VISIBLY QUEER - Piers Gaveston

Gaveston's Assassination

The further back in history one goes, the harder it can be to discern when someone queer is present. Royal lives alone are documented, however sketchily, and exhibit only euphemistic suggestions of any queerness. Usually it will be a scandal that kicks up comment in the parchment chronicles of the time.

Kings, they're always magnets for gossip and whatever the medieval equivalent of the paparazzi was. Edward 2nd, yes, he liked a bit of boy on boy, and his reign terminates with a infamously painful end. Its all salaciously recounted. History tends to obscure how the lower class male object of his affections came to prominence. How on earth would you chat up a king? Piers Gaveston was the first of Edward's known lovers, but who the hell was he?

Was he haughty? Was he charming? Was he sexy?  Truly lovely to behold? Was he impulsive? Was he narcissistic? Was he a bitch, arrogant, manipulative and toxic? Was he dangerous to be associated with? Was he a bit of a cock tease? Was he a man on the make prepared to do anything to gain power? Was he clever? Was he just a pretty bit of totty? A toy boy readily available for a French speaking Plantagenant monarch to abuse his position of power with?

Gaveston, turns up at the Royal Court, from a background of very minor but respected nobility. Hoping, no doubt, to advance his families position. He's about 16 years old, and is consciously placed in the prince's retinue by Edward 1. His already impressive military skills and good conduct made the king think he'd be a exemplary influence on his feeble minded son. For his son's effeteness and predilections were already worryingly common knowledge. Gaveston. as the prince's contemporary, was placed there specifically to encourage Edward's son to 'man up'. Its soon clear the king has made a major misjudgement. For Gaveston and the prince join forces and gang up on the king, making any pre-existing tensions between son and father much worse.

What then follows are trial separations and ultimately exile, as the king attempts to part his son from the pernicious influence of Gaveston. The prince continues to secretly lavish expensive gifts and land on Piers. The king keeps insisting to his noble friends, that they must be kept as far apart from each other as is possible. But when the king dies in 1307 the new monarch immediately recalls Gaveston and makes him 1st Earl of Cornwall. Whilst the king does his duty and marries Isabella of France, and has children by her. He remains besotted with his teenage friend.

Edward 2nd elevates Gaveston defying all contemporary conventions, bestowing a higher level of responsibility upon him. Ones not usually given to someone of such relatively low standing. This enrages overlooked members of his family and royal court etiquette. Historians dispute whether the animosity towards Gaveston and the King's relationship with him, was anything more than a distaste of his cockiness, unwarranted influence and status. But cannot entirely refute that the underlying sexually 'perverted' nature of the friendship between king and favourite, could be the central reason that was poisoning court loyalty.

Marlow's play, written over two hundred years after the event, leaves you in no doubt that he considers the upset was primarily over the latter. He was reflecting well established historical rumour in medieval chronicles of the time, onto which his elaborate dramatic fiction was draped. Factually it may not be clearly one side or the other in this debate, but a cumulative mess of a broad range of issues and events that led to the widespread hatred. There was something that they considered unhealthy in the closeness, love and unwavering devotion that the King held towards Gaveston. It had deeply infuriated his father, and now the aristocracy felt the same exasperation too.

But it's clear that the Kings favourite was also prone to behaving truly badly, in such an unbearably preening and arrogant manner, that this was seen by the nobility as a considerable affront that needed curtailing. Without the King's knowledge Gaveston was banished, thrown into exile yet again, only to be quickly pardoned and return once Edward found out. In the end the only solution as far as the nobility were concerned, was to permanently remove Gaveston. They pursued him across the length and breadth of England, until he was captured near Kenilworth and, at the relatively young age of 28, was summarily beheaded.

Edward was,of course, enraged and ineffectively threatened revenge for a while. Though he was soon to find himself a replacement 'favourite' in Hugh Despenser. So the whole woeful tale of preferential errant behaviour began to repeat itself. This, for the nobility, was beyond all toleration. Eventually this matter threw the king and nobility towards the very precipice of civil war. Edward, survived a further fifteen years after Gaveston's assassination. But once captured and imprisoned, was quietly, and if myth is correct, gruesomely tortured and disposed of.

In the story of Piers Gaveston we have a gay man daringly flaunting his relationship and influence with the king, very much in the face of royal courtiers. He manages for a number of years to get how he is perceived, as Quentin Crisp puts it, 'on his own terms'. But being a very visible power behind the throne, whether you are a gay man or a woman, is rarely going to be a popular move. Its unlikely moral disapproval would have been voiced publicly in court circles. Though maybe in quiet hushed conversations well out of royal hearing, derogatory and euphemistic slanders may have been voiced. Gaveston holding such power, belittled the royal courts own, hence the necessity to remove him. As long as the king remained devoted there seemed nothing anyone else could do, other than to plot how to eventually remove and murder them both.