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Edward II and a Literature of
Same-Sex Love
 Edward II and a Literature of
Same-Sex Love

The Gay King in Fiction, 1590–1640

Michael G. Cornelius

LEXINGTON BOOKS
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Published by Lexington Books
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Copyright © 2016 by Lexington Books

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.

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ISBN: 978-1-4985-3458-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN: 978-1-4985-3459-8 (electronic)

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Printed in the United States of America

This is for Joe, and for those who came before,
whether noted by history or not
 Acknowledgments

There are many people to recognize when one produces a project like this.
I must start first with Katherine Scheil, for reading, listening, and
supporting the project in its early stages. Celest Martin, Ken Rogers,
Stephen Barber, and Stephen Grubman-Black for input and ideas when just
starting out. Jenna Kauffman, Jessica Klein, Morgan Summers, and Patrick
Fox for assistance. Thank you to the family of Drusilla Stevens Mazur for
endowing a Research Professorship that supported this work in 2014–
2015. Thanks to Wilson College for another research stipend to support
this work. Many thanks to the scholars whose intellect and curiosity has
inspired and educated me. And, most of all, thanks to Joseph Garcia, for his
continuing support and love.

PERMISSIONS
I thank the Delta Epsilon Sigma National Catholic Honor Society, copyright
holder of the Delta Epsilon Sigma Journal, for permission to incorporate
parts of my article, “Elizabeth Cary’s Conversion and The History of Edward
II,” The Delta Epsilon Sigma Journal LII.2 (Winter 2007): 27–32.
I thank the White Crane Journal for permission to incorporate parts of
my article “Edward II’s Second Act,” White Crane Journal 76 (April 2008).
 Introduction

There were two genera of gay men commonly represented on the

Renaissance stage.
“Gay” here is, of course, an anachronism; precisely speaking, no “gay”
peoples of any stripe were represented in any medium of culture until the
term “gay” itself became connective with same-sex desire in the first half
of the twentieth century. I use the modern vernacular as something of an
aphorism, a succinct way to describe what should be—should be—a
relatively simple construct. After all, society has made considerable strides
to recognize that gay, lesbian, and other queer subjectivities are just as
legitimate and complex as heterocentric, heteronormative subjectivities, as
rich and diverse and filled with nuance and contradiction and affirmation
and the continuous reinterpretation of the conscious self against both the
yardstick of society and the individual’s idealized and disapproved visions
of the self as well. “Gay” should, by now, be recognizable and indexable
and clearly understood for the potentials it contains as one more spoke in
the complex “bicycle wheel” that represents the individual identity in
contemporary society. A bicycle wheel makes a useful metaphor for
identity. Imagine a central nexus or core radiating numerous identity
markers in all directions, only to re-congregate again, connecting to one
greater encircling mass; this fashions two objects (a core and an outer
diameter) interconnected by hundreds of individual spokes, all originating
(or culminating, depending upon one’s perspective) in the self, but also
placed firmly into the padded rubber wheel of societal standardization,
directly and implacably connecting both ends of the radiating spectrum.
The individual is that nexus; society the rubber wheel; and the spokes of
the tire the myriad threads that connect the “I” to the “us” of it all.
The construct and concept of such a resplendent, complex human
identity was, like so many other things, an innovation of the Renaissance.
Identity was not invented in the Renaissance—the dual, dueling questions
of “Who am I?” and “Who are we?” surely predate recorded history—but
in the Renaissance the depiction of and reflection upon more complex
forms of—well, more complex forms of people—was a relative novelty,
ably articulated on the stage. Drama, so interactive in its encodement and
reception, allowed for a richness of subject and character-
audience identification that had never before existed. Edgar Bley writes
that the “identification of reader and protagonist is probably the basic
psychological process in the reading of fiction.”[1] Identity construction and
codification is part of that same psychological process, and both processes
can be heightened by the interactive nature and passive receptivity of
drama; as both individual people and a collective audience, we must have
some notion of who we are in order to see ourselves represented in books,
in poems, and, especially, on the stage, where the process of identification
moves from the active, individual realm of reading to the passive, collective
world of watching.
John Martin observes that, “the Renaissance world was a theatrical
age—an age of masks, of masquerades, of role playing.”[2] Martin alludes
to the notion of identity as recreation, of trying on differing forms of
identity—either in person, or perhaps through a character on the stage—
to see what best fits. It must have been an exciting time to be—well,
simply to be. Indeed, with this new emphasis on the constructed self, the
question was perhaps not “To be or not to be,” but rather, and more
significantly, “To be—who? Or what?” The possibilities, for the first time,
seemed, if not endless, then at least exponentially broader than ever
before. Martin adds, “identity is not a given [during the Renaissance];
rather it is a cultural or political artifact.”[3] Identity, though, has always
been socioculturally constructed, at least to an extent. We do not wholly
fashion ourselves out of thin air, but rather from the raw materials
available to us: our families, our peers, the people we know, the people we
know of, the values we hold, the popular culture we engage with, the
places we go, the spaces we inhabit, the color of our eyes, our hair, our
skin—these are just a few of the potential building blocks that can
ultimately impact and be used in fashioning the self.
Sexuality is only one of those potential blocks, but its significance in
constructing identities should not be understated. David Halperin talks
about “the prominence of heterosexuality and homosexuality as central,
organizing categories of thought, behavior, and erotic subjectivity.”[4]
Halperin notes here not only the way the individual may identify the self,
but also the way society labels the individual. Categories of sexuality allow
for the categorization of individuals; notions of “he is gay” or “she is
straight” allow society to craft a clearer, and, from/for its own estimation,
preferably simpler understanding of the world that it is forever attempting
to manage. The individual may reject such strict codification, and may
embrace the ambiguity of rejecting sexual classification altogether (or,
indeed, may embrace the clarity of rigid classification, or may choose some
precept in between), but society resists such manifestations of individuality
outside its prescribed forms. Nowadays, the question of “what” we are can
be as important to identifying us as “who” we are. Yet sexuality is a
particularly complicating factor of identity, because almost no other
“block” in the construction of the self is fashioned with quite the same
combination of openness and concealment. Stephen Goettsch observes
that, biologically speaking,

sexuality is the individual capacity to respond to physical experiences

which are capable of producing body-centered genital excitation, that
only subsequently becomes associated with cognitive constructs
(either anticipatory for new experiences or reflective of past
experiences) independent of ongoing physical experiences. Sexuality
belongs to the class of phenomena sharing body-centered, rather
than cognitive, responses to physical experiences.[5]

Sexuality is thus conceptualized as “indirectly observable,” a term that

reflects both its directness and its reticence, “in that properties like genital
excitation make it possible to infer sexuality”—especially in a fully aroused
state—though our genitals remain generally hidden from view, save from
those with whom we wish to engage coitally, in which case, the proverbial
cat is, by then, let out of the bag.[6] Goettsch adds,

Distinguishing between sexuality (as concept) and the properties of

sexuality (as variables) is important. . . . Sexuality is an individual
capacity arising within each person, not originating from external
sources . . . [as such] one’s sexuality comes from within but is
normalized by the discourse of sexuality. . . . Cultures construct the
manifestations of sexuality, the sexual enactment, which includes
 norms, beliefs, values, behaviors—all elements that underlie the
discourse and regulation of sexuality.[7]

Sexuality, then, is a manifestation of an internal, biological impulse

that is shaped by societal expectations, discourses, and allowances. Our
body compels us in what to do, while society compels us in how to do it.
Thus same-sex desire—whether gayness, queerness, homosexuality,
buggery, sodomy, or however society records the particular manifestation
of it—is physiological and sociocultural. It emerges from within the
individual and is shaped by society. This is like many other aspects of the
self—including race, height, certain disabilities—and yet sexuality is
markedly different from those generally “directly observable” physical
identity parameters. Race cannot be easily concealed; ethnicity not easily
concealed; height, weight, speech impediments, physical disability—none
are easily concealed. As Martin observes, “The experience of personhood
in the Renaissance world was . . . often the experience of a divided self, of
a person who was frequently forced to erect a public façade that disguised
his or her convictions, beliefs, or feelings.”[8] Sexuality has a record of
extraordinary regulation by Western society, which seems to believe that
the possible ramifications of sexual congress—offspring, questions of
paternal identity, the social/economic/political contract of marriage, the
allegiant and destructive nature of sexual couplings, to name but a few—
have the potential to markedly impact a patriarchal society in ways that
can be viewed as both detrimental and constructive. Regulating sexuality
indicates a desire to control the manifestation and by-product of sexual
congress. Yet sexuality, because it has long been relegated to a space
behind both literal and proverbial “closed doors,” has the potential for
great concealment; so much so, in fact, that even a highly placed member
of society—say, for example, a king of England—could be “gay.”
Concealment would suggest that such a potentiality could exist without a
significant impact on society, detrimental or beneficial. Conversely, though,
sexuality also has the potential to be highly discoverable: our natural
curiosity about all things sexual, coupled with society’s desire to confront
and thus control sexuality, often brings to light that which has been
assiduously concealed. That brings to the fore another intriguing
possibility: what if the king of England were “gay,” and everyone knew it?
Alan Bray considers the Renaissance the beginning of “the great
public debate” on all aspects of “sexuality.”[9] Same-sex desire was
certainly part of that conversation. What was said about men who
practiced same-sex love during the Renaissance? As I noted before, there
were two common genera, two types or classifications, of “gay” men in
Renaissance popular fiction and drama. The first classification of
Renaissance same-sex desire was the character of the Ganymede, a
character born out of comic relief. A classic example of this figure is the
grandiosely fey fop Sir Beauteous Ganymede, from Thomas Middleton and
Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl.[10] Sir Beauteous’s surname suggests his
chief characteristic, and though a very minor figure in the play (his longest
speech is exactly one line), his dress, mannerisms, and custom were likely
sources of great amusement for the audience. He serves no distinct
purpose in the play; while it is possible that Sir Beauteous was based on a
real Renaissance personage (and thus acts as a satirical figure as well),
there is little else to build on since his character essentially does and
accomplishes nothing. As Bray notes, Sir Beauteous and others like him
“are stock figures, not identifiable individuals,” existing mainly for the
purposes of deriding recognizable Renaissance stereotypes.[11]
For such foppish, ridiculous figures, sexuality is, for all intents and
purposes, their sole identity marker. Sir Beauteous is exactly as his name
suggests, but nothing more; his bicycle wheel has but one spoke. An iconic
figure of open, easily discoverable sexuality, the Ganymede’s existence is
ratified by the need to classify his sexual desires; beyond that classification,
however, these characters generally serve no function in whatever text
they appear. The other common type of “gay” man in the Renaissance is a
more complex figure than that of the fop. Whereas the Ganymede’s
sexuality is overtly discoverable, these other characters are figures whose
“gayness” is so concealed that, ultimately, it can never be reasonably
named. They emerge from the shadowy dominion of male friendship but
never wholly metamorphose beyond the constructs of that social dynamic.
Bruce Smith labels these individuals “severed friends,” noting a large
contingent of these characters in the dramatic works of Shakespeare:
Antonio and Sebastian, Antonio and Bassanio, Proteus and Valentine,
Romeo and Mercutio, Hamlet and Horatio, Othello and Iago.[12] These are
male friends who reflect aspects of homosociality—intense male-male
social bonds—but never go beyond the potential of the social and into the
realm of the erotic. Smith does recognize the aptitude for same-sex
eroticism in these relationships, but generally only spies such feelings
occurring in unrequited ways: “most pathetic of these severed friends . . .
is Shakespeare’s more famous Antonio, the merchant of Venice, who
hazards everything for a friend—and loses him to a woman.”[13] From the
very beginning of The Merchant of Venice, Antonio’s melancholic
protestations and bucolic mood swings suggest much more than he is
telling; “Fie, fie!” he says when asked if he is in love, and here, one thinks
the gentleman doth protest too much (1.1.46).[14]
Communication between men is infrequently emotionally fraught in
Renaissance drama, but the awkward nature of the discourse between
Bassanio and Antonio—emphasized by the shifting meter of their words—
reflects the strong feelings that seem to be coursing deep within Antonio
but not in Bassanio. As Smith notes, it is not language, but “silence that
speaks volumes” in this play.[15] That same silence is at work in Smith’s
other pairs of “severed friends,” though usually one member of the dyad
tends to be more open and more frank about his feelings for the other.
Antonio in Twelfth Night, for example, is unabashed in declaring to
Sebastian,

