The Courier's Tale (32 page)

By then it was mid-November. I stayed in London a few days, and one morning I rose early to ride down to the sea. I had gone downstairs – this was in the old house in Throckmorton Street – and was standing in the dark with my hand raised to unlock the door, when, at the very same moment there came a very rapid knocking on the other side.

‘Who’s there?’

‘A herald.’

‘What herald?’

‘Inglefield herald.’

‘What does he want?’

‘Open the door.’

I opened the door. I saw a very small man standing there, a Moor, very black of skin. His aspect in itself surprised me, though why I don’t know – messengers may come in any shape or size they like, and why should you care?

‘My master, Inglefield, sends to tell you that your master, Pole, is now on the sea,’ he said.

I can still see the brass key in my hand, and the lock stile, and the dwarf who brought me the news at that moment just before the day had begun to light the street behind him. Mr Pole,
Traitor Pole
, the Cardinal of England, after many years of exile, of danger, long journeys, great fame and final mortification, was on his way home.

This astounded me. I could not understand how it had come about. From all I knew Gardiner had not changed his mind about Pole, and the Queen, besotted with her new husband, gave little thought to her cousin in exile. But I could not stand there all day and debate the matter with myself. Nor was the messenger a likely source of insight – he was a saucy devil and cocked his hand on his hip as he looked up at me, as if to say he was well aware that
I
was someone of little importance.

Without going to the lengths of strangling him, I learnt that Pole would land at Dover, cross to Gravesend and come to London by water. Hearing that, of course I changed my plans and decided to take the barge downriver to Gravesend to meet him.

Everything then went wrong – the tide was flowing; I turned back and rode instead, and arrived at Gravesend after dark; there was no Pole. In the morning he was still not there. I set out on horse to Canterbury, puzzled as to how all this was to fall out – and then, suddenly, coming around a corner, I met my Lord Cardinal.

It was not, of course, a face-to-face encounter. On the opposite side of a valley somewhere near Ospringe I saw flowing down the hill a vast crowd of thousands and thousands, moving forward as the honeycomb flows, and as dark as the wintry woods on either side of the road. It seemed that the whole county had joined the Cardinal on his route to London, and even as I watched I could see more people on foot and horse hurrying across the fields to witness what was passing.

I was somewhat nonplussed. I had forgotten how I used to imagine Pole’s eventual return to England but it was nothing like this. I rode forward and met the crowd. There was no chance in the world of speaking to Pole or even seeing him clearly in the crush of lords and bishops and ordinary folk, half of Kent, who rode ahead of him and behind him and on either side and who came on as far as Gravesend.

And this, I could see, was how things would be from now on. For ten years these folk would have lost their lives if they mentioned my master’s name except with a curse; half of them, I suppose, would have handed him over to the hangman without a second thought. But now he was back and approaching power, things were different. Ah well, I told myself, this is the slightly bitter taste of long loyalty. But then I became impatient and seized the nettle. By dint of speaking sharply in Italian to the English who swarmed around him, and sternly in English to the Italians who swarmed about him, I managed to get near my master and old friend – he gave me his hand briefly with a look as if to say ‘Don’t blame me if I scarcely recognise you, everything is changing before my eyes’ – and he was whisked away again.

All the same, I got aboard the leading barge, where in my view I deserved to be, for this, the final scene of all his years of wandering. But I was well at the back, and I never saw his face.

As an attainted traitor, Pole had been forbidden from displaying any signs of office when he arrived in England, but at Gravesend an order had come from London relaxing this command. For the last part of his long journey, up the river Thames, the silver cross of a legate stood at the bow of the barge.

The Italians, who had never seen a tidal river before, declared a miracle as the current bore us inland. From Deptford on, the banks were black with people.

At one o’clock we shot the rapids under the bridge, and a few minutes later reached Whitehall. The new king, Philip, came to the water-stairs to meet the newcomer, and then Pole was lost to sight as he went into the palace.

‘Well, that’s the end of him,’ I thought. And it seemed quite possible, since I was about to go to Italy, and he had vanished into the throng that surrounds power, that I might never see him again. But the next day he sent for me.

Chapter 2

‘I am besieged by dozens of members of my family who have lost everything,’ he said. ‘I can do little for them. There are so many grave public matters to attend to. But one thing is preying on my mind. It is a private matter, a family matter, perhaps I should ignore it, but it won’t leave me be.’

He asked me to make enquiries, as discreetly as possible, to try and find out what had happened to his young nephew, his brother’s son, who was sent to prison as a child and of whom no word had been heard for years.

‘I don’t expect good news,’ he said. ‘But we should know something – when he died, where he is buried . . . At least we should not accept knowing nothing and forget all about him.’

This meant at least another month away from Italy, but I undertook the commission out of duty and curiosity and pity as well. I thought of my own two dead children, my newborn son and daughter who – I sometimes had the impression – came to me in dreams, bidding me not to forget them entirely either.

I set to work at once. Here was another new role, and one for which I was peculiarly unfit. I had no idea where to start, and had to ask Pole how I should go about it. Above all, he said, discretion was needed: if there were secrets to hide, those who hid them might well be in a position to prevent their discovery. On the other hand, some help would be required from strangers. So for the first time I set my foot inside the archives, going first to the King’s paper room and later to the records of past lords Privy Seal and then to the books and logs of the lieutenant of the Tower.

