The Courier's Tale (16 page)

The destruction of Becket’s tomb, however, caused outrage in every country. The King of France was particularly incensed. Over many years his ancestors had sent jewels of peculiar splendour to the shrine. Now it came to his notice that King Henry was wearing them as buttons. At the conference of Nice, therefore, the princes had agreed to take action. But a year or more had passed and nothing was done.

Pole set out to try and arrange a trade embargo against England in the hope of causing another rebellion. This was his second legation. If anything, it was more disastrous than the first.

We left Rome at Christmas and had gone only a hundred miles or so when word came that the state trials had been held in England: Lord Montagu, Pole’s elder brother, was already executed, along with his cousin the Marquess of Exeter, his uncle Edward Neville, Hugh Holland and others.

The charges and evidence alleged against Montagu were of this sort:

Item
: At Bockmar one day, Montagu woke and said to his brother: ‘I dreamt just now the King was dead.’

Item
: Later he said: ‘He is not dead but he will one day die suddenly and then we shall have jolly stirrings. Though he glories in the title of Supreme Head, he has a sore leg no poor man would be glad of.’

Item
: He also said: ‘The King, to be revenged on Reginald, will kill us all.’ ‘Marry!’ said Geoffrey, ‘if you fear such jeopardy, let us be walking hence quickly.’

Item
: He said: ‘The King will be out of his wits one day, for when he comes to his chamber he looks round angrily and then falls to fighting.’

Item
: He said he had never loved the King from childhood, and that the King’s father had no affection or fancy unto him either.

There was no plot, there was no treason. There was nothing but a few words spoken between brothers, a dream, a reminiscence . . . But under the laws framed by Cromwell that was enough to end your life. I think we were at Piacenza when we heard this news. The effect on Pole was strange. He did not seem to be stricken with grief, although I knew he loved Montagu dearly. Suddenly he spurred on his horse. His blood was up. We rushed through Italy and Provence and into Spain. At Barcelona he and I left the others of the party and rode on ahead to reach the Emperor in Toledo as soon as possible. But there disappointment waited for us. The English ambassador, Tom Wyatt, had got there first. ‘Pole’s words may be fair and pleasant,’ he told the Emperor, ‘but however the head is coloured the tail is always black and full of poison. Traitors like him must be odious to all princes.’

Henry then wrote to the Emperor in a similar vein:

Most high, most excellent, and most puissant Prince, our very dear and beloved brother, and perpetual ally,

We hear that Cardinal Pole has taken the road towards you. We know his nature to be so ungrateful that no good can come of it. While weeping crocodile tears, he will shed if he can the venom of his viper’s nature . . . You must know that ever since he received his red hat, and before that too, he conspired to destroy our own person, that of our son, Prince Edward, and the lady Mary, and the lady Elizabeth . . .

These arrows found their marks. Pole was received coldly by the Emperor. The courtiers drew aside from us, as from infected men. ‘Traitors must be odious to all princes’ was the sentence to be read on those faces. One or two who knew Pole from the past, and perhaps felt sorry at the line which they must follow, came to see him in private and explained the situation. The Emperor had no intention of acting against England. Germany was in an uproar, the Turks were threatening on land and sea. This was no time to pick a quarrel elsewhere. In short, Pole had been thoroughly outplayed by both the King and circumstance.

The only good thing, in fact, that came from the whole journey was that in Toledo we met Robert Brancetor. He was a Londoner who, years before, when I was still in Venice, was one of the most famous men in the world, his name on everyone’s lips. The reason for his fame was as follows: while still a young man he made a fortune as a merchant and then set off to visit the Holy Land. In the course of this journey – no one was quite sure how or why – he crossed the dominions of the Turk in disguise, and came to the court of the Persian King, the Sophy. This was at a time when the Turkish danger hung over Italy like a dark wave – their fleets could be seen on the horizon, their army was encamped in Illyrica. Now Brancetor inspired the Persian King to attack the Turks from the east. Tremendous battles ensued, and all the Turkish forces in the west were summoned home. Italy, and perhaps the whole of Christendom, was saved.

As Brancetor’s fellow-countrymen, we in Pole’s household at that time were filled with pride – I myself almost wept with envy – at the thought of his glory. It was said that he had led a wing of the Sophy’s army into battle, and that he must surely be made no less than a duke. But then nothing more was heard of him for years, and he slipped completely from my mind. And there he would have stayed, in oblivion, except for the fact that one day, while we were in Toledo, he came up to me and, without any introduction, offered to assist Pole to get back to Barcelona.

I had no idea who he was. I could tell, of course, that he was English. That made me uneasy as spies for the King had previously tried to enter Pole’s service.

‘We need no help,’ I said.

‘You are wrong,’ said Brancetor calmly.

I looked at him more carefully. I could see he was my superior in age and experience and certainly in strength: he was very strongly built, and still young, though his hair was white like sheep’s wool or rather it was like the poll of a steer between the horns.

‘I may tell you that you need all the help you can get,’ he went on.

‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.

‘I had the honour of being informed by the English ambassador himself, Sir Thomas. You are to be ambushed on the road from Toledo to Gerona, and then killed. Possibly Sir Thomas will kill you himself, as there is a large reward.’

‘Who are you?’ I said. ‘Why have you come to warn us?’

And then he told me his name.

It is strange thing to meet an unrecognised hero, but even stranger to meet one whom for the meantime you have forgotten. When I heard the name Brancetor, I was nonplussed. It was as if I had to refer the matter to an earlier, now departed, self, to see what he would have thought; in my confusion I blushed like a girl, which infuriated me, and made me glare at the stranger. He remained unperturbed, as if he was used to waiting for others to order their thoughts.

‘Why does Sir Thomas confide in you?’ I asked.