I could not stay behind you: my desire,

More sharp than filed steel, did spur me forth;
And not all love to see you, though so much
As might have drawn one to a longer voyage,
But jealousy what might befall your travel,
Being skilless in these parts; which to a stranger,
Unguided and unfriended, often prove
Rough and unhospitable: my willing love,
The rather by these arguments of fear,
Set forth in your pursuit. (3.3.4–13)
 Geoffrey Greif notes that, as a rule, male friendships are a) less
verbally communicative than female friendships or male/female dyadic
pairings; b) less physically demonstrative; c) proffer fewer compliments for
the other males in the group; and d) are more competitive as a whole.[16]
Between males, intimacy is achieved through activity, and earnest
discourse is eschewed in favor of jocular camaraderie.[17] As Sir Toby Belch
and Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night demonstrate, men joke with
one another; they plot—either against each other or together against
another, as Toby does to/with Andrew; they goad the other or themselves
into action (serious or frivolous); and they jockey for position and compete
with one another. It is through these types of social bonding activities that
men’s friendships are constructed. Generally speaking, though, men do not
emote. According to Jerome Tognoli, “men’s inexpressive character is a
cause of their truncated social relationships with one another.”[18] The end
result, suggests Brant Burleson, is that “males use talking [primarily] to
accomplish things” and not as a means of expressive communication.[19]
Twelfth Night features two pairs of male friends: Toby and Andrew
and Sebastian and Antonio. Toby and Andrew goad one another, use one
another, and bond through making mischief and plotting romantic
overtures toward women. Sebastian and Antonio do none of these things.
Instead, they share collective past memories, express gratitude and
affection, and, just as circumstances would seem to part them, buttress
their relationship even more by planning for their immediate futures
together. Greif would argue that Antonio and Sebastian are communicating
with each other in a manner reminiscent of a union involving a woman,
and the confusion regarding Smith’s “severed” friendships might stem from
the fact that one or more of the male members in the duo are
communicating expressively and directly, in a style that, even in the
Renaissance, was not customary to men. The language/semiotics of the
relationship thus reflects a romantic pairing, even if other aspects of the
relationship do not. The dyadic nature of the relationship between these
duos—indeed, “couple” is not an inappropriate word here—only
exacerbates the matter, since the very nature of dyadic friendship both
demands and allows for more intimate connectivity. Thus, as Janet
Adelman declares, “Antonio’s unrequited love in Twelfth Night is the
strongest and most direct expression of homoerotic feeling in
Shakespeare’s plays.”[20] Yet like the other Antonio, this one, too, stands
alone at the end of the narrative, when Sebastian abruptly marries a
woman who does not even know his true name. This is the nature of male
(heterosexual) dyadism; in the end, society encourages the movement to
opposite-gendered intimacy, and, if both partners do not agree to a
concinnous transition, one is left behind.
“How typical is Antonio’s fate? Who wins in Shakespeare’s versions of
Plutarch’s debate?”[21] Leslie Fiedler proposes a move toward melancholy
and guilt for those who seem to feel “male-male attractions” in these
friendships.[22] Melancholy comes with rejection, or supposed rejection,
but guilt seems lacking in the two Antonios’ protestation of feeling for their
companions. Smith, citing the work of Catherine Belsey, indicates a
different solution: “by playing male bonding off against matrimony
Shakespeare calls traditional gender roles into question without offering
any permanent redefinitions.”[23] As Belsey herself suggests, the end result
may be that “we are able to glimpse a possible meaning, an image of a
mode of being, which is not a-sexual, nor bisexual, but which disrupts the
systems of differences on which sexual stereotyping depends.”[24]
According to Belsey, Shakespeare is not attempting to recreate or
assimilate same-sex love into his works, but rather uses these characters as
a means of measurement against which traditional, male-female pairings
may be contested and, in the case of the two examples above, affirmed. As
it has been socially constructed for both genders, when an individual
moves from adolescence into adulthood, the homosocial environ is
ultimately rejected for the socially preferred confines of heterosexual
coupling. When both Sebastian and Bassanio signal to wed, they also signal
the completion of their movement into mature, adult society; the
homosocial remnants and friendships of adolescence, no matter how
significant, are left behind.
What is uniquely unifying about both the fop and the “severed friend”
is that same-sex love is never named in the codification of either form of
identity configuration. Sir Beauteous and others of his ilk wear their
sexuality as a badge of dishonor, their names a truthful Renaissance
version of a “Hello My Name Is . . .” sticker that demonstrates to an
audience, in the simplicity of a word, all that they need know about the
character. Sir Beauteous never manifests his sexuality in The Roaring Girl;
he never reflects attraction or references anything that would directly
identify his sexual desires. His desire may be the only aspect of who his
character is, but these Ganymede figures are typically so easily dismissible
that their manifestation of sexuality is so purposeless as to be meaningless;
Sir Beauteous is meant for a laugh, nothing more. Twelfth Night’s Antonio
is certainly a more complex figure, and his declarations of “love” for
Sebastian are among the most rapturous declarations of male-male
affection in the Renaissance canon. Yet Antonio’s sexuality, and whatever
may have transpired between the two men on that ship ere it ever moored
in Illyria, remains unknowable—hence the quotes around “love” here,
since what Antonio means when he speaks of his “love” for Sebastian
(erotic, romantic, friendship, familial, fraternal) is ultimately unidentifiable.
Sexuality is so concealed in the play—that is to say, same-sex desire is so
concealed in the play—that Antonio’s subjectivity remains suspect at best.
It is a tease, nothing more. The audience may identify with Antonio as they
wish, and some may see in Antonio sexual undertones that may reflect the
desire found in the secret heart of the self, but, to use Martin’s metaphor,
while cracks may appear in the play’s façade, the surface holds.
Thus, as I noted, gay men are largely represented in two differing ways
in Renaissance popular culture, but the two depictions together do not add
up to one half of a solid subjectivity. Really, then, we can only conclude
that gay men—or same-sex desire, to leave the realm of the anachronous
behind and to be more precise to the era—same-sex desire is not
represented on the Renaissance stage or in Renaissance fiction to an
extent that would allow the psychological process of identification to truly
occur. According to Martin, “what emerged in the Renaissance was man as
he really is.”[25] That may or may not be so, but the same cannot be said
for the “gay” man as he really is, or as he was purposed to be. Gay men
today cannot look back on texts like Twelfth Night or The Roaring Girl with
any real sense of identification; we are more than Sir Beauteous, and we
deserve more than Antonio. As is so common in the historical and literary
canon, we seem relegated not even to the sidelines, nor to the shadows,
but to the nether-abyss of nothingness. Certainly the Greeks and Romans
had works that celebrated same-sex love (though in a very different form);
certainly, in the modern era, depictions of same-sex love abound in
popular culture. Was/is there nothing to bridge the expansive gap between
the two? So often gay men are reduced to asking, when considering the
historical and literary past, where did we come from? Was no man “gay”
back then? Was no man, fact or fiction, brave enough to be openly
declarative about who he was, who he loved, how he lived?
Well, there was one.

I first learned of Edward II in a freshman European history course.

Professor Devereux was an educator with a penchant for the grislier details
of history, and he often interrupted class lessons to regale his students
with dark and entertaining historical anecdotes. During a brief discussion
on the growth of baronial and parliamentary power in medieval England,
Professor Devereux, his eyes wide with zealous anticipation, settled back
against a desk and spun us the tale of the murder of Edward II. Poor
Edward. Confined to the dank interiors of Berkeley Castle, his minions and
his favorites all executed before him, Edward had little to do after his
deposition but wait for his death at the hands of Isabella, his queen, her
lover Roger Mortimer, and their co-conspirators. Finally, death came, and,
as Professor Devereux intoned while he rubbed his hands together, it came
brutally, at the end of a red-hot fire poker shoved—and at this part,
Professor Devereux leaned in closely, almost conspiratorially, and as we all
waited with bated breath, hanging on his every syllable, he finally told us—
shoved up his “you know where.”
Professor Devereux was a man who understood his audience. When I
timidly raised my hand to ask him why they had pierced Edward “you know
where,” his only response was to smile at me and say, “Well, Michael,
that’s something you’ll have to look up yourself, if you want to know badly
enough.” And with that, we returned to the class lecture, as if nothing
important had just happened.
For me, though I did not quite know it yet, something important had
happened. Filled with curiosity, I assaulted the library the next morning
and discovered the full life history of Edward II. What I found was hardly
encouraging. Recorded by most historians as a dismal failure of a king,
responsible for significant losses to Scotland, the subject of not one but
two baronial rebellions, Edward II was a man history resolutely deemed
unfit to rule England. The nineteenth-century historian William Stubbs
wrote that Edward II “had not learned to make or manage his friends; he
could not govern and they misgoverned. To a great extent the fall of
Edward II was due to his incapacity for government.” Mary Saaler echoed
this sentiment over a hundred years later when she noted the “King’s
inability, or unwillingness, to govern.”[26] Source after source I scrutinized
all spoke to these same twin concepts of ineptitude and incapacity. And
while my sources, both old and new, proffered numerous possibilities that
might explain Edward’s unfitness to rule—from ill training to ill counsel,
from laziness to an instinct to pursue rustic, base-born pursuits—all of this
only served to explain the fact of his deposition, and not necessarily the
manner of his death.
Yet among all the information I uncovered on Edward II that day, the
most interesting came in the form of one name: Piers Gaveston, identified
in every source I found as Edward’s “companion,” “favorite,” or, more
explicitly, “longtime love.”As a young, eighteen-year-old closeted gay man
at a small, suburban Catholic college in the still bourgeois early 1990s, I
began to identify more and more with this troubled fourteenth-century
ruler. Here was a man unwilling and unprepared for what life offered him, a
man unsure of himself, feelings I wrestled with daily as a first-semester
college freshman. Here was a man that an entire culture depended upon
for greatness and success; as the first in my family in three generations to
attend college, I understood (at least in my own mind) that burden as well.
Here was a man unable to live as he wanted despite the trappings of
sovereignty; his responsibilities to his crown, his lineage, and his people
outweighed his own personal desires and emotions. I, too, felt that I could
not live as I wanted; my desire to please my family and to fit in with my
new friends and my new environment overrode my own personal sexual
and romantic feelings. Like Edward II, I felt I needed to find a balance
between the overwhelming urge to find true, unabashed, romantic love
and the overwhelming need to fit in with the society I existed within every
day.
I was infatuated. Or, to be more precise about this, that complex
process of identification between actual person and historical/fictional
personage had been set in motion. And as only the young are capable, I
saw history, and Edward, through starry eyes. Yet despite my attraction to
Edward II, I also found myself jealous of him. In retrospect, it seems odd to
envy a man dead nearly seven hundred years, and one so brutally
murdered as well, but emotions are rarely sensible, especially when newly
fashioned. Where Edward had been judged handsome, I felt like an ugly
duckling; where Edward was wealthy and powerful, I was a poor boy from
a rural farming community. Edward even had the job I had always half-
jokingly said I would be perfect for: ruler of a nation. Mostly, though, I was
jealous of Gaveston. It occurred to me then, and it still does today, that for
historians from the fourteenth century to the modern day to almost
unanimously declare, for better or for worse, that there was no denying
the incredible love between these two men, that the bond between them
must have been something immense and powerful indeed. Few historical
love affairs transcend the rigors of history and time: Antony and Cleopatra,
Justinian and Theodora, Heloise and Abelard, Victoria and Albert. They are
not always deemed ideal loves, but they are universally labeled “great.” For
Edward and Gaveston to be so often and so openly named signified, to my
young queer heart, that something incredible must have existed between
them indeed. To that point in my life, I had never felt anything remotely
similar, especially requited; so of course I found myself envying this long-
dead king.
Things have changed since then; I have changed, no longer the tow-
headed youth clutching overstuffed reference texts in the back corner
carousel of my college library. I am a man now, a gay man, replete with all
the joys and tragedies that any life dishes out to any individual. Yet in many
ways, my journey toward adulthood began with Edward II, with discovering
both an intellectual curiosity for early Britain as well as beginning to
understand and rehabilitate, for myself, my own gay historical heritage. It
meant much to me to know that others like me both did exist and still
existed, and that my perhaps-naively inspired ideals of gay romantic eros
had some recorded precedents to draw from. Reading about Edward and
Gaveston assured me of both my place and the place of my community in a
historical context, as well as proffered hope for the future romantic
possibilities of both myself and my community. From Edward, I realized
that there had been both gay pasts and gay presence, and this provided
much comfort to me in my own gay present. Indeed, Edward II is where I
came in, as both scholar and gay man, and where his story leaves off, mine
begins.

