Tennyson records no fights with conscience, no turning towards the light, no sorrowful confessions at all.  He has given us a great deal, but it is not too much to say that what he rejected, a Catholic poet would have seized with delight as the purplest patches of his epic, and the climax to which the whole story led.

The same remarks do not altogether apply to Tennyson’s conception of Arthur’s character.  Although there is much that is fine and beautiful in him, as he is portrayed in the older legends, although, when pierced with many wounds, he fought on valiantly, because he was “so full of knighthood that knightly he endured the pain,” it is Tennyson who has exalted him into “the blameless king,” “the highest creature here,” and if it had only been for what he has given us in King Arthur, the Idylls would have been worth writing.  Still even here he leaves out all those Catholic touches which went to make up the life and soul of British Christianity, the custom of beginning each day with the hearing of Mass, the frequent allusions to the Pope as the Head of Christendom, the mention of prayers for the dead, of penance, and so on.

When Arthur had defied the Roman Emperor, who had sent to claim tribute, and had carried his victorious arms to the gates of the Eternal City, the legend says that senators and cardinals came out and sued for peace.  They invited him in, and there he was crowned emperor “with all the solemnity that could be made, and by the Pope’s own hands.”  King Mark of Cornwall, for reasons of his own, wanted to rid himself of Tristram, and set about it in this wily manner: 

He let do counterfeit letters from the Pope, and made a strange clerk for to bear them unto King Mark, the which letters specified that King Mark should make him ready upon pain of cursing, with his host for to come to the Pope, to help to go to Jerusalem for to make war upon the Saracens.

Mark, pretending that he could not leave home, proposed that Sir Tristram should go in his place, since the command of the Pope must be obeyed.  “But,” said Sir Tristram, “sythen the apostle Pope hath sent for him, bid him go thither himself.”  “Well,” said King Mark, “yet shall he be beguiled,” and counterfeited other letters, and the letters specified that the Pope desired Sir Tristram to come himself to make war upon the Saracens.  But Tristram began to suspect the King of Cornwall of treachery, and at last Mark was obliged to walk into the trap which he had set for his enemy, and to take an oath “that he would go himself unto the Pope of Rome for to war upon the Saracens.”

Malory’s book abounds in such illustrations and side lights as these, but enough has been said to show how entirely the modern poet has suppressed the part played by the Pope in the lives of Englishmen, at least, up to the time of Edward iv.