Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (99 page)

   Intrigued, Denby sought out the tribe of Half-Finished People. At first they seemed like any other tribe, but then Denby noticed that the older men had an oddly European look and some of them spoke English. Some of their customs were the same as the Lakota tribes’ but others seemed to be founded upon European military practice. Their language was like Lakota but contained a great many English, Dutch and German words.

   A man called Robert Heath (otherwise Little-man-talks-too-much) told Denby that they had all deserted from several different armies and regiments on the afternoon of 15th June 1815 because a great battle was going to be fought the next day and they had all had a strong presentiment that they would die if they remained. Did Denby know if the Duke of Wellington or Napoleon Buonaparte was now King of France? Denby could not say. “Well, sir,” said Heath philosophically, “Whichever of ’em it is, I dare say life goes on just the same for the likes of you and me.”

2
General Rebecq also made up a Dutch version of his jingle which was sung by his soldiers on the way to Quatre Bras. They taught it to their English comrades and it later became a child’s skipping rhyme, both in England and the Netherlands.

3
Copenhagen, the Duke’s famous chestnut horse, 1808-36.

4
In 1810 Messrs George and Jonathan Barratt, the proprietors of Vauxhall Gardens, had offered Strange and Norrell a vast sum of money to stage displays of magic every night in the gardens. The magic which the Barratts were proposing was of exactly this sort — illusions of magical creatures, famous persons from the Bible and history etc., etc. Naturally enough, Mr Norrell had refused.

5
The accepted magical technique for creating confusion within roads, landscapes, rooms and other physical spaces is to make a labyrinth within them. But Strange did not learn this magic until February 1817.

Nevertheless this was arguably the decisive action of the campaign. Unknown to Strange, the French general, D’Erlon, was trying to reach the battlefield with 20,000 men. Instead he spent those crucial hours marching through a landscape which changed inexplicably every few minutes. Had he and his men succeeded in reaching Quatre Bras it is probable the French would have won and Waterloo would never have happened. Strange was piqued by the Duke’s abruptness earlier in the day and did not mention to any one what he had done. Later he told John Segundus and Thomas Levy. Consequently historians of Quatre Bras were perplexed to account for D’Erlon’s failure until John Segundus’s
The Life of Jonathan Strange
was published in 1820.

6
In actual fact Mr Pink was only one of the civilians whom the Duke pressed into service as unofficial
aides-de-camp
that day. Others included a young Swiss gentleman and another commercial traveller, this time from London.

Chapter 42: Strange decides to write a book

1
William of Lanchester was John Uskglass’s seneschal and favourite servant, and consequently one of the most important men in England.

2
Thomas of Dundale, John Uskglass’s first human servant. See footnote 2, Chapter 45.

Chapter 43: The curious adventure of Mr Hyde

1
The Dyke is a great wall of earth and stones, now much decayed, which divides Wales from England — the work of Offa, an eighth-century Mercian king, who had learnt by experience to distrust his Welsh neighbours.

2
At the time of Strange and Arabella’s marriage Henry had been Rector of Grace Adieu in Gloucestershire. While there he had conceived a wish to marry a young lady of the village, a Miss Parbringer. But Strange had not approved the young lady or her friends. The living of Great Hitherden had happened to fall vacant at this time and so Strange persuaded Sir Walter Pole, in whose gift it lay, to appoint Henry. Henry had been delighted. Great Hitherden was a much larger place than Grace Adieu and he soon forgot the unsuitable young lady.

3
The books Strange possessed were, of course, books
about
magic, not books
of
magic. The latter were all in the possession of Mr Norrell.
C.f
. Chapter 1, footnote 5.

4
The meaning was perhaps a little more than this. As early as the twelfth century it was recognized that priests and magicians are in some sense rivals. Both believe that the universe is inhabited by a wide variety of supernatural beings and subject to supernatural forces. Both believe that these beings can be petitioned through spells or prayers and so be persuaded to help or hinder mankind. In many ways the two cosmologies are remarkably similar, but priests and magicians draw very different conclusions from this understanding.

