#historian: e. amanda mcvitty

[une-sanz-pluis]

Similar slippages between knighthood and treason arose in Henry Percy’s rebellion in 1403. After deposing Richard II in 1399, Henry IV had drawn on his reputation as a knight and on chivalric institutions such as the Order of the Garter to legitimise his own kingship and to secure the support of the nobility. Percy, meanwhile, was considered to be a model of ideal manhood, ‘the flower and glory of Christian knighthood’, and he had a record of military service under first Richard II and then Henry IV. Percy had supported the armed invasion of England in 1399 by Henry of Lancaster (the future Henry IV) and had since been fighting the Scots on behalf of his new king. Yet by 1403, Percy was in rebellion. The essence of his cause was that Henry was not the true king because he had broken his oath not to claim the throne, and Percy had issued written proclamations stating this. Henry IV accused Percy of treason, precipitating a conflict in which Percy and the king fought, first verbally and then physically, over who was the ‘true’ man. The account of their confrontation in An English Chronicle demonstrates how, in the context of treason, political conflict could be expressed through such debates over the claim to knightly manhood. When he was accused, Percy first sought to defend his honour through a knightly trial by battle, saying: ‘Traytour am I non, but a true man and as a true mon [sic] I speke.’ The kynge drue to hym his dagger; and then he seid to the kynge, ‘Not here but in the fielde.’ The perception of treason as an inversion of chivalric masculinity is strikingly illustrated in Percy’s claim that he is no traitor but a ‘true man’, a gendered identity that he will prove with his body in knightly combat. Percy met the king in battle at Shrewsbury, where he further stressed his claim to be the ‘true man’ in the encounter by telling Henry IV ‘thou payeste no man, thou holdeste no house’, both of these signalling the king’s failure to perform the chivalric virtue of largesse. Percy was slain in the battle and Henry IV seems to have had the last word in terms of marking him as a traitor by immediately having his head ‘smytte off and sett up ate Yorke’. However, rumours persisted that Percy was alive, risking the potential validation of his cause in his trial by battle and thereby his claim to be the ‘true man’ in his clash with the king. Henry IV was forced to re-enact the public degradation of Percy’s manhood by having his corpse disinterred and shamefully exposed between two millstones in Shrewsbury marketplace. That these conflicting claims to chivalric manhood could only be ended by Henry’s desecration of Percy’s corpse suggests that knightly identity was at its most fragile when it was constructed through the unstable opposition of traitor to true man.

E. Amanda McVitty, ‘False knights and true men: contesting chivalric masculinity in English treason trials, 1388–1415′, Journal of Medieval History, 40:4, 2014.

[qqueenofhades]

Hello I see that your ask is open. I imagine from what I've seen that you know and like the Tennant Richard II and I only recently experienced it (had it forever but the Tenaissance is upon us at the heels of Good Omens) and I would like to invite you to share any feels or flails or complexities you might have in terms of the relationship of Shakespeare to History or Kingship to Divinity or the conflation of Queerness with Otherness etc in the context of that performance

OH NO. YOU REALLY WANT ME TO GO THERE DO YOU. 

First of all: yes, the Tennant Richard II changed my life, after I watched it with @oldshrewsburyian whilst on vacation at the start of June and had to yell at her about my feelings for like ten minutes afterward. I was just SO FASCINATED by the things it did with gender and kingship and queerness (god! It was SO GAY! I was NOT PREPARED! The kiss with Aumerle broke my brain the first time I saw it). I was compiling a preliminary bibliography for my new queer medieval book project a couple weeks ago (which is very interesting, if I do say so myself, and I am really trying to get someone to give me money to research it at their institution) and I discovered an article basically arguing that the RSC Richard II was bad because Richard was portrayed as effeminate and openly queer/bi. Now, to be mostly fair, I think it was because it wanted to critique the association of queer men with effeminacy, rather than being homophobic, but it was still…. a bad take? Or at least a substantially underdeveloped one. It never said why this was bad, it never really got into the gender politics of what it wanted to say about this performance and the queerness thereof, and I was left looking at it like… uh huh, so… what’s your point here pal? (It griped about Gregory Dolan changing the script to have Aumerle kill Richard, but given as every Shakespeare play alters the script or staging or whatever else, I was still waiting for it to say something more about that too. But no. Anyway).

