CONCLUSION

The first text of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur was printed by William Caxton a month before Bosworth Field. If Bosworth may be taken, simply, as the date for the passing of the medieval age in England, then Morte d’Arthur, the chronicle of the rise and fall of Camelot, is that age’s fitting elegy. Romance does battle with treacherous, grasping reality, and reality wins. Sir Lancelot, the greatest knight who has ever lived, dies grovelling in shame, starved and shrunken, on the tomb of his lord, while the only four knights remaining of Arthur’s great brotherhood are dispatched to the Holy Land to die in battle with the Turks. Other kings will come, but as one Malory critic bluntly puts it, ‘We are not interested.’¹ And the source of this desolation and decay? The catalyst for the fall of Camelot? A queen.

‘And so . . . in a May morning, they took their horses with the Queen and rode a-Maying in woods or meadows as it pleased them.’ Finely mounted in her green silks, Guinevere appears to us as vividly as a jewel-like figure in a book of hours, the perfect embodiment of queenly grace and courtesy. Yet the consequences of her adulterous affair with Lancelot bring about knightly failure and political collapse. What does Guinevere’s portrait tell us about perceptions of queenship at the end of the fifteenth century? One way of answering this question is to compare Malory’s image of queenship with that of a writer from the very beginning of the period, the Anglo-Saxon ‘Beowulf’ poet. His protagonist is a lone warrior with the strength of thirty men who defeats two monsters and is ultimately defeated by a third. While initially it may appear that the two texts are divided by a whole culture, as well as seven centuries, both stories consciously invoke a lost past, myths or romances which were familiar to contemporary audiences, both investigate and criticise that past’s sense of ‘heroic’ values and both seek to make such questioning applicable to their contemporary audiences. ‘Beowulf’, too, is elegiac, in that it celebrates the passing of the pagan warriors and their monster foes whose time is over. Yet ‘Beowulf’ proposes an alternative, optimistic form of a new heroism, one that is characterised by the ‘feminine’ values of its queenly characters. In a sense, it anticipates the chivalric tradition that Guinevere’s adultery dismantles.

But how does the analysis of these texts help us to an overview of English queenship from the period of the Conquest to the beginning of the sixteenth century? Surely ‘Beowulf and Morte d’Arthur are fantasies, escapist entertainments that served as distractions from ordinary life in the way that Hollywood films might do today? Yes and no. There is no reason to believe that Saxon or medieval audiences were any less sophisticated in their relationship with such entertainments than modern cinemagoers. They knew perfectly well that knights and dragons were not ‘real’, even if their world had more of magic and miracles in it than ours. Their fears, hopes and comforts were dramatised for them in storytelling and reading just as they are for us, and the creators of those stories were alive to the inferences and resonances that would be drawn from them. Malory, for instance, who had been in Warwick’s company in the north in the 1460s, has the wizard Merlin foresee the early death of King Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon, and the consequent dangers to young princes represented by the ambitions of great lords – as topical a reference as one could wish for. Similarly, although the exploits of Beowulf take place in an ostensibly pagan world, the poet adjusts the inclinations of his characters to the expectations of his audience, rendering them ‘natural’ Christians. What makes these texts relevant, when read against each other, to English queenship, is how both centralise queens as instruments of the ideal, for better for worse, and this in turn suggests a distinct shift in values with regard to the always anomalous status of feminine power within a patriarchal culture between the eighth and fifteenth centuries.

Though there are more female characters in ‘Beowulf’ than in any other Old English poem, it can hardly be said to be ‘about’ women. The exploits of Beowulf and his thanes explore an almost exclusively masculine world. Yet of all the female characters, the five referred to by name are all queens, who observe rather than participate in the enthusiastically bloodthirsty violence of Beowulf’s adventures. Nevertheless, by their presence, their gestures and their position as victims of the heroic ethos, they are in a powerful position to offer both a comment on that ethos and an alternative to it. Essentially, they challenge the values of Beowulf’s world, both as emblems of their human cost and as transmitters of a Christianised world view which posits a new ideal of the heroic, in which battles are not fought against giants but against sin: ‘The “Beowulf” poet mobilises feminine voices to prescribe a new model of heroism premised on turning the violent energies of heroic self-assertion inward.’² How is this argued in the poem? At first, the roles of the queens appear to be conventional. The women are presented as participating in traditional heroic life in three ways: as the gracious hostesses in their lords’ halls, as the bestowers of treasure and as the peace-weavers. After Beowulf has slain the man-eating monster Grendel, Queen Wealtheow appears at the celebratory feast, elegant in her golden collar, reminding her husband to speak ‘words of gratitude’ and declaring that ‘Here, each warrior is true to the others/gentle of mind, loyal to his lord? The thanes are as one, the people all alert/the warriors have drunk well/They will do as I ask.’ She presents Beowulf with a collar, bracelets and rings, treasures which diplomatically evoke ancestral memories for Beowulf’s people, the Geats.

