Edward II: His Sexuality and Relationships by Kathryn Warner *****

Edward II: His Sexuality and Relationships by Kathryn Warner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Edward II is one of the few kings of England who it can be plausibly argued had attractions to and/or relationships with people of the same sex. However, there is controversy as to how far these went as well as how they affected his relationship with his queen, Isabella of France, who eventually deposed him in favor of their young son, Edward III. In Edward II: His Sexuality and Relationships, Kathryn Warner takes a detailed look at these questions and disposes effectively of some of the common - and often completely uncorroborated - narratives that “everyone knows.”

Most crucially, Warner makes two main points: 1) We know literally nothing directly about people’s actual behavior, or usually even their feelings about one another. 2) Our modern categories of gay, straight, bi, etc. would have had no meaning for medieval people.

She also examines two types of writers, historians/biographers and novelists, and how they look at the issues at hand. The first seem to take a very black and white view of things, either completely denying that Edward had any same-sex attractions - presumably his relationships with his favorites were based on emotional dependency, or that he had absolutely no interest in women. Reasonably, she asks why he could not have been attracted in different ways to both, especially given that he had at least one illegitimate son and Isabella became pregnant several times, when if she was actually repulsive to him, one or two should have been enough. Often, it seems as if the second type of biographers she looks at thought they were novelists, regurgitating well-known stories such as that Edward gave Isabella’s “bridal gifts” to his favorite of the time, Piers Gaveston, that there was antipathy between Isabella and Gaveston, and that the marriage was bad from the start, for which there seems to be little or no evidence. The actual novelists, although they have more leeway, fare little better in her estimation, and sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between them and some of the more wild assumptions of the so-called non-fiction writers.

Also, while there is at least some hesitation about Edward’s actual behavior, almost everyone, whether biographer or novelist, jumps to the immediate conclusion that Isabella and Roger Mortimer, her partner in deposing Edward and ruling England afterward until Edward III took the reins, had a mad, passionate love affair, again, with no evidence or contemporary corroboration. Of course, their relationship easily could have been more pragmatic, especially since Edward’s last favorite, Hugh Despenser the Younger, did apparently cause Isabella's marriage to go downhill and even made her fear for her safety, which seems to have provided enough motivation.

The thing that really surprised me in this very well-written and -argued book is how much even the most modern writers seem to be influenced by stereotypes of both women and LGBT people that we supposedly jettisoned decades ago. Despite his reputation at the time as a fit and physically strong man and his apparently respectful relationship with Isabella in the first part of their marriage, Edward (along with his favorites) tends to be portrayed - especially in fiction - using the worst possible stereotypes, as physically weedy, weak, and spiteful, as well as utterly repulsed by women. Even the fact that he did not consummate his marriage - with his 12-year-old bride - immediately is used as evidence that he “neglected” her, when in most people we would see that as a positive. No one needs to claim that he was a good king to admit that he, like all of us, was a complicated human being with good and bad points. Isabella, on the other hand, is shown by the novelists as either the vengeful, power-hungry “she-wolf,” (a phrase that was evidently never used to describe her in her lifetime) conniving to destroy her husband or, alternatively, totally under the spell of her lust for a stereotypically masculine and virile Mortimer.

Edward II: His Sexuality and Relationships provides a much-needed corrective to the very slanted view that many books - both fiction and non-fiction - give us of all of these characters, but particularly Edward and Isabella.

I received a copy of Edward II: His Sexuality and Relationships from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

View all my reviews