ABSTRACT
King Richard I, nicknamed “the Lionheart,” is arguably the most famous medieval English monarch, renowned for his military valor at the Third Crusade, but also, as I discovered, for something else. At a recent dinner party, I announced to Warren and Lila, a well-educated pair of antique collectors and avid anglophiles, that I was writing about Richard Lionheart. Unprompted, Warren immediately quipped (anachronistically or not), “You know he was gay, don’t you?” The “vexed subject of Richard’s sexual tastes” not only has engaged the popular imagination,1 as Warren’s immediate response suggests, but also has provoked controversy among historians of twelfth-century England. Although John Gillingham, the most prolific historian of Richard’s career, insists that the construction of a “gay” Richard came into prominence only in the mid-twentieth century when J. H. Harvey broke “the conspiracy of silence” surrounding Richard’s homosexuality,2 he acknowledges its earlier currency in a 1732 History of England alluding to Richard’s “sins against nature” and the effect Philip’s “caresses” had on him.3 Moreover, the veiled as well as more blatant hints of chroniclers of Richard’s own era suggest that Richard’s contemporaries suspected him of more expansive sexual proclivities than medieval mores allowed. There is still no consensus regarding this unanswered question about Richard’s personal life.
