found, then do we order statutes to rear their heads and teeth to be put into the law, that those who are guilty or likely to be, may be cowed by the avenging sword and stern penalties. (201)
These penalties include capital punishment (citing Leviticus) and the rightful wrath that God unleashed upon Sodom and Gomorrah(Jer. 23.40). It could appear that John has simply run out of steam, having indicted every pleasure as a form of self-indulgence and defined self-indulgence itself as ultimately sexual: “the son of gluttony, since in the distribution of the bodily members the genitals are seen to be appended to the lower part of the belly. Consequently when the one is over nourished, the other naturally arises in its insolence” (296). He has talked himself into a corner in which all pleasures, all attention to the self other than an examination of conscience, lead finally to self-arousal, the insolent autonomy of the sexualized male body. All arousal thus leads logically to a loss of virility and beneath that veil lies the infinite expanse of the feminine, defined only in the negative: that which is not virile, strong, resistant to pleasure, controlled, contained, or governable. Where femininity and sodomy begin, end, and overlap is difficult to ascertain.
The Curious Case of Richard the Lionheart
In 1948, the historian J. H. Harvey “outed” Richard Lionheart, saying that he was “breaking the conspiracy of silence surrounding the pop- ular hero.”87 John Gillingham debunked that outing in 1992 on the pretext that the claims made about Richard’s sexuality were based on nothing more than legends propagated by readers not capable of under- standing the many connotations that the word “sodom,” as uttered by a medieval hermit, might have carried. So far so good: sodomy, as we have seen, is often simply a marker of otherness and difference and applied indiscriminately to the non-white, non-Christian, non- reproducing foreigner. Gillingham did not, however, stop there. In his argument, reasonable doubt about the sexual life of the favored son of Eleanore of Aquitaine somehow morphed into scholarly certainty. Since there is no “evidence” of Richard’s homosexuality, Gillingham argued, we must therefore dismiss the charge.88 This positivist line of reasoning is difficult to defend. What exactly stands as reliable evidence of twelfth- century sexual conduct other than bodily fluids and DNA testing? Why is what contemporary chroniclers said about Richard to be understood as a “charge”? Finally, if, as Gillingham would have it, Richard was not “homosexual,” was he really, by process of elimination, “heterosexual,” “bisexual,” “asexual?” Is that how people really experience sexuality and,moreover, is it even remotely possible that his contemporaries thought in such binary terms?
The “charge” against Richard is more subtly addressed in C. Stephen Jaeger’s Ennobling Love but, not surprisingly, Richard once again emerges cleansed and vindicated.89 Jaeger’s account of Richard’s sexuality, in an otherwise admirable book, is marred by language that assumes attitudes for twelfth-century royalty that are not necessarily warranted. For exam- ple: would a father, a King, having found his thirty-year-old son in bed with his longtime friend, the twenty-two-year-old heir to the French throne, be limited only to the two reactions that Jaeger mentions: either “outraged” at the sexual possibilities or “betrayed” by the intimation of a too-close political alliance between the carefully groomed rivals?90
Might not he also have felt disappointed, jealous, curious, disgusted, or simply slighted over another overt act of disobedience? Is it necessar- ily true that a bond of love between two powerful princes which also included sexual affection would be thought “illicit?” If so, should not we read the “illicit” in a potentially positive light in an age when heroes – Tristan, Lancelot, the troubadours – are admired for their transgressions, and these very transgressions set the coordinates of private and literary fantasies for years to come? And, even if we buy Gillingham’s claim that there is no “evidence” of sexual involvement, is our only option there- fore to assume a chaste and ennobling friendship between the two men? Is not sexuality, not to mention friendship, a little more complicated than that? After all, all sex is not publicly acknowledged; all desire is not recognized even by the desiring subject; and if perchance there was a sexual side to the friendship, does that somehow necessarily invali- date the idealized Ciceronian bonds of friendship that united them? Why, in sum, are we constantly reminded that to impose any notion of homosexuality on the Middle Ages is anachronistic when our equally time-warped notions of heterosexuality are spread, thick and unilateral, across centuries of critical commentary? Perhaps “sodomy,” as we might understand it today, and the “ennobling love” that Jaeger evokes, are not incompatible after all, at least not in semi-official chronicles written to curry favor or discredit a ruling house. In the course of re-examining some of the textual “evidence” about Richard Lionheart not mentioned by Gillingham and Jaeger, I want to suggest that sharing a bed with afriend, even in 1187, was never as uncomplicated as scholars sometimes pretend.
As he prepared to depart on crusade in 1190, shortly after his crowning as King of England, Richard I drew up a legal code to govern the behavior of his co-crusaders. For murder on land, the murderer would be buried alive with the corpse of his victim; for murder at sea, he would be thrown overboard, tied to the unlucky corpse; for assault with a knife, he would suffer the loss of a hand; for theft, shaving of the head followed by tar and feathering of the scalp; for insulting a fellow crusader, an ounce of silver for every utterance of which he was found guilty.91 It is this last provision that piques my interest: what did Richard think of as an insult? When later that same year (1190) Richard met Philippe Auguste in Sicily en route to the Holy Land, did the chroniclers or the young kings/protagonists see their accounts of the reunion as insulting or slanderous?