THE GAY KING

The purpose of this study, at its core, is really quite simple. The narrative
retellings of the life, reign, and death of the English King Edward II (reigned
1307–1327) composed between 1590–1640 present a unique opportunity
for scholars of atypical sexualities in the early modern era. This is because
the work of authors like Christopher Marlowe, Michael Drayton, Sir Francis
Hubert, and Elizabeth Cary was inspired, to a significant degree, by
Edward’s same-sex love affair with Piers Gaveston. As such, each of them
presents particular representations of and specific discourses about male-
male sexual relations. In other words, none of these works were written in
spite of the fact that Edward II engaged in same-sex relationships; rather,
each of these authors pursued their subject because they were in some
way drawn to the very subject and nature of same-sex love. Hence, what
these works present is a concentrated body of literature about same-sex
love in the early modern era: works that explore the possible origins of
that love, the reasons and causes for it; works that explore the
ramifications of male-male romantic relationships; works that explore the
sexual politics and sociocultural dynamics of same-sex romantic
partnerships; and works that describe and denote same-sex love from an
English Renaissance perspective.
The result of these discourses is really quite remarkable. By the end of
this period, and in no small part because of the popularity of the tale with
writers of drama and poesy, the lives of Edward and Gaveston had become
inextricably interconnected with depictions of male-male erotic and
romantic love. These works helped to create a collective, public memory
that would forever link these individuals in history to the act of same-sex
intimacy. As John Bodnar notes, public memory comprises “a body of
beliefs and ideas about the past that help a society understand both its
past [and] present, and by implication, its future.”[27] Stephen Browne
adds that public memory reflects “a shared sense of the past, fashioned
from the symbolic resources of community and subject to its particular
history, hierarchies, and aspirations.”[28] In the case of Edward II, the king
himself becomes what Jan Assmann labels a “figure of memory”—that is,
an individual whose singular association with a historical moment or
quality supersedes, in many capacities, the surrounding history that
supported or created that personage.[29] These are historical figures that
the general public associates with some thing—an event, a quality—some
construct that encapsulates the individual. Attila the Hun is remembered as
a fierce warrior. Confucius as a wise teacher. Mata Hari a duplicitous traitor.
And Edward II is the gay king. The histories surrounding these individuals—
the extant writings, the chronicle sources, the popular traditions—tend to
support these generic attitudes; even if historians would prefer that our
understandings of such figures become more nuanced and detailed (there
is certainly more to Attila than his fierceness in combat), these historical
personages become “figures of memory” precisely because, in the public
consciousness, they are so readily identified with one particular aspect of
their individuality. Though based in historical accuracy, the subsequent
perception of this accuracy is more important than any nuanced
understanding of the memorialized figure. In other words, once a historical
personage has become a “figure of memory,” it is nearly impossible to alter
or work against the public dictate surrounding that individual.
This dynamic is buoyed by what Astrid Erll describes as “the inter-
medial dynamics of cultural [public] memory” remediation and
premediation.[30] Remediation suggests that, within the auspices of the
popular culture, events or historical moments (or, in this case, historical
personages) are represented and played out time and again, across a
variety of differing media, ensuring that these events are not only recorded
and re-recorded but that their propagation throughout the cultural/public
memory remains intact. As Aleida Assmann observes, “Cultural memory
contains a number of cultural messages that are addressed to posterity
and intended for continuous repetition and re-use.”[31] “Use” is a
consequential word here. Public/cultural memories are not simply utilized
for educational or memorial purposes; cultural memory entails the
delineation and the contestation of culture itself and all its auspices: social,
political, theological, sexual, etc. According to John Gillis, “Commemorative
activity is by definition social and political, for it involves the coordination
of individual and group memories, whose results may appear consensual
when they are in fact the product of processes of intense contest, struggle,
and, in some instances, annihilation.”[32] These memories are not created
randomly or haphazardly; they are selected, reiterated, sometimes
adjusted, by larger forces working within the culture. This adjoins the
remediation of these public/cultural memories to their premediation.
Premediation indicates that these events likewise connect to and
anticipate contemporary and future actions, concerns, or moments. We
use history, and these “figures of memory,” to not only reiterate key
moments/concepts related to the past but also to elucidate the present
and the future as well. Thus these “figures of memory” continually
(re)cycle through popular discourse; they emerge as cultural touchstones
upon which we can measure our own present(s) and understand our
current relationships to both the past and the future. This is why, today, we
can make a reference to someone as an “Attila” or a “Hun” and understand
the connectivity to ferocity and barbarism; or why an expression like
“Confucius say . . .” denotes philosophical leanings; even though it is
frequently utilized in a parodic sense, the cultural connective
understanding is still present. Edward II works in the same capacity. As a
“figure of memory,” references to Edward in the popular culture will
inevitably hearken back to homosexuality.
Bodnar ultimately labels public memory “an argument about the
interpretation of reality.”[33] Once a concept about any aspect of the past
has reached a particular level of public awareness—once the argument is
settled, at least for a time—it becomes devilishly tricky to alter it in any
meaningful way; while social mores may direct the manner in which male
same-sex desire was and is discussed—both then and now—such dictates
cannot effectively alter the substance or existence of said desire. As John
Boswell has pointedly observed, Edward II was the most “overtly” famous
“homosexual” in English history.[34] Thus any post-medieval writing on
Edward and Gaveston, whether historical or fiction-based, would need to
reckon with this public memory, to utilize it, challenge it, or even recast it.
Yet these works could not simply ignore it. Thus the “love that dare not
speak its name” could not be silenced, at least not in the case of Edward
and Gaveston; it must be spoke, or the work risked being rejected as
inaccurate, incomplete, or imperfect. When one sees the name Edward II,
one also sees his same-sex loves. The correlation has become ingrained
into our public recall of history.
Thus a genre of same-sex romantic literature—of gay literature, of
queer literature—from the early modern era exists. It speaks to the subject
of same-sex love. It examines and explores it. Edward and Gaveston are not
the fop, nor are they severed friends; they are clearly lovers. Yet no book-
length study of this literature has previously been conducted. Why not? Or,
perhaps more accurately, why now? After all, the active queering of
Renaissance literature has been going on for forty years. Why is this study
needed, when so much good work has already been done in this arena? To
begin to answer these questions, I must go back to another class from my
formative years, and to another question that, like these, has haunted me
across the span of time.

ARDENTLY QUEER?
The overriding question that allows for narrative progression in the
sixteenth-century drama Arden of Faversham is not if Alice Arden is
committing adultery—for, indeed, this is obvious to everyone—but rather
why Arden himself works so adroitly to avoid confronting his wife or
curtailing the affair. Every critic, scholar, and student who examines the
play commences with this notion, one which Randall Martin labels the
“critical question” of the play: “why did Arden allow the affair between his
wife and Mosby to continue under his own roof, against all reasonable
judgment, to the point of befriending Mosby and shielding Alice?”[35] The
answers to this question vary. Raphael Holinshed, the main source for the
real-life events that inspired the play, argues that, “bicause [Arden] would
not offend [Alice], and so loose the benfit which he hoped to gaine at some
of his friends hands in bearing with his lewdnesse, which he might haue
lost if he should haue fallen out with hir.”[36] For Holinshed, Alice’s
significant familial connections, and the financial gain they represent,
outweigh the threat to both Arden’s masculinity and his public standing.
Martin White suggests that Arden is conflicted by strong, tumultuous
emotions: Arden “is torn by his avowedly deep love for Alice (1.39) and his
loathing for her adultery.”[37] Randall Martin himself contends that the
relationship between Alice and Mosby reflects “an affair that Arden
tactically and surreptitiously enables in order to solve a more urgent and
deeply personal problem: his lack of a male heir.”[38] Martin continues:
“The play . . . implies that Arden may no longer be capable of sustaining a
sexual relationship. . . . Arden’s ambitions and behaviours are inflected by
the cultural pressures of male dynastic inheritance as well as the masculine
psychology of sexual jealousy.”[39] If, Martin argues, Arden is physically
incapable of having children, he may adopt whatever offspring could result
from the consummation of Alice’s affair with Mosby—even if, in Arden’s
words, Mosby is only “A botcher, and no better at the first” (1.25).[40]
Some critics do not even bother with attempting to answer the question.
Frances Dolan suggests that there is no “explanation as to why [Arden]
tolerates an adultery he suspects or why he simply abandons his wife and
home.”[41] To Dolan, Arden’s actions pass little psychological scrutiny, but
hardly matter as a point of contrivance to set up the murderous action and
dark humor of the play.
Arden’s ambivalence regarding his wife’s adultery was first presented
to me in a seminar course that explored representations of femininity and
feminism in premodern and early modern texts, focusing on works that
featured strong, non-stereotypical female protagonists. I remember being
posed the question quite vividly, mostly because I remember the answer I
produced and the reaction it procured. I had missed the preceding class—
the first day we had discussed the play—while nursing a monstrous cold.
Upon my return, the professor looked at me, an ever-reliable mouthpiece,
somewhat expectantly. The previous class had ended with some discussion
of the question, but the other students had been reluctant to hazard any
theory toward understanding Arden’s acquiescence. Turning to me, the
professor posed the same question that has bedeviled this play since it was
writ: Why does Arden so keenly overlook, and even actively assist in
concealing, his wife’s adultery? With no time to think, head pounding and
sinuses stretched to the point of bursting, I voiced the first response that
instinctively came to me: “Because he was gay.”
Of course, had I wished to have been more precise, I should have used
language appropriate to the time period to describe an intimate
relationship between two members of the same sex. Yet what term would I
choose? The possibilities were vast: men committing acts of homosexuality
in the Middle Ages or Renaissance could be labeled “pederasts,”
“sodomites,” “Ganymedes,” “catamites,” “boys,” “mollies,” “androgynes,”
“friends or lovers” (often interchangeable in the languages of earlier eras),
“sick,” “sinners,” “those who commit the sin that dare not speak its name,”
or “persons from _____” just to name a few possibilities.[42] Yet while
these terms are inclusive (they can refer to male-male sexual relations),
they are rarely exclusive (they may refer to other sexualities or types as
well). “Sodomite,” for example, was a term born of Christian use in the
eleventh century, “a medieval artifact as a category for classifying—for
uniting and explaining—desires, dispositions, and acts that earlier had
been classified differently and separately.”[43] The word frequently
appeared in penitential and other Christian writings, not only as a
reference to homosexual behavior, but also, as Mark Jordan notes, a
reference to any type of sexual transgression. Thus while contemporary
peoples almost always connect “sodomy” to homosexuality, and more
specifically to anal intercourse, this was not true in the sixteenth century,
where the term described a continuum of sexual sin that included male-
male coitus as only one possibility. Likewise, sexual terminology of the
Middle Ages and Renaissance often had distinctly specific usages.
“Pederast” was coined more for legal usage, especially in the Renaissance,
and conversely seems, in some places, to refer to general sexual
transgressors. It was rarely used outside of this connotation and was likely
never used in general daily conversation.[44] It would hardly have seemed
appropriate, then, for me to describe Arden using this term, as it was likely
a term he would not use to describe himself.[45]
What word, then, should I have used? Some critics who scrutinize
premodern and early modern sexualities have tried to design a
methodology focusing on language in an attempt to decipher any possible
early “codes” of sexual ambiguity. Forrest Tyler Stevens, for example,
attempted to discern the nature of the relationship between Erasmus and
his correspondent Servatius by examining the flowery stylistics of the
language used in the letters of the two men. Erasmus calls Servatius “a
youth of beautiful disposition” and declares that all he wants from
Servatius is that “you love him who loves you.”[46] Stevens wonders, “what
conclusions can be reached from these letters?” and even poses the
question, “Was Erasmus homosexual?”[47] Despite his close reckoning of
the intense, flowery, and love-filled admonitions of Erasmus to Servatius,
Stevens concludes, “any approach to the question [of Erasmus’s sexuality]
must work within the conceptual universe in which there is neither a state
of gender boundary nor an absolute distinction between proper and
improper sexual acts.”[48] Or, in other words, Stevens answers his own
question only by recasting it. Stevens’s ultimate conclusion, or lack of
conclusion, capably demonstrates the difficulty in penetrating the cautious
mindset and ornamental rhetoric of an era that is fully cognizant of the
existence of same-sex desire but lacking a developed vocabulary to discuss
it in any way that does not belie a negative connotation.
Civic and theological writing abounded with differing usages of sexual
terminology, and, just as sexuality, identity, and culture are oft tied to
geographical considerations in the contemporary era, every region in the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance had a different sexual vocabulary. As
Pierre J. Payer notes, “Theologians of the Middle Ages discussed the
nature, purpose, and morality of sexual behavior in the course of their
treatment of a wide range of topics.”[49] At the end of his study of
penitentials, confessional guidebooks for handing out penance, Payer
records an overwhelming conflation of sexual terminology, everything from
“A” (adultera) to, in this case, “V” (violare). Many of these terms seem
synonymous, but their meanings are obscured by the circumspection of
the penitential writers, who often refrained from overt or lengthy sexual
references in their texts in order to avoid encouraging the populace to
engage in carnal behavior they may otherwise never imagine. This
deliberate obfuscation adds to the lexicographic confusion, providing a
litany of terms that may all mean the same thing or that may perhaps differ
slightly, depending upon the intent of the originating author, one’s
interpretation of the original language of the penitential, and/or the act
itself.
The literature of the day reflected none of this more technical
terminology. In an early Anglo-Norman text written by Marie de France,
King Arthur’s queen implies that the knight Lanval is homosexual by telling
him, “que des femmez n’avez talent. / vallez avez bien afeitiez, / ensemble
o deus vus deduiez” (Women offer you no pleasure— / With a few well-
schooled young men / You prefer to pass your leisure.)[50] Her implication
is clear, but certainly she never uses any “standard” terminology, such as
sodomite, to describe Lanval’s supposed same-sex desire. Marie’s more
descriptive language may reflect premodern and early modern usage more
consistently; such similar descriptions abound in texts that directly or
indirectly reference male-male love. Yet language can be obfuscating in
texts that reflect the same kind of easy description while lacking the
context to make sense of it. In Arden of Faversham, Arden employs such
language to describe his feelings and emotions, though perhaps not as
artfully—and specifically—as Marie does above; Arden’s descriptions and
protestations of feeling toward Alice and Franklin, his close friend, both
mirror each other and only serve to further confuse our linguistic
conundrum.
Of course, modern denotations of sexual terminology may be more
readily understandable to a contemporary audience, but their usage in
describing peoples from earlier eras that pre-date the coinage of the terms
is controversial and complicating. Some scholars, for example, advocate
embracing the contemporary lexicon of sexuality—with its wide panoply of
terms and connotations—and examining premodern and early modern
sexualities with these more universal, if anachronistic, terms. For example,
in John Boswell’s study Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,
Boswell chose the more modern term “homosexuality” for his text, though
he acknowledged the contradiction in utilizing a modern term to discuss
premodern sexuality. The entire second chapter of his work, “Definitions,”
is devoted to a discussion of the terminology he uses in his study: “But
what is a ‘homosexual’ person? Is this someone ‘of one sex’? By extension,
one supposes, a ‘homosexual’ person is one given to ‘homosexual’ acts.
But just how many acts must one indulge before becoming ‘homosexual’—
one, two, ten, four hundred?”[51] Later, Boswell clearly defines
homosexuality for himself, and he hopes, for future posterity:
“‘homosexuality’ refers to the general phenomenon of same-sex eroticism
and is therefore the broadest of categories employed; it comprises all
sexual phenomenon between persons of the same gender, whether the
result of conscious preference, subliminal desire, or circumstantial
exigency.”[52] For Boswell, the term is descriptive, not subjective.
Problematically, though, Boswell’s definition of “homosexual” as a broad
umbrella term seems to go against the contemporary usage of the word; a
male who identified himself as heterosexual but who indulged in an erotic
act with another man could, by Boswell’s definition, rightly label himself
“homosexual” without ascribing to that term the sociocultural rigidity that
others may find inherent in the word. In use as an adjective, this makes
sense, but in using “homosexual” as a noun, it now becomes woefully
inadequate. To counter this, Boswell extends his own adaptations of
modern terminology to usurp the word “gay” as well, noting that modern
homosexuals seem to prefer it over any other identifier, stating that “gay
refers to persons who are conscious of erotic inclination toward their own
gender as a distinguishing characteristic.”[53] Thus, in Boswell’s estimation,
to be “gay” requires self-awareness, while any individual or act may be
deemed “homosexual.”
Not all scholars agree. Allen Frantzen, in Before the Closet: Same-Sex
Love from “Beowulf” to “Angels in America,” writes, “I call this a book
about ‘same-sex love’ because the obvious choice, ‘homosexuality,’ is, for
periods before the modern era, inaccurate. ‘Homosexuality’ and
‘homosexuals’ were not recognized concepts in the Middle Ages or in the
Renaissance . . . rather than try to establish identities for medieval people, I
describe ‘same-sex love’ and ‘same-sex relations and interactions’ that
range from sexual intercourse to expressions of non-sexual affection.”[54]
Frantzen considers the sexualities of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
too “complex” for the “ironclad” definitions used by Boswell.[55] Yet the
insistence of some critics that proper terminology be adhered to in both
study and excavation ignores the dictates of literary expression and the
distaste writers often have representing personal, character-driven sexual
desire in sexually legitimate, clinical language. Ultimately, there is no
Renaissance equivalent of “gay;” and clinical, legalistic terms are rarely
used, even in modern speech, to define one’s sense of self, especially in
casual conversations between boon companions. If Arden was, as I
supposed in my seminar class, “gay,” how would he self-identify as such?
I could, of course, have answered my professor’s question more
broadly and more post-modernly. Judith Butler, among others, has
advanced the adoption of “queer” as a useful blanketing term for usage in
discussing sexuality in a variety of literary and social contexts, similar to
Boswell’s construct regarding “homosexuality.” Butler describes “queering”
as a “contestation of the terms of sexual legitimacy. The hyperbolic gesture
is crucial to the homophobic ‘law’ that can no longer control the terms of
its own abjecting strategies.”[56] Thus, for Butler, queering is a performance
that exploits and exposes “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps,
dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the
constituent element of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made
(or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”[57] “Queering” seeks to
exploit atypicality, and has strong footholds in both
Boswell, who likewise explores similar concepts, and Frantzen, whose call
for differing terminology is heeded. Nonetheless, “queer” as sexual
terminology has its drawbacks and confusions. Richard Zeikowitz, for
example, uses the term “queer” to describe Grendel from the Anglo-Saxon
epic Beowulf, the Green Knight from the fourteenth-century alliterative
romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Pardoner from
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales because “they are not typical men of the time
and, more significant, they all pose a challenge or threat to normative
homosocial desire.”[58] “Queer” may reflect a useful umbrella term
denoting atypical forms of anti-normative sexuality, but here Zeikowitz
uses it, to cite Butler, to “contest the terms of sexual legitimacy” from a
homosexual (“homosocial”) perspective. “Queer” is useful, but hardly
definitive.
For that matter, I could turn to the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Frantzen considers her work to be “the most important,” and in her
seminal study Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire, she seems to offer a solution to my terminology dilemma.[59] In the
work, Sedgwick describes her concept of homosociality, a state of “intense
social bonds between persons of the same sex.”[60] These bonds represent
the social domination of one gender over another, in relationships ranging
from friendship or “blood brotherhood” to true homosexual liaisons; thus,
“to draw the ‘homosocial’ back into the orbit of ‘desire,’ of the potentially
erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum
between homosexuality and homosociality.”[61]
Sedgwick’s language is useful in discussing the “severed friendship”
that Arden and Franklin potentially represent. Sedgwick’s concept of
homosociality can be further augmented by considering Robert Martin’s
definition of homoeroticism, in which a sexual or seemingly sexual course
approaches homosexuality without actually achieving it. In other words, as
in Boswell’s definition of gay, Martin believes that homosexuality must be
grounded in “self-recognition,” the state commonly known today as being
“out”—at least to one’s self, and in the case of popular culture or literary
figures, to one’s audience.[62] Thus, Sedgwick and Martin provide us with
three ascending levels of same-sex terminology: homosociality, a social
domination by the same sex; homoeroticism, actions and words mirroring
homosexuality but lacking the recognition as such; and homosexuality,
where self-recognition is the key.
Yet Arden, of course, would never recognize any of these terms as
ascribed to himself. Plus, they do not quite satisfy; to be labeled
“homosocial” or “homoerotic” is not to be “gay,” the term I noted in my
answer to the question. This lexicographic journey, then, seems endless. It
is no wonder that scholars and students of sexuality become frustrated
with the study of sexuality in these early eras; they oft find it difficult to
properly articulate their ideas on texts, since they must first struggle with
the fundamental definitions and words they may be permitted to use.

