The Mammoth Book of King Arthur

by Mike Ashley

  Wydville, then only in his early twenties, was the brother of Edward IV’s future queen, Elizabeth. He was on a rapid ascent to power, having been made Lord Scales that year, and succeeded his father as Earl Rivers in 1469. He was fascinated with the Arthurian world and acquired most of the major Arthurian romances for his library. He was a renowned champion at tournaments and was initiated into the Order of the Garter in 1466. He may well have imagined himself as a Lancelot. So far as we can tell he and Malory became close companions. It was probably through Wydville that Malory acquired his Arthurian interest and he may have had access to Wydville’s library before entering prison for the final time. We know that Wydville later had a manuscript of Malory’s Morte Darthur and that he was the major patron of Caxton, so it was quite probable that Wydville provided Caxton with a copy years later before coming to his own sticky end when he fell foul of Richard III.

  We may see Wydville as Malory’s direct inspiration but the 1460s became a decade of Arthurianism, possibly encouraged by the soldier-turned-historian John Hardyng. His verse-chronicle of Britain, first issued in 1457 for Henry VI, made an analogy between the Waste Land and Britain under a series of weak kings, a point he emphasised in the revised edition completed for Edward IV in 1464. Henry VI had been a devoutly religious man and his mental affliction was seen by some as a parallel to the maimed Fisher King. Edward, Warwick and others had no problems in seeing themselves as Grail Knights seeking to heal the Waste Land. Indeed, it worked in Edward’s favour to be regarded as the new Arthur. Clerks were put to work to stimulate that view. John Hughes, in Arthurian Myths and Alchemy, draws attention to two Latin calendars compiled around 1461 and 1465, which look back over British history in the form of a series of prophecies. One of these, “A Prophecy of Merlin Concerning Henry VI”, seems to have been deliberately contrived to show that Edward’s rise to kingship was foreordained.

  Edward IV encouraged Arthurian tournaments and spectacles. Much was made of the Round Table at Winchester as the hub of the Arthurian court, from which Edward and his knights set out to achieve their glorious deeds. Even before Edward had declared himself king, and some years before his marriage to Elizabeth Wydville, he had an illegitimate son whom he called Arthur Plantagenet. This Arthur, who became Viscount Lisle, outlived them all, surviving the next two reigns and even outliving Henry VII’s first-born son Arthur, who died in 1502. Arthur Plantagenet died aged eighty in 1542.

  With Edward turning his court into a new Camelot it was perhaps inevitable that someone would look again at the Arthurian romances, but I doubt anyone would have expected it to be Malory. Wydville was himself highly literate and eminently capable of the task, though he was perhaps too busy with state affairs. There was the chronicler William Worcester, or the Latin scholar Benedict Burgh, perhaps even Caxton himself.

  Yet the circumstances under which Malory wrote the Morte Darthur were unusual. Sometime around 1468 he must have relapsed into his old ways because he was once again in prison, only it seems this time he had changed sides and become a Lancastrian sympathiser. Field conjectures that Malory had become involved in the Cornelius Plot, involving smuggling letters to Lancastrian agitators. It cannot have been so difficult a confinement since he was clearly kept provided with paper and ink and the source material he was adapting. In all probability his patron was Wydville, but Malory is silent on that score. Malory completed the work while still in prison, having been overlooked in two pardons. He finished Morte Darthur, he tells us, in the ninth year of Edward’s reign, which places it between March 1469 and March 1470. Field estimates the work must have taken him two years, and although we do not know when he was imprisoned, it cannot have been much before June 1468 if he was genuinely involved in the Cornelius Plot. However, it has since been established that he was in Newgate Prison in Easter 1468, and may have been for some months earlier. In all probability, however, he may not have completed the work until the early part of 1470. He was eventually released in October 1470, when the Lancastrians surged back to power following a reversal of allegiance by Warwick. Alas, Malory did not live long to enjoy his freedom as he died on 14 March 1471, and was buried at the church of Greyfriars in Newgate.

