The Blanket of the Dark

John Buchan

• Publisher: Birlinn
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857904997
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Clásicos

In this classic historical adventure by the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, a young monastic scholar is groomed to take the throne from Henry VIII. It is 1536, and powerful men reveal to Peter Pentecost that it is he, and not the tyrannical Henry VIII, who should be on the throne of England. Can they persuade him to risk everything in a treasonable rebellion against the throne? In the hands of John Buchan—one of Alfred Hitchcock's favorite writers—the dark, dangerous days of Tudor England come alive like never before.

Contents

	Introduction
1.	The Painted Floor
2.	In which Peter is Introduced to Fortune
3.	In which Peter Lurks in the Shadow
4.	In which Peter goes Deeper into the Greenwood
5.	The Parliament of Beggars
6.	In which Peter Emerges into the Light
7.	How a Would-be King became a Fugitive
8.	How Peter Saw Death in the Swan Inn
9.	The Road to Damascus
10.	Of the Conclave at Little Greece
11.	How Peter Came Again to Avelard
12.	Of the Vision in the Snow
13.	The Unloosing of the Waters
14.	How Peter Strove with Powers and Principalities
15.	How the Swan of Bohun Went Down
16.	How Peter Returned to the Greenwood
	Epilogue

Introduction

Henry VIII - ‘by the grace of God, King of England, France and Lord of Ireland, Defender of the Faith and of the Church of England ... on earth the Supreme Head’ - was far from the bluff good King Hal of countless film and television productions. As John Buchan rightly portrays him in The Blanket of the Dark, England’s most famous monarch was, in stark reality, a cruel despot - always careless of the lives of his subjects, always ruthless in his determination to safeguard the Tudor royal dynasty.

In truth, Henry had every reason to feel insecure.

The Tudors’ hereditary claim to the throne of England was at best slender in its validity. Furthermore, it was secured only by right of conquest by his usurper father, Henry VII, on the field of Bosworth in 1485. Rebellions continually troubled both him and his descendants that bore the crown of England throughout the sixteenth century.

The Blanket of the Dark is set in 1536-7, as the flames of bloody insurrection again burn brightly in the east and north of England; this time triggered by the cynical dissolution of the monasteries and the common people’s virulent hatred of the eponymous Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s ambitious rags-to-riches chief minister. The ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ and the subsequent uprisings in Yorkshire, Durham, Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire posed the gravest threats to Henry VIII’s crown - far more serious to the security of the Tudor monarchy than the attempt by the Spanish Armada to overthrow his daughter Elizabeth just over five decades later.

Buchan’s hero is the apparent foundling Peter Pentecost who proves to be the (fictional) lost son of Sir Edward Stafford, third Duke of Buckingham and Lord High Constable of England, who had been executed and attainted for treason fifteen years before.

Proud, arrogant Buckingham’s vocal claims of royal descent had made him an ever-present latent threat to the Tudor throne, and his opposition to a new alliance with France became a tiresome political liability that piqued that arch-schemer and manipulator, Cardinal Wolsey. For his part, Henry had also grown jealous of the former royal favourite’s huge land holdings, and now thoroughly mistrusted his loyalty.

Buckingham was therefore decapitated on 17 May 1521 on Tower Hill, after contrived and dubious evidence by his own spiritual adviser, the Carthusian monk Matthew Hopkins, was brought against him in a carefully controlled show trial. Three blows of the axe were necessary to sever his head from his body. He may have been a ‘high and puissant prince’ but in Yorkist and Tudor England, the old nobility never enjoyed anything more than a perilous existence in the fevered atmosphere at court of plot and counter-plot. (Indeed, his father was also hastily executed for high treason on Richard III’s orders on 2 November 1483.)

Buchan graphically captures the grim atmosphere of fear and oppression that overlaid Henry VIII’s fictional ‘Merry England’ - the choking blanket of the title - and conveys great empathy with the tyrant’s subjects, oppressed by taxation and social and religious change. Not for them, the delights of Henry’s lyrical Past Time with Good Company.

