The Courier's Tale (40 page)

When I read this – for a copy soon reached Mantua – I almost laughed aloud. It sounded like nothing so much as the ancient complaints of a jealous lover. The Marchioness, I think, had once been a follower of Carafa. She devoted herself to mortification of the flesh, and wore rags and starved herself to an inch of her life – exactly the austerities that Carafa admired. But Pole laughed at all this, and she listened to him, and soon she moved to the centre of my master’s circle. Had Carafa been brooding over this all these years? Was there really a woman at the bottom of it all?

In any case, I thought, no one could take seriously the charges which Carlos brandished in Brussels. But I was wrong. King Philip was enchanted to find himself in the Pope’s good books and he meant to stay there. He was greatly tempted to assist him in this matter. In any case, he and his ministers were angry with Pole for their own reasons: they saw him as the chief obstacle to their power in England. It was Pole who stood against Philip’s coronation, and against the English fighting Philip’s wars, and against allowing Philip’s troops into England.

In short, here was a moment of grave danger for my master. He was suddenly surrounded by enemies. The Pope sought his life. The King and his ministers would like to see the back of him. The English ‘weathercocks’ hated him – those ministers of fury such as Bonner and Lord Rich, who once backed Henry and now persecuted and burnt on behalf of Mary. The English Protestants, as well, had no love for a Roman cardinal. The French saw him as an imperialist. Even the Queen could not be relied on. If it came to a choice between him and her husband . . . well, Pole was only her cousin, and she still passionately loved her husband.

It was strange to consider that now my master, once again, stood under threat of being trussed up and sent over the sea to his doom, this time in the opposite direction. It was also strange, I thought, that the two older men whom Pole had most revered in his life – one of them King of England and the other now Pope in Rome – both turned on him and sought his destruction. Whatever else you may say about fate, once she chooses a theme for a man she does not idly let it drop.

One day in spring this year I received the following document. It was sent by my nephew Clement, who appended no comment:

Cardinalis Polis commissio ad procedend. Contra haereticos
.

REGINALDUS, miseratione divina tituli sanctae Mariae in Cosmedin, sanctae Romanae ecclesia cardinalis Polus, dilectis nobis in Christo filiis, magistris Nicolao Harpsfeld legum doctori . .
.

In short, this was a commission issued by Pole to proceed against certain heretics. You have to understand what this meant: apart from the first one against Rogers and Bradford, etc., which had been placed in his hands when he first arrived in England, and whose harsh proceedings he tried to mitigate, Pole had never himself issued such a commission to prosecute heresy. All those that had followed over the next three years had proceeded from the Queen or her council or certain bishops.

At the sight of this document, then, a terrible thought came to me:
Pole is in danger of the fire. So he has decided to push others in first, to save himself
.

Such an evil suspicion . . . Once you’ve had a thought like that, things are never the same. Even if Pole was innocent, I felt
I
had been changed for the worse. But I still hoped I was wrong, and I had good reasons for doing so. There was something very odd about the wording of this new document. Anyone found guilty, it stated, was to be punished only
si facti atrocitas
– ‘if the atrocity of the case required it’. Here, perhaps, I thought, was a loophole invented by Pole himself. For although he never utterly denied the right to punish heretics, he had always avoided doing so.

It occurred to me that he had been trapped or forced into making this commission. By then – earlier this year – it was becoming plain that our Queen does not have long to live. All her ‘pregnancies’ have proved false. They say she spends hours lying with her knees drawn up to ease the pain. Something is amiss with her, and it is getting worse. And when she dies, then there will be a great reckoning. Someone will be held to account for the
charbonnades
. If Pole could be proved to have blood on his hands, that would be most convenient for those below him, especially the ‘weathercocks’, who have led the persecution.

I thought that Pole might have found a way to escape the trap. In short, I had high hopes of
si facti atrocitas
.

But then one day this summer, a copy of a writ arrived, sent by my nephew Clement. It states that John Cornfoth of Wrotham, Christopher Brown of Maidstone, John Hurst of Ashford, Alice Snoth of Beddenden, and Katherine Knight of Thornham had been found guilty of heresy, and should be punished in the usual way by the secular arm. It is signed by Pole.

There is nothing more to be said. Disappointed hopes are not as savage as sudden blows. In any case, I appear to have reached the end of my service to the illustrious Pole. I have carried on with my life as usual. And I have continued to write this account of all my deeds. Why stop now? It is a kind of cure for insomnia – if I don’t write everything down then I lie awake thinking about it, and sometimes I am even woken up, it seems to me, in order to think about it.

At some of these sessions, I have truly considered the possibility that my whole life in service to Pole has been wasted. Are the old charges against him – he is indifferent, too fond of ease, pusillanimous – true? Is he a coward? Was he, then, always a coward? Or did he just
lose heart
?

‘. . . and now he must eat his own heart, and be heartless as he is graceless’.

On this question, I can only turn to my secret doctrine: ‘I do not know’.

In September, two months ago, I went to Padua to stand at the grave of young Courtenay. I thought someone should perform that office. He died while I was still in Rome, and he went friendless into the tomb. Some people declare he died by misadventure. One day, they say, he went back to the island of Lio where I had once taken him to fly his hawk, and on the way home he got soaked in a storm, and then he did not change his clothes and then he slipped on the stair in his own house and then was shaken dreadfully in a coach on the road to Padua . . . These things together killed him. What a number of mishaps are needed to end a life nowadays! It amazes me anyone manages to die at all.

These many causes were listed for me by Peter Vannes, English ambassador in Venice, shaking his head very mournfully as he recited them. The state of Venice agrees and would shake its head mournfully too if that could be managed. Instead, it has seized Courtenay’s chest and papers, which might have thrown light on the matter and which will now never be seen again.

