Love, Sodomy, and Scandal: Controlling the Sexual Reputation of Henry III

In 1589 Henry III, king of France, was addressed by an outraged subject as "Henry of Valois, buggerer, son of a whore, tyrant."¹ The audacity of calling a king by his family name and then attacking him in sexually pejorative terms indicates not just the intensity of the anger directed at Henry but the inclusion in popular fury of markers of sexual deviance. Indeed, the legacy of Henry III, who reigned from 1574 to 1589, has been fraught with sexual innuendo. Assumptions of deviance, formulated in his lifetime, have been used ever since to explain the problems of his reign, which ended with his assassination in the midst of a bloody civil war. Among the recent iterations of that negative image is Shekhar Kapur's 1998 film Elizabeth, which represents Henry, then duke of Anjou, as a silly, cross-dressing fop, more interested in the men of his entourage than in courting the queen of England. In this instance, as in others, the film is inaccurate: it conflates Henry, who never visited England, with his younger brother, Francis, duke of Alençon, who did court Elizabeth in person but was not renowned for flamboyant behavior. Kapur's film presents Henry's sexual deviance not merely as fact but as explanatory fact: he was a bad king because he was deviant. Henry's sexuality is depicted similarly in Patrice Chéreau's 1994 film La Reine Margot, based upon Alexandre Dumas père's 1845 novel of the same name. The film presents Henry as having both an incestuous desire for his sister, Marguerite, and a preference for male company. French history textbooks also include Henry III's alleged sexual misdeeds in discussions of his reign. James B. Collins describes him as cross-dressing and asserts that "Henry's contemporaries believed him to be bisexual."² All of these representations of Henry III make extensive reference, more or less sexualized, to male favorites. Their presence situates Henry as sexually and thus politically deviant. The political conclusion does not necessarily follow, of course, making it clear that the recent rhetoric is a synecdoche for a mode of political polemic that employs the capacious definition of sodomy in its condemnation.

A capital offense in early modern France (although not often prosecuted), sodomy was conceptualized as a sin against nature. It encompassed a range of nonreproductive sexual acts that included masturbation as well as acts involving two men, a person and an animal, or a man and a woman if performed in such a way as to prevent conception.³ Because of its expansive range of meanings, sodomy was often cataloged among the usual sexual behaviors. However, as David Teasley has pointed out, for a king like Henry, who claimed to be chosen by God, it was especially troublesome that sodomy was a mortal sin.⁴ Moreover, because in Renaissance theory passive male sexual acts were deemed unmanly or effeminate, for a ruler it was problematic that sodomy was associated with weakness.⁵ While some historians such as David Potter dismiss the impact of the king's sexual reputation on the unstable political context of the 1570s,⁶ others, including David Bell and Guy Poirier, consider Henry's rumored sexual misbehavior to be a factor in the unraveling of the late Valois monarchy.⁷

Influenced by Michel Foucault, much recent discussion has focused on whether Henry and his favorites were articulating some sort of homosexual identity or were, instead, simply engaging in intimate sexual acts (termed "sodomitical" at the time) without developing a sense of being "homosexual." In this vein, Joseph Cady has argued that a notion of "homosexual orientation" is implicit in the actions associated with the king's person.⁸ While Henry did not operate in anything resembling the discernible subculture many historians believe to be necessary for identity formation, Cady's...