A Fine and Terrible Mystery – Episode 23: A Glimpse of Character

This is episode 23 of my investigation into the life and works of Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur.  Episode 1 can be found here.

In my last post, several weeks ago, I lamented my lack of sense of Malory’s character and personal life.  The personal references Malory makes to himself in the colophons of Le Morte d’Arthur are short, circumspect and some of the deductions made from them are tenuous at best.  “Horror vacui,” as Parmenides observed; so does imagination.  In the absence of concrete personal biographical information some writing about Malory choose to envision him not so differently from Shakespeare’s Falstaff:  an immoderate, carousing criminal libertine who. imprisoned and prevented from following his preferred criminal pursuits, wrote Le Morte d’Arthur instead.  Others see him as an aspiring Lancelot.  In this post I’m going to begin looking more carefully at the seven years between November, 1455 and November 1462.  It was a particularly dramatic time for Malory and England generally.  Fundamental social and political boundaries were crossed and some of the most important events of the Wars of the Roses occurred, including the battle that remains arguably England’s most cruel and bloody.  Through them we can glimpse Malory’s character, and it is far more nuanced and interesting than those rather reductive fictions suggest.

When Parliament re-opened on 12 November 1455, six months after the relatively small but calamitous first battle at St. Albans, Richard, Duke of York was named Protector of the Realm; suggesting Henry VI may still have been too traumatized by the battle’s events when his guard was shot down, the King himself was wounded in the neck and the Duke of Buckingham was wounded in the face.  With York’s ascension, Malory was allowed to apply for a general pardon and immediately did so.   Before the King’s Bench on the 6^th of February, 1456 he requested dismissal of his case and presented letters patent in proof of his pardon.  Malory further produced six men willing to stand surety.

Yet the King’s Bench refused to recognize their sufficiency for surety or the validity of the pardon.  He was returned to prison and in the following months was twice sued for indebtedness:  once by one Robert Overton for an alleged promissory note for £3 which Malory denied and subsequently by Thomas Greswold for £4 9s which Malory admitted but could not pay.  The latter case is provocative:  Greswold was a Warwickshire lawyer who had served on the Nuneaton inquiry (which had produced the first, extensive detailed list of the serious and salacious accusations against Malory).  Further, he practiced at the King’s Bench and was the prosecutor who had demanded forfeiture of Malory’s sureties when Malory had failed to return from bail in 1454. Why would Malory have borrowed money from someone with such obviously questionable motives unless he was enforced to do so, possibly by circumstance?  During the same period he was also moved  multiple times from the Marshalsea, to Newgate and finally Ludgate.  Sir William Peyto was imprisoned at the Marshalsea at the same time and Field suggests that possibly he and Malory together made it difficult or impossible for the staff to run the prison as they liked, “to extract the most money from the most prisoners in the shortest time.”

I favor a different inference.  York was indeed Protector but had reached a temporary detente with Buckingham.  The highly politicized judiciary was accommodating the new real politic and the interests who wanted Malory imprisoned were still strong enough to guarantee he remain so.  Malory’s pardon may even have been a political test of strength by York in his new position.

Malory was finally granted bail twenty-one months later, in October 1457, to Sir William Neville, Lord Fauconberg, the Earl of Warwick’s uncle and the Duke of York’s brother-in-law, and two other esquires of Yorkshire and Arundel.   The period was for 2 ½ months.  Malory himself  provided £400 (£280,000 pounds purchasing power in 2015) personal surety whilst the others provided £20 each.

How was it that Malory, who had been unable to meet debts or 3 and 4 pounds a few months before, incarcerated in an environment in which continual financial extortion was the rule, was now able to provide £400 surety?

Almost certainly, the money came from Fauconberg, possibly indirectly from Warwick.  Hardyment speculates that it was to enable Malory to serve with the Calais garrison, England’s only standing force with a reputation not unlike that enjoyed by the UK’s SAS or the US Navy Seals today.  In July 1457 Warwick had asked Fauconberg to serve as Warwick’s deputy there until December 1458.  However, Malory’s bail, exorbitant as it was, was only for 2 ½ months.  Field notes that senior members of Warwick’s affinity had become feofees to Malory and it could have been part a larger scheme by Warwick to finally establish a dominant position in Warwickshire.  This is also consistent with Carpenter’s interpretation of the events.

I take a slightly different view.   The Monks Kirby Priory accounts for 9-1-1457 to 8-31-1458 has three Malory family references:  a 6 pence payment from Malory himself for use of a watermill called Hubbock Mill, 8 shillings rental for pasture from Elizabeth Lady Malory and Thomas Roche, and two pence for obsequies for Thomas Malory Jr., presumably Sir Thomas’s second son  (following common custom of naming the second or third son after the father).  Field writes  “we can only guess at what Sir Thomas and Lady Malory felt about their son’s death.”  True.  However, it isn’t unreasonable to deduce that Malory felt it imperative he be in Warwickshire for the period and the short but expensive bail enabled him to do so.  So what were Fauconberg and probably Warwick looking for in return?  For £400 I suspect it was something more than another link strengthening Warwick’s Warwickshire affinity.  York, Warwick and Fauconberg were willing to do whatever was required for the  commitment of service of an experienced field commander, recognizing that the uncertain peace was unlikely to last long.  The first battles of the Wars of the Roses were fought by relatively small and heterogeneous forces.  It didn’t take much to recognize that future conflicts would become larger and more professional affairs requiring the skills of people like Malory whom Carpenter’s statistics suggest were in short supply.

Nevertheless, I doubt anyone foresaw the tragic dimensions the conflict would reach in just a few months.  Malory dutifully gave himself up to the Marshal of the King’s Bench on December 28^th as he’d promised.  He was transferred from the Marshalsea to Newgate in Hilary term (Jan-Mar 1460).

The peace between the Duke of York and the King and Queen collapsed shortly thereafter.  On June 26, 1460 King Henry VI, Margaret, their son Edward of Winchester, Prince of Wales and a force of 5,000 confronted a force of 10,000 led by the Earl of Warwick, Lord Fauconberg and the Duke of York’s eldest son, Edward, Earl of March.  The Yorkist forces triumphed.  Warwick, Fauconberg and the Earl of March found Henry in his tent and knelt to him before taking him into protective custody, first to Delapré Abbey thence London.

Three hundred men had died during the battle.  Among them was Sir Humphrey Stafford, 1^st Duke of Buckingham, Malory’s great nemesis, killed by a squad of Kentishmen.  Field speculates that Malory was probably freed around the time the Yorkists took London, July 2-5, 1460.

It was time for Sir Thomas Malory, a taciturn, resourceful and experienced field commander who’d once mounted a siege of Coombe Abbey replete with siege equipment only 48 hours after escaping to freedom by swimming a moat, to pay the debt he owed to Lord Fauconberg and the cause of Richard, Duke of York. 

Episode 24 can be found here.