a fellow shipper
T. H. White apparently read the same book that Jean Anouilh did-Augustin Thierry's Norman Conquest of England-and wrote this note in its endpapers:
[With Thomas Becket the King] seems to have had one of the most important relationships of his life. Sodomy was a Norman vice, and Becket beautiful as well as strong, but there need have been no physical relationship. Indeed, it is most unlikely. But he did have a most intense emotional relationship with Becket, and I have no doubt that he submitted sincerely to the rods… Consider this fat, grey-eyed, bloodshot, strangely attractive sportsman kneeling to be whipped before the tomb of that beautiful person whom he had personally known to be a saint long before he was canonised, who he had persecuted all his life ("hell knows no fury like a woman scorned") and whom he had driven to revolt because he loved him and could not for that reason permit him to live his own life. Henry is a very real person.
(quoted in T. H. White's The Once and Future King by Elisabeth Brewer)
Also posted on Dreamwidth, with
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[With Thomas Becket the King] seems to have had one of the most important relationships of his life. Sodomy was a Norman vice, and Becket beautiful as well as strong, but there need have been no physical relationship. Indeed, it is most unlikely. But he did have a most intense emotional relationship with Becket, and I have no doubt that he submitted sincerely to the rods… Consider this fat, grey-eyed, bloodshot, strangely attractive sportsman kneeling to be whipped before the tomb of that beautiful person whom he had personally known to be a saint long before he was canonised, who he had persecuted all his life ("hell knows no fury like a woman scorned") and whom he had driven to revolt because he loved him and could not for that reason permit him to live his own life. Henry is a very real person.
(quoted in T. H. White's The Once and Future King by Elisabeth Brewer)
Also posted on Dreamwidth, with
comment(s)