The Kings And Queens Of Hearts

Sarah Gristwood reveals how the Tudor monarchs exploited the medieval obsession with courtly love – a romantic creed inspired by the idea of valiant knights risking their lives to woo fair ladies – to further their own agendas

- Sarah Gristwood

Lancelot is desperate to reach Guinevere’s chamber – so desperate that he’s crawled over a bridge made from a sword blade to rescue her. The French poet Chrétien de Troyes describes Lancelot’s fingers shredded to the bone as he wrenches the bars from her window, but in her service he feels no pain…

When, in the latter part of the 12th century, Chrétien de Troyes wrote this powerful account in his poem Lancelot, he was giving voice to an ideal taken up by almost every other writer of the Arthurian stories, from Thomas Malory in the 1460s to Lerner and Loewe in the mid-20th century, when they wrote the musical Camelot.

But the idea of what a later age dubbed “courtly love” goes far beyond the Arthurian tales. This creed of love was heard in the songs of the troubadours and given formal shape in the courts of what we now call France. It began as a literary fantasy, centred around the image of service – a knight, or young noble lover, kneeling in devotion before a lady he may never even attain – which fascinated the aristocracy. Triggering a huge outpouring of poems, songs and novels, courtly love was described by medievalist and writer CS Lewis as a movement compared to which “the Renaissance [was] a mere ripple on the surface of literature”.

Yet in reality, its tropes did not stay confined to the page. Indeed, the image of a man in service to his lover is a picture we still all recognise today. Take, for instance, the popular TV adverts “The lady loves Milk Tray”, where a heroic man went to ludicrous lengths to bring his lover her desire: a box of chocolates. Enshrined in many of our traditional ceremonies and courtesies, its basic tenets have come to inform our whole idea of romance.