The Once and Future King (#1-4)

by T. H. White

  At this complicated moment the cloister door was opened for the second time, and the courteous page announced as impassively as ever: ‘His Majesty the King!’

  Everybody relaxed. They let go of whatever they were holding, and began to move. Agravaine sat up panting. Gawaine turned away from him, drawing a hand across his face.

  ‘Ach God!’ he muttered. ‘If but I hadna siclike waeful passions!’

  The King was on the threshold.

  He came in, the quiet old man who had done his best so long. He looked older than his age, which was considerable. His royal eye took in the situation without a flicker. He moved across the cloister to kiss Mordred gently, smiling upon them all.

  Chapter III

  Lancelot and Guenever were sitting at the solar window. An observer of the present day, who knew the Arthurian legend only from Tennyson and people of that sort, would have been startled to see that the famous lovers were past their prime. We, who have learned to base our interpretation of love on the conventional boy—and—girl romance of Romeo and Juliet, would be amazed if we could step back into the Middle Ages – when the poet of chivalry could write about Man that he had ‘en ciel un dieu, par terre une déesse.’ Lovers were not recruited then among the juveniles and adolescents: they were seasoned people, who knew what they were about. In those days people loved each other for their lives, without the conveniences of the divorce court and the psychiatrist. They had a God in heaven and a goddess on earth – and, since people who devote themselves to goddesses must exercise some caution about the ones to whom they are devoted, they neither chose them by the passing standards of the flesh alone, nor abandoned it lightly when the bruckle thing began to fail.

  Lancelot and Guenever were sitting by the window in the high keep, and Arthur’s England stretched below them, under the level rays of sunset.

  It was the Gramarye of the Middle Ages, which some people are accustomed to think of as the Dark Ages, and Arthur had made it what it was. When the old King came to his throne it had been an England of armoured barons, and of famine, and of war. It had been the country of trial by ordeal with red—hot irons, of the Law of Englishry, and of the sad, wordless song of Morfa—Rhuddlan. Then, on the sea—coast, within a foreign vessel’s reach, not an animal, not a fruit tree, had been left. Then, in the fens and the vast forests, the last of the Saxons had defended themselves against the bitter rule of Uther the Conqueror; then the words ‘Norman’ and ‘Baron’ had been equivalent to the modern word of ‘Sahib’; then Llewellyn ap Griffith’s head, in its crown of ivy, had mouldered on the clustered spikes of the Tower; then you would have met the mendicants by the roadside, mutilated men who carried their right hands in their left, and the forest dogs would have trotted beside them, also mutilated by the removal of one toe – so that they could not hunt in the woodlands of the lord. When Arthur first came, the country people had been accustomed to bar themselves in their cottages every night as if for siege, and had prayed to God for peace during darkness, the goodman of the house repeating the prayers used at sea on the approach of storm and ending with the plea ‘the Lord bless and help us,’ to which all present had replied, ‘Amen.’ In the baron’s castle, in the early days, you would have found the poor men being disembowelled – and their living bowels burned before them – men being slit open to see if they had swallowed their gold, men gagged with notched iron bits, men hanging upside down with their heads in smoke, others in snake pits or with leather tourniquets round their heads, or crammed into stone—filled boxes which would break their bones. You have only to turn to the literature of the period, with its stories of the mythological families such as Plantagenets, Capets and so forth, to see how the land lay. Legendary kings like John had been accustomed to hang twenty—eight hostages before dinner; or, like Philip, had been defended by ‘sergeants—at—mace,’ a kind of storm troopers who guarded their lord with maces; or, like Louis, had decapitated their enemies on scaffolds under the blood of which the children of the enemy had been forced to stand. This, at all events, is what Ingulf of Croyland used to tell us, until he was discovered to be a forgery. Then there had been Archbishops nicknamed ‘Skin—villain,’ and churches used as forts – with trenches in the graveyards among the bones – and price—lists for fining murderers, and bodies of the excommunicated lying unburied, and famishing peasants eating grass or tree—bark or one another. (One of them ate forty—eight.) There had been roasting heretics on the one hand – forty—five Templars had been burned in one day – and the heads of captives being thrown into besieged castles from catapults on the other. Here a leader of the Jacquerie had been writhing in his chains, as he was crowned with a red—hot tripod. There a Pope had been complaining, as he was held to ransom, or another one had been wriggling as he was poisoned. Treasure had been cemented into castle walls, in the form of gold bars, and the builders had been executed afterwards. Children playing in the streets of Paris had frolicked with the dead body of a Constable, and others, with the women and old men, had starved outside the walls of beleaguered towns, yet inside the ring of the besiegers. Hus and Jerome, with the mitres of apostasy upon their heads, had flamed and fizzled at the stake. The hamstrung imbeciles of Jumièges had floated down the Seine. Giles de Retz had been found to have no less than a ton of children’s bones, calcined, in his castle, after having murdered them at the rate of twelve score a year for nine years. The Duke of Berry had lost a kingdom through the unpopularity which he earned by feeling sorry for eight hundred foot soldiers who had been killed in a battle. The youthful count of St Pol had been taught the arts of war by being given twenty—four living prisoners to slaughter in various ways, for practice. Louis the Eleventh, another of the fictional kings, had kept obnoxious bishops in rather expensive cages. The Duke Robert had been surnamed ‘the Magnificent’ by his nobles – but ‘the Devil’ by his parishioners. And all the while, before Arthur came, the common people – of whom fourteen were eaten by wolves out of one town in a single week, of whom one third were to die in the Black Death, of whom the corpses had been packed in pits ‘like bacon,’ for whom the refuges at evening had often been forests and marshes and caves, for whom, in seventy years, there had been known to be forty—eight of famine – these people had looked up at the feudal nobility who were termed the ‘lords of sky and earth,’ and – themselves battered by bishops who, because they were not allowed to shed blood, went for them with iron clubs – had cried aloud that Christ and his saints were sleeping.

