The Courier's Tale (20 page)

‘You would think he might look more cheerful in public,’ Bonner reported to London. ‘He was wearing a crimson cloak but was deathly pale – whatever can be troubling him?’

Now this whole affair had profound effects. Henry was enraged. He had been called ‘cruel prince’. Two of his ambassadors had been repelled, one of them, Bonner, sent home in disgrace. Henry’s attempts to drive a wedge between France and the Emperor had failed. He had not a single friend on the stage except certain German princes and dukes. And just at that time he found himself married to the sister of one them, an innocent maid whom, unfortunately, he could not bear to embrace. This was blamed on Cromwell. Shortly afterwards, Cromwell lost his life.

The story did not end there. It seems that the French, who had eagerly read Brancetor’s papers, informed Henry that among them was a letter from one of his ambassadors, Richard Pate. Pate had a reputation as one of Henry’s most loyal servants, and was most vehement against the Pope. But Henry’s suspicions were easily roused and Pate was ordered home.

On the way, he stopped at Cologne to go and see the cathedral, and there, waking in the middle of the night and taking his coffer and one manservant, he stole away from his entourage and fled to Rome to join Pole.

At this point the French, charmed with their success, may have played a further game with the King and told him that Pate was not alone – his other envoys were suspect as well. In any case, all English diplomats abroad were ordered home and thrust into prison. Wyatt himself was marched into the Tower, his wrists pinioned, surrounded by twenty-four archers. Everyone accused everyone else of secretly supporting Pole.

‘Never have I seen these people so crestfallen,’ wrote the French ambassador happily. ‘They do not know whom to trust, and the King, having offended so many people, mistrusts everyone . . . And in his irresolution and despondency, he goes on dipping his hands in blood wherever he conceives the least suspicion.’

That winter, out of sympathy for the trials of his brother-sovereign, the King of France sent Henry six great venison pasties. Henry was delighted and sent a message to say he had tasted them all and found them all marvellously good.

‘We rejoice that you liked our pasties,’ replied Francis, ‘especially since we and our sister, Queen of Navarre, were present at the seasoning and tasting thereof.’

At the French court, many jokes were then heard: ‘Poor man – he lost his
Pate
, so we sent him six
pâtés
of ours. One could do no less.’

That above all was something Henry could never bear: the sound of laughter from across the Channel.

He realised he had been outsmarted. He had been made a fool of. He had arrested his own diplomatic corps. His equals, the Emperor and the King of France, held him in low esteem. It was then, said Brancetor, that Henry’s mind turned to Pole. Pole was the source of his mortifications. It was Pole whom Brancetor preferred. It was to Pole that Pate fled. And at the same time, all that winter and early spring, the King was in agony with his ulcerated leg. Even that affliction seemed to be connected to Pole. The ulcer had opened at the same time that Pole, his own flesh and blood, first came towards his kingdom with the title of Roman legate. There was even a joke about that. ‘An ulcer ate his leg, but a legate his soul.’

Now the King, brooding over his setbacks, wanted vengeance. Pole was far away in Italy and all plans to kill him had so far failed. There remained one sure way to punish him.

And so, said Brancetor, the King had the Lady of Sarum led from her cell and across the grass, where a youth was waiting with an axe.

This was Brancetor’s view of that event, and he put himself in the centre of the story, as people will, yet there may be something in it.

As to Pole’s nephew, Montagu’s son, a child who had shared his grandmother’s dungeon and who from time to time had been allowed out to run around the castle, he now disappeared from view. On the same day that she died he was taken to another cell – much worse, it seemed, than the first one.

This was not intended to be kept a secret.

‘He is but poorly and strictly kept, and not desired to know anything,’ one of the ambassadors reported from London. In other words, it seemed that he was put into solitary confinement, and left there cold and hungry and in the dark. But no one ever knew, for he was never seen or heard of again.

Chapter 4

When Pole’s family was first arrested, the Pope refused to grant him an audience, saying he could not look him in the face. This time he did not turn away. On the news of the death of his mother, Pole was summoned to Rome, and there he was appointed governor in Viterbo.

This was the capital of the Patrimony, the oldest and most beautiful of the papal dominions, the land of ancient Etruria, bounded to the north by Umbria, by Tuscany to the west, by the Tiber to the east, and to the south by the rolling waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

In effect, Pole became the ruler of his own princely state. And the fact, which may sound heartless, is this: then began a period of happiness for many of us in Pole’s household. When all is said and done, the world is a very strange place: the cruel murder of an old lady in one country opened a door into a kind of delightful and princely garden for about twenty people far away in another.

I do not include Pole among them. His mother’s imprisonment and murder, as a result of his own actions, at the very time of life when most men are planning to take care of their parents in their old age, had a profound effect on him. But by ‘profound’ I also mean well-hidden. The subject was hardly ever mentioned. But I knew him well and I saw a change in him – beneath concealed grief there was now a certain motionlessness to him, an immobility of soul, as if some part of his inner being stood rooted to the spot in horror, and he would never move free of care through the world again.

Yet for me, I have to confess – the first year or two at Viterbo was the best time of my life up until that point. I was still at an age when sorrow can’t get a good grip on you. My duties, as chief body-guard, were less alarming than before. Without doubt he was safer there in the hills, with his own government, small as it was, than in Rome where the world’s currents surged in and out every week. And his high office distracted him, I suppose, from his grief. There was some irony in this: Pole had never sought the magistracy of state.

‘I have never wanted that office,’ he used to say. ‘I never wanted – as so many do – to tell one man to go here and another one there and a third to stand on the spot and await further orders.’