Magicians are chiefly interested in the usefulness of these supernatural beings; they wish to know under what circumstances and by what means angels, demons and fairies can be brought to lend their aid in magical practices. For their purposes it is almost irrelevant that the first class of beings is divinely good, the second infernally wicked and the third morally suspect. Priests on the other hand are scarcely interested in any thing else. In mediaeval England attempts to reconcile the two cosmologies were doomed to failure. The Church was quick to identify a whole host of different heresies of which an unsuspecting magician might be guilty. The Meraudian Heresy has already been mentioned.

Alexander of Whitby (1230s?-1302) taught that the universe is like a tapestry only parts of which are visible to us at a time. After we are dead we will see the whole and then it will be clear to us how the different parts relate to each other. Alexander was forced to issue a retraction of his thesis and priests were henceforth on the lookout for the Whitbyian Heresy. Even the humblest of village magicians was obliged to become a cunning politician if he or she wished to avoid accusations of heresy.

This is not to say that all magicians avoided confusing religion and magic. Many “spells" which have come down to us exhort such-and-such a saint or holy person to help the magician. Surprizingly the source of the confusion was often the magicians’ fairy-servants. Most fairies were forcibly baptized as soon as they entered England and they soon began to incorporate references to Saints and Apostles into their magic.

Chapter 45: Prologue to The History and Practice of English Magic

1
No one in England nowadays knows this language and all we have left of it is a handful of borrowed words describing various obscure magical techniques. Martin Pale wrote in
De Tractatu Magicarum Linguarum
that it was related to the ancient Celtic languages.

2
Variously Thomas de Dundelle or Thomas de Donvil. It seems that several of Henry’s noblemen recognized Thomas as the younger son of a powerful Norman magnate who had disappeared one Christmas fourteen years before. Given the circumstances of his return it is doubtful whether they felt particularly pleased to have him back.

3
When he was a child in Faerie the
Sidhe
had called him a word in their own language which, we are told, meant “Starling", but he had already abandoned that name by the time he entered England. Later he took to calling himself by his father’s name — John d’Uskglass — but in the early part of his reign he was known simply by one of the many titles his friends or enemies gave him: the King; the Raven King; the Black King; the King in the North.

4
The name of this
Daoine Sidhe
King was particularly long and difficult. Traditionally he has always been known as Oberon.

Chapter 46: “The sky spoke to me …”

1
The spell to detect magic appears in
The Instructions
by Jacques Belasis.

Chapter 47: “A black lad and a blue fella - that ought to mean summat.”

1
John Uskglass’s arms were the Raven-in-Flight (properly called the Raven Volant), a black raven on a white field.

2
Presumably the Raven King’s original
Sidhe
name, which Jonathan Strange thought meant “Starling”.

Chapter 48: The Engravings

1
Famulus
: a Latin word meaning a servant, especially the servant of a magician.

2
Sir Walter is voicing a commonly-held concern. Shape-changing magic has lways been regarded with suspicion. The
Aureates
generally employed it during their travels in Faerie or other lands beyond England. They were aware that shape-changing magic was particularly liable to abuses of every sort. For example in London in 1232 a nobleman’s wife called Cecily de Walbrook found a handsome pewter-coloured cat scratching at her bed-chamber door. She took it in and named it Sir Loveday. It ate from her hand and slept upon her bed. What was even more remarkable, it followed her everywhere, even to church where it sat curled up in the hem of her skirts, purring. Then one day she was seen in the street with Sir Loveday by a magician called Walter de Chepe. His suspicions were immediately aroused. He approached Cecily and said, “Lady, the cat that follows you -I fear it is no cat at all.” Two other magicians were fetched and Walter and the others said spells over Sir Loveday. He turned back into his true shape — that of a minor magician called Joscelin de Snitton. Shortly afterwards Joscelin was tried by the Petty Dragownes of London and sentenced to have his right hand cut off.

