a fellow shipper

[mayhap]

T. H. White apparently read the same book that Jean Anouilh did—Augustin Thierry's Norman Conquest of England—and wrote this note in its endpapers:

[With Thomas Becket the King] seems to have had one of the most important relationships of his life. Sodomy was a Norman vice, and Becket beautiful as well as strong, but there need have been no physical relationship. Indeed, it is most unlikely. But he did have a most intense emotional relationship with Becket, and I have no doubt that he submitted sincerely to the rods… Consider this fat, grey-eyed, bloodshot, strangely attractive sportsman kneeling to be whipped before the tomb of that beautiful person whom he had personally known to be a saint long before he was canonised, who he had persecuted all his life ("hell knows no fury like a woman scorned") and whom he had driven to revolt because he loved him and could not for that reason permit him to live his own life. Henry is a very real person.

(quoted in T. H. White's The Once and Future King by Elisabeth Brewer)