"I am Arthur, [Catholic] king of the Britons"

By Brad Miner

In our current climate of skepticism and superiority toward our own ancestors, it is easy, almost obligatory, to mock their beliefs and weaknesses. The title of this column comes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Monty Python and the Holy Grail), the 1975 parody by the British comedy troupe of all things medieval. (Adapted for the stage as Spamalot). At times it is hilarious—that is, when it does not turn sacrilegious and lewd. It is rated PG-13 (for ages 13 and up), but it should be R (for adults). If you have seen it, you already know; if you have not, beware: it takes mischief to the extreme of the crude. You have been warned.

King Arthur, played with pompous authority by Graham Chapman, trots across a rain-soaked landscape while his faithful servant, Patsy (Terry Gilliam), follows behind, striking two halves of a coconut to imitate the sound of a horse’s hooves.

At one point, Arthur encounters some peasants who appear 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 did 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 lying in ponds distributing 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 is always the same: skepticism reigns, not he.

Yet to this day, Arthur still holds sovereignty over our imagination—if, of course, we are imagining a great king. And I will not proceed without noting that I am leaving the true King, our Lord, out of this.

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

In the film business alone there have been several hundred movies about Arthur: from a dozen or more in the silent era to hundreds of sound films, both on the big screen and the small. And most bore little relation to the real King Arthur, and that is fine, because Arthur is more legend than fact, which means that what they call “poetic license” has been in play ever since “Arthur” first appeared in English literature.

His name first appears in Welsh sources from the early decades of the ninth century, more than four centuries after the events the documents claim to record.

Pagan Romans had largely eradicated the druids and other pagans from Britain, and after four and a half centuries of occupation, the legions began returning to Rome, crossing paths with Catholic missionaries coming up from the Eternal City, baptizing as they went, until new pagans, the Saxons, crossed the English Channel in the mid-fifth century. And this is the historical nexus from which the legend of “Arthur” emerged.

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

Then the Angevins enter.

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 influence and that of his queen that the story of Arthur was catapulted from mere myth to a national (and even international) spirit.

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

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

The Angevins commissioned nearly all the major works 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 work Le Morte d’Arthur (Le Morte d’Arthur, 1470) is the “definitive redaction” of the legend (largely based on Chrétien). And Malory’s book was the Arthurian bible of Hollywood from the first silent film to whatever comes next.

One might wonder why an English writer would write the life of our hero in two volumes and call it Le Morte d’Arthur, but in French. The answer is that he did not. 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 (The Whole Book of King Arthur and of His Noble Knights of the Round Table).

Lancelot and Guinevere, adulterers, seem to reenact the Fall and then do penance in an earthly purgatory: both repent of their sins and enter the religious life; the lady, with complete sincerity. After her death, Lancelot buries her beside Arthur.

Arthur, however he may have been portrayed in the earliest accounts of 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 the same of Him. And Malory wrote that on Arthur’s tomb in Avalon were the words: Hic jacet Arthurus, Rex quondam, Rexque futurus. “Here lies Arthur, the once and future king,” suggesting a resurrection and a return.

And, evidently, the world is still waiting for the return of its true King.

About the Author

Brad Miner, husband and father, is senior editor of The Catholic Thing and a senior fellow of the Faith & Reason Institute. He was literary editor of National Review and had a long career in the book-publishing industry. His most recent book is Sons of St. Patrick, written with George J. Marlin. His best-seller, The Compleat Gentleman, is now available in a third revised edition and also as an audio edition on Audible (narrated by Bob Souer). Mr. Miner has served on the board of Aid to the Church in Need USA and also on the Selective Service board in Westchester County, New York.