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Message:: [QUOTE="johnmilton, post: 6596688, member: 101855"]British king Edward II was, more than likely, gay. After he was deposed, he was held prisoner for a while. Then one night people heard him screaming. The next day he was found dead. Some say that he was strangled. The salacious story was that he had had a red hot poker pushed up his rectum. At any rate the former king’s body looked okay for burial, like he had died of natural causes. Here is an Edward II penny. This coin does not look like much, but oddly enough all of the examples I have seen look this way. The coin never seems to come nice. [ATTACH=full]1265868[/ATTACH] Edward II's last lover, Hugh Despenser, the younger, had a more gruesome death. The English were masters at torturing the people they executed before they died. They kept doing it right up until the early 1800s. It is probably the reason why our founding fathers included words in the constitution that forbid “cruel and unusual punishments.” The last scene in the film Brave Heart was accurate and perhaps sanitized. At any rate, after a long period of torture that I will leave for you to research, Despenser was castrated and his parts were tossed into a fire while he watched. Some historians might question whether Despenser and the king were lovers, but it seems like the symbolism of their executions left no doubt about the perceptions of those who were living at the time.[/QUOTE]