Through carefully drafted legislation, Cromwell had turned Henry’s realm into what we today would recognise as a totalitarian, almost Stalinist state. The minister’s widespread network of informers ensured that no man felt safe in his own home, nor so sure of himself as to dare express his opinion openly, for fear of retribution, as Buchan demonstrates. Cromwell’s insidious propaganda, broadcast through specially commissioned dramatic spectacle or printed word, sought to mould and control the very minds and wills of the population on an unprecedented scale.

Moreover, Henry’s seizure of the Pope’s role as supreme head of the church in England and the growth of the Protestant ‘new religion’ created a heady cocktail for popular confusion, dismay and discontent. No surprise, then, that blimpish Sir Ralph Bonamy exclaims at one point in the novel: ‘The pious everywhere are perturbed, since heretics sit in high places and the blasphemer is rampant in the land. [Cromwell’s] commissioners go riding the roads, with the spoil of God’s houses on their varlets’ backs, copes for doublets and tunics for saddlecloths. There are preachers who tell the folk that the Host is only a piece of baker’s bread and that baptism is as lawful in a tub or ditch as in a holy font.’

The nobility, of course, were fiercely jealous of the rise of the talented low-born administrators and courtiers that Henry called into office and saw their traditional power and status in the land leeching away. Buchan recognises and grasps that deep-seated antagonism. He has Sir Gabriel Messynger complaining that ‘The ancient nobility ... were all large-featured and lean, the body being but a sheath for a strong spirit ...Now comes the King and his race of new men, and they are all much cumbered with fat and overfull of blood. Above all, there is the King’s grace. The Beast has come to rule in England and it is ousting men made in their Maker’s image.’

However, some of the aristocracy learnt to swim with the Tudor tide. It is one of history’s little ironies that Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk - who had married one of Buckingham’s daughters - shared his father-in-law’s contempt and utter disdain for those now pulling the levers of power in England. Despite this, he was Henry’s general in suppressing the northern uprisings and prosecuted, with relish, the king’s personal and brutal orders to ‘cause such dreadful execution upon a good number of the inhabitants, of every town, village and hamlet that have offended in this rebellion, as well as by the hanging of them up on trees, as by the quartering them and setting their heads and quarters in every town, great and small, as may be a fearful spectacle to all hereafter that would practise any like matter’. Norfolk happily slaughtered hundreds of men whose religious and political ideals he passionately shared, in a contemptuous quest to win back royal favour and re-establish his pre-eminent position at court. His contempt for Henry’s nouveau riche was mirrored by his equal scorn for the common people who offended against the established social order.

In Buchan’s tale, Peter Pentecost, or Stafford, becomes the figurehead for a projected western rebellion by local magnates against Henry’s tyranny and the denouement comes when he dramatically confronts the old ogre himself. Buchan’s description of the king and his aura of supremacy is gripping: ‘The face was vast and red as a new ham, a sheer mountain of a face, for it was as broad as it was long ...’ Peter ‘hated him, for he saw the cunning behind the frank smile, the ruthlessness in the small eyes; but he could not blind himself to his power. Power of Mammon, power of Antichrist, power of the Devil maybe, but something born to work mightily in the world.’

Henry was the first English king to insist on ‘majesty’ being used as a term of address to him. He also nurtured dreams of imperial splendour, actively encouraged by Cromwell, and worked to transform England from a foggy, insignificant group of islands off the mainland of Europe, into a major player in the theatre of international politics. Here, perhaps, Buchan recognises the genesis of the British Empire and its later familiar and (to him) comfortable role as lawgiver and peacemaker over its colonised peoples. He has Henry utter, in ringing tones, the pledge: ‘I will have no treason in this land ... for it is treason not against my person ... but against the realm of England.

‘In Europe there is Caesar [the emperor Charles V of Spain] who has empire over men’s bodies and the Pope who has empire over men’s souls. I have sworn that I too shall be imperial and England an empire ... Before I die, I hope, with God’s help, to make Scotland my vassal, so that the writ of England shall run from Thule and the Ebudes to the Narrow Seas. Only thus shall my people have peace, and as a peacemaker, I shall be called the child of God.’

