A Fine and Terrible Mystery – Episode 25: The Return

This is episode 25 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 I argued the probability that Sir Thomas Malory remained in London after his release from prison by the Yorkist army under the Earls of March and Warwick and Lord Fauconberg following their unruly entrance into the city on July 2, 1460. I further suggested that he may have participated in the brutal and violent siege of the Tower, which was still garrisoned by a Lancastrian contingent under Lord Scales and that some of the changes Malory introduced in his narrative of Mordred’s siege of Guinevere in the Tower could have reflected personal experience.

The three generals and the majority of their forces left London the day after their public ceremony declaring loyalty to Henry VI at St. Paul’s.  Their sudden departure after only 48 hours argues good diplomacy as well as military initiative as it both preserved the army’s discipline as well as the good will of the merchants and residents of London.  They marched north and encountered  a royal army under the king, the queen and the Duke of Buckingham on a sodden July 10 in a meadow on the southern bank of the River Nene.  Heavy rain fouled the royal artillery.  Thirty minutes into the battle, the King’s right flank, led by Lord Grey of Ruthin, defected to Fauconberg and Warwick loudly proclaimed that neither the King nor the common people were to be harmed, only the captains and professional Lancaster soldiery.  Discipline in the royal army collapsed.  The Lancaster generals, Thomas Percy, Shrewsbury, Beaumont and the Duke of Buckingham were all searched for and killed.  Less than thirty minutes later, the Earl of Warwick, the Earl of March and Lord Fauconberg discovered Henry VI in his tent and knelt to him.  They had “rescued” the King from his “evil counselors,” including his wife, who had evaded capture and fled north.  The Yorkist army returned south and entered London in a procession.  What did Malory think as he saw the King, the son of the Henry V, now a prisoner as he himself had been but two weeks before?  What did he think when he learned that his nemesis, the Duke of Buckingham had been killed?

The Lancastrian defenders of the Tower surrendered, their leader, Lord Scales, was summarily executed and Henry VI was imprisoned in the Palace of Westminster.  Meanwhile, Richard, Duke of York returned from Ireland, landing near Chester, and marched south in procession.  It was traditional, medieval political theatre; details from the chroniclers suggest the stage management, the production values, were exquisite:   York’s sword was born upright before him, the coat-of-arms of Lionel of Antwerp, 1^st Duke of Clarence, Edward III’s third son from whom York claimed descent (Henry VI’s claim was through John of Gaunt, the fourth son) was displayed along with the York heraldry.  The white and blue coat he wore when he was reunited with his wife Cecily at Abington was even embroidered with fetterlocks, a symbol used by his ancestor, Edward, Duke of York, the one great English magnate who’d died at Agincourt.  For those who could read the symbolism, and probably all the gentry and bourgeoisie could, the meaning was clear.  This wasn’t just the procession of the returning Duke of York, but a claimant to the crown, marching to London which was held by his eldest son, the Earl of March, and Warwick.

At ten in the morning on October 10^th, he arrived at the Palace of Westminster with a mounted contingent.  He entered the great hall, with a cloth of state held over his head by servants and his sword still born before him.

And was met with silence by the assembled peers and lords.

Henry IV’s 14 year reign, which began in pragmatic usurpation, consisted of nearly constant civil war, including the first battle between English armies both equipped with long bows, had not been forgotten.  In that battle at Shrewsbury, the Prince of Wales had been shot in the face with an arrow and nearly died of his wound.  Two thousand others had died.  In the English medieval imagination with its metaphorical hierarchical view of god, kingship, the state and the country, those 14 difficult, sometimes terrible years could be seen to have had a single source:  the usurpation of the throne of an anointed king.

Episode 26 can be found here.

A Fine and Terrible Mystery - Episode 22: Why did he write it?

This is episode 22 of my investigation into the life and works of Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur.  Episode 1 can be found here.

 

Why did Sir Thomas Malory write Le Morte d’Arthur?   Here are three alternatives.  He was imprisoned and trapped in a labyrinth of legal difficulties from which he might never emerge.  His solace was a diverse library of Arthurian sources and, choosing an avocation, he undertook to reconcile and collect what he judged to be the most important of those stories into a single coherent chronicle of the legendary ruler.  It was simply a distraction.

