Read The Courier's Tale Online
Authors: Peter Walker
Mary’s husband, Philip, did not visit her on her deathbed or appear at her funeral.
‘The Queen my wife is dead,’ he wrote to his sister in Spain. ‘I felt a reasonable regret for her death and will miss her accordingly.’
For that
reasonable regret
Mary had sacrificed a great deal – the love of her people, her happiness, perhaps her life. The cause of her death is generally given as cancer of the ovaries.
Almost to the end, she continued to issue writs. The last of her subjects to be burnt were John Cornforth of Wrotham, Christopher Brown of Maidstone, John Hurst of Ashford, Katherine Knight, or Tingley, of Thornham, and Alice Snoth, or South, of Beddenden, who died at Canterbury on 10 November.
In other words, the last in her reign to die for religion are the only ones whose deaths are definitively linked to Reginald Pole. He established the commission which tried and excommunicated them, and he signed the writ of
significavit
which called on the state to punish them.
The Queen died in her palace at Whitehall at about seven o’clock, as the sun rose. The news was rapidly conveyed over the river to Lambeth Palace, just visible on the opposite shore.
Cardinal Pole, however, was not informed. His ‘familiars’ judged that he was too ill and the shock might be fatal. But his household was very large, and had many Italians in it, and in the early afternoon one of them approached Pole’s bed and mentioned the death of the Queen. Priuli wrote to his brother in Venice:
On hearing this, he remained silent for a short while and then said . . . that in the course of the Queen’s life and his own he had ever remarked a great conformity as she, like himself, had been harassed during so many years for one and the same cause; and afterwards, when it pleased God to raise her to the throne, he had greatly participated in all her other troubles entailed by that elevation. He also alluded to their relationship, and the great similarity of their dispositions, and to the great confidence which Her Majesty demonstrated in him. Then he said that considering these facts, as also the immense mischief which might result from her death, he could not but feel deep grief thereat . . .
His most Reverend Lordship then kept quiet about quarter of an hour, but though his spirit was great, the stroke entered his flesh, and brought on the paroxysm earlier, accompanied by more intense cold than he had hitherto experienced, so that he said that he felt this would be his last. He then asked that there be kept near him the book containing the prayers that are said for the dying. This was about two hours before sunset . . .
And so he continued to the end, which he made so placidly that he seemed to sleep rather than to die, and if it had not been for a physician who observed the act, he would have died without anyone noticing . . .
So there they lie – two cousins, a Tudor and a Plantagenet, one on each side of the river, in palaces within sight of each other, one dying at dawn, the other at dusk.
Many years before, in Florence, we saw Pole step through a marble door into a half-built room now famous throughout the world and even then the subject of intense curiosity in Italy and beyond. And there, we heard Bembo later declare, he glimpsed his destiny in the shape of three statues – the
Dawn
, and the
Dusk
, and ‘
Lorenzo
’, symbolising Thought.
In a way Bembo or rather ‘Bembo’, was right. The statues were a kind of manifest for Pole’s life. But he was wrong as well. He picked the wrong statue. It was not
Il Pensoroso
, the Thinker, who most truly represented Pole’s future but
Dusk
– the sad figure of a middle-aged man, looking back with regret at the remains of the day.
In a word, Pole died a failure. His life ambition – to restore the unity of Rome and England – was doomed. Elizabeth now reigned, England was to become Protestant, and the great enmity with Rome, which Henry had sown, has flourished for centuries.
Pole was aware of this – it was the ‘great mischief’ he foresaw – and he could not blame himself for all of it. But there was a personal failure as well. There is no way around the fact. He was the man who told the truth to princes as he did to Henry, to two popes, to the Emperor and a King of France, but when it came to Mary, he fell short. Whatever he said or did to moderate her policy, it was not enough. More people perhaps were put to death for their religion in her father’s reign and certainly in her brother’s, but it is Mary who occupies a place of notoriety in the English mind. She is surely behind the furious Queen of Hearts in
Alice in Wonderland
, she has the cocktail named after her . . . The nature of her victims and the peculiar horror of their deaths – by fire, in public – ensure that. And Pole, who was by her side, is implicated to some degree. His successor, the next Archbishop of Canterbury, gave him the terrible title ‘scourge and butcher of the English Church’. For centuries historians have joined in heaping execration on his name. Even today, in the great hallowed sanctuary of Canterbury Cathedral, he seems to be in disgrace. His tomb, covered in a kind of grey paint, bears the cold inscription
depositum cardinalis poli
and nothing more.
If there are doubts about his responsibility for the vast majority of Protestant deaths under Mary (probably about four or five hundred) there are always those last five, burned at Canterbury, who appear as witnesses for the prosecution.
Yet there is something strange about those five deaths as well. First, they were delayed a long time. The five were found guilty in midsummer, and were still alive late in the year. Before execution for heresy, a second writ was needed – one issued by the sovereign, ordering the sheriff to light the fires. It appears that Pole never applied for this.
When it was issued, he himself was gravely ill. And there is evidence that someone else went to great trouble to ensure the sentence was carried out.
‘Some there be that say’ – wrote the martyrologist John Foxe – ‘that the Archdeacon of Canterbury, being in London, and understanding the danger of the Queen, incontinently made all post-haste home to despatch these whom he had then in his cruel custody . . . In the which fact, the tyranny of this archdeacon seemeth to exceed that of Bonner . . .’
The Archdeacon Nicholas Harpsfield, along with his brother John (‘Dr Sweetlips’), Dean of London, and Bishop Bonner, was one of England’s most notorious zealots in hunting out heresy. And here another odd fact emerges. At the very time that Nicholas was making sure the prisoners in Canterbury died before the Queen did, John Harpsfield and Bishop Bonner were setting their own Protestant prisoners free, for precisely the same reason: the Queen’s reign was nearly over.
