MICHAEL WOOD’S VIEW
Back in the seventies when I first visited Istanbul, wandering round the famous archaeological museum I came across an extraordinary exhibit: a seven-foot-long tombstone dating from 1391. When it was first discovered, it was thought to show a married couple. Only later did experts conclude that the tombstone in fact depicted two English knights. But here’s the surprise: the knights, in a sense, had indeed been married.
The mystery of their relationship was untangled in a wonderful book by the late Alan Bray, The Friend. Sir William Neville came from the famous Durham family; Sir John Clanvowe was a Welsh diplomat, soldier and poet who wrote The Book of Cupid, God of Love (which later inspired Milton, Wordsworth and Handel). After Clanvowe died, Neville, “who had loved him more than himself… fell into such inconsolable sorrow that he took no food and died four days later”. They were buried with their visors touching, as if kissing, “faithful unto death”.
That story came to mind recently as the Church of England restated its teaching that marriage is a union between a man and a woman; that it will not conduct same-sex marriage services, nor permit clergy to bless same-sex civil marriages; that clergy cannot be married to same-sex partners. What Bray showed, however, is that up and down the land are monuments, tombstones and church records revealing that the church did recognise, and commemorate union between, two people of the same sex. From crusader knights and Oxbridge scholars to Elizabethan gents, Georgian clergymen and doughty Yorkshire gentlewomen, these people’s love was acknowledged and blessed by the church.
Not that the medieval and early modern church was a model of open-mindedness. But in earlier times, spiritual friendship of an intimate kind between men or women could be held up as a model of a Christian life. There are medieval liturgies for same-sex spiritual friendship enacted in church, while two of Henry V’s pages swore love and ritual brotherhood in church at Harfleur before the battle of Agincourt – part of an old tradition of spiritual same-sex union.
This runs right through medieval and Elizabethan literature. Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays are full of intense portrayals of male friendship. And the story is about women too: one of the most beautiful monuments in Westminster Abbey commemorates Mary Kendall (died 1710) and talks about “the close union and friendship in which she lived with the Lady Catherine Jones; and in testimony of which she desired that even their ashes after death might not be divided”.
Most famous perhaps (it was made into a TV drama starring Maxine Peake not long ago) is the tale of Anne Lister of Shibden Hall near Halifax, who plighted her troth with rings to her “wife” Ann Walker in the little church of Holy Trinity Goodramgate on Easter Day 1834. Her story is contained in one of the most extraordinary diaries in British history: the 27-volume record of her life and marriage, including her sex life. Lister later died on her travels in faraway Georgia, and Walker went through incredible hardships to bring her body back, so they could still be buried together in church.
Paradoxically, the 18th-century Enlightenment marks the beginning of the end of this medieval idea of loving same-sex union, until its revival in the late 20th century. Homosexuality was legislated against in the mid-Victorian period, culminating in the 1885 Act. But even then the latest research, trawling a quarter of a million criminal cases in the National Archives, shows that from 1850 to 1914 there were few prosecutions for gay sex – four or five a year, of which half were thrown out.
So, despite their buttoned-up image, the Victorians preferred not to intrude on the private lives of consenting adults. The real surprise though is the spike in cases in the 20 years up to decriminalisation in 1967. A last puritanical reaction to the growth of the permissive society perhaps? And now, 50 years on, the Church of England is still tearing itself apart over these matters of the heart. But perhaps some of the answers, as always, lie in history?