In the biographical remains of Philip Heseltine—known to lovers of English song as Peter Warlock—the first notice of that boon companion of his last years, poet and journalist Bruce Blunt (1899-1957), is a newspaper clipping from February 1927 pasted in Heseltine's diary reporting that they had been arrested in Cadogan Street for singing, shouting, and being generally drunk and disorderly. Blunt was to provide Heseltine with poems, often on the spur, for some of his pithiest songs—the homely and moving carol The First Mercy, the riotously campy Cricketers of Hambledon, The Fox—a haunting lament, the eerie and surreal Frostbound Wood, and Bethlehem Down. Like The First Mercy, Bethlehem Down is an a cappella close-up of the Nativity, but poignant with foreknowledge—"When He is King, they will clothe Him in grave-sheets/Myrrh for embalming and wood for a crown..."—and almost unbearable in its simple contrast with "He that lies now in the white arms of Mary/Sleeping so lightly on Bethlehem Down." In four parts, marked "Very slow and quiet," the choral version's straightforward lilt moving through all voices and delineating open intervals of fifths and sixths weaves a timeless, mystical atmosphere uncanny in its immediacy and compelling in its unforced, virtually unaltered, reiteration through four stanzas. Between 1925 and 1928, Heseltine lived in the ancient village of Eynsford, some 20 miles from London, allowing easy commutes to Oxford, Cambridge, and the British Museum where he copied, transcribed, and edited the music of Dowland, Locke, and Purcell; collected anecdotes and verse in praise of drunkenness (published in 1929 as Merry-Go-Down); and, with Jack Lindsay, prepared a modern edition of The Metamorphosis of Aiax, a Rabelaisian discourse on the water-closet, or privy, first published in 1596 by John Harrington, Queen Elizabeth I's godson (London, 1927). The Eynsford ménage, in addition to Blunt, featured a brisk turnover of artists, writers, musicians (including E.J. Moeran), women, and cats, all seemingly given to endless revelry financed by the quick production and sale of songs. On a moonlit stroll between taverns in December 1927, Blunt hit upon the words of Bethlehem Down and sent them to Heseltine in London, who took but a few days to set them and sell them to The Daily Telegraphfor publication on Christmas Eve, and on the proceeds of which they enjoyed for Christmas "an immortal carouse." An arrangement for solo voice and piano, dated December 1, 1930, was Heseltine's final musical work.

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