  If Malory undertook the work as a commission from Wydville, then we would need to consider Wydville’s motives rather than Malory’s, and considering the Arthurian splendour of Edward’s court, it was more a matter of when rather than why. Malory, no doubt wrapped up in the same enthusiasm, clearly enjoyed the work – no one could complete something on that scale and with such passion without becoming totally immersed in it. Yet if Malory had reverted to the Lancastrian cause, could he have had a motive different from Wydville’s? Might he have seen Henry VI as Arthur and Edward IV as Mordred? Why else would he have written rather cynically in the last book of Mort Darthur:

  Alas, this is a great default of us Englishmen, for there may no thing please us no term. And so fared the people at that time, they were better pleased with Sir Mordred than they were with King Arthur; and much people drew unto Sir Mordred and said they would abide with him for better and for worse.

  2. Caxton

  William Caxton was born in Kent, probably in Tenterden, in around 1422. He was apprenticed to the London mercer Robert Large, who served as Lord Mayor in 1439–40, so early in his life Caxton was making influential contacts. He went to Bruges in Flanders in 1441, and served as governor of the association for English merchants in the Low Countries from 1462 to 1471. One of those significant small events that change history happened in October 1468 when, as head of a trade mission, Caxton visited Charles, Duke of Burgundy, who only three months earlier had married Margaret, sister of Edward IV. Also on that mission he would have met Anthony Wydville. Just over two years later Caxton became attached to the household of the Duke of Burgundy as a commercial advisor.

  In 1469 Caxton had attempted to translate into English the popular French book, Recuyell of the Histories of Troie by Raoul Lefevre, which recounted many of the legends of ancient Greece. Caxton’s French was poor, but, encouraged by Margaret of Burgundy, he persevered and finished it in 1471, presenting the duchess with the first copy. The task of producing further copies to meet the demand was onerous and, recalling a printing press he had seen in Cologne, Caxton acquired one and experimented. In 1475 he published his translation as the first book printed in English. The following year, under the patronage of Edward IV, Caxton returned to England and set up a printing office within Westminster Abbey. The first book he printed on English soil was the second part of Lefevre’s Histories of Troie, which he entitled Jason. Soon after, he published Wydville’s own Diets and Sayings of the Philosophers.

  Caxton would never have met Malory, but the common link was Wydville. We don’t know when Caxton received Wydville’s copy of Morte Darthur, but it must have been before Edward IV died in April 1483, because Caxton tells us it was Edward who encouraged him to print it. Wydville doubtless lent him his own copy shortly before Edward’s death, but Wydville’s fate was also soon sealed. After Edward’s death, he incurred the suspicions of Edward’s brother, the future Richard III, who had Wydville executed in June 1483. It is possible that after Wydville’s death Caxton acquired another variant copy of Malory’s work.

  For centuries the only known version of Malory’s Morte Darthur was that published by Caxton, but in 1934 another version was found at Winchester College. It was deduced that neither of these versions was Malory’s original, but had been slightly adapted by copyists in the decade since his death. The Winchester manuscript is, however, believed to be closer to Malory’s original than Caxton’s, as the printer took some liberties in rearranging some of the text and in removing some of Malory’s references to himself. The Winchester version was eventually published by the Clarendon Press in 1967 as The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, edited by Eugène Vinaver. This showed that Malory had written the work as a series of self-contained books, rather than as the unified whole presented by Caxton.

  By the time
Caxton was readying the book to print, England was once again in upheaval. Edward IV had died somewhat mysteriously (he was still only 40) on 9 April 1483 and within ten weeks his brother Richard had assumed the throne as Richard III, after deposing Edward’s young son Edward V, one of the two doomed Princes in the Tower. Richard’s reign lasted just two years before he was killed at the Battle of Bosworth on 22 August 1485.

  It was during those same two years that Caxton worked on adapting and printing the Morte Darthur. He completed it on 31 July 1485. On that very same day Henry Tudor set sail from Harfleur to claim the English throne, landing at Milford Haven a few days later. Richard III would have been too preoccupied to see a copy of Morte Darthur and, even if he had, may not have noticed a subtle change that Caxton made in Book 5, in which Arthur sails to do battle with the Emperor Lucius of Rome. While on his ship Arthur has a dream of a battle between a dragon and a bear, in which Arthur – the dragon – is shown to be victorious. Caxton changed “bear” to “boar”. The white boar was Richard III’s heraldic device, whilst Henry Tudor was represented by the Welsh dragon. Here Caxton, once a staunch Yorkist, betrayed his changed allegiance to the Tudors. Once again, the Arthurian stories meant something new to each generation. Doubtless as Caxton brought the book to press he saw Richard III as Mordred, who had stolen the kingdom from Edward/Arthur and imprisoned the queen. Richard, on the other hand, would have seen himself as the new Arthur, who had saved the kingdom from the final depraved years of his brother and was now conducting a crusade to improve the country’s morals. This was probably why Caxton’s preface includes a lengthy paragraph exhorting everyone to “Do after the good and leave the evil.” Henry Tudor, in turn, perhaps saw himself as Uther Pendragon, ridding the kingdom of the enemy and establishing a new order. Just thirteen months after Bosworth, Henry’s wife Elizabeth (daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Wydville) produced an heir to the throne, Arthur, Prince of Wales, the new hope for England.