  ‘Pourquoi,’ the poor wretches had sung in their misery:

  Pourquoi nous laisser faire dommage?

  Nous sommes hommes comme ils sont.

  Such had been the surprisingly modern civilization which Arthur had inherited. But it was not the civilization over which the lovers looked out. Now, safe in the apple—green sunset before them, there stretched the fabled Merry England of the Middle Ages, when they were not so dark. Lancelot and Guenever were gazing on the Age of Individuals.

  What an amazing time the age of chivalry was! Everybody was essentially himself – was riotously busy fulfilling the vagaries of human nature. There was such a gusto about the landscape which stretched before their window, such a riot of unexpected people and things, that you hardly knew how to begin describing it.

  The Dark and Middle Ages! The Nineteenth Century had an impudent way with its labels. For there, under the window in Arthur’s Gramarye, the sun’s rays flamed from a hundred jewels of stained glass in monasteries and convents or danced from the pinnacles of cathedrals and castles, which their builders had actually loved. Architecture, in those dark ages of theirs, was such a light—giving passion of the heart that men gave love—names to their fortresses. Lancelot’s Joyous Gard was not a singularity in an age which has left us Beauté, Plaisance, or Malvoisin – the bad neighbour to its enemies – an age in which even an oaf like the imaginary Richard Coeur de Lion, who suffered from boils, could call his castle ‘Gaillard’, and speak of it as ‘my beautiful one—year—old
daughter’. Even that legendary scoundrel William the Conqueror had a second nickname: ‘the Great Builder.’ Think of the glass itself, with its five grand colours stained right through. It was rougher than ours, thicker, fitted in smaller pieces. They loved it with the same fury as they gave to their castles, and Villars de Honnecourt, struck by a particularly beautiful specimen, stopped to draw it on his journeys, with the explanation that ‘I was on my way to obey a call to the land of Hungary when I drew this window because it pleased me best of all windows.’ Picture the insides of those ancient churches – not the grey and gutted interiors to which we are accustomed – but insides blazing with colour, plastered with frescoes in which all the figures stood on tip—toe, fluttering with tapestry or with brocades from Baghdad. Picture also the interiors of such castles as were visible from Guenever’s window. These were no longer the grim keeps of Arthur’s accession. Now they were filling with furniture made by the joiner, instead of the carpenter; now their walls rippled doorless with the flexible gaieties of Arras, tapestries like that of the Jousts of St Denis which, although covering more than four hundred square yards, had been woven in less than three years, such was the ardour of its creation. If you look closely in a ruined castle even nowadays, you can sometimes find the hooks from which these flashing tapestries were hung. Remember, too, the goldsmiths of Lorraine, who made shrines in the shape of little churches, with aisles, statues, transepts and all, like dolls’ houses: remember the enamellers of Limoges, and the champlevé work, and the German ivory carvers, and the garnets set in Irish metal. Finally, if you are willing to picture the ferment of creative art which existed in our famous ages of darkness, you must get rid of the idea that written culture came to Europe with the fall of Constantinople. Every clerk in every country was a man of culture in those days – it was his profession to be so. ‘Every letter written,’ said a medieval abbot,’ is a wound inflicted on the devil.’ The library of St Piquier, as early as the ninth century, had 256 volumes, including Virgil, Cicero, Terence and Macrobius. Charles the Fifth had no less than nine hundred and ten volumes, so that his personal collection was about as big as the Everyman Library is today.

