The Man On a Donkey
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THE MAN ON A DONKEY
H.F.M. Prescott
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About The Man on a Donkey
Sir John Uvedale had business at Coverham Abbey in Wensleydale, lately suppressed, so he sent his people on before him to Marrick, to make ready for him, and to take over possession of the Priory of St. Andrew from the Nuns, who should all be gone by noon or thereabouts.
In 1536, Henry VIII was almost toppled from his throne when Northern England rose to oppose the Dissolution of the Monasteries. For a few weeks Robert Aske, the leader of the rebels, held the fate of the entire nation in his hand...
The Man on a Donkey is an enthralling novel about a moment in history when England’s Catholic heritage was scattered to the four winds by a powerful and arrogant king.
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
About The Man on a Donkey
Introduction
Author’s Note
The Beginning and The End
Christabel Cowper, Prioress
The Chronicle Begins
1509
1511
1515
1516
1519
1520
The Chronicle Is Broken To Speak Of
Thomas, Lord Darcy
1520
1521
1522
1523
1524
Julian Savage, Gentlewoman
1525
1526
1527
Robert Aske, Squire
1527
1528
Gilbert Dawe, Priest
1529
1530
1531
1532
1533
1534
1535
1536
1537
The End and The Beginning
Plan of Marrick Priory
Appendix I: Historical note
Appendix II: List of works consulted
About H.F.M. Prescott
About the Introducer
Endpapers
About the cover and endpapers
More from Apollo
About Apollo
Copyright
Introduction
‘What can a man do other than obey his Prince?’ A familiar refrain in Renaissance literature, this question from one nobleman to another lies at the heart of H.F.M. Prescott’s powerful evocation of the dissolution of the monasteries and the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion against Henry VIII. Originally published in 1952, The Man on a Donkey won admiration both in Britain and America for its richness of texture and measured pace. Its two main characters, the reluctant rebel leader Robert Aske and Christabel Cowper, last Prioress of the Benedictine house at Marrick in Yorkshire, each face moral dilemmas on which the plot turns. Aske has to decide whether to accept the pressure of local opinion, and the pricking of his own conscience, by leading the great revolt of the North against the devastating religious reforms imposed by Thomas Cromwell in the King’s name. Facing the closure of her nunnery and the end of a carefully cultivated career, Dame Christabel also finds her resilience and her vocation tested by the coming of the Reformation.
Ebbing and flowing between court and country, the novel dwells on issues of faith and honour, love and loyalty, poverty and grandeur, the position of women and the gnawing insecurity of life at a time when mere words could mean treason. Prescott’s 1976 obituary in The Times praised her vivid historical imagination and depth of scholarship. Today, her writing invites comparison with the work of Hilary Mantel, for its inventiveness and insight as much as its choice of subject; Eamon Duffy describes The Man on a Donkey as a ‘largely forgotten masterpiece’.1 At a time when the public appetite for the Tudors has never been greater, the re-publication of such a thoughtful book is especially welcome.
Hilda Prescott (1896–1972) won recognition as a historian and biographer as well as a novelist. A graduate of Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, she studied for an MA at Manchester under the pioneering historian of medieval England T.F. Tout before becoming a full-time writer. Her study of Queen Mary I was awarded the James Tait Black Prize in 1940, placing her in the company of R.W. Chambers (for his influential Thomas More) and John Neale as biographer of Queen Elizabeth I. Though avowedly a work of fiction, The Man on a Donkey often quotes directly from the printed State Paper sources for the Pilgrimage of Grace, a massive popular uprising in 1536 which might quite easily have put an end to the government of Henry VIII. Robert Aske’s Oath of the Honourable Men, committing the pilgrims to ‘expulse all villein blood and evil councillors against the commonwealth’, has been pored over by generations of undergraduates studying Tudor rebellions. Bizarre rumours of taxes on weddings and white bread did indeed play a part in firing the commons of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. If Robert Aske’s story before the Pilgrimage of Grace is nearly all imagined, then his attempt to halt the uprising by forbidding Marshland to rise until it hears the bells of Howden Minster, while telling Howdenshire to wait on Marshland, is well attested.2 Prescott regretted that the Second World War had prevented her from reading more of the original manuscript sources, but also pointed out the many ‘intimate yet authentic facts’ woven into the story: Anne Boleyn’s fear of monkeys is just one such gem.
