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Above: Tintagel Castle, possible birthplace of King Arthur.
O, hark, O, hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O, sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying,
Blow, bugles; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.—Alfred Lord Tennyson
King Arthur, since watching The Sword in the Stone as a very young child with my father back in 1963 (though to be fair, all I really remembered until seeing it again a decade later was the haunting opening song) has held a stronghold upon my imagination. Both the faux-mediaeval image of movies and the Prince Valiant comic strip on the one hand and as I grew older more original sources only solidified this hold. Malory and Tennyson did their bit – as did even the Inklings. The line from Camelot, “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot,” became as dear to me as the Man of La Mancha’s willingness “to ride into hell for a Heavenly cause.”
As I got to know what such historians as Geoffrey Ashe believe to lie behind the legends, the picture became even more enchanting. My father’s French-Canadian ancestors had fought the English for a century and a half until losing at the Plains of Abraham; he also had a Scots ancestor who had fought at Culloden and loved the Jacobites as result. He also revered the heroes of the Vendée and the Papal Zouaves. My mother loved the Habsburgs and the Romanoffs, and they knew a number of White Russians who had fought the Communists in that country’s civil war. Thus, the picture of Arthur as the last Dux Bellorum of Britain, maintaining the light of the Catholic Faith and civilisation as the darkness closed in around him and his gallant followers appealed to me greatly.
Much as the adventures of Arthur and his Knights thrill me on that level, the addition of the Holy Grail – a late addition to the stories which in itself has come to symbolise the Kingship of Christ and Queenship of Mary, the Passion, the Eucharist, the Precious Blood, the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts, Christian Monarchy, Chivalry – adds all that I hold dear and Sacred. Indeed, it is the subject of one of my books.
Of course, King Arthur has had a far wider influence beyond my internal universe. As the invading Saxons drove the Britons west into Strathclyde, Cumbria, Wales, and Cornwall – and many fled over the sea to Brittany – they brought their stories of their great hero and his associates with them. The centuries wore on, and from Brittany, the stories passed on to the Normans, who would spread them throughout England, France, and Southern Italy. Some of the greatest writers in every Mediaeval country added to the store of legend, and so, he was inserted even into most of the royal genealogies of Europe. Alongside Charlemagne and Godefroy of Bouillon, Arthur was eventually hailed as one of the three great heroes of Christendom as a whole.
In the wake of the Protestant revolt he took on both a cultural and political role in the defence of tradition. As Orson Welles put it:
I think there has always been an England, an older England, which was sweeter, purer, where the hay smelled better and the weather was always springtime and the daffodils blew in the gentle, warm breezes. You feel a nostalgia for it in Chaucer, and you feel it all through Shakespeare. And I think that he was profoundly against the modern age, as I am. I am against my modern age, he was against his. And I think his villains are modern people…They represent the modern world, which includes gouging out eyes and sons being ungrateful to their fathers, and all the rest of it. I think he was a typically English writer, arch-typically, the perfect English writer in that very thing, that preoccupation with that Camelot, which is the great English legend, you know.
But for the political and military opposition to the onset of that cruel and evil modernity, Arthur played a very specific role, as Murray Pittock informs us:
Subsequently, it was to be ‘those who supported the Divine Right of Kings’ who ‘upheld the historicity of Arthur’ whereas those who did not turned instead ‘to the laws and customs of the Anglo-Saxons.’ Arthur remained a figure central to Stuart propaganda. Stuart iconography celebrated the habits and beliefs of the ancient Britons. In particular, the Royal Oak, still a central symbol of the dynasty, was closely related to ideas about Celtic fertility ritual, and the King’s power as an agent of renewal: ‘The oak, the largest and strongest tree in the North, was venerated by the Celts as a symbol of the supreme power.’ It was thus fitting that an oak should protect Charles II from the Cromwellian troops who wished to strip the sacred new Arthur of his status. The story confirmed the King’s mystical authority, and also his close friendship with nature. Long after 1688, the Stuart dynasty was to be closely linked with images of fertility. In literature, Arthurian images of the Stuarts persisted into the nineteenth century. This ‘Welsh messiah, the warrior who will come to overthrow the Saxons and Normans,’ was an icon of the Stuarts’ claim to be Kings of all Britain, both ‘Political Hero’ and ‘National Messiah,’ in Arthurian mould. Arthur’s status as a legendary huntsman (‘the figure of the Wild Huntsman is sometimes identified with Arthur’) was also significant. The Stuarts made much of hunting: it helped to confirm their heroic status as stewards of nature and the land.
