Reading - The Man on a Donkey
This week I finished reading The Man on a Donkey by H.F.M. Prescott. This book is a fictionalised chronicle of the English Reformation and Prescott was a historian and author who was active in the mid-twentieth century. The book focusses on many real historical characters such as Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell and the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace, Robert Aske, as well as some entirely fictional characters, several of whom exist at the very bottom of the social scale of the society at the time.
I have to say that this book has touched me very deeply. And I would also say that it is one of the very best novels that I’ve ever read. Part of the difficulty in describing it1 is that this is a multivalent work: yes, it’s about the political situation and the elites of the time and their dealings. But I think the whole point is to contrast these odious people such as Henry and Cromwell with the weak, fragile and vulnerable characters.
The central question of the book may be about the presence and the purposes of God: this was a time of tumultuous upheaval as England was breaking from its thousand-year alliance with the Roman Catholic Church. The entire social and religious fabric of this nation was dependent upon that alliance. And, yet, where was God in all of this? Was he with Henry VIII and Cromwell? Was he with Robert Aske and Thomas Darcy?
I have to admit that I feel very angry with Henry and Cromwell for what they did. The spoliation of monastic life in this country and the theft of the riches of the monasteries was a terrible crime. But there is a moment in this story in which Christabel Cowper, the worldly prioress of Marrick Priory, stays with some nuns in another monastery. In Marrick, Christabel and the other nuns are afraid that their house will be dissolved by Cromwell, but they don’t seem to see any other significance to this potential disaster than that they would lose the comfort of their home and their way of life. Christabel is confounded, therefore, when, speaking on the same subject, the prioress of St Helen’s says, “It is better…better it should fall, if thereby shall come peace between us and God. For I think it is for our sins, madame, that He has chastened us. And if He take from us all we have, it is to make us, who have cleaved to worldly wealth, cleave only to Him, so that He may bless us”. Of course, Christabel is too spiritually blind to understand what the other prioress is talking about and this because her comfortable monastery is an idol to her and she cannot imagine life without it. So, here the question is raised: of course Henry and Cromwell’s crime against the monasteries was abominable, but did God have a purpose in it and was it, in some sense, his judgment upon those who had trusted in riches too much? The purposes of God are not always straightforward in this world.
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