Summary
The Candle of the Wind opens with a description of two members of the Orkney faction: the decadent, often drunk Agravaine and the elusive, wispy Mordred. The brothers are at Camelot, watching the domesticated hawks in the courtyard and mulling over their family history. Mordred, Arthur's son by Morgause (Arthur's own half-sister), has resented his father well into adulthood: when Mordred was an infant, Arthur had attempted to kill Mordred by loading a boat full of babies and wrecking the ship at sea. Aware of his difficult status as a child of incest, Mordred is determined to exact revenge by using the affair between Lancelot and Guenever to damage Arthur. Agravaine does not necessarily disapprove of an attempt against Arthur, though he does warn Mordred that personal intrigues against the king will need to be linked to broader political or ideological causes in order to succeed. Yet Mordred's other brothers—Gawaine, Gaheris, and Gareth—are not so accepting of Mordred's schemes. These three men soon arrive, and a violent confrontation erupts; Gawaine orders Mordred not to confront Arthur about the Lancelot-Guenever liaison and, when Agravaine and Mordred persist in their plan, bars their path and draws a hunting knife. Fortunately, the violence abates with the arrival of the aged King Arthur and his followers.
As White's narrator explains, in a series of paragraphs that offer a panorama of the Middle Ages, Arthur has succeeded in lifting England out of a state of society defined by bizarre atrocities and random violence. The Middle Ages would witness an evolution away from disease, subservience, and feudalism and an evolution into an era of achievements in architecture, literature, and reasonable civic order (with occasional instances of rough justice). This vast scene gives way to the more intimate view of Lancelot and Guenever, now much closer to old age, singing a song. Their love continues to be impossible to fulfill, since Guenever cannot abandon Arthur and live with Lancelot. In any case, they are soon joined by Arthur; he was fully aware of the scuffle among the Orkneys and explains to his two friends a few difficult truths, particularly his incestuous relationship with Morgause and his failed attempt to kill the infant Mordred. Lancelot, however, cannot bring himself to see Arthur as wicked, even in light of these transgressions.
Agravaine and Mordred persist in their plan to confront Arthur; despite the protestations of their other brothers (especially Gawaine), the two of them confront Arthur in his Justice Room and lay out the charge of intimacy between Lancelot and Guenever. Arthur acknowledges that such intimacy would be a treasonous offense, and consents to let justice run its course. He will even go on an excursion that will give Lancelot a chance to visit Guenever at night - and Agravaine and Mordred a chance to catch Lancelot and to thus prove their charges. Yet he warns the two Orkneys about Lancelot's prowess in combat and about the harsh penalties (death for Agravaine, exile for Mordred) should their charges be unfounded.
Gareth, who adores Lancelot, attempts to warn the older knight about the trap that has been set by Agravaine and Mordred. Lancelot is unworried and goes to visit Guenever's chamber at night; the two lovers soon realize that armed men directed by Mordred have gathered outside the chamber door. Lancelot does not have a sword or any armor. He opens the chamber door slightly, uses a stool to knock out the first man who enters, and plunges the man's sword into the man's helmet. The man turns out to be Agravaine. Lancelot arms himself and kills most of the other men who have gathered against him; Mordred, who escapes with a broken arm, is the only survivor.
Though Lancelot escapes, Guenever is sentenced to be burned at the stake. It is widely believed that Lancelot will come to save her, and Arthur, out of respect for the proceedings, insists on increasing the guard around his guilty wife. He asks Gareth and Gaheris to provide support; the two men go only grudgingly, and only under the condition that they will not wear armor and (presumably) will play only a minor role in the fight. Sad and anxious, Arthur and Gawaine watch from a window as the execution ceremony begins; suddenly, and to the joy of the two men, Lancelot's forces storm the scene and sweep Guenever to safety. Yet Mordred returns bearing sad news: though unarmed, Gareth and Gaheris were both killed in the course of the action, and their deaths are attributed directly to Lancelot.
Lancelot and Guenever successfully reach Lancelot's French castle, Joyous Guard, and settle in for the winter. Spurred on by the anguished and vengeful Gawaine, Arthur's forces set up a siege of the castle. They taunt Lancelot as the "Traitor knight!" and Lancelot and Guenever realize the impossibility of brokering a truce on their own. The Church, as represented by the Bishop of Rochester, arranges for Guenever to be returned to Arthur; Lancelot, Guenever, and Arthur are all together for the last time in their lives during the reconciliation ceremony at Arthur's castle. Yet Lancelot is forced to leave the country, and to return to war. Gawaine, who refuses to move past the deaths of his brothers, returns to besiege Joyous Guard with Arthur. Mordred has in the meantime created a violently nationalistic order known as the Thrashers; he is left behind in England as Protector of the realm while Arthur is away.
