Through this man [Launcelot] and me [Guenever] hath all this war been wrought, and the death of the most noblest knights of the world; for through our love that we have loved together is my most noble lord slain.

This lament is spoken by Queen Guenever (Guinevere) late in Malory’s Arthurian compilation, after the collapse of the Round Table. In *Le Morte Darthur*, the exposure of Guenever’s long love for Sir Launcelot fractures Arthur’s court, provokes armed conflict between Arthur’s faction and Launcelot’s, and helps create the conditions for Mordred’s rebellion. After Arthur’s death, Guenever interprets the catastrophe as the moral and political consequence of her and Launcelot’s affair. In the final movement of the work she withdraws from the world, embracing penitence and religious seclusion, and frames the ruin of “the most noblest knights” as a tragic chain of causation rooted in private desire.

Guenever’s speech turns romance into tragedy by insisting that personal love has public costs. She names Launcelot and herself as the agents through whom “all this war” has been made, linking erotic loyalty to civil destruction and the death of chivalry’s best. The line also functions as a retrospective moral judgment: the Round Table’s ideals—fellowship, restraint, service—prove vulnerable to the very passions courtly literature often celebrates. Malory gives Guenever a voice of culpability rather than simple victimhood, emphasizing penitence and the recognition that Arthur’s kingship, however noble, could be undone by intimate betrayal and the cascading obligations of honor, vengeance, and faction.