ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how fourteenth-century sources characterise the king’s relationship with his favourite when using it to account for Piers first exile at the hands of Edward father. External affairs tends to be prominent in the second part of the accounts of Edward reign, and the seeds for the baronial wars had already been sown during Piers life. The principal story of the fourteenth-century sources about the relationship between good government and same-sex desire is both simpler and subtler. The underlying idea seems to be the king’s natural prerogative to rule and is the best guarantee of the goodness of his rule. This seems to hinge on the particular version of the divine right of kings as articulated in medieval sources. It essentially hinged on the fact that the king’s irresistible erotic pull towards those favourites made them vulnerable to bad counsel and alienated, from the kingdom’s magnates and his subjects.