  Lastly there were under the windows the people themselves – the coruscating mixture of oddities who reckoned that they possessed the things called souls as well as bodies, and who fulfilled them in the most surprising ways. In Silvester the Second a famous magician ascended the papal throne, although he was notorious for having invented the pendulum clock. A fabled King of France called Robert, who had suffered the misfortune to be excommunicated, ran into dreadful troubles about his domestic arrangements, because the only two servants who could be persuaded to cook for him insisted on burning the saucepans after meals. An archbishop of Canterbury, having excommunicated all the prebendaries of St Paul’s in a pet, rushed into the Priory of St Bartholomew and knocked out the sub—prior in the middle of the chapel – which created such an uproar that his own vestments were torn off, revealing a suit of armour underneath, and he had to flee to Lambeth in a boat. The Countess of Anjou always used to vanish out of the window at the secreta of the mass. Madame Trote de Salerno used her ears as a handkerchief and let her eyebrows hang down behind her shoulders, like silver chains. A bishop of Bath, under the imaginary Edward the First, was considered after due reflection to be an unsuitable man for the Archbishopric, because he had too many illegitimate children – not some, but too many. And the bishop himself could hardly hold a candle to the Countess of Henneberge, who suddenly gave birth to 365 children at one confinement.

  It was the age of fullness, the age of wading into everything up to the neck. Perhaps Arthur imposed this ideal on Christendom, because of the richness of his own schooling under Merlyn.

  For the King, or at least this is how Malory interprets him, was the patron saint of chivalry. He was not a distressed Briton hopping about in a suit of woad in the fifth century – nor yet one of those nouveaux riches de la Poles, who must have afflicted the last years of Malory himself. Arthur was the heart’s king of a chivalry which had reached its flower perhaps two hundred years before our antiquarian author began to work. He was the badge of everything that was good in the Middle Ages, and he had made these things himself.

  As Malory pictures him, Arthur of England was the champion of a civilization which is misrepresented in the history books. The serf of chivalry was not a slave for whom there was no hope. On the contrary, he had at least three legitimate ways of rising, the greatest of which was the Catholic Church. With the assistance of Arthur’s policies this church – still the greatest of all corporations free to learned men on earth – had become a highway open to the lowest slave. A Saxon peasant was Pope in Adrian IV, the son of a carpenter in Gregory VII. In those despised Middle Ages of theirs you could become the greatest man in the world, by simply having learning. And it is a mistake to believe that Arthur’s civilization was weak in this famous science of ours. The scientists, although they happened to call them magicians at the time, invented almost as terrible things as we have invented – except that we have become accustomed to theirs by use. The greatest magicians, like Albertus Magnus, Friar Bacon, and Raymond Lully, knew several secrets which we have lost today, and discovered as a side issue what still appears to be the chief commodity of civilization, namely gunpowder. They were honoured for their learning, and Albert the Great was made a bishop. One of them who was called Baptista Porta seems to have invented the cinema – though he sensibly decided not to develop it.

  As for aircraft, in the tenth century a monk called Aethelmaer was experimenting with them, and might have succeeded but for an accident in adjusting of his tail unit. He crashed ‘quod’ – says William of Malmesbury – ‘caudam in posteriori parte oblitus fuerat adaptare.’

  Even in modernity, the ages of darkness were not so far behind us. At least they had some sparkling names for their fiercer cocktails: which they called Huffe Cap, Mad Dog, Father Whoresonne, Angel’s Food, Dragon’s Milke, Go to the Wall, Stride Wide, and Lift Leg.

