Uther Pendragon

Uther's whole function is the begetting, and both the chronicle and the romance tell it the same way.

He summons the Duke of Cornwall and his wife Igraine to court, conceives an overwhelming desire for her, and is refused. War follows. While the duke is besieged in one castle and Igraine shut in another at Tintagel, Merlin changes Uther's shape to the duke's and lets him in. The duke is killed that same night, some hours before Uther reaches Igraine's bed — a detail both traditions are careful to include, because it makes the subsequent marriage legitimate and the child's conception not quite adulterous, on a technicality.

Merlin's fee is the child.

Malory's Uther dies early and badly, and the realm is left in confusion for years because nobody knows there is an heir. Everything that follows — the stone, the sword, the boy nobody has heard of — exists because of how this was arranged.

What Uther leaves behind is a vacuum, and Malory is precise about how bad it is. The king dies without publicly acknowledging an heir — the only people who know the child exists are Merlin, Ector, and a handful of lords sworn to silence — and the realm stands in great jeopardy long while, for every lord that was mighty of men made him strong, and many weened to have been king. Years pass. There is no government.

It is Merlin who ends it, by proposing the stone and the sword, which means that the mechanism that makes Arthur king was designed by the man who arranged his conception and holds the contract on his life. The test in the churchyard looks like an act of God and is in fact a piece of stage management by an interested party. Malory does not point this out. He simply puts the two facts twenty pages apart and lets them sit there.