Guinevere

Guinevere's earliest appearance in the developed legend carries no trace of the love affair that later defines her. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, writing around 1136, names her Guanhumara and gives her one central role: victim of Mordred's treachery, seized along with the throne itself while Arthur campaigns against Rome on the continent, an act of usurpation with no romantic betrayal attached to it at all in Geoffrey's telling. It is Chretien de Troyes, writing in French some four decades later, who first gives Guinevere a lover, in a romance whose very title, Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, centers Lancelot's devotion to her as its subject, Lancelot's willingness to suffer public humiliation, riding in a cart normally reserved for criminals, simply to reach her. Once introduced, the affair does not stay a minor color in the legend; the following century of French prose romance, and above all the thirteenth century Vulgate Cycle, builds an entire tragic architecture around it, so that by the time Malory writes his English Le Morte Darthur in the fifteenth century, the affair is no longer a late addition to Arthur's story but its very engine, the private failure that becomes a public catastrophe.

In Malory's Le Morte Darthur, the affair between Guinevere and Lancelot is not merely a private matter but the specific mechanism that destroys the Round Table. Mordred and the knight Agravain expose the lovers to force Arthur's hand, precipitating Guinevere's trial and near execution for treason, a sentence Lancelot interrupts by force, killing several of his fellow knights, including Gareth and Gaheris, in the rescue, an act that turns their brother Gawain from Lancelot's staunch defender into his implacable enemy and drags Arthur into a war against the very knight who has been his kingdom's greatest defender. That war is what pulls Arthur out of Britain and leaves Mordred as regent, the opening Mordred needs to seize the throne and, in some versions, Guinevere herself, precipitating the campaign that ends at the Battle of Camlann. Guinevere's own ending is deliberately quiet against that scale of consequence: she takes the veil at Amesbury as Arthur's kingdom collapses around her, and when Lancelot comes to her one last time, she refuses him, choosing a life of penance over a reunion, a final scene Malory gives real weight to as the one act of the whole tragedy that is entirely her own choice.