by Peter Walker
During this discourse, we had gone round the whole field and through the kitchen gardens, and then Cortese led us up the stairs of the old bell tower to show us the island at our feet, and I looked out and saw the city just across the water, and the great lagoon stretching blue and green in all directions. Pole, meanwhile, had been turning over the letters in his hand, glancing at the dates and datelines and, as Cortese was pointing out the sights, he began to open one or two of them.
So it was there on the tower of S. Giorgio Maggiore that the news first reached us of a great and fearful shift in direction of events in England.
This came in the form of a report sent by the imperial ambassador in London, which had then been copied on to the embassy in Venice.
Yesterday were dragged through the length of the city three Carthusians and a Brigettine, all men of good character and learning, who were put to death in the place of execution, for maintaining that the Pope was the Head of the Church universal . . . The King’s son, Richmond, was there, the Duke of Norfolk and other lords and courtiers were present, quite near the sufferers.
And there was a second letter, which came from Paris, and which was more terrible still:
These men the King caused to be ripped apart in each other’s presence, their arms torn off, and their hearts cut out and rubbed upon their mouths and faces.
On reading this, Pole looked staggered. He went pale, and Cortese asked him sharply what the matter was. He answered, in Italian and, for some reason, while speaking to the abbot he handed the letters to me – though I suppose there was no reason why not, for the information was not secret. These were, I think, the first death sentences carried out under the new laws devised by Cromwell. They came as a bitter shock to Pole, who above all had always loved the King, his cousin, so much so that he now had the look of a man transfixed by a sword who at first does not credit what has happened to him.
There was another letter in the bundle, in the handwriting of Tom Starkey, Pole’s closest friend, and it was to this that Pole now turned, eagerly, as if hoping it would disprove the power of the sword. This is what Starkey wrote:
At the last parliament, an act was passed that all the King’s subjects should, under pain of treason, renounce the Pope’s superiority; to which the rest of the nation agreed, and so did these monks, three priors and Reynolds of Sion, though they afterwards returned to their old obedience . . . Reynolds, whom I have often heard praised by you, would admit no reason to the contrary . . . They were so blind and sturdy they could neither see the truth in the cause nor give obedience to those who could. Therefore they have suffered death according to the course of the law . . . This is the truth for . . . I was admitted to hear Reynolds’ reason and confer with him . . . I conferred with him gladly for I was sorry to see a man of such virtue and learning die in such a blind and superstitious opinion. But nothing would avail . . . It seemed they sought their own deaths, of which no one can be justly accused.
‘Reynolds?’ said Pole. ‘Not Reynolds!’ He gazed at us for a moment as if he could not make us out.
‘But who is Reynolds?’ said Cortese.
‘Reynolds . . . Reynolds,’ said Pole almost to himself. ‘He was my teacher. He taught me the ancient languages. What! “The king caused his heart to be cut out and rubbed on his lips”. I do not believe what I am reading. I cannot. Reynolds! A man with the spirit and countenance of an angel. “It seemed they sought their own deaths”? Oh, Starkey. Tom Starkey! For shame!’
Below us a flotilla was sprinting towards the open sea – the Turkish threat had increased that month and the Jewish corsair with his thirty foists was prowling near Corfu – and from the city amid its smoke and hum came a strange sound every five seconds or so, a regular thud like a crack of a whip. I think it came from the Arsenal where they were building ships, but all the time, as the news sank in, I kept wondering what it was, as if hearing for the first time the great clockwork of mankind. Pole, meanwhile, had taken his letters and shuffled through them all again, and began to read the first one again, aloud, and to the end:
People say the King himself would have liked to see the butchery, which is very probable, seeing that all the Court and the Privy Council were there . . . and indeed it was thought he was one of five who came there . . .
‘He? Who? Does he mean the King?’ said Pole, muttering to himself, but then went on:
It was thought he was one of five who came there accoutred and mounted like Borderers, and armed for secrecy, with visors before their faces . . . and when they spoke all dislodged . . .
‘What does it mean? What is he saying?’ said Pole. ‘The King was there? Ah, you wretch! You went to watch the fun! But you kept your face hidden . . .’
I was astounded to hear the King spoken of in this way, but that was how his new image first came to me. In fact, I could never think of him again without seeing a man in a Borderers’ helmet – a very good helmet it is, too, with the moveable cheek-pieces, and a keel hammered into the central ridge for strength – watching behind a closed visor as four of his most learned subjects were tortured to death.
How long we stayed on the bell tower I am not sure. When we first went up, the Alps were shining with snow to the north, but then a wind sprang up – you could hear the squeak of a weathercock shifting this way and that above our heads – and the mountains faded like the daytime moon and soon the plains on the mainland were lost in a haze. I could still see some domes far away, perhaps those on the big church in Padua, which the licentious students liken to a woman’s breasts. In the other direction, many leagues out to sea, a ship under full sail was coming towards us with all diligence and yet it was so far away it seemed motionless. I began to wonder how to make my departure, but then Cortese and Pole, who had been talking earnestly all this time, ended their discussion. They came down with me and I said my farewell and went to the jetty.