But Wealtheow’s poise is counterpointed by the examples of two other women. Before she appears, the warriors hear the story of Queen Hildeburh, whose political marriage collapses in the tensions between her marital and natal kin. She is pictured singing ‘doleful dirges’ over the corpse of her son, and is stripped of her treasure and returned to her own people. Hildeburh has failed as a peace-weaver, and the poet predicts the same fate for Wealtheow’s daughter, Freawaru, whose marriage will fail to effect concord between the Danes and their enemies the Heathobards. Although women have a crucial role in the maintenance of the social order, the price of adherence to the old-fashioned ethos of heroism is simply too high. Beowulf himself refuses to marry, as for him incessant warfare is incompatible with domesticity, but this has severe spiritual and practical consequences. When Beowulf divests himself of his weapons in order to fight hand-to-hand with Grendel, it seems initially that his gesture is heroic, but in a sense he is reducing himself to the level of a monster – ‘life within a cultural group ruled by the logic of the sword’s edge is ultimately dehumanising’.³ Beowulf’s lack of a wife reflects his insistence on the ‘old’ heroic model, but he is left without sons, and with no woman to pass the mead cup in his hall he is unable to establish the necessary affective bonds between lord and thane. In his final encounter with the dragon, his men desert him and he is killed. His death is all the more poignant because he has no children, his heroic virility to all intents and purposes fails him at the last and, just as he had no queen to love him, there is no woman to mourn him.

In this reading of the poem, Beowulf is ultimately shown as an anachronism, albeit a glorious one. What is the alternative to the ‘toxic’⁴ violence of the heroic code? If traditionally ‘feminine’ attributes can be incorporated into heroism, then heroes can reinvent themselves. This is not to suggest that Beowulf is best advised to stay at home and take up weaving, but to absorb the more fluid understanding of gender roles that typified Anglo-Saxon culture. It has been proposed that sexual difference in the Anglo-Saxon world was less a result of biological distinction than of the way in which the individual accessed and interacted with power – sex was effectively dependent on status. In the ‘old’ code, such status was predicated on aggression, but it could, potentially, be spiritual. Spiritual militancy was a means of transcending gender: women could be geworht werlice (made male), through faith. Anglo-Saxon hagiography is rich with examples of ‘trans-vestite saints’, women who have overcome their biological femininity by attaining spiritual masculinity. The wisdom which was traditionally associated with women in Germanic culture, and which is frequently referred to in Beowulf was, when combined with Christian faith, a route to power and thus a crossing of gender boundaries. As the tenth-century divine Aelfric put it, ‘If a woman is made manfully and strong in accordance with God’s will, she will be counted among the men who sit at God’s table.’⁵ But what constituted spiritual as opposed to martial strength? In the section of ‘Beowulf’ known as Hrothgar’s ‘Sermon’, the aged King advises Beowulf that the real enemy is not monsters and dragons, but ‘secret temptation’ and ‘the seeds of arrogance’. Beowulf must ‘learn the nature of nobility’ if he wishes to achieve ‘gain everlasting’; that is, battles are no longer to be fought only with swords, but with the will. If ‘heroic’ maleness can in this manner be associated with the ‘feminine’ qualities of the mind, the gender distinctions might meld into a new definition of ‘heroic femininity’ which offers a positive prospect for the future when compared with the deadly code of the fading Germanic twilight. If the arena of battle is relocated to the spirit, then peacefulness is rendered heroic, and ‘Beowulf’ can be seen as gesturing ‘toward a new model of masculine heroism, one rooted less in external proficiency in war than in a cultivation of the inner self⁶ As observers and critics, the queens of ‘Beowulf’ posit and endorse such a model.