I stood by his grave at the church of Eremitani, in Padua – he is soon to be moved – but nothing happened in my heart as I looked at the stone. This is the way of things at the moment. The world, to tell the truth, seems rather flat and bare lately. I sometimes think of Bembo, as he grew old, saying: ‘Oh, that I were a shepherd, and could look down on Urbino again!’

At that, everyone would laugh merrily. Anyone less like a shepherd than the elegant Lord Bembo was impossible to imagine. But now I understand him better. Oh, that I were roaming over the hills behind Viterbo again . . . Sometimes in the summer Flamminio and I would stop on the heights and look at the headwaters of rivers far away and without names. But I don’t suppose I will ever go back up there again.

This month, however, we – Agnes Hide and I – have decided to go to England next spring, Pole or no Pole. I have a great desire to be in Warwickshire in May once again and see the woods in all their heavy green robes. The other day, when the Regent read out one of his reports from England, I felt – even at my age and after living here so long – the pangs of the young traveller far from home.

The largest city is built on the River Thames which here has the form of a bow, and therefore the town is shaped accordingly. At one extremity of it is a castle called the Tower, with a serraglio in which, from grandeur, they keep lions and tigers and cat-lions.

At the other end of the bow, in the great church of St Peter’s, there is a chapel much decorated with marble and gold, called the King’s Chapel, in which are the tombs of late kings and queens . . .

Of the women in England, this may be said: in general they are of ready wit, as shown by their prompt replies, and many of them are very learned in Latin and Greek. They have a handsome presence, fine complexions and great liberty of action, and no one enquires what they do, either at home or out, which causes them to be but slightly continent.

Englishmen do not hold women’s honour in account, and even if the lie is given, they cannot be induced to fight, but do so only from caprice. Then, after exchanging two or three stabs with a knife, they make peace at once, and go and drink together . . .

They are naturally very obstinate, but are also fickle, and most inconsiderate in their actions. They are extremely courageous, the more so in proportion to the difficulty of the undertaking.

They have often been seen going to the stake and gibbet laughing, and, as it were, ridiculing martyrdom; and many persons, members of whose families have been executed, are accustomed to boast of it.

Lately, a foreigner, having asked an English captain if any of his family had been hanged and quartered, answered ‘not that he knew of ’. Another Englishman whispered, ‘Don’t be surprised, for he is not a gentleman.’

As the Regent read this, he stopped and gazed at me several times with his usual expressions of amazement, which, for some reason, I always find most gratifying.

That was a month or two ago; it was the last time I was out of the house. Since then I have been unwell. Portaleone first diagnosed catarrh, then ague, followed by a general malaise, which he counters with egg whites and the ink of the squid. The ague is very severe this year. The Pope himself fell ill and the whole world held its breath, but then he came round.

Navagero was summoned to his bedside.

‘Ah, my son, we did not expect to see you alive,’ came a voice from the pillow. ‘We were about to go to the Lord. We had our mouth closed and they had to force it open with a spoon. For a week we lived on jelly broth alone and ordered the college of cardinals to elect a good pope, and not a rogue, but now we have had a good night’s rest and are brisker than ever!’

The Emperor, we have just heard, has also died, in a monastery in Spain where he retired to live alone with the monks, whom he greatly terrorised, and his twenty-eight clocks.

‘What folly to try and make men agree on matters of religion,’ he said in the end, ‘when I cannot even make my clocks agree when to strike the hour.’

I must now tell you what happened to me last night. I was here in my room just after dusk. The house was very quiet as my wife and children have gone to the farm for the autumn bonfires. As I was dozing off by the fire, I heard a great rumbling in the street. I got up to see what it was. On the way across the room, however, I noticed a door in the room I had not seen before, and went through it and found myself in the courtyard of the palace of the Te.

Now this of course was absurd as the Te is a mile across town, but I did not know I was dreaming.

And there I saw the same figure I saw before, a captain on a stone chair with his back half turned to me.

Once again he rose as soon as I entered and came towards me, but this time he stopped. Again, I saw he was identical to me.

‘But who are you?’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he said and laughed: ‘Don’t you
remember
?’

Then I opened my eyes and found I was still sitting in front of the fire. And I thought ‘It was my soul!’ Outside the rumbling was getting louder. This time I really did get up and go to the window and looked out, but it was only the Duke’s orange trees going past on heavy wagons on their way to the palace of Te.

Afterword

The date of 1 November 1558 is recorded for the death of Michael Throckmorton. If this was known in London three weeks later – the velocity of news in the sixteenth century was never much more than eighty miles a day – no one in the city, in any of the palaces, even in Pole’s own household, would have taken much notice. By that time, far more momentous events had taken place. On 17 November Queen Mary died.

That date itself is now no longer inscribed on English memories, as it was for centuries. At about midday that day, Mary’s sister, Elizabeth, sitting under an oak tree (perhaps) in a garden in Hertfordshire, saw several men crossing the grass towards her. They came to tell her that she was now Queen. Nine hundred years of Catholic England came to an end. Protestant England was reconstituted. Mary was soon to become ‘Bloody Mary’, as she remains.

Against that, what was the death, far away, of a certain Michael Throckmorton, courier, bodyguard, condemned traitor, country gentleman, who one summer morning rushed around Padua ‘as pale as ashes’ looking for an assassin, and who later was well known for his hospitality to English visitors to Italy? Even some members of his own family might have been excused if they took little notice of his death. His nephew Nicholas, for instance, was one of the messengers racing towards Elizabeth. He was carrying the black enamelled ring from Mary’s finger as proof that she was dead.