The world being what it is, this is what he got. And for several years we lived in Viterbo and he governed there, carrying out the office perfectly well. It seems there is much less to the business than our rulers like us to think: their demands for grandeur and splendid rewards would have to be reduced if it was known that all that is required is the application of some reason, moderate foresight and a mild interpretation of the laws. But perhaps I’m wrong: perhaps Viterbo was a special case. Only fifty years earlier the city had been infamous for bloody feuds. Then one day a group of youths dressed in white began going around the town saying: ‘
Pace, pace, si con noi
’: ‘Peace, peace be upon us. The Madonna commands it.’

The streets fell silent. People put down their weapons to consider the idea. The Governor and the Bishop came out of their fortresses to give their approval. And ‘
pace, pace
’ has reverberated in the air ever since above Viterbo. There was hardly any crime to speak of in our years in the governorate. It’s true there was a cat-burglar who plagued us for a while but, one night, seeing the local policeman approach, he jumped back
into
the palace and was collared by Priuli, whereupon he burst into tears and then confessed all. Now this was a clear miracle since the officer in question was, as usual, at home and fast asleep in bed at the time. In short, a phantasm had been sent to aid us.

Only the shepherds outside the walls never rid themselves of the habit of sliding a dagger between one another’s ribs, but they lived widely scattered and did not meet every day. In general, the administration of justice in Viterbo was completed by noon or, at the most, by two in the afternoon. After that, the members of the household devoted their time to conversation, books, painting, riding out and so on. The Marchioness came to live nearby, and as Viterbo was just over the horizon from Rome, beyond Mt Soracte, which in winter could be seen shining with snow from certain high windows in the city, many visitors came out: Carnesecchi, Piombo, Michelangelo, Farnese, the secretary of state (‘not a mouse stirs in Europe or Asia but Farnese hears it’), Bembo, Gianotti, Lily and Pate.

It was there that Marc’Antonio Flamminio and I became close friends. By then he was about forty-five, an old man in my eyes, with a tawny beard, but there still seemed to be a cheerful boy behind that mask of age, still looking for adventures. He used to come out hunting with me early in the mornings – hunting was banned in the Patrimony but who would enforce such a law? – and we would slip out of the gates before the sun came up, Flamminio the strangest hunter you ever saw, stalking along through the vines wearing a Turkoman’s padded jacket embroidered with roses or a conical hat that he had picked up on the wharves in Venice. In his youth he had been famous for his amorous verses, on the ‘sweet thefts of love in the woods’ or a certain flute which his girlfriend liked to fondle. Now he had become ambitious for salvation and was busy translating the Psalms. Even so, on cold winter mornings, when he saw the hillside turning russet from the summit down, or glimpsed two hares dancing on frosty ground at the end of the vines, he would stand and gaze, and declaim a verse or two addressing some nymph or dryad or sylph or Nature herself.

‘Who is this
Nature
of yours?’ I would say. ‘She seems a cold-hearted minx to me – at least she has very cold fingers. You’d be better off back in bed with a nice, warm, real girl – that’s my opinion.’

‘Ah yes, but you are a rude barbarian from beyond the Alps, which God put up as a fence for our beloved Italy, and which he paints with snow every year as a sign to keep you out. And yet here you all are. Whatever are we to do with you?’

I never got used to his quips and sallies and strange fancies, which were what I liked most about him. He always had in his pocket, for instance, a little ball, a
balla de mondo
, with the lands and seas of the world painted on it.

‘What
is
that?’ I asked him one day.

‘This? Why, I have carried this ever since the Spaniards, having sailed away in one direction, one day came back in the other, thus proving the world was a sphere. Of course we knew that already, but theory and fact are very different things. Did you not observe that the world then seemed to float more lightly and that the forests and mountains to echo more than before?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I did not.’

‘Good heavens, I noticed it distinctly,’ he said. ‘After all it is a splendid thing to live on a sphere aloft among stars,
thus
’ – and he tossed the ball into the air and caught it again. Then he looked at it and said: ‘Is that really you, O little ball, divided by fire and sword among so many nations?’

And then, with an earnest expression, he said to me: ‘Yet think how large and fair she would be if love reigned among us.’

In summer, Marco and I used to climb into the hills, high above the shepherds’ grassy kingdoms, and fish for trout in the pools below waterfalls. When they leapt through the air – the trout, I mean – he called them ‘low meteors’; and on the way back down we would stop and drink wine and eat ewes’ milk cheese with the murderous shepherds. You see what a delightful life it was.

Of course the idyll could not last. After a year or two, people began to drift away from Pole’s court and the shadows crept towards us. Two great friends of Pole and the marchioness fled to join Calvin in Geneva and then went on to England. Their flight created a great stir. By then the peace conference between Catholics and Protestants had failed and the schism was worse than ever. The office of the inquisition was then set up in Rome. This was done by the ever-zealous Carafa who persuaded the Pope of its necessity. There could be no more conferences with Protestants, he said, no more compromises. Germany was lost. In Italy, heresies must be detected and rooted out. He was so eager to begin the process that he paid to fit out his own house as a court for the hearings.

At this news, a cold breeze and shadow went through the air in Viterbo.

‘The inquisition was invented by Satan to destroy the Church,’ said Pole. And Flamminio recited some verses he had once written:

When harsh zealots light the fires

And poor Hieronymo writhes in pain,

‘Cruel men, desist,’ Religion cries,

‘Tis not error, but I who am slain.’

At the same time, the fact that Pole now ruled in his own princely state seemed to infuriate the King of England more than ever. Henry sent more assassins, at first in ones or twos. For a while they failed to disturb our little paradise. An angel with a sword must have been guarding the gate. Later, the King’s plan of action against Pole became much more ambitious. But that was still some time off.

Chapter 5