  3. Morte Darthur

  The title Le Morte Darthur, lacking any punctuation as is usual for that period, was assigned to the work by Caxton. Malory’s title was The Whole Book of King Arthur and of His Noble Knights of the Round Table. Although less accurate, Caxton’s title is more memorable, but apparently he selected it by mistake, thinking that the title Malory gave to his final book was the title for the whole.

  What Malory achieved, and what makes his work more memorable than most of its predecessors, is the unravelling of the intricate, interlacing work of the earlier romances, in which several stories run parallel to each other and the reader is taken in and out of them, reworking each as a separate continuous narrative. As a result, there is a greater concentration on the individual episodes, which helps to develop the characters. To produce this, Malory had to do a fair amount of rewriting, and in the process was able to bring his own thoughts and perspective to the whole cycle. Although he frequently deleted elements of the original, he added little, preferring more subtle changes that would make the story resonate with the period of Edward IV. However, the result is not just a collection of stories because, as Malory warmed to his theme, he constructed the sequence so that characters develop from book to book.

  I do not intend to go through Morte Darthur in any detail. Not only is it readily available in several editions, but I have already discussed the story-lines in the preceding chapters. I would, however, like to highlight Malory’s sources and such changes as he made to establish the Arthurian story as we now know it, and this is set out in the following chart. I’ve used for this the version from the Winchester Manuscript, as published in the edition called Complete Works (OUP, 1971), as this shows the original sequence of books.

  Table 19.1. The sources for Malory’s Morte Darthur

  As this analysis shows, the only story that Malory created was “The Healing of Sir Urry”, a self-contained episode of a Hungarian knight who, after killing his opponent, is sorely wounded in a joust. The opponent’s mother, a sorceress, curses Urry that he shall wander the world, never to be healed other than by the best knight in the world. Urry is carried everywhere in a litter by his mother and sister for seven years, until at last they reach Arthur’s court. All the knights try to cure Urry and fail, but when Lancelot returns from his adventures he succeeds. In this episode, coming after the Grail Quest when Lancelot has failed as the purest knight, Malory has restored Lancelot to a state of grace. Clearly Lancelot was too important to him to have him become a lesser knight. Perhaps Malory saw himself as Urry, restored to favour years before by Sir Anthony Wydville (Lancelot) after his seven years in prison.

  Although Arthur’s world looked as if it was collapsing beyond Malory’s prison walls, Malory could at least show that an individual might be redeemed. Throughout Morte Darthur there is a constant fluctuation between triumph and tragedy, a rise to glory followed by a fall from grace. Worldly fortunes may be won and lost but what is more important is spiritual fortune. Lancelot, the real hero of Morte Darthur, has to be redeemed even if all else fails. Lancelot is the conscience of the world that runs throughout Morte Darthur, and with the story of Urry, Malory was able to restore hope for the future.

  20

  THE VICTORIAN REVIVAL

  For nearly four hundred years after Malory the Arthurian romance went into decline. With Malory’s magnificent achievement now available in printed form, what more was there to do? The chivalric romance in general was steadily going out of fashion. There would be a few more great works, some of which drew upon Arthurian characters or motifs, such as Montalvo’s Amadis of Gaul (1508) and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516), but these are of marginal Arthurian interest, the last salvos in a war long won. Edmund Spenser would use a quasi-Arthurian world to epitomise the Elizabethan world of chivalry in his Faerie Queen (1590), but despite Arthur and Merlin being the main framing characters, and the mood being brilliantly evocative of the romances of old, it is clearly one step removed and not really an Arthurian work. Ironically, the character of Artegall may be based on Arthur of the Pennines, although Spenser would not have known that (see Chapter 23). Miguel de Cervantes so mercilessly, yet brilliantly, parodied the chivalric romance in Don Quixote (1605) that it sounded the death knell of the genre, which would not re-emerge until the time of Tennyson and the blossoming of the Victorian Pre-Raphaelite movement.

