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 jewellike figure in a book of hours, the perfect embodiment of queenly grace and courtesy.
