2110-5-10-2

Love to Susie & a Happy New Year to you all. Don't overwork but give us another historical romance before we get too old.

Ever yours

Stair A Gillon

Pitliver

16. 1. 32.

My dear John

I have now read the Blanket oddly enough in the American Edition lent me by Cordiner of this office who had been sent it from a relation in America.

Nina was reading my copy. It is certainly an admirable get up & the print & paper are A1.

It has been an intense pleasure, as it was to the lender (who by the way puts "Montrose" on the pedestal of an obelisk & rightly), to me & probably he got more from some

bits while I with the veneer of a certain local knowledge scored in other places no doubt, but neither will have got the full good out of your impressive knowledge of the scene & the period & the spirit of the age.

Your Lord is a far more convincing skeleton that the ordinary story of it seated at a table. Starving folks go through a good deal before they go out.

I notice you give more emphasis to the importance of the Bohun strain & inheritance which of course brought the

blood of Thomas of Woodstock with the prestige of 'Constable'.

Curiously enough there had lingered for many years in my head inaccurately a jingle about "the princely, the superb House of Stafford" somewhere in Lodge's Portraits. I ran the quotation to earth last Saturday. It comes in the sketch of Geo. Villiers, Duke of B. "First Duke of Buckingham, that is to say the first to whom the title was granted since it had been torn by attainder from the blood of Plantagenet in the Superb House of Stafford."

I'm sure your researches amply justify you in stressing

both Bohun & the attractive device of the Swan as the lure to the nobles gentles & commons who clung to the old.

Various memories came up of rummagings in Vicary Gibbs' Complete Peerage as to the forebears of Mary Sutton or Dudley, Countess of Home, whose two daughters carried that blood to the descendants of James 4th Earl of Moray & John, Duke of Lauderdale, & caused me to hunt up Dudley Tibetot, Cherleton of Powis Dein court & Lovel etc in V.G. and G.E.C. (as V.G. stops at "Lincolnshire") & find links with some of the families alluded to in your book

It was some time before I got Boarstall away from that very different poets' corner on the other side of Oxford. But then I recalled our drive home from Muswell Hill. How little did I ever think as the old 12 Noon used to take me tingling - fidgin fain - for the North through what I couldn't yet appreciate that it was to be a land of romance.

Fancy if we had had those travel facilities for our Oxford time, what explorations we could have made away west to the Escarpment

N.W. to the Cotswold plateau N. beyond Banbury & all the intervening space of few or no rails & sparse main roads.

I like your story. Peter & the Lady Sabine are problems, he a sort of Hamlet, she the battleground between the natural charm of a good heart and the ambitious promptings of a sound head. Bonamy Avelard (a very happy hit that name) & Father Tobias stand out as types

but I'm not sure that I don't give the palm of the whole lot to Simon Rede, precursor of what was resolute & simple & profound in the Protestant - Puritan Movement.

As for Henry VIII he might have sat for his Holbein portrait as a king in a pack of cards with his pig eyes and his paunch & not quite perfect leg.

And then the underworld! In to that I just followed