Sir Agravain

Agravain comes to court as one of the five sons of King Lot of Orkney and Lothian and of Queen Margawse, the half-sister of Arthur, which makes him the king's nephew and heir to the proudest and most dangerous clan in the realm. The old French romances name him in the roll of great knights as Agravain the Proud, and pride is the key to him. When King Lot fell in the wars of Arthur's succession, slain by King Pellinore, his sons carried the debt of blood to Camelot with them, and though they took the Round Table's oath, they never abandoned the Orkney way of private vengeance. Gawain grew into the pattern of courtesy, Gareth into the pattern of humility, but Agravain kept the clan's older face: envious, watchful, and certain that the world owed his house more than it paid.

The feud runs through his story long before his famous act. The brothers avenged their father upon King Pellinore, and when Sir Lamorak de Galis, Pellinore's son and the third knight of the world, became the lover of their own widowed mother, the clan closed in again. Their brother Gaheris found Queen Margawse with Lamorak and struck off her head with his own hand, and afterwards the four brothers, Gawain, Agravain, Gaheris and Mordred, set upon Lamorak together and killed him, Gaheris dealing the stroke from behind. Arthur wept for Lamorak and foresaw the ruin in it, for the court had watched the king's own kin commit murder under the banner of honour, and no law had touched them. In that impunity Agravain learned his lesson: blood and title excuse everything, and a word placed in the right ear can kill a man more safely than a lance.

His hatred of Lancelot had no single cause, and Malory states it flatly: Agravain and Mordred had ever a privy hate unto Queen Guinevere and to Sir Lancelot, and daily and nightly they watched upon him. The whole court knew what the two watchers claimed to know, and the whole court had agreed not to know it, for the realm was built upon the love of the king, the queen and the first knight of the world standing together. Agravain resolved to make the secret a fact. He and Mordred spoke it openly before their brothers, and were answered as they deserved: Gawain told them plainly that they would destroy the realm and the fellowship, and he, Gaheris and Gareth refused to be of their counsel. So Agravain went to the king.

Arthur, trapped between his crown and his heart, could only permit the proof. The king let it be known that he would hunt all the next day and lie from the court all night, and the queen, as the plotters intended, sent for Lancelot. Sir Bors warned Lancelot that it smelled of a snare, and Lancelot went anyway, for the queen had sent. At midnight Agravain, Mordred and twelve knights of their following ringed the chamber and cried out upon him as traitor, taken at last. Lancelot, unarmoured, held the door, prayed, and made his choice. He let the first knight thrust in, killed him, and armed himself in the dead man's harness; then he came out. Agravain, who had waited years for that hour, died in it by Lancelot's own hand, and eleven more with him, and only Mordred crawled away wounded to carry the news.

Everything that Agravain had not foreseen followed from his success. The queen, taken in adultery by the law of the realm, was condemned to the fire, and Lancelot came out of the woods to save her, cutting his way through the crowd about the stake and killing, without knowing them in the press, the unarmed Gaheris and Gareth, the two brothers who had loved him best. That chance stroke made an enemy of Gawain, whose grief no reason could master, and the war with Lancelot drew the king and the flower of the realm overseas, leaving Britain to Mordred. The wheel that Agravain set turning did not stop until Camlann. He is the proof that a court can be destroyed by facts as surely as by lies, and the tradition has never forgiven him for being right. Modern tellings keep his malice: T.H. White makes the Orkney boys' ruined childhood the seed of it, and gives young Agravain the killing of a unicorn out of pure spite, while the BBC's Merlin borrows his name for a traitor within the royal house itself. He remains the Iago of the Round Table, the man whose watchfulness saw truly and whose heart made the seeing fatal.