My feelings about Shakespeare, queerness, and queer Shakespeare have recently been noted. I have been working my way through Shakesqueer, which is undoubtedly fascinating, though as a historian I sometimes find all this theoretical vagueness a little TOO broad and am like DEFINE SOMETHING AND SAY SOMETHING ABOUT IT RATHER THAN SAYING THAT YOU CAN’T SAY SOMETHING. But that’s a personal methodological thing on my part, and it certainly has been delightfully helpful in pointing out how none of Shakespeare’s plays are in the least Straight ™ by modern standards, even if technically none of his characters are LGBT. Obviously, they would not be constructed as such by sixteenth-century terms, but that’s another debate. He absolutely left the exact interpretative space that many productions have taken advantage of, some plays are VERY heavy on the subtext, and while critics have argued that the gender subversion and sexual fluidity is introduced only to re-establish heteronormative supremacy at the end, I think that is a fairly shallow reading. Why otherwise HAVE it so consistently, when its negotiation and presence is part of the ways in which these characters can and often have been read? Just because everyone gets married at the end of the comedies doesn’t mean that the queerness has been negated or made irrelevant. Arguably, the opposite.

Anyway, one of my main contentions in this premodern queer lives book project that I’m developing is that when we read the past as queer, we have to take care that we’re not only considering it as thus in comparison to modern heteronormativity, which we consider to be monolithic and transhistorical and applicable to all times and places. Richard Zeikowitz (among others) has made this point in Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the 14th Century. Male desire that we would consider “queer” either in its affection or formulation was solidly mainstream, and if we read that as Queer/Other, we risk imposing an estrangement on medieval/early modern queerness that may not have necessarily existed within its community. Yes, we’re all aware of the anti-sodomitical polemics of clerical writers, but consider: why did those guys (the equivalent of right-wing religious commentators today) keep having to write things complaining about it if nobody was doing it, if it wasn’t visible or accepted at all in society, or it was only a theoretical concern that had no relevance to anyone’s daily lives? This is why it drives me so batty when the Straight Historians inevitably try the “just because it was being written about doesn’t mean anyone was doing it!!!” erasure tactic. My dude my guys my pals. How do you think rhetoric even works?

In the particular case of Richard II, there was absolutely a queer discourse/suspicion of queerness around him in his own time (see Sylvia Federico, ‘Queer Times: Richard II in thePoems and Chronicles of Late Fourteenth-Century England’) and it was part of a larger late-medieval discourse of suspected sodomy around kings and their favourites, not just in England but in other places across Europe. (Henric Bagerius and Christine Ekholst, ‘Kingsand Favourites: Politics and Sexuality in Late Medieval Europe’, and E. Amanda McVitty also talks about Richard, his favourites, chivalric masculinity and homosociality in ‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting ChivalricMasculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415′). So…. yes, there is considerable leeway to depict him as queer, and Shakespeare does write it in the text in the scene where Bushy and Green are accused, prior to their execution by Bolingbroke:

You have misled a prince, a royal king,A happy gentleman in blood and lineaments,By you unhappied and disfigured clean:You have in manner with your sinful hoursMade a divorce betwixt his queen and him,Broke the possession of a royal bedAnd stain’d the beauty of a fair queen’s cheeksWith tears drawn from her eyes by your foul wrongs.

“Made a divorce betwixt his queen and him/Broke the possession of a royal bed.” Yeah, they’re Richard’s boyfriends. Both we and the Elizabethan audience would have understood it that way. Bushy, Bagot, and Green are fictional, but Robert de Vere, duke of Ireland, was Richard’s real-life favourite and was accused by Thomas Walsingham at least of sleeping with him or otherwise having some taint of an “obscene relationship”. But Richard was also notably devoted to his first wife, Anne of Bohemia, so as ever, bisexuality exists, my pals. It can go both ways.

….anyway, this swiftly got away from me, so in conclusion, let me relate an actual dream I had last night, for which we can 100% blame the heat. In it, I was watching some Shakespeare play or other, and there was a scene in which the villain dramatically pushed the blonde heroine into the arms of his muscle-bound henchmen in their flowing trousers, then turned to the hero and announced that he would do the same to him. To this, in what was supposed to probably be a defiant “you just try it” moment in other versions of fictional Shakespeare plays that my subconscious writes, the hero stared him dead in the eye, whisked his tunic off to reveal he was wearing nothing but a jeweled G-string underneath, and announced that lo, NOW HE WAS PREPARED. DO THY WORST.