  The view from the window was delightful, though in some cases it was odd. Where we have hedged fields and parklands, they had village communities, moorlands, fens and forests of enormous size. Sherwood stretched for hundreds of miles, from Nottingham to the middle of York. The busyness that went on in the island, the bee—keeping and the rook—scaring and the ploughing with oxen: for these you must look in the Luttrell Psalter, where they are beautifully drawn. In those days, if you had been interested by peculiar things, perhaps you would have had the luck to notice a knight—in—armour riding past the window. You would have noticed his head, which was shaved round the ears and at the back: but on the top his hair rose up like a Japanese doll’s, so that the skull looked like a cottage loaf. This top—knot made an excellent shock—absorber, under his helm. The next man to pass might have been a clerk, perhaps on an ambler, and the hair of this one would have been exactly the opposite of the knight’s – for he would have been completely bald on top, because of his tonsure. When he had gone to the bishop to be made a clerk in the first place, he had taken a pair of scissors with him. Next, if you wanted some peculiar person to ride by, there might have come a crusader who had promised to deliver the grace of God. You would have expected the cross on his surcoat, no doubt, but you might not have realized that he was so delighted with the whole affair that he put the same symbol almost everywhere that it could be made to go. Like a new Boy Scout, transported with enthusiasm, he would have stuck the cross on his escutcheon, on his coat, on his helm, on his saddle, and on the horse’s curb. The next man to pass the window might have been one sort of Cistercian lay—brother, whom you would have expected to be a learned man because of his cloth. But no, he was ex officio an illiterate. It was his business to stick the leaden seals on papal bulls, and, so as to preserve the Secrecy of the Pope, they used to make sure that he could not read a word. Now might come a Saxon wearing the beard and a sort of Phrygian cap, as a sign of defiance – now a knight from the
Marches of the Northern border. The latter, because he lived by raiding during the night—time, would have borne a moon and stars on azure in his coat. Here might be some smoke in the landscape, rising from the bellows of an alchemist who was, most sensibly, trying to turn lead to gold – an art which has remained beyond us to the present day, though we are getting nearer to it with atomic fusion. There, far away in the environs of a monastery, you might have seen a procession of angry monks making a barefoot march round their foundation – but they might have been walking against the sun, in malediction, because they had fallen out with the abbot. Perhaps, if you looked in this direction, you would see a vineyard fenced with bones – it had been discovered, during the early years of Arthur, that bones made an excellent fence for vineyards, graveyards, or even for forts – and perhaps, if you looked in the other, you would see a castle door that looked like a keeper’s gallows. It would have been completely covered with the nailed heads of wolves, bears, stags, and so forth. Far away, over there to the left, perhaps there would be a tournament going on according to the laws laid down by Geoffrey de Preully, and the Kings—at—arms would be carefully examining the combatants, like referees before a boxing match, to see that they were not stuck to their saddles. The referees at a judicial duel between a certain Earl of Salisbury and a Bishop of Salisbury, under the supposed king Edward III, found that the bishop’s champion had prayers and incantations sewn all over him, under his armour – which was almost as bad as a boxer hiding a horse—shoe in his glove. Below the window—ledge a pair of constipated papal nuncios might have been riding gloomily back to Rome. Such a pair were once sent with bulls to excommunicate Barnabas Visconti, but Barnabas only made them eat their bulls – parchment, ribbons, leaden seals and all. Following closely behind them perhaps there would have strode a professional pilgrim, supporting himself on a stout knobbed staff shod like an alpenstock and weighed down with blessed medals, relics, shells, vernicles and so forth. He would have called himself a palmer and, if he were a well—travelled one, his relics might have included a feather from the Angel Gabriel, some of the coals on which St Lawrence was grilled, a finger of the Holy Ghost ‘whole and sound as ever it was,’ ‘a vial of the sweat of St Michael whereas he fought with the devil,’ a little of ‘the bush in which the Lord spake to Moses,’ a vest of St Peter’s, or some of the Blessed Virgin’s milk preserved at Walsingham. After the palmer perhaps there would have prowled a rather more sinister figure: one of those who ‘sleep by day and watch by night, eat well and drink well, but possess nothing.’ He would be an outlaw, of whom they wrote: