A Good Deliverance
1468, nearly Pentecost. Sir Thomas Malory, seasoned courtier, is arrested by King Edward’s men whilst enjoying the haven of his sunny Warwickshire garden. Roughly trussed to a mule, he is escorted to Newgate Prison and thrown without mercy, for his years, into a befouled cell, his only comforts a tiny rush dip light and the company of a flea-bitten feral cat. Knowing himself a scapegoat, his death horribly foreshadowed by such manhandling, Sir Thomas prays in abject terror as the locking-bar slams shut.
One imperative plagues his fevered brain: he must be remembered. Recalling the knights whose valour inspired his youth, immortalised in his prison writings (later collectively named Le Morte d’Arthur), he grimly summons a patina of dignity. (For yes, his writing saved his sanity when previously arraigned in this very cell – thanks to the ubiquitous treachery of these malignant times.) He agonises, in utter wretchedness, that his own story will fade into obscurity.
It has been brim-full of experience, if not quite as envisaged in idealistic salad days as Sir Richard Beauchamp’s page of honour. As blood-soaked veteran of war, survivor of the siege of Calais, witness to the atrocities heaped upon the ‘Armagnac witch’ – just a skinny, bruised girl with faith unimaginable – the later seemingly unassailable respectability of knighthood, hearth and home tasted all the sweeter. Home, so excruciatingly missed. A sudden apparition?… No footsteps, yet an urchin at the door proffers ale! Sir Thomas almost sobs with gratitude.
Toby Clements unflinchingly lays bare all the casual barbarity of a feudal society decaying from the core, not least the cruel, convoluted politicking of nobles – and of kings. A bored gaoler’s son tolerates a gabbled near-confession to hear of much-mythologised Agincourt glories, redemption he cannot possibly imagine to a soul in direst torment. Haunting.
