request for a job for Kay.
"Sure thing," said Arthur, and thus Sir Kay became Arthur's PA, or sensechal, a position he would hold for the rest of Le Morte D'Arthur.
Ector found the Archbishop and filled him in on all this. After the tournament, when the knights showed up to try their hands at pulling out the sword, Arthur was there waiting for them. He readily demonstrated his sword-pulling prowess. The barons and lords and knights assembled didn't buy it, though. Arthur was basically a kid, so they decided to come back and try again later.
They came back later, but none of them could pull out the sword. Meanwhile, Arthur, who'd been waiting there, pulled it out yet again. This process repeated twice more, all spring, and still all the barons and the warlords refused to accept it.
In the course of his literally months of sword-pulling demonstrations, Arthur acquired a cadre of knights who bought into his being the king: Ector and Kay, but also Ulfius and Brastias, a Sir Baudwin, and a bunch of others Malory doesn't name.
Months and months of this went by. Arthur pulled the sword from the stone and the barons and the landed gentry and the knights all refused to accept him, lather, rinse, repeat. He kept trying, though, straight through from New Year's to Pentecost. Pentecost, for those of you who didn't pay attention in Sunday School, is part of the Movable Cycle; depending on the phases of the moon it lands anywhere from mid-May to late June. So literally five or six months of sword-drawing. At Pentecost he did it again! The largest collection of English aristocrats yet showed up. They brought along a bunch of knights and a huge mass of commoners, and once again, Arthur demonstrated that he could pull the sword from the stone and therefore was the rightful king. And once again, the barons and so on were all, nope, we don't buy it, you're way too poor-looking and scruffy and insufficiently powerful a warlord to be king.
But they had miscalculated in bringing along an enormous pile of commoners, because the commoners were sick and tired of this back and forth, and accepted Arthur as king (it was no skin of their noses). They threatened to riot unless the barons come round. They would kill one thousand barons a day, the peasants claimed, unless the barons swore fealty to Arthur. So the barons submitted and apologized. Arthur was very gracious about it. He accepted their apologies and allowed himself to be knighted/crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury. And there was a big party, which should have been nice.
The big party was sullied, sadly, by everybody and their dog coming to Arthur and complaining about how they'd been wronged by somebody else, and their nation had just gone to hell since Uther died, and what were their taxes paying for if not, et cetera, et cetera. Arthur listened to all of these complaints and clucked his tongue and said he'd see what he could do. A lot of barons whose estates had gotten very large since Uther's death discovered the hard way that Arthur didn't respect their property rights. He seized parts of their lands and turned around and gave it to the various impoverished gentry whose land it had been up until somebody seized it. However, the rich barons were cool with this, because they didn't want to get lynched.
Arthur set up rebuilding some kind of government. He put Kay, and the other knights who stuck by him all spring during Sword-in-the-Stonegate, in charge of various projects, departments, and castles. He set about reconquering all of the island of Great Britain that he didn't already rule -- everything north of the river Trent, including Scotland, and most of Wales. This took a while, but after a year, maybe two, it was all done with. That's what Malory says here, anyway; he's about to super contradict himself about it. It makes more sense to assume Arthur was spending this time consolidating his power in the greater London metropolitan area, with the fat-cat land barons and the angry peasants and so on. It sounds like something that would take a while to work out.
King Arthur hasn't done much at this point, really, but already I like him about ten thousand times as much as Uther. Arthur is humble, he forgives his enemies, and he seizes the ill-gotten gains of the wealthy and returns them to the poor (albeit the poor nobility rather than the poor in general). Here's hoping he doesn't get Merlin to help him rape anyone. Also, I can't help but notice that according to Malory, Arthur and Merlin haven't met yet. When I was a kid I watched Disney's Sword in the Stone a bunch, and as a teen I read the first half of Once and Future King multiple times in unsuccessful attempts to make it through the whole thing, and one thing I do remember is that Merlin and Arthur had a Doc Brown & Marty McFly relationship, in that version of the story. Plus, lots of shapeshifting, which hasn't come up yet either. So that's kind of an interesting change. Merlin himself comes across as much more Gandalf the Gray than I was expecting, too; he's all the time setting events into motion and telling kings what to do.