Buchan also accurately encapsulates the anomalous nature of Henry’s religious beliefs. To his death, the king believed he was a better Catholic than the Bishop of Rome, that he was indeed, God’s personal deputy on earth. ‘I am the devoutest man that ever wore ermine,’ he assures Peter. ‘If I have broken with the Pope, I will defend the faith better than he. No heretic shall breathe freely in this land while I sit on the throne ... Every day I serve the priest at Mass, every Sunday I receive the holy bread, every Good Friday, I creep on my knees to the Cross’ [in the old pre-Reformation liturgy that was later swept away by his son, Edward VI]. Henry insists: ‘I am God’s vice-regent on earth ... therefore I sit in God’s place.’

It must be nice to have that kind of larger-than-life self-confidence.

The Blanket of the Dark was first published in July 1931 and quickly went into five reprints in its first year. It was part of Buchan’s prodigious literary output after he was elected a Scottish Unionist MP for the Scottish Universities in a by-election in 1927. A novel a year, he acknowledged frankly, was necessary to offset his expenses at Westminster and this book was sandwiched between Castle Gay, an adventure involving Buchan’s most unlikely hero, the retired Glasgow grocer, Dickson McCunn, and Gap in the Curtain, which reprised Buchan’s probable own alter ego Sir Edward Leithen, in a tale about predicting (and changing) the future. The same year as Curtain, Buchan also published a biography of Julius Caesar.

His historical novels may have been eclipsed in popularity by the timeless derring-do appeal of his adventure stories, but this is wholly wrong in my view. Their dialogue might sometimes seem a little contrived, or a little pedestrian, but they form a corpus of powerful narratives which remain page-turners even to our jaded modern tastes. The Blanket of the Dark is one of the most compelling and, what is more, evokes the smell of real, naked fear in Tudor England.

Robert Hutchinson
July 2008

ONE

The Painted Floor

Peter Pentecost, from his eyrie among the hazels, looked down on the King’s highway as it dipped from Stowood through the narrow pass to the Wood Eaton meadows. It was a King’s highway beyond question, for it was the main road from London to Worcester and the west for those who did not wish to make Oxford a halting-place; but it was a mere ribbon of rutted turf, with on each side the statutory bowshot of cleared ground between it and the forest fringes. And, as he looked, he saw the seventh magpie.

Peter was country-bred and had country lore in the back of his mind. Also, being a scholar, he respected auspices. So, having no hat to doff, he pulled his forelock. Seven magpies in one day must portend something great.

He had set off that summer morning on an errand for the cellarer of Oseney Abbey to the steward of the King’s manor of Beckley, some matter touching supplies for the Abbey kitchen. The sun had risen through lamb’s-wool mists, the river was a fleckless sheet of silver, and Peter had consecrated the day to holiday. He had done his errand long before noon, and had spent an hour watching the blue lagoons on Otmoor (there was much water out, for July had begun with rains), with the white geese like foam on the edges. The chantry priest at Horton had given him food - a crust only and a drink of ale, for the priest was bitter poor - and in the afternoon he had wandered in the Stowood glades, where the priory of Studley had right of pannage and the good sisters’ droves of swine rooted for earth-nuts. Peter was young, and holiday and high summertide could still intoxicate. He had lain on the spicy turf of the open spaces, his nose deep in thyme and rock-rose; he had made verses in the shadow of the great oaks which had been trees when Domesday Book was written; he had told his dreams aloud to himself at the well under the aspens where the Noke fletchers cut their arrows. The hours had slipped by unnoted, and the twilight was beginning when he reached his favourite haunt, a secret armchair of rock and grass above the highway. He had seen four magpies, so something was on the way.

The first things he saw in the amethyst evening were two more of the pied birds, flapping down the hollow towards Wood Eaton. After them came various figures, for at that hour the road seemed to have woken into life. Travellers appeared on it like an evening hatch of gnats.

