The Tragedy of a Gay

 

Image by Gemini AI - see PPS below

He possessed a grand estate, seven children, and the favour of the King. Yet in the spring of 1931, this man who wielded much political clout in the British Empire was given a choice by his own brother-in-law: catch the next boat into permanent exile, or face scathing insult before the hangman’s noose tightens around his neck.

Earl Beauchamp was the man. His offence: homosexuality. His brother-in-law’s motive: jealousy.

William Lygon was the seventh Earl Beauchamp. King George V held him in high esteem and bestowed many extraordinary honours upon him. Yet a moment came when the King exclaimed, “My God! I thought men like that shot themselves.”

George V was a deeply traditional, rigid man who inherited his royal protocols and moral standards from Victorian conservatism. His mindset skipped the decadent, pleasure-seeking Edwardian era of his father, Edward VII. That’s why his sensibility was shocked by the allegation of homosexuality levelled against his esteemed Beauchamp.

Homosexuality was a serious crime in England right from 1533, the year in which the infamous Buggery Act was passed. The term ‘buggery’ didn’t just mean homosexuality. The modern concept of a fixed ‘sexual orientation’ did not exist in those days. Anything other than what came to be known later, rather facetiously, as the “missionary position” was considered unnatural and hence immoral in sex.

Originally, the punishment for buggery, “the unmentionable crime,” was no less than execution. Later it became life imprisonment.

The Duke of Westminster was Earl Beauchamp’s brother-in-law. His jealousy was aroused by the royal favour that the Earl enjoyed. So he decided to decimate his brother-in-law and the unmentionable crime was the most apt weapon. Beauchamp accepted the charge and chose to leave the country, especially for the security of his children. It wasn’t an easy decision for a man who had served his country as best as he could and had also received many honours for that. His later letters and diaries written during his exile in Germany and Venice reveal a man in deep mourning for his lost life. He felt profoundly betrayed by his wife who sided with her brother and filed for divorce. His children loved him still, nevertheless. He was a good father.

By 1937, the British attitude towards homosexuality had mellowed, though the Buggery Act was repealed only in 1967. But Beauchamp could return to England in 1938, the country he loved much. He spent his final days on British soil and passed away peacefully a year after his return.

Beauchamp’s story rushed to my mind the moment I saw Blogchatter’s latest theme for the weekly hop. I had just finished reading the story of Beauchamp in Andrew Marr’s book on the Second Elizabethan England (1952-2020).

I hadn’t thought of how India viewed homosexuality in the olden days until the above prompt landed in my mailbox yesterday. The British imposed their Victorian morality on India in 1860 by transporting the Buggery Act lock, stock, and barrel as the Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code [IPC].

India that created classics like the Kamasutra wouldn’t have been as ruthless in matters of sex as it was to people of lower castes. Even our temples reveal a society that largely accommodated, and sometimes even celebrated, a wide spectrum of sexualities and gender expressions, viewing them as natural variations of the human experience.

Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra has a whole chapter dedicated to oral sex and details of relationships between men, as well as between women. The text describes courtly homosexual citizens and notes that same-sex unions could be bound by deep affection and mutual attachment, treating these relationships with clinical, non-judgmental acceptance.

Even the heartless Manu didn’t think much of homosexuality as a vice, though he didn’t quite approve of it. A public bath with full clothes on was enough to wash away the sin of homosexuality by Manu’s laws.

The Khajuraho and the Konark temples proclaim louder than any place of worship the variegated delights of sex that Indians relished without the supervision of Queen Victoria’s ‘missionary’ descendants.  

Even the Mughals had no issues with eroticism of any sort, it seems. Homosexuality and homoeroticism found a prominent place in court culture, high literature, and Sufi mysticism during the Mughal centuries. Babur, for example, was very candid while writing about his infatuation with a teenage boy named Baburi in the market of Samarkand.

Officially, however, India discarded the British contribution of the Buggery Act to IPC only in 2018.

To conclude, the tragedy of Lord Beauchamp is not that he was discovered, but that he lived in an era that insisted his capacity to love was a crime. When the British Raj exported Section 377 to India in 1860, it sought to codify a rigid, singular morality across empires. Yet, history has a way of correcting its own course. Today, as both Britain and India have dismantled these colonial relics, Beauchamp’s story transforms. He is no longer a cautionary tale of aristocratic ruin, but a testament to a truth that pre-colonial cultures always understood: that identity cannot be permanently legislated away, and authenticity will always outlive the empires that try to suppress it.

 

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Blog Hop

PPS. Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited was based on the story of Earl Beauchamp.