So it has been with the figure of Arthur across Europe. It is recorded that as a young prince he came here to Austria, to the shrine of Maria Lanzendorf – which seems impossible until one remembers that there was a steady flow of pilgrims passing through this region from Britain to Rome in the 400s and 500s, when Arthur would have been King in Britain. Since moving to Europe, I have visited as many Arthurian sites as time and money would allow. In July of 2019, I made it at last to the enchanted forest of Broceliande in Brittany. For years I had wished to walk its glades – to visit the “Grail Church” of Trehontereuc, the Fountain of Barenton, and the Arthurian exhibit at the nearby Castle of Comper.
In 2022, as the grip of COVID was relaxing, I was able to visit a sliver of southwestern Wales – the Oratory of Cardiff, with its shrine of the Protomartyr of Britain, St. Alban, was obvious. But the rest of the day was spent at Caerleon, which has its own store of Arthurian tales, to include what is claimed to have been the inspiration for the Round Table. Wales, little though I saw of it, was as enchanting as Brittany. Last year, I went with a friend to Carlisle, whose castle is also recorded as a centre of Arthur’s court.
This year, another opportunity was offered by friends to travel. On April 23, St. George’s Day, the five of us set out on the night train from London to Penzance. Arriving the next morning, we had a cup of tea, and then took the two-and-a-half-hour ferry to St. Mary’s Isle, the largest of the Scilly Isles – according to legend, all that is left of the lost land of Lyonnesse of Arthurian story, and home of Sir Tristram of Tristram and Isolde fame. We put up at Tregarthen’s Hotel, where Lord Tennyson, himself a great contributor to the modern vision of Arthur through The Idylls of the King, had vacationed and written Enoch Arden. It is a strange place – with palm trees and a dreamy maritime atmosphere.
The next day we returned by ferry to Penzance. Cornwall, like Brittany, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, is a Celtic country, and driving through its countryside, I was struck this first time, as so often in those other paces by the memory of Tolkien’s description of Lindon: “Beyond the Lune was Elvish country, green and quiet, where no Men went…” So it was between Penzance and St. Ives (though en route there we met neither man, wives, sacks, cats, or kits). It is easy to see why the Celtic imagination is so haunted by elves and fairies. But the following day, it was not the Little People we were interested in, but the great Archangel, St. Michael.
Unfortunately, St. Michael’s Mount was closed. It is not only the sight of an apparition of the Heavenly Prince, but the beginning of “St. Michael’s Line,” – a straight line passing through various of his shrines in Europe down to Mount Carmel in Israel. The Mount itself remans the property of a local gentry family, and the villagers are their tenants. But we would dearly have loved to pray in the Mediaeval chapel.
Instead, we drove on to Truro, current capital of Cornwall, or Kernow as the native Cornish language has it. Although still part of the Catholic diocese of Plymouth in Devon, the Anglicans made it a separate diocese in the 19th century, and so their cathedral dates from that era. It is beautiful; its builder, Edward White Benson, first bishop of the place, created the now world-famous Yuletide “Service of Nine Lessons and Carols” to raise money for the building. Later Archbishop of Canterbury, he was the father of Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson. We then drove on to St. Columb Major, which was the centre of the Cornish Jacobite Rising of 1715. Like the stalwarts then, our small party stood in front of the Market Cross and loudly cheered “God Save King James!” Given that there was no one else about, this explosion of fervour aroused little comment.
That night we stayed at the Mill House, near Tintagel. For Sunday Mass the next day, we went to Lanherne. Now a Carmelite monastery, since the Middle Ages it had been the home of the Arundells of Lanherne. They kept the Faith during and after the Protestant revolt – Sir Humphrey Arundell leading the 1549 Prayer Book Rebellion against the abolition of the Latin Mass. It became the centre of Catholic Cornwall. When the last heiress married her Arundell of Wardour cousin in the 18th century, the house was given to the Carmelites. To-day it remains a refuge for the Traditional Latin Mass. We then drove to Dozmary Pool, legendary site of the reception from and return of Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake. Close by is Jamaica Inn, the site of Daphne du Maurier’s 18th century smuggling novel. We then put up at the Mill House, near Tintagel, legendary site of King Arthur’s birth.