THE PROBLEM WITH “ADJECTIVE FRIENDS”

The reaction in my seminar class, when I inadvertently “outed” Arden, was
rather unexpected. My professor did what can only be described as a
comic double take; clearly, my answer had not been expected—not even
considered—and, in her backpedaling response, was not necessarily
something she was prone to consider at that moment. My peers, however,
responded in a very opposite manner; immediately their drooping
shoulders straightened and their listless faces alit. This made sense to
them; the more they thought about it, the more they considered the
possibility, the more my preposterous notion seemed right.
 At a cursory glance, there is evidence to make the case that Arden and
Franklin may have been more than “just friends.” The first proof, of course,
is Arden’s hysterically “laissez-faire” approach to his wife’s conduct:
“Thomas Arden’s apparent credulity in the face of his wife’s affair with her
lover, prior to their murder of him in 1551, strikes an erratic chord in an
otherwise finely tuned drama of psychological realism.”[63] It is this “erratic
chord” that first resonated within me. I also found myself drawn to the
character of Franklin and his obviously intimate relationship with Arden.
Writing on Franklin, White observes, “The playwright’s own invention,
Franklin’s main function in the play is to provide someone to whom Arden
can confess his inmost thoughts without the constant need for soliloquy,
and to act as a spokesman on the otherwise isolated Arden’s behalf.”[64]
Arden has no problem expressing his feelings for his closest companion, as
his opening lines in the play attest:

ARDEN: Franklin, thy love prolongs my weary life;

And but for thee how odious were this life. (1.9–10)

As Arden complains about his wife’s conduct with Mosby, Franklin

proffers first some banal advice:

FRANKLIN: Comfort thyself, sweet friend; it is not strange

That women will be false and wavering. (1.20–21)

When that fails to placate Arden, he suggests further measures:

FRANKLIN: Be patient, gentle friend, and learn of me

To ease thy grief and save her chastity:
Intreat her fair; sweet words are fittest engines
To race the flint walls of a woman's breast.
In any case be not too jealous.
Nor make no question of her love to thee;
But, as securely, presently take horse,
And lie with me at London all this term;
For women, when they may, will not,
But, being kept back, straight grow outrageous. (1.44–53)
 Franklin’s advice continues to console Arden, if not slightly horrify the
reader:

FRANKLIN: Gentle Arden, leave this sad lament:

She will amend, and so your griefs will cease;
Or else she’ll die, and so your sorrows end.
If neither of these two do haply fall,
Yet let your comfort be that others bear
Your woes, twice doubled all, with patience. (4.21–26)

When Arden is not soothed, Franklin provides even further comfort:

ARDEN: My house is irksome; there I cannot rest.

FRANKLIN: Then stay with me in London; go not home. (4.27–28 )

Comfort that, it seems, comes in distinct forms:

MICHAEL: My master [Arden] would desire you come to bed.

FRANKLIN: Is he himself already in his bed? (4.55–56)

Arden of Faversham is a tremendously performative piece of

stagecraft. The characters are consistently acting, both in the literal and
figurative sense of the word, as they believe society expects. Much of the
play is, in essence, a put-on sham, minor skits set amid a larger drama. The
marriage between Alice and Arden is a sham; the forcibly polite social
interactions that occur in the play a sham; even the relationships generally
presented by the “players” to their larger society (husband/wife,
master/servant, lord/retainer) are a sham. Even when alone, the speeches
of the characters ring with a clarion call of falsity; there is almost nothing
sincere in Franklin’s pained/painful lamentations in Scene 4, delivered, it
seems, more for the benefit of what should be said in the moment, rather
than what Franklin truly feels. As the central figure of patriarchal authority,
Arden is, perhaps, the biggest actor of all: “Arden’s identity has been
regarded as divided and undynamic. His subjectivity is no less constrained
and performative, however, as he responds creatively to his threatened
loss of patriarchal agency.”[65]
 Only when characters share the stage with their co-conspirators—
Alice and Mosby, Black Will and Shakebag, and, indeed, Arden and Franklin
themselves—do they seemingly speak true. Thus discounting Arden’s
hysterical performance regarding his wife’s affair or his polite interactions
with Michael or Lord Cheiny, the true Arden is revealed only in his one-on-
one scenes with Franklin. Alternatively irritable over his domestic situation
and comforted by his relationship with Franklin, the true Arden is neither
hysterical nor politic, but simply a man in an untenable situation relying
heavily on the kindness and grace of his “dearest friend” (3.34).
Yet what kind of friends are Arden and Franklin? Smith would perhaps
present the duo as another of his “severed friends,” no different than
Antonio and Bassanio or Antonio and Sebastian. In my own estimation of
these relationships, I label them “adjective friends,” a reference to the
common manner in which the two males refer to each other, especially in
private. In Arden, for example, Franklin and Arden use the word “sweet”
and “gentle” as a descriptive epitaph preceding the word “friend” when
describing each other no less than four times in the play, though only when
alone. Such terminology is reflected in other works, where similar
descriptors are common between those males who exhibit intense bonds,
but almost always in private.[66] Halperin describes such male friendships
as a “tradition that emphasizes equality, mutuality, and reciprocity in love
between men.”[67] This “love” is important: “if we are to devise a complete
and satisfactory genealogy of male homosexuality, we will have to find
room in it for a history of male love.” It is also, however, incredibly
problematic:

[I]t does indicate that sexual love, at least as it is viewed within the
cultural horizons of the male world, is all about penetration and
therefore all about position, superiority and inferiority, rank and
status, gender and difference. Friendship . . . by contrast, is all about
sameness: sameness of rank and status, sameness of sentiment,
sameness of identity. It is this very emphasis on identity, similarity,
and mutuality that distances the friendship tradition, in its original
social and discursive context, from the world of sexual love.[68]
 These intense male friendships—Sedgwick’s homosociality given
literary life—are the most common of the sexual/ity categories Halperin
proposes comprising the forms of relationships that literary history
incorporates regarding male-male love in the English Renaissance. The
other categories—which include homosexuality, effeminacy, sodomy, and
inversion—are perhaps more frequent in non-fictive works, histories and
polemics against sin, but in literature, male friendship takes center stage
when any discussion of “queering” the canon occurs. Yet, as Halperin
himself observes, these friendships are disconnective from sexual
relationships. Halperin suggests that, “Far removed from the hierarchical
world of the sexual penetration of subordinate males by superordinate
males is the world of male friendship and love, which can claim an equally
ancient discursive tradition.”[69] In this construct, sex is base, punitive, an
action played out for the purposes of gratification only, and then only for
one of the partners involved. Friendship, on the other hand, is intense,
emotive, and downright pure—satisfying on one level, but lacking in
others.
What all of this—all of this, from Arden’s “queerness” to the
continuing debate over the apposite usage of these myriad sexual
vocabularies to homosociality and homoeroticism to “queering the canon”
to male friendship to endearing adjectives to continuums of male behavior
—all of this simply, and quite profoundly, told my young gay heart that I,
and people like me, were not well represented in the annals of literary
history. Whereas Edward II opened up the possibilities of queering the
past, everything I discovered subsequent to that felt as if we were all
simply layering possibilities onto further possibilities without ever moving
into the more substantive area of distinct probabilities. I did not want to
strain to read queerness and gayness into a text; I did not want to have to
understand the subtleties of coded language or sociocultural
understandings of customs and traditions that spoke only to a particular
few. I did not want to create distinguishments between friendship and sex,
especially reading sex to be political and powerful and not romantic and
pleasurable. I wanted love; I wanted passion; and yes, despite Halperin’s
hesitations, I wanted sex.
David Leavitt articulates the subject far better than I:
 Unlike our heterosexual counterparts, for whom history, rituals of
courtship, models for behavior, and codes of decorum are handed out
daily . . . [homosexuals] must seek out, furtively, some sense of our
connection to official history, not to mention some sense of our own
history, which by definition is discontinuous, a series of stops and
starts that begins again each time a young gay man or lesbian sneaks
his or her way to the gay section at a bookstore—if indeed there is a
gay section; if indeed there is a bookstore.[70]

I knew—instinctually, with every fiber of my being—that gay people

had existed before me, had existed before I was born, had existed since
time immemorial. I knew this—and yet, disconsolately, while there was
much that was tenuous to support my feelings, those concrete
reassurances that I sought—the concrete reassurances that gay men had
always existed, that gay men had always lived and loved—simply were not
there. Lee Edelman talks about the limits of homosexuality’s “determining
relationship to . . . the legibility of signs.”[71] Like Edelman, I was tired of
signs, of codes, of reading between and betwixt lines that may not truly be
saying what I thought or hoped they were. I wanted overtness. I wanted
action. I wanted to see, and read, in the historical canon, someone who felt
like me.