‘To impress me,’ he said. ‘He has been threatening me, in certain forms, for the last ten days, but he knows I am not afraid of him. I don’t think that he is in a position to harm me.
You
, however, are another matter . . .’

Then he explained his situation. He did not tell me why he was there in Spain and not a duke in Persia, nor how he had managed to get home, indicating with a certain look that that was none of my business. He did say, however, that having arrived in Europe, he made his way to the Emperor, in expectation of a reward. This was duly promised but so far had not been forthcoming. In the meantime he had lived very quietly at court, and not without honour, although – he allowed me to understand – his famous exploit had earned him the hatred of some other courtiers. Those people did not perturb him. But then his presence at that court had been noted in England. This was a different matter. Almost at once he was commanded by Cromwell to return home. The English envoys – and there was always a stream of messengers of one grade or another to the imperial court – were perfectly affable but their persistence put him on his guard.

These envoys were also evasive.

Why was it so important that he go and stand before the King? he had asked them.

They smiled, they looked out the window.

It suddenly occurred to Brancetor that his splendid feat in Persia might not be seen as such in England. He had, after all, helped save Italy; he had strengthened the hand of the Emperor.
Treason
! And just as he came to this surmise, Wyatt arrived and began to make veiled threats. Did he think the King’s patience was limitless? Did he not know how powerful he was, and jealous of his rights? At that, Brancetor made a firm decision. The last place he intended to visit in the forseeable future was the city of his birth.

‘I did not say so in as many words,’ he told me. ‘On the contrary, I often say how much I long to see the Thames again. Nothing is as sweet as the sight of your native land! But I point out that it would be absurd and ridiculous to leave this court empty-handed, having been promised my reward. Despite himself, Wyatt finds he has to agree with that. Now I do not know the terms of your dispute with him, but as he was magnifying the King’s power to me, he mentioned certain plans being made against you. I do not approve. I would be happy, in fact, to help you defeat them.’

When I reported all this to Pole, he was incredulous.

‘It is unthinkable,’ he said. ‘Ambassadors do not ambush one another on the highway. No – these are just the boasts of furious, impetuous youth.’

‘Youth?’ I said. ‘Wyatt is two years your junior. In any case, it will not be possible to ask him if he wants to kill you. He has already left court.’

We ourselves were departing in two days.

‘Perhaps he has gone ahead to wait for us,’ I said.

‘What should we do?’ said Pole.

I explained that Brancetor not only knew the language of Spain but the country as well. He had advised us to take back roads and byways. He offered to guide us himself. Pole must ask the Emperor if he could borrow him.

This was what was done. We set off from Toledo, we slipped away without any fanfare, and taking bridle paths and goat tracks we crossed the moors of Aragon just as the gorse and broom were coming into flower in the cold winds of spring. We reached Barcelona safely, then Gerona, and finally found a haven in the town of Carpentras in Provence, where Pole’s old friend Sadoleto, a famous scholar, was bishop. And there we stayed. And there, like a man who remains firm in the heat of battle but afterwards begins to tremble, Pole lost his nerve. The slaying of his brother, the danger which his mother and others of the family were still facing, the charges of treachery, the cold faces in Toledo – all these now seemed to overwhelm him. He could not face the world. He was ordered to return to Rome and he begged to be excused.

If a man loses a parent, a wife or child, [he wrote] they are granted some leave. Should not I, who almost in the same instant, have lost all those dearest to me, have the same exemption? . . . Perhaps you have heard that my mother has been sentenced to death, or rather to eternal life – for unless I understand it in that way, my own life would be insupportable to me. Yet even with that firm persuasion, I cannot bear the light. I must hide in the cavern while the glory of the Lord passes by.

Chapter 18

In Carpentras, Pole began a great work, another long letter or book, this one written to the Emperor. One might have thought that his first book had got him into so much trouble he might be advised never to pick up a pen again, but he did so to clear his name of the charge, now broadcast in every country, that he was the worst traitor in history. In England itself that year, in London and other towns, great musters were held at dawn and in the evenings in the hundreds of every shire all the young men, dressed in white, marched and swore oaths by torchlight against ‘the spotted serpent, the Pope’ and ‘the arch-traitor, Pole’. At the same time a little book was published and sent by the King to every court in Europe to justify the recent state trials and executions. A copy soon arrived in Carpentras. The writer aimed his blows first at Pole’s brother, Montagu:

Might not this fond or rather detestable traitor have talked and dreamed of other things than the King’s death? Might not he have been content with this world and the state he was in, leaving his lewd prophecies of the time that should make him merry, if he still tarried in it?

But his main target was Pole himself:

To come at last to the arch-traitor, and to speak somewhat of him, whom God hateth, nature refuseth, all men detest, yea and all beasts too would abhor, if they could conceive how much viler he is than the worst of them . . .

O Poole, full of poison, that would have drowned thy country in blood, thou thought to have overflowed thy prince and sovereign lord, thou thoughtest with thy traitorous streams to have over run all together. God be thanked, thou art now a pool of little water and that at a wonderful low ebb . . .

I plainly protest, I am thine enemy . . . I wish thee to live for ever, never out of shame, never out of infamy.

And so it ran, for forty or fifty pages.

The writer was none other than my old friend Morison, who used to pound his fist on the table in Sandro’s kitchen and, with tears in his eyes, swear fidelity to anyone who was ever his friend.

Pole affected to be scornful of this performance. It showed only the ‘miserable servitude’, he said, of Morison’s mind. But he was stung, all the same, and composed several replies: ‘You came to live under my roof as a brother, now you omit no form of curse . . . I have to say I smiled when you declared your enmity – a curse from a man such as you is like Balaam’s curse, a kind of blessing . . .’