Or, imprisoned and trapped in a labyrinth of legal difficulties but with access to a diverse library of historical and fictional writing about King Arthur he decided to extract the true history of that most worthy king into a single chronicle and through doing so develop the perspective and wisdom to understand and patiently bear his own situation.  It was a search for personal illumination.

Or, finally, imprisoned and trapped in a labyrinth of legal difficulties but with access to an extraordinary Arthurian library, he decided to write a new work of fiction compiled from them which would prove to the world the virtue and morality of the code by which he himself attempted to live in stories about a time as fraught with conflict and unrest as his own.  It was an act of self-affirmation.

I’ve been researching Sir Thomas Malory’s life and reading his works since January and I wouldn’t presume to opine which of the those three is most likely correct.  The events of his life and what I’ve learned has convinced me that he was most probably innocent of all the charges leveled against him in the 1450s.  At a minimum the extant evidence is far from sufficient for conviction by modern legal standards.  Yet, for all that, I’m surprised at how little I feel I know the man.  What was his own family life like?  Did he love his wife and son?  Did he love the Warwickshire country in which he lived and remember moments and vistas as he languished in the Marshalsea?

One of my goals in undertaking the project was to develop a deeper sense of 15^th century life.  The past is indeed a foreign country; they do things differently there and it is sometimes very difficult to travel.  Yet that uncertainty is part of a greater empathy I’m developing for those that lived at that particular time and the difficult choices they faced.

Here’s an example.  From 1455 to 1460, extensive, sometimes ruthless parliamentary maneuvering and four important battles, 1^st St. Albans, Blore Heath, Ludford Bridge and Northampton delineated and polarized the two major camps of the Wars of the Roses:   the Queen’s party and the party of Richard, Duke of York.   As I’ve discussed previously, Malory was finally freed in October of 1457 through the efforts of  Lord Fauconberg, one of York’s lieutenants.  York’s ambition was apparent, yet he was also the more capable and equitable administrator.  The Queen’s party which mostly had control of the government, and King Henry’s apathetic approval, was exploitive, corrupt and divisive.  On October 31, 1460, the last great compromise between the two factions was announced.  Henry VI would rule until his death, but he would be succeeded by York and his heirs, not his own son, Edward of Winchester.  Shakespeare portrays a weak Henry, coerced by Warwick and York, who have him in his power but there could be more to it.  There was speculation at the time that Edward might not have been Henry’s son.  (Margaret may have chosen to conceive by a surrogate because the King was incapable or unwilling.  When her pregnancy was announced, the Milanese ambassador told Duke Francesco Sforza that when told of his wife’s pregnancy Henry had exclaimed “If she is expecting a child, then it must have been conceived by the Holy Ghost.”)  If so, there was a certain sense to it:  York would have been Henry’s proper heir.  Nevertheless, I don’t know.   Malory almost certainly didn’t know.

One thing we do know is that Malory’s nemesis and the Queen’s lieutenant, Humphrey, Duke of Buckingham was killed at the Battle of Northampton and the events of Malory’s life would have a very different character thereafter.

Episode 23 can be found here.

A Fine and Terrible Mystery

There is a book I want to read but it hasn’t been written.  It’s a book which solves an important mystery, or at least provides the likely solution to the mystery embodied in the known life, deeds and works of a man who lived in the 15^th century.

Call him Thomas.  He was born in 1416, approximately, near the year of Henry V’s great victory at Agincourt, in Stretton-under-Fosse in Warwickshire.  A minor noble, he was knighted sometime before 1441 (commonly at the age of 21) and in that year served as an Elector in Northamptonshire.   When he was 27 he and one Eustace Barnaby were accused of stealing  £40 from one Hugh Smyth.  (At that time £40 purchased £29,440 worth of goods at 2015 prices, but corresponded to £230,600 in the relative value of labor.)  It wouldn’t have been a minor theft yet it wasn’t prosecuted.