QUEER INSTINCTS
When I responded in my seminar class that Arden was gay, waggish as I
may have seemed, I meant my response wholly and sincerely. One reason I
could not easily articulate why, however, is that my response came as both
an instinct and a personal reaction to the work. Franklin and Arden’s
declarations of affection toward the other, their continuing use of
endearments to speak to the other, their shared bed—these were things I
wanted, desperately, at that point in my life. My mind reasoned that if
Arden and Franklin were affectionate, and relied on the other emotionally
and psychologically, and shared a bed, then why could they not be gay like
me? This hearkens to that process of identification, and to those things all
individuals seek and desire—comfort, care, affection, sex—and yet, for gay
people, it was evident that they came not as easily, and with much less
social sanction, than they did for straight people.
It was incredulous to read authors like Montaigne:

Our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they
efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again. . . . If you
press me to tell you why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be
expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I . .
. it is I know not what . . . which, having seized my whole will, led it to
plunge and lose itself in his.[72]

or John Dryden:

I was his soul, he lived not but in me.

We were so closed within each other’s breasts,
The rivets were not found that joined us first.
That does not reach us yet: we were so missed
As meeting streams, both to ourselves were lost;
We were one mass; we could not give or take
But from the same, for he was I, I he.[73]

and not see my own inherent longings and desires present in these
words. This is not same-sex love? According to Halperin—no:

It is difficult for us moderns—with our heavy psychologisitic model of

the human personality, our notion of unconscious drives, our
tendency to associate desire with sexuality, and our heightened
sensitivity to anything that might seem to contravene the strict
protocols of heterosexual masculinity—it is difficult for us to avoid
reading into such passionate expressions of male love a suggestion of
“homoeroticism” at the very least, if not “latent homosexuality,” those
being the formulation that often act as a cover for our own perplexity
at how to interpret same-sex emotions that do not quite square with
canonical conceptions of sexual subjectivity.[74]
 Ahh, how carelessly Halperin damages the queer heart here; the
hopes of a young man, reading passages that reflect his own inner
longings, are dashed against the critic’s seemingly cold interpretation of
such passionate expressions of love. Or am I only a poor “modern,” who
sees gay love in places where it truly is not?
One of my great difficulties in reconciling notions of “severed” or
“adjective” friends and other forms of nongay “gay” love is that I—and
many other individuals like me—initially respond to these texts as a form
of instinct, and not from our conscious sifting of the material clues at hand.
My instincts told me Arden was acting “queerly” first; any cognizant
defense of that instinct came afterward. I knew Arden was gay before I
knew Arden was gay. Instinct is a funny thing; Darwin considered instinct
actions that were performed without experience or foreknowledge, but
more contemporary scientific thought defines instinct (amongst other
things) as behavior or knowledge “shared by all members” of a group,
which may be codified into “distinct behavioral systems.”[75] Though we
may share a joke about “gaydar” here, what I am really getting at is
identification, and our desire to create connections between ourselves and
those who have come before us through significant cultural, social, and
sexual traditions. Never mind that these traditions continually transmute,
and change, and adapt over time, and that our understanding of these
traditions, and the ability of the writers of any period to describe them
across the centuries, changes as well. Never mind, as Gregory Woods
eloquently states it, “The problem for us today is to conceive of how the
mind of a poet might work in a society with completely different sexual
rules from our own.”[76] These bridges and gaps and dissonances and
obfuscations ignore our own instincts and our needs, our very great and
tangible needs, to see ourselves reflected and represented in our own
historical pasts. Halperin notes that, “Identification gets at something:
something important; it picks out resemblances, connections, echo
effects.”[77] Identification is all about crafting that connection between the
central part of the identity wheel and the rubber tire that propels it. As
Peter Foreman and David Whetten have observed, an “implied or explicit
identity comparison process involves an evaluative component, the intent
of which is to help group members reduce dissonance between
perceptions regarding ‘who I am’ and ‘who we are.’ Furthermore, these
models propose that an underlying desire or pressure for congruence, or
‘fit,’ shapes certain attitude and behaviors.”[78] Something in Arden—
something in Antonio, something in Montaigne and Dryden and countless
others—pricks at the part of me where my own sexual identity resides,
coiled like a serpent around the tree of my own life. This identification
triggers a psychological process within me, an audience of one, that in turn
generates an instinctual response for me to identify with aspects of what I
am reading or viewing on the stage. Quite simply, it speaks to me, and in
that act of speaking, volumes are uttered.
We all wish to find ourselves represented in the canon, in the great
works by the great authors of their day. Yet does my own reading process,
my own desire to identify, to have existed, alter how I perceive these
works? I want to be in Shakespeare—but am I reduced to being the
pseudo-pirate Antonio who “holds the purse” for the hero, furthering
Sebastian’s chances of a heterosexual union, thus relegating himself—and
myself—forever to the sexual sideline? Or, if I am to find myself in an
author like Chaucer, am I reduced to clinging to a huckster snake-oil
salesman whose sexuality is generally ascribed to one oft-examined and ill-
defined usage of the word “mare?” I speak, of course, of the Pardoner. In
the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer describes the Pardoner,
somewhat insecurely, as “I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare,” “trowe”
meaning “believe” or “guess.”[79] From this one line critics have concluded
that the Pardoner is quite queer indeed:

Since Walter Curry’s introduction of the topic in 1919, when he

named the Pardoner as a eunuch ex navitate, the Pardoner has been
categorized as a “normal” male, a congenital eunuch, a man who has
been castrated, a man impotent but physically intact, a
hermaphrodite, a “testicular pseudo-hermaphrodite of the feminine
type,” an oversexed womanizer, an alcoholic, a “drag queen,” a cross-
dressed woman, and, most resonantly, a homosexual.[80]

All of this from one little word, a word the narrator uses in an “or”
construction with another, and one the narrator is not even sure actually
applies. The word usage itself is quite problematic; Monica McAlpine
argues that, “‘Geldyng’ and ‘mare’ are homely metaphors that that must
have had meanings both familiar and fairly precise for Chaucer’s medieval
audience; modern readers, however, face difficulties in recovering those
meanings.”[81] If these words were common enough in Chaucer’s day to be
readily understood as vernacular, why have almost no other examples of
them used in such a context come to light? How can we understand what
Chaucer means, when we cannot understand the words he uses?[82]
And, most importantly, why are we hanging our collective queer hats
on a single word? Or on “friends” who are not clearly more than friends?
Why do I so wrestle with Arden, when he will never reveal his secrets to
me? Please do not mistake me: I do not mean to disparage the work that
so many scholars have done before me. Their work is invaluable, and I
would not be who I am without them. I only express my frustrations, not at
the fine scholarship of the last forty years, but at the lackluster source
material available. B. R. Burg, writing of seventeenth-century sailing
communities, writes that “homosexual activity among lower-class males
[was] considered to be ordinary behavior.”[83] How extraordinary, to be
considered so ordinary. Yet the records of their existence do not extend to
the literary ventures of the day. History feeds morsels to those who desire
richer meat. Alan Sinfield once wrote, “gay men seem doomed to wrestle
with the canon.”[84] Foreman and Whetten label this type of activity
“congruence-enhancing responses,” necessary when the “identity
comparison gap” is too great to easily bridge.[85] Despairingly, I may almost
agree with all this. It may, on some level, be almost hopeless. Gay men,
however, have one fierce ally on our side; one last trick up our sleeves.
We have Edward II.

STARTING SOMEPLACE “GAY”

In his fine study Sodometries, Jonathan Goldberg writes:

It has been my assumption throughout this chapter that Marlowe’s

radical rethinking of the possibility of being a sodomite was not
widely shared in his time, that the deconstructive energies he
 bequeaths are not assimilable to the subsequent discourses of sexual
difference. But by this I do not mean to suggest Marlowe’s singularity
save in the value he attached to what his culture so vehemently
opposed. Hence, it is possible, imperative, to recognize in Marlowe a
site of political resistance. To recognize too that this could have
literary consequences.[86]

Goldberg is writing, of course, about Christopher Marlowe’s late

sixteenth-century drama Edward II.[87] In his initial assertions, Goldberg is
absolutely correct: Edward II did radically reconstruct the structural means
in which the “sodomite” was presented in Renaissance thought. Yet it is
not, as Goldberg asserts, a singular work. Indeed, the functional purpose of
the literary character of Edward II in the Renaissance was to do, in part,
what Goldberg states: to reconceptualize what same-sex male love and
sexual relations might, could, or should signify to an early modern
audience.
This is not to suggest that each of the works examined in this study
will cast or recast Edward’s sexuality in a positive connotation; indeed,
even Marlowe’s shamelessly “pro-sodomite” work complicates Edward’s
sexuality rather than simply attempting to enshrine it. What each work
does do, however, is to put same-sex love at the cynosure of the fictional
narrative, front and center. No longer must code be understood in order
for a text’s queerness to be read; there is no concealment at work here.
This affords critics the opportunity to look past the questions of “Are they .
. . ?” and “Did they . . . ?” that haunt such works as Twelfth Night and
Arden of Faversham and, finally, exhaustedly, transcend them. With the
literature surrounding Edward II, the question is never “Are the characters
queer?”—for indeed, they are—but rather, “What is being said about their
queerness?”
This seems a lot to put on the fictions written about a man decried by
historians as one of the worst kings in English history.[88] The Articles of
Deposition summarize his rule as incompetent, ill-counseled, and given
over to “unseemly works and occupations” while relaying that Edward II
was a poor general, an enemy of the church, and a cruel and incorrigible
king.[89] Historians, in fact, remain overwhelmingly consistent in their
general depiction of Edward II’s character as king—or lack thereof—
throughout the chronicle accounts. The differences are not found in
statements of character, but only in degree. This is particularly noteworthy
considering the personal nature of historical narrative in fourteenth-
century England. Medieval historians, while reporting what they believed
to be fact, almost always demonstrated their own personal biases toward
their subjects as well. Robert Metcalf Smith, writing of the problems of
reading English medieval and Renaissance chronicles, notes:

Almost every English chronicle is a compilation from innumerable

chronicle sources and narrates them baldly. As the narrative descends
to contemporary events the writer usually takes a new interest and
handles his narrative in a more personal and graphic way. But rarely
does he attempt anything more than a description of events in bald
chronicle form; and too frequently he shows no power of selection or
perspective, and no historical sense. He fills the work with long
descriptions of royal or city feasts, entertainments, processions; with
fabulous tales, scraps of poetry; or with matters more important to his
mind than even foreign events, such as the remarkably cold winter of
1390, or the delivery of a monstrous child by a woman in Kent.[90]

There is no sense of detached objectiveness in these histories; value

judgments abound, and as such, while basic facts may remain generally
consistent, the interpretation of these facts is skewed by the local political
and social milieu through which the author is chronicling. The personal
experiences of the historian, sometimes with the very subject being
considered, can also affect the character of the history. Edward II’s father,
Edward I, for example, was universally considered a strong military ruler,
but fourteenth-century historians vary widely in their more personal
feelings about him. He is both “tyrannical” and “just,” both “great” and
“harsh;” his rule is witnessed as both “glorious” to the dictates of England
and full of unnecessary wars and costly victories.[91] He was a great
general, or, conversely, a poor fiscal ruler, one who depleted the treasury in
his attempts to subdue Scotland (successfully) and France (not as
successfully). The facts are (roughly) the same, but their emphasis and
interpretation vary greatly with each individual historian.
With Edward II, however, there remains a great consistency of
historical feeling, while it is the facts of his reign that occasionally become
clouded and obscure, especially in regards to the events that transpired
after his deposition. There, rumor and innuendo replace evidence, though
the insistence of these rumors makes a strong case for them to be based in
actual fact. Thus with Edward II one finds a consensus among historians,
from the fourteenth century to the modern day, regarding the disposition
of his rule. There is almost no disagreement, and this, perhaps, accounts
for why historians seem content to label Edward II an unfit king, a man
whose reign is marked more by failures than successes and whose interest
lies not in what he did but instead in what happened to him. In many ways,
then, Edward II becomes important not for the events of his reign, but
rather for the perceptions surrounding them. For example, there is no
historical basis regarding Edward’s murder; there is no confession or court
document that states in what manner he was executed. The “hotte broche
in the fundament” could merely be the invention of a creative chronicler
that was widely circulated by later historians, who likely appreciated the
ironic, sodomitic nature of the murder along with its dark, grisly telling.
The story was first reported in John Trevisa’s translation of Higden’s Latin
Polychronicon, and, as Trevisa was vicar of Berkeley during Sir Thomas
Berkeley’s lifetime, the story has retained an air of authenticity.[92] Modern
prudent historians caution not to accept this history as representation of
fact, but rather as simply the prevailing rumor of the day; while such
rumors often ring with a clarion of truth, there is no unequivocal proof. It is
this notion of prevailing rumor, though, that surrounds the life and reign of
Edward II and makes him somewhat unique. He is a man who has become
more important for the perceptions that surround him than for the facts of
his reign. Thus, whether or not Piers Gaveston was the great love of his life
is less important than the fact that public perception suggests as much,
from the earliest fourteenth-century chroniclers to the present day. Hence,
Gaveston is widely viewed as having been his great love, even though some
modern scholarly work, such as Jeffrey Hamilton’s piece in History Today,
still insists upon “weigh[ing] the evidence and conclud[ing] that Edward II
and his notorious favorite were more than just good friends,” something
the Chronica monasterii de Melsa unequivocally stated almost seven
hundred years earlier.[93]
The historical Edward II, however, is not as informed by perception as
the cultural and literary personage that emerged from the historical person
after the death of the king. In the centuries after his murder, this
“embarrassment of a monarch” became a fashionable literary figure, a
man whose story is told in both poetic and dramatic form repeatedly, more
often than both his well-regarded father and son. Edward II becomes a
popular cultural figure—indeed, a pop culture figure—in the Renaissance.
Josie Campbell notes that popular culture in the premodern and early
modern eras serves a useful purpose, since early popular cultures allow us
to “discover . . . not only where we have been but also traces of what we
are.”[94] Campbell asserts that the popularity of a narrative reflects a
society’s desire and need to consider and consume it; these stories, then,
can represent a time, a place, a society, and a person—especially the
popular perception of a historical personage—as well as any other source.
It is this Edward that this study looks to, the Edward of fiction; the Edward
of story, not of history.
For if Edward II is where I came in, as both scholar and gay man, in
many ways, Edward II is where all modern gay men come in, because the
endurance of Edward II in literature has significant implications for the
history of sexuality beyond the importance of his place in English history.
His name and his story are still famous today, not because of the facts of
his reign, not because of the baronial wars he fought, not because of his
marriage to and bloody quarrel with Isabella of France, and not because of
his ultimate deposition and death. Edward II has remained famous, a public
historical and popular culture figure, for one primary reason—his same-sex
love affair with Piers Gaveston. He exists today because he was “gay,” not
in spite of it, not simultaneous to it, and not as a matter of happenstance.
It is Gaveston, and the king’s unabashed love of Gaveston, that has created
Edward II’s undying fame. Edward II may have been a failure as a ruler, but
as a literary figure, he represents real queer agency, a man with an
acknowledged same-sex romantic counterpart, a man who, for better or
worse, is widely depicted and widely perceived to have lived his life in as
openly—and here, I purposefully emphasize the anachronism—“gay” a
manner as any man in these eras could. While he both fascinates and
repulses later writers, who openly celebrate and decry his sexuality, both
sides must acknowledge this same sexuality to be the most discernable
aspect of his character, and, indeed, the feature most worthy of literary
pursuit. Thus, Edward II survives as a literary figure not because of his
spectacular failure as a medieval monarch but rather for his remarkable
success at being a “gay” man. His presence survives because of his love,
and the later authors who wrote about this figure fully participated in the
creation of his iconic “gay” status.