All agree that Richard was a conundrum: doomed by family history yet, according to contemporary interpretations of prophecy and celestial signs, chosen by God to serve his purposes on earth.92 He was, after all, the son of infamous, scandalous parents. According to William of Newburgh, Henry II was a slave to vice, disrespectful of marriage (like his grandfather, Henry I), tolerant of heretics and Jews.93 It surprised no one when Merlin’s most dire predictions about mutiny and patricide among the Plantagenets came to pass.94 Eleanore
’s family fares no better. Her famous grandfather, the first known troubadour, was excommunicated several times; her own behavior during the second crusade was said to have included incest with her uncle; and Gerald of Wales reports that she was also the former lover of Henry’s own father, Geoffrey of Anjou, before marriage to his son.95 Richard is always seen in the light of this larger family history, fighting to establish himself while battling personal demons and the burden of history.
Little is said about his personal life. He emerges first and foremost as a warrior, a military man whose prowess did not exclude periodic spiritual devotion. His undertaking of the Crusade established him as a popular hero and his record in battle, especially when compared to his continental counterparts (Philippe Auguste of France and Conrad of Montferrat), only enhanced his status.96 One of the only topics ofa personal nature that concerns the chroniclers is, in fact, Richard’s relationship with Philippe Auguste – not surprising given the close ties that bound them through childhood and the rivalry and struggle for control that marked their relations after Richard’s coronation in 1189.
The portrait of Philippe that emerges from the chronicles is largely negative. He is cowardly, opportunistic, holds grudges, is ungenerous, the very antithesis of the ideal ruler. Richard’s feelings for him swing from love to hate, never settling on indifference. Ralph of Coggeshall claims that Richard was obsessed by Philippe and reports that even his final hours on earth were marred by thoughts of him.97 As Richard lay dying, he received holy communion for the first time in seven years and explained to those gathered the reason for his long abstinence. Having carried for years in his heart a deep hatred for the King of France, he chose not to profane the host by allowing it contact with his imperfect soul. Such a long abstinence would certainly have attracted attention from court and Church, not to mention the damage to his chances of salvation. We might then wonder whether Richard would have risked public criticism and eternal damnation over what any contemporary would have recognized as simple political antagonism. Feelings as strong as his seem, at the very least, to point in multiple directions.
Philippe and Richard had known each other their whole lives. Despite the annulment of the union of Louis VII and Eleanore of Aquitaine, and her new husband’s subsequent accession to the throne of England, the royal houses of France and England remained united by their polit- ical destinies. Philippe, son of Richard’s mother’s former husband, was schooled with Richard. Both daughters from Louis’s second marriage (sisters of Philippe) were raised at the English court as the fiance´es of Henry and Eleanore’s sons, Young Henry and Richard.98 Benedict of Peterborough’s infamous account of an 1187 meeting between the young King of France and the Duke of Aquitaine offers some evidence of their still-close ties:
Philippe . . . held him [Richard] in such high honor and for such a long time that they ate from the same dish and at night no bed kept them apart. The King of France cherished him as he did his own life; they loved each other with such a love that, confronted with the violence of their feelings for one another, the King of England [Henry II] was stupefied, wondering what to make of it.99Whatever sentiments still united them in 1187 were ruptured defini- tively soon thereafter. Richard refused to marry Philippe’s sister Ae´lis to whom he had been promised at the age of four because, according to Gerald of Wales and Roger of Howden, Ae´lis had been his father’s mistress and had borne him a son.100 Philippe’s subsequent threat to Richard is reported by Benedict: “Let him know that if he sends her back and marries another I will be his enemy and the enemy of all his people for as long as I live.”101 If this is true, then the last meeting during which the two men met as friends occurred in Sicily, en route to the Holy Land in 1190. The intensity of this meeting in Messina, after separate crossings, was remarked upon by several chroniclers. Benedict of Peterborough says only that they were so close that one could not imagine anything breaking their love or coming between them, highly ironic in light of the incessant skirmishes that would mark the final five years of Richard’s reign after his return from the crusade and captivity in 1194.102 Richard of Devizes presents a more suggestive account of their stay.103 He also stresses the great affection in which they held one another and says that the Kings parted after the festivities “exhausted but not satisfied.”104 This expression is a citation from Juvenal’s sixth satire (l. 130) in which it applies to the wife of the Emperor Claudius, “the imperial harlot,” who left her bed each evening to take up a cell in a whorehouse, where she displayed her “gilded nipples” to clients, hoping to lure them in. At night’s end, in Juvenal’s telling:
she lingered as long as she could before closing her cell and sadly leaving, still on fire, clitoris rigid. At last she returned, exhausted, but not fulfilled, by her men; and with greasy grimy cheeks, and foul from the smoke of the lamp, she carried back to the emperor’s couch the smell of the whorehouse.105
Though the expression might have been a cliche´ among authors writing in Latin during this period, Devizes was writing for his prior, to keep him informed of happenings on the outside world, after his retirement to the Charter house of Witham.106 Writing to a highly educated man, anxious for gossip, and in a period when citations from classical texts were common and valued, it is unlikely that the original connotation of the phrase was lost on its reader. If Devizes did mean to imply a sexual interlude between the Kings, then it is interesting to note that Richard’srole in the rest of the account is in no way tainted with suggestions of femininity, lasciviousness, or decadence, characteristics that generally accompany any suggestion of sexual activity between men in the earlier twelfth-century chronicles of John of Salisbury, Orderic Vitalis, and Walter Map.