In the centuries between the composition of ‘Beowulf’ and the Morte d’Arthur, it could hardly be said that pacifism acquired heroic status. The splendours of war bedazzled the fear of death and the elites of Europe continued slaughtering one another (and their unfortunate retainers) with familiar gusto. Norbert Elias offers a picture of the practical psychology of the warrior of the Middle Ages. ‘(He) not only loved battle, he lived in it. He spent his youth preparing for battle. When he came of age he was knighted and waged war as long as his strength permitted . . . His life had no other function. His dwelling place was a watchtower, a fortress . . . If by accident he lived in peace, he needed at least the illusion of war. He fought in tournaments and these tournaments often differed little from real battles.’⁷ Several critics have pointed out the ‘chronic form’ of war and the ‘universal uncertainty’ it produced,⁸ and the tension between knightly Christianity and its clerical form is at the centre of scholarly discussion on the definition, meaning and uses of chivalry. The world of Morte d’Arthur, for which Malory drew on the French romances that had been such popular reading matter with many English queens, largely endorses the ‘knightly’ version in its tales of gallant warriors, beautiful women and conveniently flexible aristocratic morality. (Casual encounters are one thing, but ladies of family quite another.) Early on, Sir Lancelot’s view of the ‘feminine’ world of marriage is similar to Beowulf’s own: ‘But for to be a weddyd man, I thynke it not, for then I must couche with hir and leve armys and turnaments, batelys and adventures’. For Lancelot and his fellows, women might be a good excuse for fighting, but there is nothing feminine about heroism.

Then something odd happens. In Book Six, ‘The Tale of the Sankgreal’ (the Holy Grail), Malory abruptly shifts the moral focus of the Arthurian world to incorporate a version of heroism which looks very much like the one posited by the ‘Beowulf’ poet. Suddenly, earthly valour is shown as inferior to spiritual might; ‘Goddys workis’ take the place of ‘worldly workis’. Chastity is now imperative, and even killing is off the menu: Lancelot declares that ‘sith that he wente into the queste of the Sankgreal he slew never man nought shall, tylle that he come to Camelot again’.

Yet even as he raises the possibility of such a new form of heroism, Malory disenchants his reader. Lancelot fails in the Grail quest because of his sinful relationship with Queen Guinevere, and from that sin springs the disaster which overwhelms the world of the knights. As in ‘Beowulf’, it is the private world, the interior world, that is the real enemy, but whereas in ‘Beowulf’ the private is figured as a new battleground to be conquered, in Morte d’Arthur it is the imprudence of allowing the private into the public realm that brings destruction. Lancelot and Guinevere fail at the challenge the ‘heroic femininity’ laid down in ‘Beowulf’. Malory does not quite condemn their relationship, but their love gives an opportunity for evil to slip into Camelot, just as Lancelot (in one of the sexiest passages in medieval literature) breaks the iron bars protecting the Queen’s bedroom. The lovers are trapped and discovered, and now the world of ‘private ambition and greed’ represented by the wicked Mordred pollutes Arthur’s kingdom with avarice and ambition, treachery and dissent. The values of chivalry no longer apply, the public good is overwhelmed by the personal and private. When Mordred and Arthur confront one another in their final showdown, Malory offers a vision of a world in which battle is anything but noble: ‘That pyllours and robbers were corn into the fylde to pylle and robbe many a full noble knight . . . And who were not dead all out they slew them for their harneys and their riches.’ Morte d’Arthur, like ‘Beowulf,’ takes place in a mythicised past; what Malory is presenting here is a window on the future, in a sense, his present.

If the queens of ‘Beowulf’ anticipate a form of feminine power, then Guinevere’s end closes off the possibility of its achievement. She sees out her life as a nun at Amesbury, redeemed, but enclosed and powerless. Her spirituality is penitent rather than militant. Her laments recall the geomuru ides, the ‘sad women’ of Anglo-Saxon literature who, like Hildeburh in ‘Beowulf’ can do nothing but weep and mourn the destruction their men have wrought. Like Beowulf, Guinevere is barren. Beowulf’s lack of heirs can be read as positive, as making way for the new type of hero the poem envisages through its queens, but Guinevere’s childlessness can only confirm the ignobility of the future anticipated by the thieves who stream over the battlegrounds. If, then, we see these two ‘historical’ texts as casting a question and an answer, how does Malory’s response in the fifteenth century allow us to examine the paradigm of queenship from the Conquest onwards?