THE FICTION OF EDWARD II

Any examination of Edward II literature must converge on Marlowe’s late
sixteenth-century biopic drama of Edward II. Though Marlowe’s work
represents more a genesis than an apex to the genre, the work’s
significance culturally, politically, and historically apogizes it; while not the
last of its kind (indeed, Marlowe’s work seems to invigorate great interest
in Edward’s biography in Renaissance England), Marlowe’s version of the
life, reign, and love of Edward II clearly represents the zenith of this form of
literature.
The reason for this derives not from the reception of the work nor the
canonical respect that now lists Marlowe as perhaps second only to
Shakespeare among Renaissance playwrights; no, the genius and popular
response to Marlowe’s drama lies not within its reception, but within its
representation, both of Edward’s atypical sexuality and of the character of
the king himself. Lawrence Normand writes of Edward II that “while
characters in the play recognize sexuality in the relationship of the King and
Gaveston, they do not have one single discourse in which to represent
it.”[95] In causing sexuality to become recognizable, Marlowe crafts
multiple discourses based and centered upon the character he fashions for
Edward II. In fashioning his king, Marlowe creates Edward in opposition to
the common characterizations of men who indulged in same-sex love in
the literary Renaissance, a stereotype Marlowe himself perpetuated in
some of his earlier works, notably with his Ganymede figure in Dido, Queen
of Carthage. Marlowe’s Edward is no Sir Beauteous Ganymede. At the
same time, there is absolutely no concealment—nor even attempt at
concealment—on the part of Edward and Gaveston. They are not severed,
nor are they friends; they are lovers. Thus the character of Edward II
becomes, in reality, an act of defiance on Marlowe’s part—an author
recognizing the importance of sexuality and same-sex desire in the
construction of a literary character, but an author who likewise ignores the
standardized conventions associated with that sexuality in his time. In
Marlowe, sexuality becomes identity, the building block(s) on which he
fashions his main character. In doing so, Marlowe constructs a wholly new
typology of queer fashioning. By moving beyond stereotype, or the
common characteristics allowed in fashioning same-sex desire in his day,
Marlowe can explore the difficulties inherent in fulfilling one’s own sexual
desires, especially when those desires are considered atypical, while at the
same time serving society in the highest capacity, in this instance as
monarch and symbol of the realm.
Through this conflict, Marlowe fashions a new figure whose same-sex
love is the basis for his identity-formation, an icon with roots in earlier
Edward II literature. Oddly enough, while medieval historians had little
issue proclaiming (and, in some cases, declaiming) Edward II’s same-sex
love affairs, the fictions of Edward created prior to the Renaissance remain
somewhat reticent in discussing the king’s sexuality. The first chapter of
this study, “Sexuality as Silence: Representing Edward II in Medieval English
Literature” explores the historical recordings of Edward’s same-sex love
affairs in comparison to the praxis of silence that surrounds the king’s
sexuality in medieval-era works by Adam Davy, John Lydgate, and John
Barbour, among others. Silence is often said to speak volumes, but in these
works, what remains unsaid challenges and tempers the public memory of
Edward’s reign and the historical accounts of his same-sex love affairs. The
result is a discordant record, one in which the fictive accounts ring false,
because they lack a key component of the story. Indeed, their silence
perhaps engenders a void in which Marlowe can craft his own version of
the truth and the king, which is explored in the second chapter of this
study, “Sexuality as Identity: A King, A Lover, and a Crisis of Identity in
Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II.”
As a result of Marlowe’s reconfiguration of the quiddity of this
medieval king, his “queer” identity is appropriated by later writers in the
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gravely disporting himself at Oxford, exchanging compliments and
eating dinners with the sages and scholars at that seat of learning.
Another month was allowed to pass, and then, on the 24th of March
1733, the royal marriage was solemnised ‘in the French Chapel,’ St.
James’s, by the Bishop of London.
The ceremony was as theatrical and coarse as such things used
to be in those days. The prince must have looked very much as M.
Potier used to look in Riquet à la Houppe, before his transformation
from deformity to perfection. He was attired in a ‘cloth of gold suit;’
and George and Caroline may be pardoned if they smiled at the
‘baboon’ whom they were about to accept for their son-in-law. The
bride was ‘in virgin robes of silver tissue, having a train six yards
long, which was supported by ten dukes’ and earls’ daughters, all of
whom were attired in robes of silver tissue.’
Nature will assert its claims in spite of pride or expediency; and
accordingly it was observed that, after the bridegroom had arrived,
and the marriage procession began to move through the temporarily
constructed gallery, blazing with light, and glittering with bright gems
and brighter eyes, the bride herself seemed slightly touched, and
Caroline especially grave and anxious in her deportment. She
appeared, for the first time, to feel that her daughter was about to
make a great sacrifice, and her consequent anxiety was probably
increased by the conviction that it was too late to save her daughter
from impending fate. The King himself, who had never been in the
eager condition of the seigneur in the song, who so peremptorily
exclaims—

