The Courier's Tale

by Peter Walker

  The only good thing, in fact, that came from the whole journey was that in Toledo we met Robert Brancetor. He was a Londoner who, years before, when I was still in Venice, was one of the most famous men in the world, his name on everyone’s lips. The reason for his fame was as follows: while still a young man he made a fortune as a merchant and then set off to visit the Holy Land. In the course of this journey – no one was quite sure how or why – he crossed the dominions of the Turk in disguise, and came to the court of the Persian King, the Sophy. This was at a time when the Turkish danger hung over Italy like a dark wave – their fleets could be seen on the horizon, their army was encamped in Illyrica. Now Brancetor inspired the Persian King to attack the Turks from the east. Tremendous battles ensued, and all the Turkish forces in the west were summoned home. Italy, and perhaps the whole of Christendom, was saved.

  As Brancetor’s fellow-countrymen, we in Pole’s household at that time were filled with pride – I myself almost wept with envy – at the thought of his glory. It was said that he had led a wing of the Sophy’s army into battle, and that he must surely be made no less than a duke. But then nothing more was heard of him for years, and he slipped completely from my mind. And there he would have stayed, in oblivion, except for the fact that one day, while we were in Toledo, he came up to me and, without any introduction, offered to assist Pole to get back to Barcelona.

  I had no idea who he was. I could tell, of course, that he was English. That made me uneasy as spies for the King had previously tried to enter Pole’s service.

  ‘We need no help,’ I said.

  ‘You are wrong,’ said Brancetor calmly.

  I looked at him more carefully. I could see he was my superior in age and experience and certainly in strength: he was very strongly built, and still young, though his hair was white like sheep’s wool or rather it was like the poll of a steer between the horns.

  ‘I may tell you that you need all the help you can get,’ he went on.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.

  ‘I had the honour of being informed by the English ambassador himself, Sir Thomas. You are to be ambushed on the road from Toledo to Gerona, and then killed. Possibly Sir Thomas will kill you himself, as there is a large reward.’

  ‘Who are you?’ I said. ‘Why have you come to warn us?’

  And then he told me his name.

  It is strange thing to meet an unrecognised hero, but even stranger to meet one whom for the meantime you have forgotten. When I heard the name Brancetor, I was nonplussed. It was as if I had to refer the matter to an earlier, now departed, self, to see what he would have thought; in my confusion I blushed like a girl, which infuriated me, and made me glare at the stranger. He remained unperturbed, as if he was used to waiting for others to order their thoughts.

  ‘Why does Sir Thomas confide in you?’ I asked.

  ‘To impress me,’ he said. ‘He has been threatening me, in certain forms, for the last ten days, but he knows I am not afraid of him. I don’t think that he is in a position to harm me. You, however, are another matter . . .’

  Then he explained his situation. He did not tell me why he was there in Spain and not a duke in Persia, nor how he had managed to get home, indicating with a certain look that that was none of my business. He did say, however, that having arrived in Europe, he made his way to the Emperor, in expectation of a reward. This was duly promised but so far had not been forthcoming. In the meantime he had lived very quietly at court, and not without honour, although – he allowed me to understand – his famous exploit had earned him the hatred of some other courtiers. Those people did not perturb him. But then his presence at that court had been noted in England. This was a different matter. Almost at once he was commanded by Cromwell to return home. The English envoys – and there was always a stream of messengers of one grade or another to the imperial court – were perfectly affable but their persistence put him on his guard.

  These envoys were also evasive.

  Why was it so important that he go and stand before the King? he had asked them.

  They smiled, they looked out the window.

  It suddenly occurred to Brancetor that his splendid feat in Persia might not be seen as such in England. He had, after all, helped save Italy; he had strengthened the hand of the Emperor. Treason! And just as he came to this surmise, Wyatt arrived and began to make veiled threats. Did he think the King’s patience was limitless? Did he not know how powerful he was, and jealous of his rights? At that, Brancetor made a firm decision. The last place he intended to visit in the forseeable future was the city of his birth.

  ‘I did not say so in as many words,’ he told me. ‘On the contrary, I often say how much I long to see the Thames again. Nothing is as sweet as the sight of your native land! But I point out that it would be absurd and ridiculous to leave this court empty-handed, having been promised my reward. Despite himself, Wyatt finds he has to agree with that. Now I do not know the terms of your dispute with him, but as he was magnifying the King’s power to me, he mentioned certain plans being made against you. I do not approve. I would be happy, in fact, to help you defeat them.’

  When I reported all this to Pole, he was incredulous.

  ‘It is unthinkable,’ he said. ‘Ambassadors do not ambush one another on the highway. No – these are just the boasts of furious, impetuous youth.’

  ‘Youth?’ I said. ‘Wyatt is two years your junior. In any case, it will not be possible to ask him if he wants to kill you. He has already left court.’

  We ourselves were departing in two days.

  ‘Perhaps he has gone ahead to wait for us,’ I said.

  ‘What should we do?’ said Pole.

  I explained that Brancetor not only knew the language of Spain but the country as well. He had advised us to take back roads and byways. He offered to guide us himself. Pole must ask the Emperor if he could borrow him.

  This was what was done. We set off from Toledo, we slipped away without any fanfare, and taking bridle paths and goat tracks we crossed the moors of Aragon just as the gorse and broom were coming into flower in the cold winds of spring. We reached Barcelona safely, then Gerona, and finally found a haven in the town of Carpentras in Provence, where Pole’s old friend Sadoleto, a famous scholar, was bishop. And there we stayed. And there, like a man who remains firm in the heat of battle but afterwards begins to tremble, Pole lost his nerve. The slaying of his brother, the danger which his mother and others of the family were still facing, the charges of treachery, the cold faces in Toledo – all these now seemed to overwhelm him. He could not face the world. He was ordered to return to Rome and he begged to be excused.

