We lovers of history and historical fiction just can’t seem to get enough of King Henry VIII, his obsessive quest for a legitimate son, his six, ill-fated queens, and his three children who ruled after him, including the magnificent Elizabeth I. Yet perhaps the best novel of the many written about the colorful Tudors, The Man on a Donkey, does not expend all its ink on the royals. Published in 1952, the novel has never been out of
print.
Author Hilda Frances Margaret (known as H.F.M.) Prescott gets at the Tudor period somewhat sideways through the stories of five non-royal characters: Christabel Cowper, prioress of Marrick Priory (a fictional character who bears the name of the real- life last prioress of Marrick); a young woman named Julian Savage; a bad-tempered, reformist priest named Gilbert Dawe; and two men closely based on real-life characters, Lord Thomas Darcy, and the lawyer Robert Aske who became the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace.
Prescott was a historian and an academic who focused on the Tudor period. Long before she brought out The Man on a Donkey, Prescott had published an award- winning biography of Queen Mary I. Life in England in the Tudors’ time was so well-known to Prescott that she absorbed much of the minutiae of everyday routine in the 16th century, as well as the rhythms of speech, the way different classes and strata of society related to each other, and how the concerns of the great came to affect the lives of ordinary folk.
The Man on a Donkey
When the reader opens the pages of The Man on a Donkey, the usual delicate barrier between reader and story seems to disappear. The reader seems to walk right into the long-ago time period of the reign of Henry VIII and sit down next to the characters, observing them up close as if they are our own kin or neighbors.
We observe Christabel’s cold and clever political struggles to gain the rule of Marrick Priory and turn it into her own small, personal fiefdom. We see poor Julian
Savage, plain, ignored sister of the beautiful Margaret, fall hopelessly in love with Robert Aske because he is briefly kind to her. We watch the cruelties committed by the revolutionary priest Gilbert Dawe in his own life while he heartily condemns the sins of the rich and powerful. Along the way we also get glimpses of Anne Boleyn in all her moods, Katherine of Aragon’s obstinate refusal to allow Henry to abandon her without a battle, and a dangerous tyrant king who woos and wins, and then brutally destroys without a backward glance when his will is gainsaid or his power challenged.
The story is all told in beautiful, choice language—never showy or self-conscious but straightforward and natural, as when Prescott refers to “the triumphant, open heat of perfect summer weather,” or describes little Julian Savage’s image of what it would be like to be married to Robert Aske: “the circle was indeed closed, complete, and of a perfection infinite.”
Henry VIII
The reign of Henry VIII was a time of great danger, not just for the nobility but also for ordinary citizens. Henry ended up severing England’s religious connection with the pope and making himself head of the Church in England. He also looted and destroyed all the religious houses, large and small. But, in terms of ritual and mode of worship, he wanted to keep the Church in England much as it had been. He never intended to throw the doors of the Church wide open to the new winds of the Reformation.
Only the most pliable and least sincerely devout of citizens were comfortable changing their faith and their worship with every new swing of the pendulum as various groups gained and lost ascendancy during the course of Henry’s reign. Many of the true believers of one kind or another felt that their hope of salvation absolutely depended on clinging to the old Roman Catholic faith—or to some version of the new Protestant faith. As the religious houses were abolished, the poor saw one of their few sources of possible sustenance and survival disappear.
Pilgrimage of Grace
The central historical theme of The Man on a Donkey is the Pilgrimage of Grace, which took place in 1536 and was perhaps the most serious threat to the rule of Henry VIII in his long, turbulent reign. Forty thousand insurgents, led by a handful of gentlemen and nobles, including Sir Thomas Darcy and Robert Aske, marched south towards London demanding a return of the nation to Roman Catholicism, an end to the dissolution of the monasteries, and the dismissal of Thomas Cromwell from the king’s service.
King Henry charmed Robert Aske, entertaining him at Greenwich Palace over Christmas and making vague promises that the demands of the Pilgrimage would be met. Aske, taken in by this display of royal bonhomie, dismissed the rough army of “pilgrims” that gave him his power. But within a matter of months, over 200 leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace were executed. Poor Aske, betrayed by almost everyone in the end, was hanged in chains high up on the walls of Clifford’s Tower in York, left to die in a ruthlessly prolonged agony of exposure, dehydration and starvation. (No spoilers here: Aske’s execution is a matter of historical record.)
The emotional climax of the novel occurs with a last look at the honest, well-intentioned Aske, not yet dead, half-conscious in his chains, suffering thoughts of
fathomless despair, but yearning with his last breaths for “that good, that holy, that merciful, which though not God, though vanquished, was still the last dear love of a vanquished and tortured man.”
A minor character who appears over and over in the novel must also be mentioned because she offers Prescott’s ironic commentary on the religious conflict of
the time and gives the novel its title. The half-mad Malle, a simpleminded serving woman, experiences a vision of Jesus riding a donkey over a bridge in the Yorkshire countryside. Almost every important character in the novel attempts to interrogate Malle about her various visions of the Savior, hoping to enlist her otherworldly sightings on one side or another of the religious controversies of the day.
But Malle will not be co-opted. She continues to describe her visions in her own way and refuses to be enlisted in anyone else’s crusade. Malle proclaims her visions of the Christ again and again, but, despite the religious posturing on all sides, no one is really listening. No one is interested in her innocent, pure-hearted encounters with the divine.
H.F.M. Prescott takes us deep into the heart of England in the early 16 th century. We see good people fail and the most venial and duplicitous succeed—but perhaps only for the moment. In the time of King Henry VIII, the wheel was always turning and the executioner’s axe was always sharp. Without ever commenting directly on the events that occur in the novel, Prescott makes us care for the fate of her characters trying to find their way in a murky, deadly environment. She also plainly exposes the greed, ambition and fear driving the religious/political battles of the day and the casual, deadly betrayals perpetrated by powerful people.