The tension between the heroic potentiality of the ‘Beowulf’ queens and the ambiguous presentation of Guinevere in Arthurian literature corresponds with several of the dynamics discussed in relation to the lives of English queens. The source of this tension has been identified as the ‘structural misogyny’⁹ that characterised the era, in which powerful women were increasingly defined in terms of their ‘masculine’ attributes. Women could, and did, participate in politics, economic and religious matters at the highest level, but such participation was consistently figured in relation to the superiority of a masculine model. Hence the trans-gender possibilities offered by heroic femininity anticipate the cultural case for the medieval virago, a ‘third sex’ of women whose power traversed the traditional confines of their role, a position which was ‘unconsciously addressed in the legislation of the era, but that had never been overtly categorised’.¹⁰ The sixth-century Life of the Holy Radegund confirms the potential of spiritual militancy signalled in ‘Beowulf’. ‘He wins mighty victories through the female sex and despite their frail physique He confers glory and greatness on women through strength of mind. By faith, Christ makes them strong who were born weak so that . . . they garner praise for their creator who hid heavenly treasure in earthen vessels.’¹¹ Yet while such possibilities were recognised, the figure of the virago remained troublingly anomalous, and it might be argued that in the period between ‘Beowulf’ and the Morte d’Arthur its connotations were increasingly negative.

A skilful queen could negotiate the ambiguities of the ‘virago’ label to her advantage. Confronted with rebellious French magnates during the minority of her five-year-old son, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s granddaughter Blanche of Castile met with them on her bed, holding her child. This image – maternal, intimate, sexual and beseeching – convinced the magnates to support her, placing them in the position of chivalrous protectors, after which Blanche governed as actively as any man. In post-Conquest England, Matilda of Boulogne was able to manipulate the stereotypes of femininity in such a manner that in her case, ‘virago’ became a term of praise, in contrast with its negative use by the detractors of her rival, the Empress Matilda. Eleanor of Provence was positively commemorated as a ‘virago’, but anxieties about Isabella of France’s sexuality and ruthless ambition again saw the description used pejoratively. By the fifteenth century, Marguerite of Anjou’s desperate struggle for her rights earned her the sobriquet ‘shrill virago’.¹² Considering Guinevere’s portrayal in the fifteenth century, it would seem that the virago had descended from a richly able figure whose role as counsellor, peace-weaver and ruler in post-Germanic culture was accepted and honoured (if not unequivocally) to a transgressive fomentor of dissent who needed to be kept in her place. Malory is careful to display Guinevere as less an individual woman than the occupier of a role. His portrait of her exists because of the purpose it serves ‘at the heart of the public/private clash which heralds and provokes the downfall of the realm’.¹³ In a sense, she exists at all only insofar as she is a queen. When Lancelot rescues her from being burned at the stake, he rides ‘straight unto Queen Gwenyver and made caste a kurtyll and gown upon her’. Lancelot cannot speak to her as a woman before he has restored her fitting apparel as a queen; she has no power of her own, merely that with which her role, literally, in this instance, covers her. Her position has superseded her personality, and when, as Lancelot’s lover, Guinevere casts it off, the ramifications are terrible.

Morte d’Arthur’s answer to the question posed by ‘Beowulf’ summarises a model of queenship from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries in which queens’ active authority slowly declines while their ceremonial, ritual role becomes increasingly complex and codified. The move from actual to symbolic efficacity of the intercession dynamic, as we have observed in the examples of Philippa of Hainault and Anne of Bohemia, the elaboration of ceremonies such as coronation, childbirth and churching fix the queen ever more firmly in her place, reducing her, like Guinevere in her kirtle, to a powerless image. Malory refuses the possibilities of heroic femininity opened up by ‘Beowulf’ just as he despairs at the passing of the chivalric world he celebrates. The Morte d’Arthur is, as we have seen, coloured by contemporary events. It is theorised that Malory diverted from his sources in the tale of the ‘Knight of the Cart’ to reflect Marguerite of Anjou’s ‘Queen’s gallants’, who died for her at Blore’s Heath, in Guinevere’s company of ‘Quene’s knyghts’.¹⁴ This is not to suggest that Malory believed the violence and conflict of 1485 was brought about by a queen, but, as noted in the case of Eleanor of Provence, a foreign queen was always the preferred scapegoat in times of conflict, and perhaps it is not going too far to say that the diminution in queens’ actual power by the fifteenth century, as best exemplified by Elizabeth of York, was correlated to the anxieties provoked by the paradoxical figure of the virago.

And yet. The sixteenth century was to see England’s first queen regnant, and in the figure of Elizabeth Tudor its most heroic female of all. Any dynamic of slow decline in queenly power from the Anglo-Norman period to the fifteenth century is abruptly arrested by a peek into the future. Compared with Wealtheow at the beginning of the period, Guinevere is a pessimistic queenly model for its end, but while Thomas Malory may have been despondent about the possibilities of queenship, the political and cultural legacies of all the women discussed combined to inaugurate perhaps the greatest period of female power in England before the twentieth century.