I can only think that this is exactly what Shakespeare would have wanted.

[une-sanz-pluis]

All three parties to this plot were found guilty and on the face of it, they received similar sentences: ‘As traitors…they should be drawn, hanged and beheaded.’ Elements of this punishment were remitted for Gray and the earl of Cambridge, but Lescrope – the conspirator perceived to be closest to and most beloved of the king – was subjected to the worst punishment. He was drawn, beheaded and his head displayed on the gates of York. In Lescrope’s case, it was because of his status as a Knight of the Garter that he was treated more harshly, an interesting contrast to the treatment of the Garter knight Sir Simon Burley. The trial record explains: The aforesaid Henry, Lord Lescrope, is however a knight of that illustrious and excellent military Order of the Garter…; the same Henry, therefore, despite being in the same order, should be lawfully punished for his crime, without allowing any person to presume to malign or think ill of that illustrious order for those who wear it worthily. This condemnation of Lescrope seems to contain a sense of unease about falseness that might lurk even within that most idealised model of manhood, the Garter knight, and about the ever-present potential for corruption of homosocial bonds of love that were so crucial to the performance of chivalric masculinity. The admonition that no one ‘should presume to malign or think ill of that venerable Order to those who wear it worthily’ suggests an awareness of this potential and an attempt to foreclose dangerous interpretations of Lescrope’s execution. It was Lescrope’s profound violation of knighthood that made him more blameworthy and therefore deserving the harshest punishment. The degrading process of drawing, public beheading and the display of his severed head was intended to mark him out as an anomaly, a debased inversion of true manhood who had been emphatically excised from the masculine body politic. However, the warning that no one should interpret Lescrope’s fall as a reason to malign men who remained members of the Garter implies an underlying anxiety about the tenuous nature of a gendered identity that was constructed and performed through structures of masculine chivalric intimacy.

E. Amanda McVitty, ‘False knights and true men: contesting chivalric masculinity in English treason trials, 1388–1415′, Journal of Medieval History, 40:4, 2014.

[une-sanz-pluis]

The legal records of Oldcastle's trial drew on the chivalric model of treason but to a large extent this was subsumed by judicial constructions of treason as a crime against the people and nation of England. As with the Percys, the understanding of treason as a personal betrayal was represented by fears that corrupt homosocial affinities had subverted natural masculine bonds between political subjects and the king. In the indictment arising from a commission of oyer and terminer of 10 January 1414, Oldcastle, the lollard chaplain Walter Blake and Sir John Acton were charged with planning a Privatim insurgerent to advance their nephando propositio. The term 'private insurgency' distinguished this as unsanctioned aggression and pre-empted any defence that Oldcastle's actions were a legitimate performance of dififidatio. The term privatim, when linked to the term nephando, suggested that Oldcastle and his followers had formed a secret confederacy against the king. As discussed earlier, nephando invoked the most extreme form of perverse male attachment, the sin of sodomy, which was characteristically referred to in late medieval theological tracts and legal texts as nephandum peccatum or 'unspeakable sin'. Canon and civil law connected sodomy to lèse-majesté and heresy in a triumvirate of hidden crimes that were rooted in unnatural deviance. Invoking a universally understood legal and intellectual framework in which gender inversion signalled wilful rebellion against divinely-ordained natural order, the traitor, the heretic and the sodomite all stood as existential threats to the integrity of the masculine body politic. Echoing the gendered rhetoric of nephandum in the Oldcastle indictment, the idea of unnatural bonds also surfaced in the April 1414 statute, which targeted 'those belonging to the heretical sect called lollardy as well as others of their confederacy'. The discursive link between lollardy as a sect and the forming of dangerous confederacies deliberately seeded the idea that the problem was not lone malcontents but a well-organised cabal. For the Lancastrian regime, it must have seemed that in Oldcastles betrayal and rebellion, their deepest forebodings about perverse homosocial affinities had been fully realised.

E. Amanda McVitty, Treason and Masculinity in Medieval England: Gender, Law and Political Culture (The Boydell Press 2020)