The next morning, we went first to the high advertised “Arthurian Centre” in Camelford, only to find it temporarily closed. Then we drove on to Tintagel itself. In the middle of the town is King Arthur’s Great Halls, which were actually built in the 1920s by a wealthy industrialist-turned-Arthurian-enthusiast. Being of a Masonic-esoteric disposition, one finds a bit of that influence. But the multimedia retelling of the basic story is worthwhile, the place is beautiful, and the stained-glass windows illustrating various Arthurian stories are lovely – and the giftshop has some interesting items. One ignores the odd bits as one must at so many of our national monuments in Washington.
It was then on to the ruins of Tintagel Castle itself, which are spectacular. Most of what is visible is Norman, which has led many authorities to dismiss the stories of Arthur’s birth. But recent archaeological discoveries show that under that castle was a large settlement dating back to the 500s, and in trading relations with the Eastern Mediterranean. So it seems that there may be well be something to the old stories.
We drove to Launceston on the River Tamar, which separates Kernow from the land the Cornish call Pow Saws, but which the natives dub “England.” The Castle is where the current King, as Prince of Wales, received the homage of his Duchy of Cornwall. The early 16th century church of St. Mary Magdalene was open and interesting. Unfortunately, the Catholic Shrine of the great Cornish martyr, St. Cuthbert Mayne, was locked up at mid-day, though we prayed outside.
Across the Tamar, we entered Devonshire, and headed to Sampford Courtenay, centre of the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, and led by Sir Humphrey Arundell as noted. St. Andrew’s Church was open, and had a wonderful display on the rebellion, and the Banner of the Five Wounds on the wall. One of our party told us the story of how the entire Catholic hierarchy of England and Wales had come there in 1949 to officially commemorate the 500th anniversary – 50 years later, they forbade any notice being taken of it. Thence we drove to Crediton, where St. Boniface, apostle of Germany, was born. Unfortunately, as with that of St. Cuthbert Mayne, the Catholic National Shrine was closed mid-day. We drove on to our hotel in Street, a suburb of Glastonbury.
Unlike all the other places we had been so far, I had been to Glastonbury. The first time was in 1992, in the aftermath of the Tolkien Centennial Conference in Oxford. That time, at 31 years of age, I rushed up the Tor quickly and happily. Thirty years later, when I visited Geoffrey Ashe in his house at the foot of the Tor, I climbed up afterwards slowly and painfully. It was harder still this time; but we reached St. Michael’s Tower, where the Martyrs of Glastonbury suffered under Henry VIII, and we prayed. We visited the Chalice Well at the bottom; New Age-y though it is, it is very pleasant. Indeed, the New Age pulsates through Glastonbury, to a greater or lesser degree disgusting my friends, but transporting me back to the Hollywood of my 1960s childhood. The Catholic shrine of Our Lady of Glastonbury was predictably closed. But we entered the Abbey ruins, and prayed at various spots, including the site of Arthur’s and Guinevere’s tombs. After a quick bite at the Mediaeval George and Pilgrims, we drove on to Cadbury Castle to gaze on the site of Camelot. There is not much to see, but as with Tintagel, archaeology has confirmed a good deal of folklore.
The next day we came at last to our final destination: Winchester – which Geoffrey of Monmouth gave as Arthur’s capital. We went first to the Cathedral – two of us singing the New Vaudeville Band’s 1966 hit of that name before going in. It is a truly breathtaking masterpiece of the Gothic. From thence we went to Winchester’s Great Hall – all that remains of the Castle. In it is exhibited what has been claimed to be King Arthur’s Round Table. It doubtless dates back to the 1200s at least and was doubtless used for that purpose in re-enactments – something that the legend of King Arthur has always inspired.
If anything, this trip further fuelled my love of the Once and Future King. There is the old prophecy that he will one day come back and lead his people – though whether those be the English or their Welsh, Breton, Cumbrian, and Cornish opponents – or indeed, all of those Europeans who ended up revering him – is another question. Indeed, every Christian people has legends of some King or hero who shall similarly return. It might just be a yearning for the Second Coming – but then again, when Our Lord does return, what could be more appropriate than such a royal and heroic honour guard? And who could be a more appropriate member of that corps than he who held the flame of the Faith aloft when all his neighbours attempted to smother it? Who could be a greater inspiration to us to-day, in a similar situation?