Those who escaped death in this way later acquired a kind of celebrity. Foxe tells the story of a preacher named William Living and his wife, and a friend named Lithall, who were being watched by a ‘promoter’ – a police spy – named Cox. One day Cox searched Living’s house in Shoe Lane and his eye fell on a book of astronomy,
De Sphaera Mundi
, with a gilt cover. He took it out into the street to examine in the daylight. Opening it, he found page after page of diagrams: circles, triangles, the sun, moon and stars.
‘Aha,’ he cried, ‘I have found him out at last! It is no marvel the Queen is sick, seeing there are such conjurers in privy corners. I trust he shall conjure no more.’
Living, his wife and Lithall were led to the chancellery, interrogated, put in the coal house, robbed by the constable, put in the stocks, taken to Lollards’ Tower, offered mercy and refused it, all the while denouncing the Pope and the mass in the usual terms. Lithall was led into the cathedral and was wrestled to the ground in a general scrum when he refused to kneel before the crucifix.
He and the Livings resisted – and were then released.
At the same time, Nicholas was racing to Canterbury to put to death those condemned by Pole’s writ. There is only one way to explain the discrepancy: by setting their prisoners free, and making sure Pole’s died, responsibility for the entire persecution could be laid at his door, as indeed has often happened.
Seen in this light, the Livings and Lithall appear in a new role – as witnesses for the defence of the Cardinal. It may be that five deaths for which he is personally blamed are the only ones of Mary’s reign he never knew took place.
If that is the case, then Pole should be judged less harshly. He was, after all, in a situation of almost impossible difficulty, caught, trussed up, in a net of competing interests, including his own lenient heart. And if we grant that, then perhaps in his final hour, as the river between the two palaces grew dark, a certain likeness does come to him of the third great figure, the
Lorenzo
, which, of course, in no way resembled the real Lorenzo of whom the sculptor said: ‘In five hundred years no one will give a damn what he looked like.’
This I suppose might be called a ‘documentary novel’, by which I mean anything cited in it as a document – whether a letter, a treatise or tailor’s bill – has been excerpted (often only approximately in Throckmorton’s ‘recollections’) from documents which do exist and which may be consulted, easily enough for the most part in the calendars of state papers, principally:
Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, from the Reign of Henry VIII
(London 1862–1932);
Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers Relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain
(London 1862–1954);
Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives and Collections of Venice and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy
(London 1864–98);
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series of the Reign Mary I
.
The same assurance is not given or, presumably, sought with regard to the conversations, though a good many of those are derived from the written record. Pole’s speeches to Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo about Machiavelli, Cromwell and Henry are for instance taken almost entirely from his book written for Henry VIII, known as
De Unitate
, and from the long letter he wrote to the Emperor,
Apologia ad Carolum Quintum Caesarem
.
An English translation of
De Unitate
, by Joseph Dwyer, was published in 1965 by Newman Press; the précis on pages 53–4 is adapted from this.
Apologia ad Carolum Quintum
appears in a collection of Pole’s letters,
Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli
. . . [etc], ed. Angelo M. Quirini, 1744–57. A new collection of Pole’s letters, edited by Thomas Mayer, has recently been published by Ashgate Press.
Other works written, rewritten or translated by people in this story are:
Richard Morison:
An Invective against the Great and Detestable Vice, Treason, Wherein the Secret Practises and Traiterous Proceedings of Theym That Suffrid of Late are Disclosed
, 1539
Michael Throckmorton:
A Copye of a Verye Fyne and Wytty Letter
. . . [etc], 1556
Castiglione:
The Book of the Courtier
(English translation, Thomas Hoby, 1561)
Pietro Bembo:
De Aetna
, 1495
Beccadelli:
Life of Cardinal Reginald Pole. Translated into English with Notes Critical and Historical
, 1766
Marco Antonio Flaminio:
Il Beneficio di Cristo
, 1543
Edward Courtenay:
The Benefit of Christ’s Death
, 1548
I owe particular thanks to the late Dr Ian Roberston, and to Will Hobson, for their translations. I want to express my deep gratitude to all those people who gave advice, encouragement, technical enlightenment, hospitality, long lunches, and the use of houses in Italy, France, England and New Zealand; especially Dan Witters, Sam Russell, John and Nan Fogarty, Jane Campion, Jenny Todd, Roland Gift, Louise Meldrum, Malcolm McSporran, Jill Goldson, Jonathan Lamb, Sarah Herriot, Justine Hancock, Sophie and Tony Torney, Susan Hancock, Louis Baum, Kathy Walker, Leah Seresin, Mary Kisler, Glynis Hall, Tim Gorton, Alice Duckworth, Rebecca Kamm, William Henderson, Mel Humphreys, Barry Fraser, Penelope Bieder, Sarah Lucas, Gretchen Albrecht, Jamie Ross, Brian Cathcart, Raymond Whitaker, Peter Graham, Rollo Hilbery and Andrew Marshall.
I am very grateful to my editors, Liz Calder and Bill Swainson, for their insight and long forbearance, to David Godwin for his constant support, to the staff at the Rare Books Room and Manuscripts Room of the British Library, and to fellow readers there, who become your colleagues in passing.
And I am especially indebted to Margot and Fergus Henderson, and to Sue Smith, who, in Covent Garden and on the coast of Coromandel respectively, were the first to listen to this story as it took shape and who seemed to think it was worth hearing.
Peter Walker
is a New Zealander who has lived in London since 1986. He worked for seven years on the
Independent
and spent three years at the
Independent on Sunday
, where he was Foreign Editor. He has also written for the
Financial Times
and
Granta
. His first book,
The Fox Boy
, was published in 2001.