De ma fille Isabelle
Sois l’époux à l’instant—

manifested more impassibility than ever. Finally, the knot was tied
under a salvo of artillery and a world of sighs.
The ceremony took place in the evening, and at midnight the
royal family supped in public. It was a joyous festival, and not before
two in the morning did the jaded married couple retire to the bower
prepared for them, where they had to endure the further nuisance of
sitting up in bed, in rich undresses, while the court and nobility,
‘fresh’ from an exhilarating supper and strong wines, defiled before
them, making pleasant remarks the while, as ‘fine gentlemen’ used
to make who had been born in our Augustan age.
Caroline felt compassion for her daughter, but she restrained her
feelings until her eye fell upon the bridegroom. In his silver tissue
night-dress, his light peruque, his ugliness, and his deformity, he
struck her as the impersonation of a monster. His ill figure was so ill-
dressed, that, looked at from behind, he appeared to have no head,
and seen from before, he appeared as if he had neither neck nor
8
legs. The Queen was wonderfully moved at the sight—moved with
pity for her daughter, and with indignation at her husband. The
portion of the ceremony which used to be the merriest was by far the
most mournful, at least so far as the Queen’s participation therein
was concerned. She fairly cried with mingled vexation,
disappointment, and disgust. She could not even revert to the
subject, for days after, without crying, and yet laughing too, as the
oddity of the bridegroom’s ugliness came across her mind.
The married couple were assuredly a strangely assorted pair.
The bride, indeed, was not without common-place charms. In
common with a dairy-maid the princess had a lively clear look and a
very fair complexion. Like many a dairy-maid, too, of the time, she
was very much marked with the small-pox. She was also ill-made,
and inclined to become as obese as her royal mother. But then the
bridegroom! All writers dealing with the subject agree that his
ugliness was something extraordinary. No one doubts that he was
deformed; but Hervey adds some traits that are revolting. His serene
highness did not, like the gods, distil a celestial ichor. He appears,
however, not to have been void of sense or good feeling; for when,
at the period of his arrival, he was received with very scanty honours
and cold ceremony—was made to feel that he was nothing in
himself, and could only become anything here by marrying an
English princess; when George, if not Caroline, ‘snubbed’ the
courtiers who crowded his apartments at Somerset House; and
when, in short, the prince of 12,000l. a year was made to feel that
but little value was set upon him—he bore it all in silence, or as if he
did not perceive it. Let us hope that gallantry for the lady induced the
princely Quasimodo thus to act. It was almost more than she
deserved; for while the people were ready to believe that the alliance
was entered into the better to strengthen the Protestant succession,
Anne herself was immediately moved thereto by fear, if she were left
single, of ultimately depending for a provision upon her brother
Frederick.
Lord Hervey was the master of the ceremonies on this serio-
comic occasion. According to his table of precedence, the Irish peers
were to walk in the procession after the entire body of the peerage of
Great Britain. This was putting the highest Irish peer beneath the
lowest baron in Britain. The Hibernian lords claimed to walk
immediately after the English and Scotch peers of their own degree.
It was the most modest claim ever made by that august body; but,
modest as it was, the arrogant peers of Great Britain threatened, if
the claim were allowed, to absent themselves from the ceremony
altogether! The case was represented to Caroline, and she took the
side of right and common sense; but when she was told that to allow
the Irish claim would be to banish every British peer from the solemn
ceremony, she was weak enough to give way. Lord Hervey, in his
programme for the occasion, omitted to make any mention of the
peers of Ireland at all—thus leaving them to walk where they could.
On being remonstrated with, he said that if the Irish lords were not
satisfied he would keep all the finery standing, and they might walk
through it in any order of precedency they liked on the day after the
wedding. One lord grievously complained of the omission of the
illustrious Hibernian body from the programme. Lord Hervey excused
himself by remarking, that as the Irish house of peers was then
sitting in Dublin, he never thought, being an Englishman, of the
august members of that assembly being in two places at once.
The claim was probably disallowed because Ireland was not
then in union with England, as Scotland was. On no other ground
could the claim have been refused; and Caroline saw that even that
ground was not a very good one whereon to rest a denial. As it was,
the Irish peers felt like poor relations, neither invited to nor prohibited
from the joyous doings, but with a thorough conviction that, to use a
popular phrase, their room was deemed preferable to their company.
During the week following the marriage, Frederick, Prince of
Wales, was employed, after a fashion which suited his tastes
extremely well, in escorting his brother-in-law to witness the sights of
London. It then appears to have suddenly struck the government that
it would be as well to make an Englishman of the bridegroom, and
that that consummation could not be too quickly arrived at.
Accordingly, a bill for naturalising the prince was brought in and read
three times on the same day. It, of course, passed unanimously, and
the prince received the intelligence of his having been converted into
a Briton with a phlegm which showed that he had not altogether
ceased to be a Dutchman.
He was much more pleasurably excited in the April of the
following year, when he heard that the King had sent a written
message to the Commons, intimating that he had settled five
thousand a year on the princess royal, and desiring that they would
enable him to make the grant for the life of the princess, as it would
otherwise determine on his Majesty’s death. The Commons
complied with this message, and the Prince of Orange was infinitely
more delighted with this Act than with that which bestowed on him
the legal rights of an Englishman.
This pleasant little arrangement having been concluded, the
prince and princess set out for Holland, from St. James’s, on the
10th of April 1734; and in July of the same year the princess was
again in England, not at all to the satisfaction of her sire, and but
very scantily to the delight of her mother. The young lady, however,
was determined to remain; and it was not till November that she
once more returned to her home behind the dykes. The Queen was
not sorry to part with her, for just then she was deep in the fracas
connected with the dismissal of her husband’s ‘favourite,’ Lady
Suffolk, from her office of mistress of the robes to her Majesty, an
office in which she was succeeded by the more worthy Countess of
Tankerville. The King had the less time to be troubled with thought
about ‘that old deaf woman,’ as he very ungallantly used to call his
ancient ‘favourite,’ as he, too, was deeply engaged in protesting
against the Elector Palatine, who had been very vigorously
protesting against the right of the King, as Elector of Hanover, to
bear the title of arch-treasurer of the empire.
The commiseration which the Queen had felt for her daughter
was shared by the sister of the latter, the Princess Amelia, who
declared that nothing on earth could have induced her to wed with
such a man as the Prince of Orange. Her declaration was accepted
for as much as it was worth. The gentle Princess Caroline, on the
other hand, thought that her sister, under the circumstances, had
acted wisely, and that, had she been so placed, she would have
acted in like manner. Nor did the conduct of the bride give the world
any reason to think that she stood in need of pity. She appeared to
adore the ‘monster,’ who, it must be confessed, exhibited no
particular regard for his spouse. The homage she paid him was
perfect. ‘She made prodigious court to him,’ says Lord Hervey,
‘addressed everything she said to him, and applauded everything he
said to anybody else.’
Perhaps the pride of the princess would not permit a doubt to be
thrown upon her supreme happiness. Her brother Frederick strove to
mar it by raising a quarrel, on a slight, but immensely absurd,
foundation. He reproached her for the double fault of presuming to
be married before him, and of accepting a settlement from her father
when he had none. He was ingenious in finding fault; but there may
have been a touch of satire in this, for Anne was known to have
been as groundlessly angry with her brother for a circumstance
which he could not very well help, namely, his own birth, whereby the
princess royal ceased to be next heir to the crown.
The prince, however, was not much addicted to showing respect
to anybody, least of all to his mother. It was because of this
miserable want of respect for the Queen that the King, in an
interview forced on him by his son, refused to settle a fixed annuity
upon him—at least till he had manifested a more praiseworthy
conduct towards the Queen.
The anxiety of Frederick on this occasion was not unnatural, for
he was deeply in debt, and of the 100,000l. granted to the prince by
parliament out of the civil list, the King allowed him only 36,000l. The
remainder was appropriated by the King, who doubtless made his
son’s conduct the rule of his liberality, measuring his supplies to the
prince according as the latter was well or ill behaved. It was a
degrading position enough, and the degradation was heightened by
the silent contempt with which the King passed over his son’s
application to be permitted to join in active service. Throughout these
first family quarrels, the Queen preserved a great impartiality, with
some leaning, perhaps, towards serving her son. Nothing, however,
came of it; and, for the moment, Frederick was fain to be content
with doing the honours of the metropolis to his ungraceful brother-in-
law.
The congratulatory addresses which were presented on the
occasion of the marriage had a mordantly satirical tone about them.
It is wonderful how George and Caroline, whose unpopularity was
increasing at this time, continued to preserve their equanimity at
hearing praises rung on the name and services of ‘Orange’—the
name of a prince who had become King of England by rendering the
questionable service to his father-in-law of turning him off the throne.
The address of the Lords to the Queen, especially congratulating
the mother on the marriage of her daughter, was rendered painful
instead of pleasant by its being presented, that is spoken, to her by
Lord Chesterfield. Caroline had never seen this peer since the time
he was dismissed from her husband’s household, when she was
Princess of Wales. He had not been presented at court since the
accession of the present Sovereign, and the Queen was therefore
resolved to treat as an utter stranger the man who had been
impertinent enough to declare he designed that the step he took
should be considered as a compliment to the Queen. The latter
abhorred him, nevertheless, for his present attempt to turn the
compliment addressed to her by the Lords into a joke. Before he
appeared, Caroline intimated her determination not to let the peer’s
cool impertinence awe or disconcert her. He really did find what she
declared he should, that ‘it was as little in his power for his presence
to embarrass her as for his raillery behind her back to pique her, or
9
his consummate skill in politics to distress the King or his ministers.’
 The Queen acted up to this resolution. She received Lords
Chesterfield, Scarborough, and Hardwicke, the bearers of the
address, in her bedchamber, no one else being present but her
children and Lord Hervey, who stood behind her chair. The last-
named nobleman, in describing the scene, says: ‘Lord Chesterfield’s
speech was well written and well got by heart, and yet delivered with
a faltering voice, a face as white as a sheet, and every limb
trembling with concern. The Queen’s answer was quiet and natural,
and delivered with the same ease that she would have spoken to the
most indifferent person in her circle.’
Caroline, however, had more serious matters to attend to during
this year than affairs of marriage. Of these we will now briefly speak.
Sir Robert Walpole’s celebrated Excise scheme was prolific in
raising political agitations and exciting both political and personal
passions. The Peers were, strangely enough, even more resolute
against the measure than the Commons; or perhaps it would be
more correct to say, that a portion of them took advantage of the
popular feeling to further thereby their own particular interests and
especial objects.
It is again illustrative of the power and influence of Caroline, and
of the esteem in which she was held, that a body of the peers
delegated Lord Stair to proceed to the Queen, at Kensington, and
remonstrate with her upon the unconstitutional and destructive
measure, as they designated the Excise project.
Lord Stair was a bold man and was accustomed to meet and
contend with sovereigns. He had no doubt of being able to turn
Caroline to his purpose. But never did delegate perform his mission
so awkwardly. He thought to awaken the Queen’s indignation against
Walpole by imparting to her the valuable admonitory knowledge that
she was ruled by that subtle statesman. He fancied he improved his
position by informing her that Walpole was universally hated, that he
was no gentleman, and that he was as ill-looking as he was ill-
inclined. He even forgot his mission, save when he spoke of fidelity
to his constituents, by going into purely personal matters, railing at
the minister whose very shoe-buckles he had kissed in order to be
appointed vice-admiral of Scotland, when the Duke of Queensberry
was ejected from that post, and accusing Walpole of being
manifestly untrue to the trust which he held, seeing that whenever
there was an office to dispose of, he invariably preferred giving it to
the Campbells rather than to him—Stair. To the Campbells!—he
reiterated, as if the very name were enough to rouse Caroline
against Walpole. To the Campbells! who tried to rule England by
means of the King’s mistress; opposed to governing it by means of
the King’s wife.
Caroline heard him with decent and civil patience until he had
gone through his list of private grievances, and began to meddle with
matters personal to herself and the royal hearth. She then burst
forth, and was superb in her rebuke—superb in its matter and
manner—superb in her dignity and in the severity with which she
crushed Lord Stair beneath her fiery sarcasms and her withering
contempt. She ridiculed his assertions of fidelity, and told him he had
become traitor to his own country and the betrayer of his own
constituents. She mocked his complacent assurances that his object
was not personal, but patriotic. She professed her intense
abhorrence of having the private dissensions of noblemen ripped
open in her presence, and bade him learn better manners than to
speak, as he had done, of ‘the King’s servants to the King’s wife.’
‘My conscience,’ said Lord Stair.
‘Don’t talk to me of your conscience, my lord,’ said Caroline, ‘or I
shall faint.’ The conversation was in French, and the Queen’s
precise words were, ‘Ne me parlez point de conscience, milord; vous
me faites évanouir.’
The Scottish lord was sadly beaten down, and confessed his
disgraceful defeat by requesting her Majesty to be good enough to
keep what had passed at the interview as a secret. He added, in
French, ‘Madame, le Roi est trompé et vous êtes trahie’—‘The King
is deceived and you are betrayed.’ He had previously alluded to
Lords Bolingbroke and Carteret, as men worthy indeed to be trusted,
and who had the honour and glory of the kingdom at heart. These
names, with such testimonial attached to them, especially excited
the royal indignation. ‘Bolingbroke and Carteret!’ exclaimed Caroline.
‘You may tell them from me, if you will, that they are men of no parts;
that they are said to be two of the greatest liars in any country; and
10
that my observation and experience confirm what is said of them.’
Stair reiterated his request that the incidents of the private
interview should not be further spoken of. Caroline consented; and
she must have felt some contempt for him as he also promised that
he would keep them secret, giving knowledge thereof to no man.
‘Well?’ said Carteret, enquiringly, as he met with Lord Stair after
this notable interview with Caroline.
‘Well!’ exclaimed Lord Stair, ‘I have staggered her!’ A pigmy
might as well have boasted of having staggered Thalestris and
Hippolyta.
A short time subsequently Lord Hervey was with the Queen, in
her apartment, purveying to her, as he was wont to do, the floating
news of the day. Among other things, he told her of an incident in a
debate in parliament upon the army supplies. In the course of the
discussion, Carteret had observed that, at the period when Cardinal
Mazarin was ruining France by his oppressive measures, a great
man sought an audience of the Queen (Anne of Austria, mother of
the young King Louis XIV.), and after explaining to her the perils of
the times, ended with the remark that she was maintaining a man at
the helm who deserved to be rowing in the galleys.
Caroline immediately knew that Lord Stair had revealed what he
had petitioned her to keep secret; and feeling that she was thereby
exonerated from observing further silence, her Majesty took the
opportunity to ‘out with it all,’ as she said in not less choice French:
‘J’ai pris la première occasion d’égosiller tout.’
Reverting to Carteret’s illustration she observed that the ‘great
man’ noticed by him was Condé, a man who never had a word to
say against Mazarin as long as the cardinal fed a rapacity which
could never be satisfied. This was, in some degree, Stair’s position
with regard to Walpole. ‘Condé, in his interview with the Queen of
France,’ observed the well-read Queen of England, ‘had for his
object to impose upon her and France, by endeavouring to persuade
her that his private resentments were only a consequence of his zeal
for the public service.’
Lord Hervey, very gallantly and courtier-like, expressed his wish
that her Majesty could have been in the house to let the senate know
her wisdom; or that she could have been concealed there, to have
had the opportunity of saying, with Agrippine—

Derrière une voile, invisible, et présente,

Je fus de ce grand corps l’âme toute puissante.

The quotation, perhaps, could not have been altogether

applicable, but as Lord Hervey quoted it, and ‘my lord’ was a man of
wit, it is doubtless as well-placed as wit could make it. The Queen, at
all events, took it as a compliment, laughed, and declared, that often
when she was with these impatient fellows, ever ready with their
unreasonable remonstrances, she was tempted herself to say, with
Agrippine, that she was—

Fille, femme, et mère de vos maîtres;

a quotation less applicable even than the former, but in which Lord
Hervey detected such abundance of wit that he went into a sort of
ecstasy of delight at the Queen’s judgment, humour, knowledge, and
ability.
When the Excise bill was for the first time brought before the
house, the debate lasted till one in the morning. Lord Hervey, during
the evening, wrote an account of its progress to the King and Queen;
and when he repaired to the palace at the conclusion of the
discussion, the King kept him in the Queen’s bed-chamber, talking
over the scene, till three o’clock in the morning, and never for a
moment remembered that the hungry intelligencer had not dined
since the yesterday.
When the clamour against the bill rose to such a pitch that all
England, the army included, seemed ready to rise against it, Walpole
offered himself as a personal sacrifice, if the service and interests of
the King would be promoted by his surrender of office and power. It
is again illustrative of the influence of Caroline that this offer was
made to her and not to the King. He was in truth the Queen’s
minister; and nobly she stood by him. When Walpole made the offer
in question, Caroline declared that she would not be so mean, so
cowardly, or so ungrateful as to abandon him; and she infused the
same spirit into the King. The latter had intended, from the first, to
reign and govern, and be effectively his own minister; but Caroline
so wrought upon him that he thought he had of himself reached the
conviction that it was necessary for him to trust in a minister, and that
Walpole was the fittest man for such an office. And so he grew to
love the very man whom he had been wont to hold in his heart’s
extremest hate. He would even occasionally speak of him as a
‘noble fellow,’ and, with tears in his eyes, would listen to an account
of some courageous stand Walpole had made in the house against
the enemies of the government, and he would add the while a
running commentary of sobs.
The Queen’s greatest triumph was this overcoming of her
husband’s personal hatred for Walpole. It could not have been an
achievement easy to be accomplished. But her art in effecting such
achievements was supreme, and she alone could turn to her own
purpose the caprices of a hot-headed man, of whom it has been
said, that he was of iron obstinacy, but that he was unlike iron in this,
that the hotter he became the more impossible it was to bend him.
Caroline found him pliant when she found him cool. But then, too, he
was most wary, and it was necessary so to act as to cause every
turn which she compelled him to make appear to himself as if it were
the result of his own unbiassed volition.
Supremely able as Caroline was, she could not, however, always
conceal her emotion. Thus, at this very period of the agitation of the
Excise bill, on being told, at one of her evening drawing-rooms, of
the difficulties and dangers which beset the path of the government,
she burst into tears, became unusually excited, and finally affecting,
and perhaps feeling, headache and vapours, she broke up her
quadrille party, and betrayed in her outward manner an apparent
conviction of impending calamity. She evinced the same weakness
on being told, on a subsequent evening, that Walpole was in a
majority of only seventeen. Such a small majority she felt was a
defeat; and, on this occasion, she again burst into tears, and for the
first time expressed a fear that the court must give way! The
sovereign was, at the same time, as strong within her as the woman;
and when she heard of the subordinate holders of government posts
voting against the minister or declining to vote with him, she bitterly
denounced them, exclaiming, that they who refused to march with
their leader were as guilty as they who openly deserted, and that
11
both merited condign punishment.
The King on this occasion was as excited as his consort, but he
manifested his feelings in a different way. He made Lord Hervey
repeat the names of those who thwarted the views of the crown, and
he grunted forth an angry commentary at each name. ‘Lord John
Cavendish,’ began Hervey. ‘A fool!’ snorted the King. ‘Lord Charles
Cavendish.’ ‘Half mad!’ ‘Sir William Lowther.’ ‘A whimsical fellow!’
‘Sir Thomas Prendergast.’ ‘An Irish blockhead!’ ‘Lord Tyrconnel.’ ‘A
puppy,’ said George, ‘who never votes twice on the same side!’
On the other hand, the populace made their comment on the
proceedings of the court. It was rendered in a highly popular way,
and with much significancy. In the city of London, for instance, the
mob hung in effigy Sir Robert Walpole and a fat woman. The male
figure was duly ticketed. The female effigy was well understood to
mean the Queen.
Her power would, after all, not have followed in its fall that of
Walpole. Lord Hervey remarks, that had he retired, Caroline would
have placed before the King the names of a new ministry, and that
the administration would not have hung together a moment after it
had outlived her liking.
In the meantime her indefatigability was great. At the suggestion,
it is supposed, of Walpole, she sent for the Bishop of Salisbury, Dr.
Hoadly, who repaired to the interview with his weak person and
stately independence, if one may so speak, upheld by his ‘crutched
stick.’ His power must have been considered very great, and so must
his caprice; for he was frequently sent for by Caroline, remonstrated
with for supposed rebellion, or urged to exert all his good offices in
support of the crown. It is difficult to believe that the lengthy
speeches reported by Hervey were actually delivered by Queen and
bishop. There is nothing longer in Livy, and we are not told that any
one took them down. Substantially, however, they may be true. The
Queen was insinuating, complimentary, suggestive, and audacious;
the bishop all duty, submission, and promise—as far as his
consistency and principles could be engaged. But, after all, the
immense mountain of anxiety and stratagem was reared in vain, for
Walpole withdrew his bill, and Caroline felt that England was but
nominally a monarchy.
 CHAPTER IV.
FAMILY AND NATIONAL QUARRELS.

