The Lost Land of King Arthur

by John Cuming Walters

And I should evermore be vexed with thee

In hanging robe or vacant ornament

Or ghostly footfall echoing on the stair.”

This was when the time was come that Arthur should see Camelot no more—when he had gone forth to his last fight, and Guinevere had taken the nun’s habit and immured herself in Almesbury.

Renan has very finely remarked that in Celtic literature woman is more tenderly and delicately portrayed than in the writings and songs of any other race. Love is “a mystery, a kind of intoxication, a madness, a giddiness,” and woman is superbly idealised until she seems in our eyes an ethereal, radiant, half-spiritual or even angelic creature. The romances are “dewy with feminine sentiment,” and the chivalric conception of the heroine is so pure and beautiful that Percivale’s sister, or Geraint’s wife, appears “as a sort of vague vision intermediate between man and the supernatural world.” Even faithless Guinevere—is she not so rarely beautiful, are not her spell and witchery so strong, that, while hating her sin, we hesitate to join in her condemnation, and have no heart to approve such passionate denunciation as was spoken by the king in his hour of gloom?[27] The vision of Guinevere flashes upon us as she was when Lancelot led her from Cameliard to the king’s court at Camelot, when she went a-Maying with her maidens, and when she was the cynosure of all eyes among the spectators of the tournament. There was something daring on the part of the old chroniclers in making King Arthur’s danger issue from the best of knights and the most lovely of women—the two nearest to him, and bound to him by the most sacred ties of love and honour. Still more strange is it that, deep as their sinning was, we have so little blame—or rather, let us say, resentment—for Lancelot and Guinevere. This is not because Arthur has not the strongest claim upon our sympathy, or because for one moment he fails to win our admiration; it is only because Lancelot and Guinevere also have strong human claims upon us, and so far have won our regard that we cannot withhold our compassion also. Were not the knights themselves reluctant to condemn? The romance brings out the fact conspicuously that it was not the noblest, but the meanest, of the knights who revealed the wrong to the king; nor was it the gallant men who willed that Guinevere should die at the stake for her infidelity. And in the end do we not pity mournful and repentant Lancelot in his lonely castle, or when paying that noblest of tributes to his dead master? And does not even a deeper feeling extend to the desolate woman who wore out her life in the Almesbury convent?

What ingredient of historic fact there may be in the record that the Ambresbyrig of the Saxons, and the Caer Emrys of the “Mabinogion” was the queen’s retreat, the faithful alone must decide. All that impartial and not too credulous historians can do is to pronounce the place as not unlikely, not impossible, and not unfitting as her abode and as the scene of her last acts of restitution and repentance. Almesbury is a British earthwork of forty acres, the stronghold of Ambrosius Aurelianus, Dux Britanniarum, of Roman lineage, but the champion of the Britons against the Saxon horde. Religious associations both early and late cling to this ancient place, and long after Guinevere was dust a Benedictine monastery, founded by Queen Elfrida, continued the religious traditions of the earlier era; and the fact that Almesbury was the customary retreat of royal ladies who wished to withdraw from the world confirms the character of the place as depicted in Malory’s chronicle. Guinevere gave herself up to lamentation among the nuns, “and never creature could make her merry”; Sir Lancelot’s visit only strengthened her resolution to make amends for the past, and prompted him also to seek, too late, perfection in righteous living. While in a hermitage himself there came to him the vision of the queen’s end, and taking her corpse to Glastonbury, he performed for it the last rites, and then delivered himself over to death. His resting-place was Joyous Gard, which, in his grief he had called Dolorous Gard; the queen was laid by her husband’s side in the island-valley. But at Llanilterne, near Cardiff, a huge quoin stone may be seen with an almost undecipherable Hic jacet, and popular tradition declares that this is Guinevere’s monument. “Through this knight and me,” said the queen, when Sir Lancelot and she met in the Almesbury convent, “all the wars were wrought, and the death of the most noble knights of the world: for through our love that we have loved together is my most noble lord slain; therefore, wit thou well, Sir Lancelot, I am in such a plight to get my soul’s health; and yet I trust, through God’s grace, that after my death for to have the sight of the blessed face of Jesu Christ, and at the dreadful day of doom to sit on his right side: for as sinful creatures as ever was I are saints in heaven.” When next the “falsely true” knight saw the queen he was in his monk’s habit and she was “wrapped in seared cloths of reins, from the top to the toe, in thirty fold”; then, on foot, he followed her to her tomb, recalling “her beauty, her bounty, and her nobleness.” The next scene is at Joyous Gard itself, with Sir Lancelot smiling as he lies dead, and a hundred torches burning about him; while Sir Ector de Maris delivers the noblest of tributes to the courtliest knight, the truest friend, the meekest man, the sternest foe, and “the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman.”

From Camelot to Almesbury is a far journey, and that journey marks the two extremes of Arthurian history from the happiest to the saddest, from the height of power and the plenitude of peace to the final desolation and unavailing regret. The bridge which connects Camelot with Almesbury is made up of the greatest achievements and the deepest tragedies of Arthur’s reign. It is a bridge of ascent and descent, its highest point marked by the puissance of the Table Round and Galahad’s achievement of the quest of the Grail, its lowest part dipping into the eternal gloom which followed the last battle in the west—a gloom from which the Britons were destined never to emerge. That gloom falls over Almesbury, but Camelot is still left in the light.

Never was, and never can be, such a fairyland as “many-tower’d Camelot.” Its crystal dykes, its slope street, its weird white gate, and its spires and turrets without number, are a poet’s dream. It was the city of enchanters, built by fairy kings, a city which had no beginning, was raised by no human hands, and can have no end—