On the contrary, Richard is for the first time called “the lion” in Devizes’s account; his anger and indignation are equated to righteous roaring; and it is rather he, the King, who calls his treacherous ene- mies “effeminate.”107 It was also during this stay in Sicily that Richard’s mother, Eleanore, came to visit with the daughter of the King of Navarre, Berengaria, in tow: a woman whom Devizes referred to tastefully as “more intelligent than beautiful.”108 Richard had held out for years against marriage with Ae´lis, his betrothed. He was therefore technically free to marry Berengaria but because they were still in the season of Lent, he left her in the custody of his sister and moved on to Cyprus. It was there, in May of the following year, that the marriage ceremony and coronation were performed. Roger of Howden’s rather flat account of their union speaks volumes about the passion behind it: “Then, after the marriage celebration, the King departed with his army and the famous city of Nicosia surrendered to him.”109 No mention is made of a cele- bration or consummation; no pretext of love is invoked; and Berengaria essentially disappears from the chronicles.110 It is estimated that she saw Richard only very infrequently and that the marriage was essentially one of convenience. William of Newburgh admits candidly that Richard’s interest in marrying was to have an heir: “for he still had no son to suc- ceed him on the throne and his predilection for pleasure inclined him to the practice of vice.”111 Marriage was traditionally recommended by the Church as, among other things, a way to avoid the occasion of sin, especially the temptation of sodomy. Once Richard had married Beren- garia, and Philippe had departed early from the Holy Land, the die was cast. Philippe lobbied hard to prevent Richard’s return from captivity and during the last five years of Richard’s life they or their forces fought incessantly.
Benedict of Peterborough claims that in the struggle for power over the continental holdings of Richard, the lords of Poitou came to prefer Philippe Auguste to the brutal King of England to whom they owed their allegiance. Richard, according to Benedict:was wicked toward everyone, worse toward his own people and worst of all to himself. He ripped from their families the women, young girls and female family members of the free men who owed him allegiance and made them his concubines. Then, after having had his way with them, he passed them on to his knights to satisfy their needs and pl
easures.112
Richard had let the “thorns of desire take over his mind and there was no way to remove them.”113 When finally he felt the need to repent, he brought before him all the bishops and archbishops in his entourage. Holding in his hand three sticks from which the bark had been peeled, he threw himself naked at their feet and confessed his sins while they inflicted penance upon him. As to the nature of the sins to which he was referring, there were apparently many to choose from.
Though Benedict claims that Richard brutalized young women and passed them on to his men, there is nothing in the record to indicate that what Richard was doing was anything other than rape. And while some historians have seen these rapes as an indication of affectional preference, I would maintain that rape is not an indication of sexual desire at all but a desire to impose one’s will, in this instance a political will. Other than the accounts of Richard’s early affection for Philippe Auguste, there is nothing in the chronicles to indicate that he loved anyone or felt impelled to procreate. It is particularly interesting that when he did marry, it was at the instigation and insistence of his mother, ever vigilant to protect her hereditary holdings in Aquitaine. Though Richard followed through on her wishes and married Berengaria, she seems not to have played any significant role in his life. The texts are silent on the subject of sexuality, not unusual for chronicles of the period, except for condemnations of unorthodox practices. Richard of Howden’s account of a visit paid to Richard by a hermit is therefore significant for its inclusion. The unknown hermit, evoking a topos familiar to readers of Chre´tien de Troyes’s Roman du graal, appears at court to deliver this message to the King: “Remember the destruction of Sodom and give up forbidden pleasures; otherwise you will receive from God the punishment you deserve!”114 According to Howden, Richard chose to ignore the warning. Only later, when struck with illness, did he recognize the hermit as a divine messenger and call before him the clergy:He did not blush to tell them of his shameful conduct. He did penance and received his wife with whom he had not had sexual relations in a long time. He gave up the forbidden forms of love and joined with his wife; both were of one flesh; and God brought health to his body and soul.115
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