First came a couple of friars - Franciscans by their grey habits - who had been exploiting the faithful in the Seven Towns of Otmoor. Their wallets swung emptily, for the moormen had a poor repute among the religious. They would sleep the night, no doubt, in the Islip tithe-barn. After them appeared one of the Stowood hogwards, with the great cudgel of holly which was the badge of his trade. Peter knew what he was after. In the dusk he would get a rabbit or two for his supper on the edge of the Wood Eaton warren, for the hogwards were noted poachers.

From his view-point he could see half a mile down the road, from the foot of the hill to where it turned a corner and was lost in the oakwoods of the flats. It was like the stage of a Christmas mumming play, and Peter settled himself comfortably in his lair, and waited with zest for the entry of the next actors. This time it was a great wool-convoy, coming towards him from the Cherwell. He watched the laden horses strain up the slope, eleven of them, each like a monstrous slug buried in its wool-pack. There were five attendants, four on foot and one riding a slim shaggy grey pony. They might be London bound, or more likely for Newbury, where Jack Winchcombe had his great weaving mill and the workmen wrought all day in sheds high and dim as a minster - so many workmen that their master twenty years back had led his own battalion of spinners, carders and tuckers to Flodden Field. Peter viewed the convoy with no friendly eye. The wool barons were devouring the countryside, and ousting the peasants. He had seen with his own eyes hamlets obliterated by the rising tide of pasture. Up in Cotswold the Grevels and Celys and Midwinters might spend their wealth in setting up proud churches, but God would not be bribed. Let them remember Naboth’s vineyard, those oppressors of the poor. Had not the good Sir Thomas More cried out that in England the sheep were eating up the men?

The next arrival was a troop of gipsies, a small furtive troop, three donkeys laden with gear, five men on foot, and two women, each with an infant at breast. In his childhood Peter remembered how these vagabonds had worn gaudy clothes and played openly on fantastic instruments of music; they were shameless priggers and rufflers, but they were welcomed everywhere except by the dwellers in lonely places, for they brought mirth and magic to the countryside. Now they were under the frown of the law, and at the will of any justice could be banished forth of England, for it was believed that among them they harboured Scots and Spaniards, and plotted against the King’s peace. This troop were clad like common peasants, and drab and dingy at that, but there was no mistaking their lightfoot gait, and even at that distance Peter could mark their hazel-nut skins and bird-like beaks. They came on the stage stealthily, first reconnoitring the patch of open road, and, when they neared the other corner, sending out a scout to prospect ahead. Peter saw the scout turn his head and give a signal, and in a second the Egyptians, donkeys and all, had taken cover like weasels, and were deep in the wayside scrub.

Presently the cause was apparent. Down the hill trotted an imposing cavalcade, four gentlemen, no less than six servants armed with curtal-axes, and two led baggage-horses. One of the gentlemen was old, and his white hair mingled with the ermine collar of his purple cloak. The others rode cloakless in the warm evening. Two had the look of lawyers, being all in black and white, except for their tawny horsemen’s boots, but the fourth was a gay gallant, with a wine-red doublet, a laced shirt, sleeves monstrously puffed and slashed, and on his head a velvet bonnet with a drooping blue feather. Two of the servants carried at their saddle-bows the flat leather boxes which scriveners used. Peter guessed their errand. They were some of the commissioners whom the King was sending far and wide throughout the land to examine into the condition of the religious houses. Their destination might be the Augustinians at Bicester or the Benedictines at Eynsham - the latter he thought, for there were better roads to Bicester from London than this, and these men were doubtless from the capital. They were in a hurry, and passed out of sight at a sharp trot, the led horses shying at the smell of the gipsy donkeys hidden in the covert. In two hours’ time they would be supping off Thames trout - for it was a Friday - in the Eynsham fratry.

When the last of the company had jolted round the far corner the stage was empty for a while. The amethyst was going out of the air, and giving place to that lemon afterglow which in a fine summer never leaves the sky till it is ousted by the splendours of dawn. The ribbon of road was beginning to glimmer white, and the high wooded sides of the glen to lose their detail to the eye and become massed shadows.... But the play was not yet ended, for up t...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Bibliography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Sir Ranulphe Crewe
• Contents