In which Arthur has some trouble making friends
At the end of the previous story Malory explained to us that Arthur soon ruled all of Great Britain, including Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland, but at the start of this story either he claims that was just a spoiler for future events, or else he straight-up contradicts himself. This story is the tale of Arthur making war upon the kings of the parts of Great Britain that he's not king of. We open at Pentecost, with a new status quo: Arthur crowned, and the folks who live south of the river Trent pretty much all accepting him as king.
Arthur visited Wales, just after his coronation, and threw a big feast at Caerlaeon there, Caerlaeon being the best place available. I can't tell whether Malory means for this trip to have happened immediately following Arthur's coronation in London, or if he spent a full year (or more) establishing himself as King of Much of England, then at the next convenient Pentecost traveled to Caerlaeon for an anniversary coronation party. It doesn't really matter for purposes of the story -- if it was a year, it was a year at the end of which there was still a lot of Great Britain that he didn't rule. Plus there was the earlier assertion that he spent two years conquering everything; is this a celebration of that? Best not to worry about it. What we can be sure of is that it was very early in Arthur's reign and not everyone accepted his legitimacy. That's the context, here.
At Caerlaeon Arthur threw a big feast and invited all the other kings in the area, which included his three brothers-in-law from Chapter II: Lot of Orkney who married Margawse, Nentres of Garlot who married Elaine, and Uriens of Gore who married Morgan le Fay once she graduated from necromancy school. Other kings in attendance were the King of Scotland, whom Malory doesn't name, the King of Carados, and a king known to us only by the epithet "the King with the Hundred Knights." Or, as I like to call him, Mister 100. Lot, Nentres, Uriens, Scotland, Carados, and Mister 100 each brought along hundreds of knights with them, so this was a gigantic party. Arthur was thrilled by this; it was his first major kingly act, this party, and look at the turnout!
However Arthur's glee soon turned to disappointment and despondency, because this conversation kept happening:
ARTHUR'S MESSENGER: Hey, King Lot/King Nentres/King Uriens/King Scotland/King Carados/King Mister 100!
KING: Yo.
MESSENGER: Arthur wanted you to have this gift basket and thank you for coming to his celebratory Arthur-is-King-of-Everything-Outranking-All-Other-Kings party.
KING: Get bent!
(KING throws gift basket in MESSENGER's face.)
It turns out that if you're the king of, say, Carados, and you get word that some punk teenager has declared himself Super-Mega-Ultra King, a kid who isn't even the son of anyone important (you've never heard of his dad Ector and besides they say he was adopted), then you're disinclined to cheerfully swear fealty to him. When you show up at his party with a few hundred heavily armed men, it's not really a social call.
Malory turns a nice phrase here: the other kings "sent him word they would none of his gifts, but that they were come to give him gifts with hard swords between the neck and the shoulders." Well, it's a nice phrase compared to Malory's usual output.
Reluctantly Arthur made ready for the coming rumble. He'd rather not fight, so instead he holed up in a tower with a few
hundred men of his own and waited for the other kings to leave. A couple weeks of siege went by, nothing getting resolved, neither side giving up; Arthur had all his party food in the tower and the kings were motivated to give the little twerp what-for.
Fortunately Merlin showed up to fix the situation. All the kings outside the tower knew Merlin, of course, everyone knew Merlin, and they were all, "how's it going, Merle, you've come to cheer us on?"
And Merlin was like, "no, no, Arthur is the rightful king, you guys are on the wrong side of this issue."
The kings were all, "wha?" And Merlin went, "listen, he's actually Igraine's and Uther's son, remember Uther? Kind of a dick but still the king of everything."
One of the kings did some quick math, Malory asserts, and deduced that if Uther fathered Arthur on Igraine, it must have been while she was married to Gorlas, otherwise the timing doesn't work. Therefore Arthur was a bastard, therefore not the rightful king. I would be unconvinced by that, given the tight timing of Arthur's conception, Gorlas's death, and Uther's marriage to Igraine, but it went over well with the assembled kings.
"I anticipated your objection," said Merlin, and produced a long-form