But before I sailed off, Pole sent a man after me, and then he himself came down to meet me as I returned to the monastery. He spoke with great earnestness and asked me to forget everything that I had heard.
‘I spoke out of turn,’ he said. ‘My thoughts were disordered. I need time to think. Say nothing, Michael – especially in our own house, where letters fly out the door to England every hour of the day.’
I promised to keep my counsel. I knew that by then Pole had already been ordered by the King to write his opinion on the Divorce and the new laws in England. I knew also that he hadn’t started yet. Everyone said he was ‘collecting his thoughts’. Now it seemed he would have to start a new collection.
He made me repeat my promise; I did so; we shook hands and then I left and crossed back to the city.
Chapter 5
After that I did not see Pole for several weeks. In the meantime, I said nothing to my friends about my journey to S. Giorgio Maggiore. There was a sort of rivalry in the household for il Signor’s favour, and some of them – Lily and Friar and so on – might consider that I had stolen a march on them, hopping out of bed and over the sea to take letters to Pole when no one else was looking. So I said nothing, even to my bosom companion of the time, Richard Morison. He, in fact, was more anxious than anyone to secure Pole’s love and approval. He was not then one of our household, but was eager to be taken in, and he rattled on day and night about the excellent Polonus, as he called Pole, and the great Aristotle, whom they had in common.
‘If only I was living with you all,’ he said to me. ‘Polonus and I could read Aristotle together and we would certainly become close friends. Does he realise how learned I am in Greek, Michael? Does he know how short of money I am? You must let him know; I depend on you.’
The problem for Morison was that he was always poor. A day after his allowance arrived he was penniless again. It was amazing to see his money disappear. Have you ever seen a fox pluck a chicken? Feathers fly in all directions. And yet Morison was a very bad candidate for poverty. He had a portly frame, his eyes gleamed with joy as he entered a room looki
ng for pleasure. In his case, Venice was more dangerous than Padua: ‘There is more liberty to sin in nine hours in Venice than in nine years in London’ is the saying today, but it was just as true then.
Earlier that year Morison had fallen ill, and, alone in his poor lodgings, cold and hungry, he became frightened for his life. That was why he was desperate to join our ‘family’; he needed to get a roof over his head.
I myself, his junior by several years, used to give him clothes and lend him money. Off we would go down the street at sunset, Morison in my old green velvet breeches and cap.
‘I must be your man, for I wear your livery,’ he would say with a shout of laughter. ‘I therefore request an advance of wages.’
And so I would lend him a golden crown.
In Venice it was possible to go for days without even catching sight of Pole. When he went out, he, like everyone else in that watery city, needed only one boatman to accompany him. But on the mainland, on terra firma, it was a different matter. There, great lords and patrons always went about accompanied by a number of horsemen, and later that same summer, when the heat of the city drove Pole first to Padua and then into the Eugenean hills, I often accompanied him, visiting his friends – the noble Priuli, for instance, the very reverend Giberti, the famous Bembo, who was then his closest friend.
All of these lords received my master with the greatest affection. Bembo especially held him in high regard, not only on his own account, I used to think, but because he was kinsman of a great king, and he always begged him to stay, or sought to lure him away to his country villa called Noniano. The first time Pole went to visit Bembo in Padua that summer, we were there only half an hour when suddenly the order came to get ready to depart: Bembo had decided that we must all set out at once for Noniano, a few miles away across the plain. The reason? To listen to a nightingale.
It seemed that over the previous weeks a particularly melodious bird had been heard there, pouring out its song at night, and the more enthusiastically the nearer Bembo came to listen. Of course, Bembo was one of those men who always had the best of everything. His library, his beautiful mistress, La Morosina, their handsome and witty infants, his garden, his roses, his strawberries . . . It was now clear that no one in history had ever been sung to so sweetly as he by his nightingale.
For my part, however, I was very pleased to be off. Even in Padua I felt the constraints of city life and I was always longing to get out on the plains under the open sky. In fact, on that occasion I could not restrain myself. No sooner were we through the city gates than I rode up to Pole and asked him if I might gallop ahead to exercise my horse. He gave his permission and away I went. I raced ahead for a mile or two, then came back just as fast and much exhilarated. Pole laughed. ‘Temere juvene et furioso’, he said – ‘rash and furious youth’ – and Bembo gave me an approving look. Until then he had not noticed my existence.
I knew him, of course. He was famous for many reasons: his mistresses, his love sonnets, his influence in high places. Above all, Bembo was a climber. In his youth, it was up ladders into bedrooms. At twenty-two he went to Sicily and climbed Mt Etna, just for pleasure, and then wrote a book about it – the first book ever printed in the modern script, in round letters, that is, derived from the inscriptions on Roman monuments which have survived the dark ages.
In his book he describes the terrible fields of stones on the ascent, the views as far as Naples, and the prodigious winds that beat about the summit.