During their siege, Arthur and Gawaine receive distressing news: Mordred (who is by now completely deranged) has falsely declared the two older men dead and has attempted to take Guenever as his wife. Guenever has fled to the Tower of London for safety, but Mordred has begun to attack the Tower with cannons. Even though Gawaine is grievously wounded from recent bouts of single combat with Lancelot, the two men set off. Lancelot, upon learning of the troubles in England, follows after.
The final pages of The Once and Future King find Arthur on the eve of battle. Gawaine was killed as Arthur's forces moved back into England, and Arthur and Mordred are readying for one last fight. Arthur reflects on the lessons of his life, at first with pessimism, wondering if human nature is in fact capable of improvement. To him, it seems possible that humanity cannot move beyond the burdens of the past and the urge for possession and power. He calls for a page; a boy named Tom arrives, and Arthur realizes that Tom should serve a special purpose. Tom will not fight in the impending battle, as had been originally intended. Instead, he will leave Arthur and keep safe, but with the intention of perpetuating Arthur's civilizing project and Arthur's legend through storytelling. Eventually, this Tom grows up to be Thomas Malory, the author of the source text for much of The Once and Future King.
Arthur then reflects anew on human nature. The problem, he realizes, is the system of boundaries that people create between nations and between one another. He envisions a society recreated again, this time on the harmonious model of the birds and geese that he knew in his youth. Yet he will never put his plan into action. Mordred is killed in the ensuing battle, Lancelot becomes a hermit, Guenever becomes a nun, and Arthur either perishes or—as some believe—disappears, fated to one day return.
Analysis
With The Candle in the Wind, White continues and intensifies a critique begun in The Ill-Made Knight: an examination of the limits and shortcomings of Arthur's political project. In that previous book, Arthur's system of virtue and chivalry was shown to require major readjustments. In this book, however, the Arthurian system is presented as fatally flawed, the kind of noble yet self-defeating system that a man like Mordred has no trouble manipulating. Perhaps this is not especially surprising: Arthur grew up in conditions that exposed him to an especially kind version of human nature, and never really saw a good parallel for Mordred's deviousness in his explorations of animal communities. Those communities were at worst governed by absolute power (the fish) and mindless obedience (the ants), never by the cynical intrigue that Mordred favors.
Nor does Mordred really embody the "Might is Right" philosophy that Arthur has spent his life opposing. The younger man is not a knight of any exceptional physical prowess; he is not even a violent man in the manner of Sir Bruce Sans Pitie or one of the other marauders of Arthur's youth. Instead—as his success in forming the Thrashers indicates—Mordred is a man who can sway the whims and prejudices of a crowd, who can make ideology more formidable than any brute weapon. Early in The Candle in the Wind, Agravaine nicely foreshadows how Mordred will ultimately solidify his power: "You need a national grievance—something to do with politics which is waiting to burst out. You need to use the tools which are ready to hand" (519). The Thrashers are but one form of such grievances put into action; the English campaign against Lancelot (a French knight, after all) can be read as another.
But there is more to The Candle in the Wind than the suggestion that Arthur is a trusting old man who would probably not last five minutes on Game of Thrones. There is also the sense that Arthur was a man ahead of his time. The real flaw in his system of rule is not that it is weak or unjust in any fundamental way, but that it is a system inhabited by human beings who are themselves too deeply flawed to help it to run harmoniously. As White reminds us with the panoramic scenes that occur early in this climactic book, Arthur's world is still shedding conditions that are little better than barbarism. Another few generations—another few centuries—and perhaps the Round Table would seem more like a workable civic order and less like a fragile utopia.
White is equally determined to end the stories of Lancelot and Guenever, for all the flaws of these two characters, on its own dignified note. Their connection is free of the qualms and jealousies that beset it in The Ill-Made Knight—partially because Elaine no longer haunts Lancelot in any noticeable way, partially because their own maturity has led to candor without much in the way of disruptive conflict. White is also well aware that an extramarital affair involving two aging aristocrats may not be the stuff of stirring romance. He pushes back against this liability in the material, for instance when Lancelot takes leave of Guenever at the reconciliation ceremony: "He saw her ridiculous olive branch, her clumsiness and silly clothes. With a lifted hand he raised their tragedy to nobleness and gravity" (603). With a few modifications, the final words of this description could apply equally well to White himself.
Of course, it is possible to take a pessimistic view of everything that The Candle in the Wind has set forth. Arthur lost his kingdom through misplaced trust in his own system and his devious son; Lancelot and Guenever took needless risks that undermined the king they both adored. However, to embrace such pessimism would be to go against the message of White's final pages, pages in which Arthur emerges morally victorious—convinces at least one of his followers, young Tom, that there are values far more important than Might. Those values are not necessarily bound up with a grand vision of Right, either. Perhaps the real way to counter injustice, whether in the Middle Ages of Arthur or in the post-World War II era that saw The Candle in the Wind in print, is to understand human nature in all its particularities and all its flaws. Such understanding comes to Arthur over a lifetime, and is transmitted, page-by-page, to the reader of The Once and Future King.
