Forgotten Books#2
H.F.M. Prescott, The Man on a Donkey
I was introduced to this book by the art historian, Pamela Tudor Craig. The Dissolution of the Monasteries, personal strife over Christian theology — not my period, not my thing. But I read it anyway.
Books have generations like people. The ‘big names’ of my youth are more or less forgotten. Graham Greene, Angus Wilson, John Fowles. Where are they in today’s book lists? H.F.M. Prescott I hadn’t heard of but through Pamela I gathered she was a she. Precious little is known of her. Daughter of a vicar, a blue-stocking, spinster of the college as well as the parish. Shy, retiring, hard-working.
A Man on a Donkey is her best-known novel and one which has remained in print. (The current edition is published by Head of Zeus.) It is not a novel, more a chronicle of five characters woven together to form one narrative of life in a time of religious trauma.
They are: Robert Aske, a Yorkshire squire at odds with the regime. Julian Savage, a girl in love with him, who strives to save him from execution. Gib Dawe, a carter’s son turned uneasy priest. Christabel Cowper, Prioress of Marrick, and Thomas, Lord Darcy, a gnarled aristocrat lost in the new-style Renaissance intrigue at court.
Whether religious or non-religious, Catholic or Protestant, you will probably smart from the bare-faced greed, the reckless injustice of the greatest land grab of all times, and the consignment of the monastic tradition, the centuries of incense and prayers, the painted walls, the statues, to oblivion. Except we have never forgotten. In medieval churches throughout the land one can often see a patch on the walls where plaster has been removed to reveal the glorious colour of a bible scene, one of the many which once decorated the entire place. Oh, and the music, the sacred chanting of the psalms. Somehow these things remain like a shadow corpse in a grave excavated by archaelogists: a hint of what was once there leaving its mark on the soil.
According to Wikipedia: The Pilgrimage of Grace was an English Catholic popular revolt beginning in Yorkshire in October 1536 before spreading to other parts of Northern England, including Cumberland, Northumberland, Durham and north Lancashire. The protests occurred under the leadership of Robert Aske. The ‘most serious of all Tudor period rebellions’, the Pilgrimage was a revolt against King Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church, the dissolution of the lesser monasteries, and the policies of the King’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, as well as other specific political, social, and economic grievances.
Forget the strange decision of Hilary Mantel to excuse Cromwell. He was to Henry as Peter Mandelson to Tony Blair or Morgan McSweeney to Keir Starmer. The man in the background manipulating events that would make the rich obscenely richer while impoverishing many. Imagine the amount of nuns and monks left homeless by the dissolution.
The story is not gripping unless you enjoy fine writing and such a sense of being there that you wonder how it was achieved. I fancied that Prescott lived somewhere in Yorkshire close to a ruin and for a year kept a weather diary for each day, for it is always different, always atmospheric. It casts a spell on you and while men are arguing in council you are listening to rain cascading down the roof.
The Prioress shivered. A tide of air, snow-cold, steady and strong, rushed by them. The morning’s blue was now threatened by a cloud that rose and darkened across half the sky. It sounds like January but is in fact April.
Given its being constantly in print, even if it seems that no one has heard of it, The Man on a Donkey is in line for the status of ‘classic’.