Thanks, Max, for your immoral support!
The other thing that amuses me about Richard is the apparent lack of fuss made then about his being gay. It seems that 12 Century was a much more tolerant era than the 20th, or at least an era in which it was recognised that one's sexual proclivities have little or no relevance to one's competence as a political leader.
I rather think that a king in the thirteenth century, provided he brought home the bacon, could do damned well anything he liked. Certainly our Rich was more French than English. We tend to forget than until roughly Tudor times England was pretty much a small backwater hanging off Europe and regarded as more of a nuisance in Europe than anything else. The Hundred Years War was seen in France as a side show (unless you got in the way of it, of course), and that was over 100 years later than Richard. If you read French history instead of English, you begin to get the idea. France would have been much more congenial to a man of Richard's tastes since it was the centre of elegance and nascent chivalry which England very much was not.