The unusual form of The Man on a Donkey, as well as its length (the novel initially appeared in two volumes), prompted a note of explanation from the author. Prescott described it as a chronicle rather than a narrative: episodic, requiring persistence from the reader, but repaying that investment as characters become more familiar and begin to have unexpected influences upon each other. Her ability to draw together disparate threads, tracing the long-term consequences of apparently inconsequential people and occurrences, is one of Prescott’s strengths as an author. Another is unquestionably her prose style. Within the apparent certainty of a dated chronicle of events, Prescott’s evocation of mood or place often assumes an ethereal quality which adds another degree of depth to her writing. The novel opens and closes with the same haunting image of pages torn from an illuminated book of devotions strewn about the cloister of the abandoned Priory at Marrick; a serving-woman gathers them up like flowers, then folds them into miniature boats to float down the River Swale. We follow the turning of the seasons and the weather, squalls of rain or a sudden shaft of sunlight illuminating the fells. All the senses are invoked, from the feel of costly fabrics to the scents and sounds of a Westminster garden, salt mingled with honeysuckle and the slap of the tide on the Thames. The author never allows this to get out of hand; the reader is brought back to earth with a description of a busy kitchen, or a dog disobediently sleeping on a counterpane (Prescott was fond of dogs). Conversations are plainly spoken, as befits the mainly Yorkshire folk who people this book, laced with oaths (‘Mass!’) and words of Middle English which had persisted into the sixteenth century: sarplers of wool, leman (for a mistress), murrain (meaning plague). And yet a mystical element runs through the novel, represented by Shepherd – far-seeing and disinclined to speech, resembling a figure in a medieval morality play – or the wandering Protestant preacher Trudgeover. The dying thoughts of Robert Aske, horribly suspended in space between God and man, hover uncertainly between despair and redemption.
Prescott is consistently attuned to the women and children in her story, giving them a voice when they are overlooked by others and acutely sensitive to their vulnerability. The most enigmatic character in The Man on a Donkey is also the most interesting. The woman who sails her paper boats downriver in the final scene had herself washed up at Marrick as a young girl wi
th no past, incapable of speaking to the nuns who had purchased her at York market. Somehow they had been cozened into believing she was a mermaid. The Prioress sardonically christens her Malle, the name of the sheep in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale. The reference to medieval literature is a clue. One of the books kept at Marrick is the Revelations of Divine Love by Dame Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century anchoress whose intensely joyful visions of Christ crucified are a testament to a uniquely female spirituality. Malle too is a mystic, who sees Christ riding on a donkey over Grinton Bridge – the source of the novel’s title. Though chided as a misfit and ultimately ejected from the nunnery, she continues to experience visions whose cycles (as Prescott points out in the preface) connect with the fates of the principal characters in the book. Malle sees sacredness and divine love all around her, leading a pack-horse across a stream or wringing water from her dress:
‘All’s smitten through with Him. Love, frail as smoke, piercing as a needle – near – here. He that’s light has come into the clod.’
Were this book to become a set text for English Literature students (and there is no good reason why it shouldn’t), the meaning of Malle’s revelations would be one of the first topics for debate.
The daughter of a clergymen, Hilda Prescott remained a committed member of the Church of England. This makes her treatment of religion in the novel all the more intriguing. The reign of Henry VIII created fracture lines in society which widened and deepened with alarming speed, cleaving a permanent division between Protestant and Catholic within a single generation. To this day, both traditions look back to this period as a time of definition, whether the provision of a printed Bible in English or the beginning of the martyrdoms which have done so much to mould post-Reformation English Catholicism. By the time The Man on a Donkey was written, the Church of England was unsure about its past: still wanting to believe in the rightness of Henry VIII’s break from Rome and the church as a bastion of national identity, while also shot through with nostalgia for the beauty of holiness defiled by a political Reformation. Marrick Priory provides sanctuary for the women who live there, but it is not a beacon of virtue. They squabble, compete for position, take too much pleasure in their own comfort. Dame Christabel is shrewd but worldly, at heart a wool factor in the mould of her father. When compassion is needed, it is casually rejected on grounds that her way of life must continue whatever the human cost. The faith of Robert Aske and his fellow captain Lord Darcy seems purer, but in truth is also complicated by ties of military loyalty and social obligation. Prescott’s novel is not a lament for the passing of Catholic England, even if it is sometimes remembered in those terms. And yet Gilbert Dawe, an angry low-class priest whose conversion to Protestantism fills him with the rhetoric of reform, is one of the least appealing characters in the book: permanently resentful, violent towards Malle and his own disabled son, hungry for change so that those around him will be brought low. Only an ember of self-recognition remains, too faint to be blown into the righteous fire which he desires so much.
In Henry VIII, there is not even a spark of goodness. Prescott’s portrait of England’s most famous king is of a tyrant pure and simple. Following their separation, Queen Katherine petitions her husband to be allowed to nurse their sick daughter Mary, to no avail. Feverish after the birth of Princess Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn looks at Henry’s slashed velvet doublet and sees an image of bloodied flesh. The most chilling exchange takes place in the royal palace at Whitehall. The scene is a recreation of one of the most striking surviving images of Henry VIII, an illuminated page in his personal Psalter. Henry is sitting in his chamber, playing a Nunc Dimittis on the harp – Simeon’s prayer to depart in peace on sight of the infant Christ. A gentleman enters with news of the execution of the Carthusian monks who had preached against the royal supremacy over the church. Reassured that their deaths were as slow as they could be, Henry decides on a game of archery. It is a picture of a psychopath, served by men content to corrupt themselves for favour at court. The arrest of a Lutheran cook for heresy – his servants flee, the women of the house are left behind to fend for themselves – is a clear echo of the totalitarian regimes which were still raw in the memory when this book was first published. Comparisons between Henry VIII and Joseph Stalin are out of fashion these days, but the similarities between their two governments – the fawning cult of personality, the purges of opponents and servants, the fear of being noticed and denounced – must have seemed all too real at the time this novel was written. Though no political allegory, The Man on a Donkey nevertheless deserves to be set in its own historical context in order to be fully appreciated.