  There follows a selective annotated checklist of those few works of interest in the period 1500–1800, during which time interest shifted to theatrical works, with John Dryden writing the first Arthurian opera. Few of these works have any relevance to the medieval romances, but instead hark back to a loose interpretation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History. Anyone wishing more detail on this period of Arthurian literature should consult The Flower of Kings by James Douglas Merriman (University Press of Kansas, 1973).

  1. Original Arthurian works, 1500–1800

  This list is in chronological order, and includes only new works (not translations or reworkings) which deal wholly with the Arthurian world.

  Arthur of Little Britain (London, c1530s). A translation by Sir John Bourchier [Lord Berners] of the French story Artus de la Petite Bretagne, which dates from the late fifteenth century. The eponymous Artus is not King Arthur, but the son of the duke of Brittany who, inspired by his namesake, undertakes a series of quests to break the enchantment on a castle and win the hand of the fair damsel Florence. Probably the earliest example of an Arthur-inspired fantasy.

  I Due Tristani (“The Two Tristans”), anon. (Venice, 1555). This romance is in two parts. The first repeats the Tristan and Iseult story, but the second deals with their two children, also called Tristan and Iseult. After the lovers’ deaths, young Tristan is welcomed by Mark (who believes him to be the son of Tristan’s wife Iseult of the White Hands) and becomes king of Cornwall. He is welcomed by Arthur into the Round Table and suffers the unwelcome advances of Guenevere.

  The Misfortunes of Arthur, Thomas Hughes and others (London, 1587). The earliest known Arthurian play, it w
as first performed before Elizabeth I at Greenwich on 28 February 1587. It follows Geoffrey of Monmouth’s basic story of Arthur, but with Mordred as the son of Arthur and his sister Anne. Amongst Hughes’s various collaborators was Francis Bacon. The play can be found on the internet at < www.lib.rochester.ed/camelot/hughes.htm > The most recent printing is edited by Brian Jay Corrigan (Garland, 1992).

  The History of Tom Thumb, R.J. (usually treated as Richard Johnson) (London, 1621). One of the earliest English fairytales, not overly Arthurian but set in the time of King Arthur, which was obviously regarded in the seventeenth century as the “good old days”. Merlin helps a barren couple have a child, the dwarf Tom Thumb, who becomes an adventurer at Arthur’s court. Available in many sources, including The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Iona and Peter Opie (OUP, 1974). Henry Fielding freely adapted this for his play Tom Thumb, a Tragedy (London, 1730).

  The Birth of Merlin, attributed to William Rowley (London, 1662). First performed in 1622, this play was posthumously published as a collaboration with William Shakespeare, but it is now believed that Rowley’s collaborator was probably Thomas Dekker, though it was written as a sequel to Hengist, King of Kent (1615, also known as The Mayor of Queensborough), by Thomas Middleton. A motley jamboree-bag of a play about Merlin’s role in the defence of Britain against the Saxons, more humour than history. Merlin’s mother is called Joan Goe-Too’t, and there’s a courtier called Sir Nichodemus Nothing. The play was adapted with new material by R.J. Stewart, Roy Hudd and Denise Coffey, available as The Birth of Merlin (Element, 1989), whilst the original is on the internet at < www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/rowley.htm >

  King Arthur, or the British Worthy, John Dryden (London, 1691). A dramatic opera with music by Henry Purcell. An original work with only passing obligation to earlier sources, it has been described as more of a fairy extravaganza. Arthur and the Saxon chieftain Oswald battle against each other and against various perils to both win control of Britain and the hand of Emmeline, daughter of the duke of Cornwall. There are some imaginative scenes of sorcery including the summoning, by the Saxon magician Osmond, of an ice demon, the “Cold Genius”, who can only be thawed by love. It was the most popular of Dryden’s plays in his day. The latest printing is in The Works of John Dryden, edited by Vinton A. Dearing (University of California Press, 1997).