Twenty years later, he was standing at a high window in Rome beside Pope Leo and looking down at the pilgrims streaming towards the Vatican. ‘Whatever else Christianity may be,’ he is said to have remarked, ‘it is a most lucrative fable.’
Now he was more famous than ever, not for his own deeds or words, but as a character in a book which everyone in the world was then reading, The Courtier, written by a friend of his named Castiglione. This book tells the story of a group of friends who four nights in a row stay up late in the palace at Urbino, discussing a single subject – the qualities of the perfect courtier. He should, for instance:
Most of these qualifications I was pleased to think I possessed, but of course a truly valuable courtier must be able to do more than dance and sing well and vault over a horse, and The Courtier goes on to address much weightier matters. Now I was young at the time, and bold, and curious, but riding out to Noniano that day I did not imagine I would have the chance to ask Bembo about this book, in which a character named ‘Bembo’ makes many speeches on liberty and on love which had greatly moved me when I first read them. But that afternoon Bembo insisted that I, as one of Pole’s familiars and a fellow countryman, dine with them both. To my surprise I found at dinner that I was not at all in awe of him. In fact, he reminded me for some reason of the knave of hearts, whom you see on the playing cards and who is not, after all, a formidable figure. In any case, I found I could talk to Bembo quite easily and began to ask him about the book, The Courtier, and whether it truthfully described what had happened in the palace at Urbino, reminding him of how the story ends, when ‘Bembo’ makes a great speech on love – first the human passions, then intellectual love and then spiritual, until, mounting higher and higher on the stair, as it were, he comes in sight of that high summit where ‘the soul wakes from sleep, and opens the eyes, which all men have, but which few use’ and sees the fire of divine love burning in all things.
There the book ends. The conversation is broken off. One of the friends says:
‘We’ll meet again tomorrow.’
‘Not tomorrow, but tonight,’ said Lord Cesar.
‘How can it be tonight?’ quoth the Duchesse
‘Because it is day already,’ said Lord Cesar, and he showed her the light that began to enter the clefts of the windows.
Then everyone stood up in wonder. When the windows were opened on the other side of the palace that looks towards the high top of Mt Catri, they saw already morning like the colour of roses, and all the stars voided except Venus . . . from which appeared to blow a wind that filled the air with biting cold and began to quicken the birdsong from the hushed wood on the hill.
‘Of course, it didn’t really happen like that,’ said Bembo, laughing. ‘We certainly stayed up all night more than once and saw the dawn appear at the shutters, but I’m sure we never discussed one subject four nights in a row. Nor was I capable of making such an edifying speech. Yet the tale is not to be dismissed. A writer must be permitted some falsehood – just sufficient in order to tell the truth. Remember the story of the marble doors in Rome which learnt to speak, and thus many deplorable cases of adultery were revealed.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I have never met anyone before who is also a character in a book. Did you feel pleased to meet M. Pietro Bembo on the printed page, or did he seem like a wretched usurper?’
Bembo burst out laughing again.
‘I see your familiar is not afraid of asking difficult questions,’ he said to Pole. ‘In fact,’ he said, turning back to me, ‘it is rather odd to come across a man of your own name, age and manner making speeches which have never crossed your lips. But this too must be forgiven, if the object is a good one. The Courtier presents itself as a book of laughter and pleasantries, but its aim is serious: to teach a prince how to govern well. Is there anything more important? If an ordinary man lives badly he harms only himself and perhaps a few around him. But if a ruler governs badly so many evils arise – cruelty, corruption, war – that it may truly be said to be the deadliest plague on earth. Here in Venice, perhaps we are in less danger than elsewhere—’
‘Why is that?’ I asked.
‘Here we have a republic and are governed by many rather than one,’ he said.
‘Why should that matter?’ I pressed.
‘Because the evils of scorn or pride or greed enter the mind of a single ruler more easily than that of the multitude, which is like a large body of water, and less liable to pollution than a small one,’ said Bembo. ‘For example,
God has given man liberty as a sovereign gift, and it is against all reason that it should be taken away from him, yet this often happens under the rule of princes. So what is to be done? What safeguards can be imposed? Above all, a prince must have good advisors. This is the real question posed by this book. Who is the most valuable courtier of all? Someone who tells his prince the truth. That is what a prince, more than anyone else, stands most in need of, and yet most often lacks. His enemies will not do it – they are happy to see him remain in ignorance, knowing it will ruin him. Nor will his friends, who are afraid that if they rebuke him on some matter, then they will lose favour and be shut off from access. So instead they become his worst flatterers. And thus a prince, his mind corrupted by seeing himself always obeyed and praised, wades on to such self-love he will admit no good counsel and takes the view that true happiness is to do whatever he desires. And then he comes to hate justice and reason as a bridle on his happiness. In the end he resembles one of those colossi you see being led through Rome on holidays, which look like great men in triumph but are in fact filled with rubbish and rags and tow.’
