‘I Am Arthur, [Catholic] King of the Britons’

In our current mood of skepticism and sense of superiority about our own ancestors, it’s easy, almost obligatory, to mock their beliefs and foibles. The title of this column comes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the British comedy group’s 1975 send-up of all things medieval. (Adapted for the stage as Spamalot.) It is, at times, hilarious – that is when it’s not being sacrilegious and lascivious. It’s rated PG-13 but should be R. If you’ve seen it, you know; if you haven’t, beware: it puts the rib in ribald. You’ve been warned.

King Arthur, played with stodgy imperiousness by Graham Chapman, jogs across a sodden landscape with his faithful servant, Patsy (Terry Gilliam), following behind, clapping two coconut halves together to make the sound of hoofbeats.

At one point, Arthur encounters some peasants, who seem to be harvesting. . .mud. They ask him who he is.

King Arthur: I am your king.

Woman (Terry Jones): Well, I didn’t vote for you.

King Arthur: You don’t vote for kings.

Woman: Well, how’d you become king then?

[Angelic music plays…]

King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king—

Dennis (Michael Palin): [interrupting] — Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Poor Arthur. No matter where he goes, it’s always the same: skepticism reigns, not he.

Yet to this day, Arthur has sovereignty over our imaginations if, that is, we are imagining a great king. And I’ll go no further without noting that I’m leaving the true King, our Lord, out of this.

When I was 6 years old, my father’s mother came to visit and babysit my older brother and me while our parents took a short vacation. One afternoon, she took us to see Knights of the Round Table, which starred Robert Taylor as Lancelot, Ava Gardner as Guinevere, and Mel Ferrer as Arthur. I loved the movie. In high school, I bought the original Broadway cast recording of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot, with Robert Goulet as Lancelot, Julie Andrews as Guinevere, and Richard Burton as Arthur.

In just the motion picture business, there have been several hundred Arthur films: from a dozen or more in the Silent Era to hundreds of “talkies,” on the Big Screen and the small one. And most have had not the slightest thing to do with the real King Arthur, and that’s okay, because Arthur is more a legend than a fact, which means what they call “poetic license” has been in play since “Arthur” first appeared in English literature.

His name initially appears in Welsh sources from the early decades of the 9th century, which is more than four centuries after the events the documents purport to record.

The pagan Romans had largely rooted out Britain’s Druids and other pagans, and after four-and-a-half centuries of occupation, the Legions began heading back to Rome, crossing paths with Catholic missionaries coming up from the Eternal City, baptizing as they came, until new pagans, the Saxons, crossed the Channel in the middle of the 5th century. And this is the historical nexus from which the legend of “Arthur” arose.

But every surviving source about Arthur comes from four centuries later. In the earliest, he’s not a king but a warrior – and a Catholic warrior at that; a soldier, with an image of Our Lady on his shield. He is undefeated in battle.

Then enter the Angevins.

 Angevin (from Anjou, a duchy in northern France) refers to the dynastic line that begins with Henry II. He was Count of Anjou before becoming King of England. And it was under his and his queen’s influence that the story of Arthur catapulted from mere myth to national (even international) ethos.

That queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was a formidable woman. Movie fans know her and  Henry from The Lion in Winter: Katherine Hepburn versus Peter O’Toole. So enamored were Henry and Eleanor of the story of King Arthur and his queen, Guinevere, that they styled their union as a sort of sequel, and their courts (at Westminster in England and Chinon in France) as 12th-century Camelots.

Henry even conspired with the monks of Glastonbury Abbey to “discover” the graves of Arthur and Guinevere. After nearly seven hundred years, mirabile dictu, the queen’s skull still had lovely blonde locks!

The Angevins commissioned nearly every work of consequence written about Arthur – by William of Malmesbury, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Robert Wace, Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, Walter Map, and Robert de Boron – until we leap forward three hundred years to Sir Thomas Malory, whose Le Morte d’Arthur (1470) is the “definitive redaction” of the legend (based largely on Chrétien). And Malory’s book has been Hollywood’s Arthurian bible from the first silent film to whatever comes next.

One may wonder why an English writer would write a two-volume life of our hero and call it The Death of Arthur, but in French. The answer is he didn’t. The printer William Caxton gave it that title. Malory wanted The Whole Book of King Arthur and of His Noble Knights of the Round Table.

Lancelot and Guinevere, adulterers, seem to re-enact the Fall and then do penance in an earthly purgatory: both repent of their sins and enter religious life – the lady with sincerity. Upon her death, Lancelot buries her next to Arthur.

Arthur, however he may have been portrayed in the first tales about him, has come down to us as a Catholic king. A man of faith who tried to create a kind of heaven on earth. He was a noble failure. Of course, many who saw Christ crucified thought that of him, too. And Malory wrote that on Arthur’s tomb at Avalon were the words, Hic jacet Arthurus, Rex quondam, Rexque futurus. “Here lies Arthur, once King, and future King,” suggesting a resurrection and a return.

And, obviously, the world continues to await the return of its true King.