On the first day, I admit my heart sank at the sight of the walls stacked with rolls and folios rising higher than a man’s head, and going back, no doubt, for centuries. There were clerks there, who were neither helpful nor unhelpful. I showed them a letter from Pole, a kind of safe conduct through those dry mountains, but the clerks looked at this document with indifference. In their eyes, hunting for knowledge among their papers was great folly: the wise thing to do was to keep them undisturbed, as far from prying eyes as possible.

In the end, it was Tom Rutter of all people who came to my aid. He had come up with me when I left Coughton. I could not stop him doing so.

He came along just to see London again, and then, since I was staying on, he decided to stay on as well, as my servant and, as he saw it, my guardian.

He was now a tenant of mine and as my tenant – and a very bad tenant, at that – he regarded me as a most valuable property. He did not like to have me out of his sight.

‘But how can you stay on, Tom?’ I said. ‘What about your wife and children?’

‘Them? Right as roaches.’

When I first went to work in the paper room, Tom stayed well away, standing out in the street with a strange, innumerable acquaintance he had gathered, I don’t know how, in a matter of hours. Then the cold winds drove him inside. He began to gaze over my shoulder. Until then I had no idea that he could read. As time went on, he became interested in my progress or, rather, continual failures. I soon noticed that he could deal with the clerks better than I. They were unsettled by his unblinking stare. They gave up their secrets to him. He also had the poacher’s instinct for what lies hidden in the thicket. It was Tom who learnt of the existence of a trove of papers which had been taken from Cromwell’s own house when he fell from power. The clerks perhaps would not have brought these to my notice. It was there that we found a few faint tracks of young Henry Pole. These came in the form of memoranda which Cromwell wrote – ‘remembrances’, as he called them – on matters that he meant to refer to the King’s attention.

These separate notes were much thumbed and creased with black – they had been folded and kept inside the pocket of the Lord Privy Seal himself:

6 October 1539:
Remember the diets of young Courtenay and Poole and the Countess of Salisbury, and to know the King’s pleasure therein
.

31 October:
What the King will have done with the Lady of Salisbury. For the diet of young Pole
.

10 November:
Remember the two children in the Tower
.

That was all I could find regarding the children. The ‘remembrances’ came to an end – as Cromwell himself came to an end. But by then we knew what to look for, and could follow the spoor elsewhere. In the spring of 1540 there had been a general amnesty for those accused of treason, but there were certain exceptions: ‘
Not to extend to the following: Thomas Cromwell; the Lady of Salisbury, Edward Courtenay, Henry Pole, son of Lord Montagu
.’

Cromwell was then put to death, but it was possible to follow the little doomed party for a few months more, this time through payments made to the lieutenant of the Tower:

King’s monthly payments to E. Walsingham, for the diets of Margaret Poole, Edward Courtenay and Henry Poole:

8 July 1540 – £13/6/8.

3 October 1540 – £40.

10 November 1540 – £64

2 December–2 February 1541 – £26/13/8

3 February–3 March – £26/13/4

31 March–25 May – £26/13/4.

Then the group dwindled again. Lady Salisbury was no longer mentioned. She was killed at the end of May. The expenses fell.

Payments to Sir Edward Walsingham for the diets of Edward Courtenay and Henry Pole, at £4 a month, each:

30 March–24 May – £16

May–July – £16

20 July–13 September – £16

There the trail ended. We looked on ahead for several more years. Young Courtenay was still mentioned, but there was no sign of Henry Pole. From the record, it appeared that he had died four or five months after the last words we ever heard reported about him: ‘He is but poorly and strictly kept and not desired to know anything.’

At the Tower itself, no one knew anything. The old lieutenant had died, the new one could not help me. The guards, from the youngest to the very oldest, who had been there for years, found they too could not assist in my enquiries. When I stated the year in question – 1541 – their eyes bulged in wonder that such infinite distances should be compassed by the mind of man. I might have been asking about the Fall of Troy. But one day, on my second or third visit, two of the older warders relented and led us down into a dark cell with no light but that from a grate, and showed us some words written there on a wall, in what may (or may not) have been a childish hand.

Ubi lapsus

Quod feci

Which is to say: Where have I fallen? What have I done?

There was a sort of legend, the warders said – very vague and unreliable, they said – among the guards, that this had been written by one of the children held prisoner at that remote and long forgotten era.

There the search came to an end, without any conclusion. I reported my failure to Pole. It had all taken much longer than I expected and was a sad and painstaking business. Yet I have to admit that in a way I enjoyed it as well: it was strangely calm, and at times exciting, like tracking deer in a fog over a moor. And once I had stumbled on Cromwell’s papers, I could not keep away from them. For there in the paper room, before my very eyes, was the story of my own life from twenty years ago.

The first thing I found with a shock of recognition were letters in my own writing – a bold youthful script, carelessly committing to paper – the very paper in my hand again – many disgraceful lies:

O my lord Cromwell, what shall I do now? I seek your excellent counsel, as no man has proved better the profit of true fidelity.

And:

I rejoice I showed you once a little kindness, Master Morison, where other men get money you win men’s hearts . . .

I found Cromwell’s instructions to Wilson and Heath as they left for Maastricht: ‘
Declare to the said Pole his miserable condition . . . By no means call him by any other name than
Mr
Pole
’.

I found the records of the interrogations of the Lady of Sarum, both her sons, their servants, Hugh Holland. I found my own poor brother’s tearstained page: ‘
Michael? It would be better if he had never been born!
’