FOR SKEWL!

RICHARD THE LIONHEARTED!
King of England. Richard was famed for his reckless courage and extreme cruelty‒he massacred 3,000 brave Moslems who had surrendered Acre to the Crusaders under his safe conduct‒as well as for gallantry to many, including Saladin. Favorite of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who set him against his royal father Henry 11 of England-himself falsely accused of having loved Thomas Becket, with whom he did share a bed on occasion while carousing and wenching together before Becket became Archbishop of Canterbury- Richard has been seen by some as a mama's boy.

The Norman and Angevin (Plantagenet] kings of England were, along with their courtiers, regularly accused by monkish chroniclers of sodomy. It was not true of Henry 11, who .made his son's fiancee Alice of France his mistress to the outrage of Eleanor and Richard. The accusation rings true, however, for William II Rufus (ca. 1056-1100), as for his nephew Prince William (son of his brother Henry I), who was coasting down the Channel with his frivolous, effcrninate companions, when the White Ship capsized‒"God's vengeance on the sodomites," as the chroniclers declared.


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