3
It has already been described how Lt-Col. Colquhoun Grant’s devotion to his scarlet uniform had led to his capture by the French in 1812.

4
The common people in Northern England considered that they had suffered a great deal in recent years — and with good reason. Poverty and lack of employment had added to the general misery which the war with the French had produced. Then just when the war was over a new threat to their happiness had arisen — remarkable new machines which produced all sorts of goods cheaply and put them out of work. It is scarcely to be wondered at that certain individuals among them had taken to destroying the machines in an attempt to preserve their livelihoods.

5
There could be no neater illustration than this of the curious relation in which the Government in London stood to the northern half of the Kingdom. The Government represented the King of England but the King of England was only the King of the southern half. Legally he was the steward of the northern half maintaining the rule of law until such time as John Uskglass chose to return.

6
Naturally, at various times pretenders have arisen claiming to be John Uskglass and have attempted to take back the kingdom of Northern England. The most famous of these was a young man called Jack Pharaoh who was crowned in Durham Cathedral in 1487. He had the support of a large number of northern noblemen and also of a few fairies who remained at the King’s city of Newcastle. Pharaoh was a very handsome man with a kingly bearing. He could do simple magic and his fairy supporters were quick to do more whenever he was present and to attribute it to him. He was the son of a pair of vagabond-magicians. While still a child he was seen at a fair by the Earl of Hexham who noted his striking resemblance to descriptions of John Uskglass. Hexham paid the boy’s parents seven shillings for him. Pharaoh never saw them again. Hexham kept him at a secret place in Northern England where he was trained in kingly arts. In 1486 the Earl produced Pharaoh and he began his brief reign as King of Northern England. Pharaoh’s main problem was that too many people knew about the deception. Pharaoh and Hexham soon quarrelled. In 1490 Hexham was murdered on Pharaoh’s orders. Hexham’s four sons joined with Henry VII of Southern England to attack Pharaoh and at the Battle of Worksop in 1493 Pharaoh was defeated. Pharaoh was kept in the Tower of London and executed in 1499.

Other pretenders, more or less successful, were Piers Blackmore and Davey Sans-chaussures. The last pretender was known simply as the Summer King since his true identity was never discovered. He first appeared near Sunderland in May 1536 shortly after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. It is thought that he may have been a monk from one of the great northern abbeys — Fountains, Rievaulx or Hurtfew. The Summer King differed from Pharaoh and Blackmore in that he had no support from the northern aristocracy, nor did he attempt to gain any. His appeal was to the common people. In some ways his career was more mystical than magical. He healed the sick and taught his followers to revere nature and wild creatures — a creed which seems closer to the teachings of the twelfth-century magician, Thomas Godbless, than any thing John Uskglass ever proposed. His ragged band made no attempt to capture Newcastle or indeed to capture any thing at all. All through the summer of 1536 they wandered about Northern England, gaining supporters wherever they appeared. In September Henry VIII sent an army against them. They were not equipped to fight. Most ran away back to their homes but a few remained and fought for their King and were massacred at Pontefract. The Summer King may have been among the dead or he may have simply vanished.

7
Consulting dead magicians may strike us as highly sensational, but it is a magical procedure with a perfectly respectable history. Martin Pale claimed to have learnt magic from Catherine of Winchester (who was a pupil of John Uskglass). Catherine of Winchester died two hundred years before Martin Pale was born. John Uskglass himself was reputed to have had conversations with Merlin, the Witch of Endor, Moses and Aaron, Joseph of Arimathea and other venerable and ancient magicians.

Chapter 49: Wildness and madness

1
Scholars of magic are always particularly excited about any new discovery concerning the great Dr Pale. He occupies an unique position in English magical history. Until the advent of Strange and Norrell he was the only noteworthy practical magician who wrote down his magic for other people to read. Naturally his books are esteemed above all others.

2
For centuries this passage was considered an interesting curiosity, but of no practical value since no one nowadays believes that Death is a person capable of being interrogated in the manner Pale suggests.