Queer Royals You (Probably) Never Heard About

Edward II. and his Favourite, Piers Gaveston by Marcus Stone. 1872

Royal history is written by the people who inherit the palace, and for centuries that meant scrubbing anything inconvenient out of the record — including who the king actually loved. Some of what follows is undisputed. Some of it is argued over by historians who will never fully agree, because the sources themselves were often written by people with a reason to lie. Both kinds of story are worth telling.

James I and George Villiers

James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, and by the 1610s the most powerful man at his court, after the king himself, was a minor gentleman’s son named George Villiers. James made him a viscount, then an earl, then a marquess, then in 1623 the Duke of Buckingham — the only man in England to hold that rank without royal blood. He called him “Steenie,” after Saint Stephen, who was said to have the face of an angel.

The letters survive. James signed himself Villiers’s “dear dad and husband” and wrote that he would rather live in exile with him than “live a sorrowful widow-life without you.” When the Privy Council balked at how much the king favored his young courtier, James didn’t deny it — he defended it from scripture: “Christ had his John, and I have my George.” Historian David Bergeron, who spent years working through the correspondence, has argued flatly that Buckingham was James’s last and greatest lover.

Villiers, for his part, married Katherine Manners and had children with her. That was expected of a duke. It didn’t stop him signing his own letters to the king “your dog Steenie,” a level of intimacy nobody at the Stuart court would have used lightly.

Edward II and Piers Gaveston

A few centuries earlier, England had already been here. Piers Gaveston was a Gascon knight’s son raised alongside the future Edward II, and when a chronicler described the moment the prince met him, the language wasn’t subtle: Edward “entered into a covenant of constancy” with Gaveston the instant he saw him. Edward I was worried enough about the relationship to banish Gaveston from his son’s household — twice.

None of it worked. The day Edward II took the throne in 1307, he recalled Gaveston and made him Earl of Cornwall, a title that had never before gone to anyone outside the royal family. Gaveston was married off to the king’s niece, Margaret de Clare, which did nothing to slow the gossip. At the coronation, Edward reportedly paid so much attention to Gaveston that members of the queen’s own family walked out.

It ended badly, the way these things tended to. The barons had Gaveston seized in 1312 and beheaded on a hillside without trial. Historian J.S. Hamilton, who wrote the standard modern biography, put it bluntly: “there is no question that the king and his favorite were lovers.” Other historians read the same evidence as an unusually intense political alliance, even an adoptive brotherhood. Eight hundred years of secondhand chronicles will do that — leave room for both readings at once.

Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill

Lilly, Edmund; Queen Anne (1665-1714); Pembroke College, University of Oxford

Move the story to women and the record gets thinner, mostly because women’s private letters were less likely to survive at all, but Queen Anne’s did. She and Sarah Churchill met as girls and by adulthood had agreed to write to each other under assumed names — Anne was “Mrs. Morley,” Sarah was “Mrs. Freeman” — specifically so their letters could read as two equals rather than a monarch and her subject.

What Anne wrote to “Mrs. Freeman” over the following decades reads less like courtly friendship and more like courtship. “I had rather live in a cottage with you than reign empress of the world without you,” she told her in 1692. Elsewhere: “I hope I shall get a moment or two to be with my dear Mrs Freeman that I may have one dear embrace, which I long for more than I can express.” When Anne’s affection shifted toward a different lady of the bedchamber, Abigail Masham, a furious Sarah began circulating rumors about the two of them, and after Anne’s death published memoirs pointedly hinting at what had gone on behind closed doors.

Historians still argue over how literally to take any of this — effusive language between women was common in this period, and it’s genuinely hard to separate convention from confession three hundred years later. But contemporaries at court were already gossiping about “dark deeds at night,” and the frustrated, jealous tone of Anne’s letters whenever Sarah pulled away doesn’t read like ordinary friendship even by the standards of the time.

The fabulous movie The Favourite takes liberties but you will be completely caught up in lesbian drama and bunnies.

Queen Christina and Ebba Sparre

Alexandre Tardieu after Sébastien Bourdon after Charles Auguste van den Berghe, Queen Christina of Sweden

Christina became queen of Sweden at six years old, was crowned in her own right at eighteen, and by twenty-seven had done something almost no reigning European monarch had done before: she abdicated, on her own terms, and left. She’d spent her adult life refusing to marry, dressing in a style contemporaries called masculine, and keeping one particular woman closer than anyone else at court.

Ebba Sparre arrived as a lady-in-waiting the same year Christina turned eighteen, and the two became, in the words of one biographer, “constant companions and bedmates” — not unusual in itself, since sharing a bed for warmth was common practice, but Christina’s surviving letters to Sparre go well past practicality. She introduced Ebba to a visiting English ambassador as her “bed-fellow” and made a point of praising both her beauty and her intellect in the same breath. She called her “Belle.”

Sparre eventually married a count and left court; Christina kept writing to her anyway, in language passionate enough that later biographers built entire theories of Christina’s sexuality around those letters alone. Whether the relationship was sexual is something historians still can’t settle — the surviving evidence is real but incomplete, and Christina wrote intimately to plenty of people. What isn’t in dispute is that Ebba Sparre mattered to her more than almost anyone else in a life that included a throne, a continent’s worth of correspondence, and a fairly dramatic exit from Sweden entirely.

The line between “friend” and “lover” in these older stories will probably never fully resolve, because the people writing the record either didn’t have the vocabulary for what they were seeing or had every reason to hide it. The two royals below didn’t have that excuse, and didn’t take it.

Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil and DeAndre Richardson

Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil

Manvendra Singh Gohil is the probable heir to the former princely state of Rajpipla, in the Indian state of Gujarat — a title that, in modern India, comes with social standing but no actual power. In 2006 he became the first openly gay member of a royal family anywhere in the world, and the reaction in Rajpipla was not gentle. Effigies of him were burned. His mother took out newspaper notices publicly disowning him. His parents tried to have him sent to the United States for conversion therapy, a plan that fell apart only because the American Psychiatric Association had already classified homosexuality as no disorder at all.

He didn’t retreat from any of it. He founded the Lakshya Trust, which works on HIV prevention and LGBTQ support across Gujarat, and became one of India’s most visible advocates against Section 377, the colonial-era law that criminalized gay sex until India’s Supreme Court struck it down in 2018. He met DeAndre Richardson, an American, online; the friendship became something more, and the two married in 2013. Gohil has since said he wants to turn his family’s ancestral palace into a shelter for LGBTQ Indians who’ve been thrown out of their own homes — the opposite of what happened to him.

Lord Ivar Mountbatten and James Coyle

Lord Ivar Mountbatten is a second cousin of King Charles III and a great-great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria — genealogically close enough to the throne that when he came out publicly in 2016, it made news across Britain as a first for the extended royal family. He’d been married to Penny Thompson for seventeen years and has three daughters with her; the marriage ended amicably in 2011, and Penny has said she knew about his attraction to men before they wed.

In 2018 Mountbatten married James Coyle, an airline cabin services director he’d met at a Swiss ski resort, at his family estate in Devon — the first same-sex wedding in the extended royal family’s history. Penny walked him down the aisle. No senior royals attended, though Mountbatten has been characteristically unbothered about it in interviews since, telling the Daily Mail that people will eventually look back and wonder what the fuss was about. “But for our generation,” he said, “it was.”

None of these six stories needed modern language to happen — kings wrote love letters to men centuries before anyone used the word “gay,” and queens found ways to keep the women they loved close without ever having to name it. What’s changed isn’t that queer royals exist now. It’s that some of them, finally, get to say so themselves.