Thomas married Elizabeth Walsh in the same year and together they had a son, Robert and possibly 1-2 other children later.  In 1443 he was elected to Parliament as one of two “Knights of the Shire” for Warwickshire and was appointed to the Royal Commission for the distribution of funds to impoverished Warwickshire towns.  That trust could suggest the earlier accusation was frivolous and without merit.  In 1449, at the age of 33, he was elected Member of Parliament for the Duke of Buckingham’s safe seat of Great Bedwyn.

In 1451, when Thomas was about 35 years old, his life changed.  He was accused, along with 26 others, of trying to murder the Duke of Buckingham, one of the most powerful Lancastrian magnates in the land.  Thomas probably owed allegiance to the Earl of Warwick, a powerful Yorkist supporter.  The accusation was never proved.  Later in the same year he was accused of extortion twice then of breaking into the home of Hugh Smyth of Monkskirby, stealing £40 and raping Smyth’s wife and attacking her in Coventry 8 weeks later.  (Rape at that time could mean abduction or consensual sex with a married woman.)  His arrest was ordered but nothing was done.  In the following months Thomas was accused of over 100 serious crimes, mostly violent robberies.

He was finally brought to trial in August of that year in Nuneaton, the heartland of Buckingham’s power and imprisoned in infamous Marshalsea Prison in Southwark in spite of pleas to be tried by a new jury from Warwickshire.  Over the next several years he escaped was imprisoned again, escaped, was imprisoned until he was released on £200 bail (worth £147,000 of goods at 2015 prices) gathered by Warwickshire magnates.

From 1460 until 1470 he was imprisoned at Newgate for further alleged crimes, including joining with the Earl of Warwick in a plot to assassinate the Yorkist King, Edward IV.  He was explicitly excluded from two of Edward IV’s general pardons afterwards but was finally released during the short period when the Earl of Warwick returned Henry VI to the throne.  He died in 1471, about the age of 55.

While Thomas was in Newgate he had access to the library of the Greyfriars Monastery adjacent to the prison, one of the finest libraries in western Europe at the time.  And he wrote a book, arguably the greatest achievement of prose literature in the 15^th century, “Le Morte d’Arthur.”

Here is just one quote from Sir Thomas Malory’s book,  (there are many others that would have served just as well),

“Wherefore, as me seemeth, all gentlemen that beareth old arms ought of right to honour Sir Tristam for the goodly terms that gentlemen have and use, and shall do unto the day of doom, that thereby in a manner all men of worship may dissever a gentleman from a yeoman, and a yeoman from a villain.  For he that gentle is will draw him to gentle thatches (virtues) and to follow the noble customs of gentlemen.”

There are several obvious mysteries.  First, what happened in 1451 that caused a young knight with family, income and good prospects to turn into an apparently notorious outlaw?  If he was such an outlaw, why did the magnates of Warwickshire pay such a great sum for his bail?  Finally, most importantly, why is it that someone who was accused of such crimes wrote a book so intimately concerned with the issue of knightly morality?  Was he a redeemed sinner, a hypocrite, a Robin Hood, a rare honest man caught in an age in which everything, including the justice system was freely and cruelly manipulated by partisan politics (as the Paston letters indicate)?

I expect reasonable cases can be made for most, if not all, of the above.  As of late the study of Sir Thomas Malory’s life has become a bit of back water in spite of his importance to English letters.

Ian Mortimer has written a unique, thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening historical work:  “1415:  Henry V’s Year of Glory.”  The book chronicles everything that occurred on every day in 1415 in the world as far as Henry could have known it.  What makes the book so extraordinary is how a nuanced, complex and deep characterization of Henry Vth emerges from meticulous examination of that detail.

It seems to me that the life of Sir Thomas Malory, so important to understanding one of the seminal works of English literature and the English literary imagination might yield to a similar approach, particularly a close  examination of 1451 and the actions of the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of York, the Earl of Warwick and Queen Margaret as well as those more immediate to Malory himself. It's easily worthy of Sherlock Holmes, don't you think?

Episode 2 is here.