Marrick Priory flourishes today as an outdoor recreation centre supported by the Church of England. The cloister and courtyards are long gone, but the bell-tower and church still stand amidst a scatter of farm-buildings and grazing Swaledale sheep. Hilda Prescott is remembered as a visitor to Marrick, sitting in a field to write. A copy of the sixteenth-century plan which she used to reconstruct the layout of the nunnery still hangs on the wall. The real Christabel Cowper, meanwhile, is commemorated in a modern slate plaque in the house from which she was evicted as Prioress prioress in 1540.
John Cooper, 2016
1 Eamon Duffy, ‘Pitiless Power of Henry’s Man’, review of Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, The Tablet 19 May 2012, p18.
2 R. W. Hoyle, ‘Aske, Robert (c.1500–1537)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Author’s Note
The book is cast in the form of a chronicle. This form, which requires space to develop itself, has been used in an attempt to introduce the reader into a world, rather than at first to present him with a narrative. In that world he must for a while move like a stranger, as in real life picking up, from seemingly trifling episodes, understanding of those about him, and learning to know them without knowing that he learns. Only later, when the characters should by this means have become familiar, does the theme of the whole book emerge, as the different stories which it contains run together and are swallowed up in the tragic history of the Pilgrimage of Grace. And throughout, against the world of sixteenth-century England, is set that other world, whose light is focused, as through a burning glass, in the half-crazy mind of Malle, the serving-woman, and, in the three cycles of her visions, is brought to bear successively upon the stories of the chief characters of the Chronicle.
The Beginning and The End
Sir John Uvedale had business at Coverham Abbey in Wensleydale, lately suppressed, so he sent his people on before him to Marrick, to make ready for him, and to take over possession of the Priory of St. Andrew from the Nuns, who should all be gone by noon or thereabouts. Sir John’s steward had been there for a week already, making sure that the Ladies carried away nothing but what was their own, and having the best of the silver and gold ornaments of the Church packed up in canvas, then in barrels, ready to be sent to the King. The lesser stuff was pushed, all anyhow, into big wicker baskets; since it would be melted down, scratches and dints did not matter.
Sir John’s people left Coverham before it was daylight, because the November days were short. They had reached the top and were going down towards Marrick when the sun looked over the edge of the fells in a flare of wintry white gold. It was about ten o’clock in the morning that they came down, into Swaledale and through the meadows towards Marrick stepping-stones; the Priory stood opposite them across the river, at the top of a pleasant sloping meadow whose lower edge thrust away the quick running Swale in a great sickle-shaped curve. The cluster of buildings and the tall tower of the Church took the sunshine of a morning mild and sweet as spring. Behind the Priory, with hardly more than the width of a cartway between, the dale side went up steeply, covered for the most part with ash, beech and oak; the mossed trunks of the trees showed sharply green in the open sunlit woods. There was one piece of hillside just behind the Priory where there were no trees, but only turf nibbled close by the Nuns’ neat blac
k-stockinged Swaledale sheep; in the summertime the Ladies had used sometimes to sit here with their spinning and embroidery, and here in spring the Priory washing was always spread out; now, on this winter morning, the slope was empty.
They crossed the stream, climbed the meadow by the cart-track, and turned the corner of the long Priory wall. Sir John’s steward stood in the sunshine that struck through the gate-house arch; he swung a big key from his finger – the key of the Priory gate, which the Prioress herself had a moment ago put into his hand.
And now he watched the Prioress and the last two of the Ladies who went with her, and a couple of servants, as they rode alongside the churchyard on their way to Richmond and into the world. Of the three middle-aged women, one, plump and plain, was crying helplessly and without concealment; she kept her face turned to look back on the Priory, for all that her tears drowned the sight of it. Another, a handsome woman yet, who had flashed her dark eyes at the steward, glanced once over her shoulder; her mouth shook, but she tossed her head and rode on.
The Prioress herself did not look back, nor was her face in any way discomposed. Down at the core of her heart she was angry, though not with the King for turning away all the monks and nuns in England and taking the abbeys into his hand – surely he had a right to them if any had. She was not indeed angry with any man at all, but with God, who had tricked her into thirty years of a nun’s life, had suffered her to be Prioress, and to rule, and now had struck power out of her hand.
But that anger lay beneath, so that she did not even know it was there. Her mind was set on the future as she considered and tried to estimate what her position would be in the house of her married sister. She would have her pension – but suppose it were not paid regularly—? On what foothold could she stand so as to make her will felt? Her thoughts were so closely engaged that she did not notice when they crossed the muddy lane which was the boundary of the Priory lands, and so left Marrick quite behind.