Retirement of Lady Suffolk—Tact of Queen Caroline—Arrogance of Princess

Anne—Private life of the royal family—The Count de Roncy, the French
refugee—German predilections of the Queen—A scene at court—Queen
Caroline’s declining health—Ambitious aspirations of Princess Anne—
Bishop Hoadly and the see of Winchester—The Queen and the clergy—
The Queen appointed Regent—The King and Madame Walmoden—Lord
Hervey’s imaginary post-obit diary—The Queen’s farewell interview with
Lady Suffolk—Grief made fashionable—The temper of the King on his
return—A scene: dramatis personæ, the King, Queen, and Lord Hervey—
Lady Deloraine (Pope’s Delia) a royal favourite—An angry scene between
the King and Queen—The King’s opinion of Bishop Hoadly—Dissension
between the King and Prince—The royal libertine at Hanover—Court
revels—Lady Bolingbroke and the Queen.

The year 1734 was marked by the retirement from court of the lady
whom it was the fashion to call the Queen’s rival. Mrs. Howard, on
becoming Countess of Suffolk, by the accession of her husband to
the earldom in 1731, had been raised to the office of mistress of the
robes to the Queen. Her husband died two years subsequently; and,
shortly after, the King’s widowed favourite was sought in marriage by
another suitor.
Her departure from court was doubtless principally caused by
this new prospect of a happier life. It may have been accelerated by
other circumstances. Lord Chesterfield, angry with the Queen for
forgetting to exert her promised influence for him in obtaining some
favour, applied to Lady Suffolk, and informed the Queen of the
course he had taken. Caroline thereon told the King that she had
had some petition to present on Lord Chesterfield’s behalf, but that
as he had entrusted it to Lady Suffolk’s presenting, her own
influence would probably be unavailing. The King, fired at the implied
affront to his consort, treated his old mistress, now nearly half a
century in years, with such severity that she begged to be permitted
to withdraw. Lady Suffolk brought her long career at court to a close
in this year, previous to her marriage with the Honourable George
Berkeley, younger son of the second Earl of Berkeley. He was
Master of St. Catherine’s in the Tower, and had served in two
parliaments as member for Dover. Horace Walpole, who knew Lady
Suffolk intimately when she was residing at Marble Hill, Twickenham,
and he at Strawberry Hill, says of her, that she was what may be
summed up in the word ‘lady-like.’ She was of a good height, well
made, extremely fair, with the finest light-brown hair, was remarkably
genteel, and was always dressed with taste and simplicity. He adds,
‘for her face was regular and agreeable rather than beautiful, and
those charms she retained, with little diminution, to her death, at the
age of seventy-nine’ (in July 1767). He does not speak highly of her
mental qualifications, but states that she was grave, and mild of
character, had a strict love of truth, and was rather apt to be
circumstantial upon trifles. The years of her life, after her withdrawal
from court, were passed in a decent, dignified, and ‘respectable’
manner, and won for her a consideration which her earlier career
had certainly not merited.
The Queen’s influence was even stronger than the favourite’s
credit. ‘Except a barony, a red riband, and a good place for her
brother, Sir John Hobart, Earl of Buckinghamshire, Lady Suffolk
could succeed but in very subordinate recommendations. Her own
acquisitions were so moderate, that, besides Marble Hill, which cost
the King ten or twelve thousand pounds, her complaisance had not
been too dearly purchased. She left the court with an income so little
to be envied, that though an economist and not expensive, by the
lapse of some annuities on lives not so prolonged as her own, she
found herself straitened, and, besides Marble Hill, did not at most
leave twenty thousand pounds to her family. On quitting court, she
12
married Mr. George Berkeley, and outlived him.’
It is not certain how far Caroline’s influence was exercised in the
removal of Lady Suffolk, whom the Queen, according to some
authors, requested to continue some time longer in her office of
mistress of the robes. Nor is it important to ascertain. Caroline had
higher duties to perform. She continued to serve her husband well,
and she showed her opinion of her son, the Prince of Wales, by her
conduct to him on more than one occasion. Thus, on New Year’s
Day the prince attended his royal sire’s levée, not with any idea of
paying his father the slightest measure of respect, but, suspecting
that the King would not speak to him, to show the people with what
contempt the homage of a dutiful son was met by a stern parent.
When Caroline heard of the design, she simply persuaded the King
to address his son kindly in public. This advice was followed, and the
filial plot accordingly failed.
The Queen was as resolute in supporting the King against being
driven into settling a permanent income upon the prince. She spoke
of the latter as an extravagant and unprincipled fool, only less
ignorant than those who were idiots enough to give opinions upon
what they could not understand. ‘He costs the King 50,000l. a-year,
and till he is married that may really be called a reasonable
allowance.’ She stigmatised him as a ‘poor creature,’ easily led
away, but not naturally bad-hearted. His seducers she treated as
knaves, fools, and monsters. To the suggestion that a fixed
allowance, even if it should be less than what the King paid out for
him every year, would be better than the present plan, Caroline only
replied that the King thought otherwise; and so the matter rested.
The tact of the Queen was further displayed in the course
adopted by her on an occasion of some delicacy. Lord Stair had
been deprived of his regiment for attempting to bring in a law
whereby the commissions of officers should be secured to them for
life. The King said he would not allow him to keep by favour what he
had endeavoured to keep by force. Thereupon Lord Stair addressed
a private letter to the Queen, through her lord-chamberlain, stuffed
with prophetic warnings against the machinations of France and the
designs of Walpole.
Caroline, on becoming acquainted with the contents of the
epistle, rated her chamberlain soundly, and bade him take it instantly
to Sir Robert Walpole, with a request to the latter to lay it before the
King. She thus ‘very dexterously avoided the danger of concealing
such a letter from the King, or giving Sir Robert Walpole any cause
of jealousy from showing it.’ His Majesty very sententiously observed
upon the letter, that Lord Stair ‘was a puppy for writing it, and the
lord-chamberlain a fool for bringing it.’ The good chamberlain was a
fool for other reasons also. He had no more rational power than a
vegetable, and his solitary political sentiment was to this effect, and
wrapped up in very bad English: ‘I hate the French, and I hope as we
13
shall beat the French.’
The times were growing warlike, and it was on the occasion of
the Prince of Orange going to the camp of Prince Eugene that the
Princess Anne returned to England. She was as arrogant and as
boldly spoken as ever. In the latter respect she manifested much of
the spirit of her mother. During her stay at court, the news of the
surrender of Philipsburg reached this country. Her highness’s remark
thereon, in especial reference to her royal father, is worth quoting. It
was addressed to Lord Hervey, who was leading the princess to her
own apartment after the drawing-room. ‘Was there ever anything so
unaccountable,’ said she, shrugging up her shoulders, ‘as the
temper of papa? He has been snapping and snubbing every mortal
for this week, because he began to think Philipsburg would be taken;
and this very day, that he actually hears it is taken, he is in as good
humour as I ever saw him in in my life. To tell you the truth,’ she
added, in French, ‘I find that so whimsical, and (between ourselves)
so utterly foolish, that I am more enraged by his good, than I was
before by his bad, humour.’
‘Perhaps,’ answered Lord Hervey, ‘he may be about Philipsburg
as David was about the child, who, whilst it was sick, fasted, lay
upon the earth, and covered himself with ashes, but the moment it
was dead, got up, shaved his beard, and drank wine.’ ‘It may be like
David,’ said the princess royal, ‘but I am sure it is not like Solomon.’
It was hardly the time for Solomons. Lord Chancellor King was a
man of the people, who, by talent, integrity, and perseverance, rose
to the highest rank to which a lawyer can work his way. He lost his
popularity almost as soon as he acquired the seals, and these he
was ultimately compelled, from growing imbecility of mind, to resign.
He was the most dilatory in rendering judgments of all our
chancellors, and would never willingly have decided a question, for
fear he should decide it incorrectly. This characteristic, joined to the
fact of his having published a history of the Apostles’ Creed, extorted
from Caroline the smart saying, that ‘He was just in the law what he
had formerly been in the Gospel, making creeds upon the one
without any steady belief, and judgments in the other without any
settled opinion. But the misfortune for the public is,’ said Caroline,
‘that though they could reject his silly creeds, they are forced often to
submit to his silly judgments.’
The court private life of the sovereigns at this time was as dull as
can well be imagined. There were two persons who shared in this
life, and who were very miserably paid for their trouble. These were
the Count de Roncy and his sister. They were French Protestants,
who, for conscience’ sake, had surrendered their all in France and
taken refuge in England. The count was created Earl of Lifford in
Ireland. His sister, Lady Charlotte de Roncy, was governess to the
younger children of George II. Every night in the country, and thrice a
week when the King and Queen were in town, this couple passed an
hour or two with the King and Queen before they retired to bed.
During this time ‘the King walked about, and talked to the brother of
armies, or to the sister of genealogies, while the Queen knotted and
yawned, till from yawning she came to nodding, and from nodding to
14
snoring.’
This amiable pair, who had lived in England during four reigns,
were in fact hard-worked, ill-paid court-drudges; too ill-paid, even, to
appear decently clad; an especial reproach upon Caroline, as the
lady was the governess of her children. But they were not harder
worked, in one respect, than Caroline herself, who passed seven or
eight hours tête-à-tête with the King every day, ‘generally saying
what she did not think,’ says Lord Hervey, ‘and forced, like a spider,
to spin out of her own bowels all the conversation with which the fly
was taken.’ The King could bear neither reading nor being read to.
But, for the sake of power, though it is not to be supposed that
affection had not some part in influencing Caroline to undergo such
heavy trial, she endured that willingly, and indeed much more than
that.
At all events, she had some respect for her husband; but she
despised the son, who, in spite of her opinion of the natural
goodness of his heart, was mean and mendacious. The prince,
moreover, was weaker of understanding and more obstinate of
temper than his father. The latter hated him, and because of that
hatred, his brother, the Duke of Cumberland, was promoted to public
employment. His sisters betrayed him. Had Caroline not had a
contempt for him, she would have influenced the King to a very
different line of conduct.
It was said of Frederick, that, from his German education, he
was more of a German than an Englishman. But the bias alluded to
was not stronger in him than it was in his mother.
Caroline was so much more of a German than of an
Englishwoman, that when the interests of Germany were concerned
she was always ready to sacrifice the interests of England. Her
daughter Anne would have had Europe deluged in blood for the
mere sake of increasing her own and her husband’s importance. In a
general war she thought he would come to the surface. Caroline was
disinclined to go to war for the empire only because she feared that,
in the end, there might be war in England, with the English crown for
the stake.
There was at this time in London a dull and proud imperial
envoy, named Count Kiuski. He was haughty and impertinent in his
manner of demanding succour, as his master was in requiring it,
from the Dutch. Caroline rallied him on this one day, as he was riding
by the side of her carriage at a stag-hunt. She used a very homely
and not a very nice illustration to show the absurdity of losing an end
by foolishly neglecting the proper means. ‘If a handkerchief lay
before me,’ said she, ‘and I felt I had a dirty nose, my good Count
Kiuski, do you think I should beckon the handkerchief to come to me,
15
or stoop to take it up?’
Political matters were not neglected at these hunting-parties.
Lord Hervey, ‘her child, her pupil, and her charge,’ who constantly
rode by the side of her carriage, on a hunter which she had given
him, and which could not have been of much use to him if he never
quitted the side of his mistress, used to discuss politics while others
followed the stag. The Queen, who was fourteen years older than
he, used to say, ‘It is well I am so old, or I should be talked of
because of this creature!’ And indeed the intercourse was constant
and familiar. He was always with her when she took breakfast, which
she usually did alone, and was her chief friend and companion when
the King was absent. Such familiarity gave him considerable
freedom, which the Queen jokingly called impertinence, and said that
he indulged in that and in contradicting her because he knew that
she could not live without him.
It was at a hunting-party that Lord Hervey endeavoured to
convince her that for England to go to war for the purpose of serving
the empire would be a disastrous course to take. He could not
convince her in a long conversation, and thereupon, the chase being
over, he sat down and penned a political pamphlet, which he called a
letter, which was ‘as long as a “President’s Message,” and which he
forwarded to the Queen.’ If Caroline was not to be persuaded by it,
she at least thought none the worse of the writer, who had spared no
argument to support the cause in which he boldly pleaded.
We have another home-scene depicted by Lord Hervey, which at
once shows us an illustration of parental affection and parental
indifference. The Princess Anne, after a world of delay, had
reluctantly left St. James’s for Holland, where her husband awaited
her, and whither she went for her confinement. The last thing she
thought of was the success of the opera and the triumph of Handel.
She recommended both to the charge of Lord Hervey, and then went
on her way to Harwich, sobbing. When she had reached Colchester
she, upon receiving some letters from her husband stating his
inability to be at the Hague so soon as he expected, started
suddenly for Kensington.
In the meantime, in the palace at the latter place Lord Hervey
found the Queen and the gentle Princess Caroline sitting together,
drinking chocolate, shedding tears, and sobbing, all at the absence
of the imperious Lady Anne. The trio had just succeeded in