  If a man loses a parent, a wife or child, [he wrote] they are granted some leave. Should not I, who almost in the same instant, have lost all those dearest to me, have the same exemption? . . . Perhaps you have heard that my mother has been sentenced to death, or rather to eternal life – for unless I understand it in that way, my own life would be insupportable to me. Yet even with that firm persuasion, I cannot bear the light. I must hide in the cavern while the glory of the Lord passes by.

  Chapter 18

  In Carpentras, Pole began a great work, another long letter or book, this one written to the Emperor. One might have thought that his first book had got him into so much trouble he might be advised never to pick up a pen again, but he did so to clear his name of the charge, now broadcast in every country, that he was the worst traitor in history. In England itself that year, in London and other towns, great musters were held at dawn and in the evenings in the hundreds of every shire all the young men, dressed in white, marched and swore oaths by torchlight against ‘the spotted serpent, the Pope’ and ‘the arch-traitor, Pole’. At the same time a little book was published and sent by the King to every court in Europe to justify the recent state trials and executions. A copy soon arrived in Carpentras. The writer aimed his blows first at Pole’s brother, Montagu:

  Might not this fond or rather detestab
le traitor have talked and dreamed of other things than the King’s death? Might not he have been content with this world and the state he was in, leaving his lewd prophecies of the time that should make him merry, if he still tarried in it?

  But his main target was Pole himself:

  To come at last to the arch-traitor, and to speak somewhat of him, whom God hateth, nature refuseth, all men detest, yea and all beasts too would abhor, if they could conceive how much viler he is than the worst of them . . .

  O Poole, full of poison, that would have drowned thy country in blood, thou thought to have overflowed thy prince and sovereign lord, thou thoughtest with thy traitorous streams to have over run all together. God be thanked, thou art now a pool of little water and that at a wonderful low ebb . . .

  I plainly protest, I am thine enemy . . . I wish thee to live for ever, never out of shame, never out of infamy.

  And so it ran, for forty or fifty pages.

  The writer was none other than my old friend Morison, who used to pound his fist on the table in Sandro’s kitchen and, with tears in his eyes, swear fidelity to anyone who was ever his friend.

  Pole affected to be scornful of this performance. It showed only the ‘miserable servitude’, he said, of Morison’s mind. But he was stung, all the same, and composed several replies: ‘You came to live under my roof as a brother, now you omit no form of curse . . . I have to say I smiled when you declared your enmity – a curse from a man such as you is like Balaam’s curse, a kind of blessing . . .’

  In the end he sent no answer to Morison. He wasn’t worth the trouble, he said. I think that in fact there was a further difficulty: the charge he made against Morison – of base ingratitude – was exactly that made by the King against him. He laid down his pen for several weeks, as if he needed to think, and when he took it up again he wrote instead to the Emperor, telling the whole story of his relations with Henry and the murder of those learned men, Reynolds and others, in whose blood, he said, he saw God’s finger, writing a terrible judgement on the King . . .

  Meanwhile, Brancetor and I roamed about the countryside, filling in time. To tell the truth we were at a loose end. Pole and the household had left Carpentras and retired to a little monastery where he was perfectly safe. We had nothing to do. It is strange to say but when I look back at all the scenes of my life, that first half of the summer in Carpentras seems the worst – not the most tragic or cruel or puzzling, but the dreariest. The sun beat down. There was famine and drought in the countryside. Carpentras was papal territory and therefore home to many Jews who fled there over the years to escape the cruel French. But now there was famine, a war broke out between the peasants, who had eaten all the seed grain, and the Jews to whom they owed money. Cries of rage were heard in the town; the villages were silent and hungry.

  Brancetor rode up and down looking as from a great distance at this quarrel over bread and money. We had no part in it.

  ‘Don’t intervene,’ said Brancetor, as I turned one day without thinking towards the sound of shouting. ‘What do you know about these troubles? Why should you join in the yapping?’

  He was a strange man, at times full of human sympathy, otherwise cut off from all concerns but his own. I never knew what was being considered within that great head with its poll of white wool. How he passed through the midst of several million Turks unquestioned I never understood. Perhaps it was simple: he did not see danger. He did in fact have poor eyesight, but I mean something other than that: he did not consider that trouble had any claims on him. And so we rode on, and climbed up to the ridges and looked down on the villages where pinched faces watched us from black doorways.

  After a while we began to travel further afield, staying away for a few nights, sleeping in inns or barns. On one occasion we came to that mountain near Aix where there is a cavern of incredible height, spacious and echoing, and where, it is said, Mary Magdalene ended her days. Beyond the cave, a path leads up through the juniper and aromatic bushes to the top of the mountain. I was feeling gloomier than usual that day. The latest news from England was as delightful as the last. We learnt that we had been formally declared traitors and condemned to death by act of parliament. It was the strangest legislation ever passed: the dead and the living were all mixed up together in the bill, as if Montagu and Exeter and the others had been or could be brought back from the next world in order to be sent there again, along with Pole, his mother, Brancetor and me and various others.

  This was Cromwell’s doing. It was a new form of law he had invented. There was no longer any need for judge or jury or evidence or any chance for the accused to hear and answer the charges. All that was needed was a list. The names of bad people, the worst of the worst, were collected and sent to parliament, which obediently declared their lives forfeit. I don’t know why this new burden oppressed me so much. Perhaps it was the thought of Cromwell’s power: not only were men’s lives now easily destroyed, but so were their laws. No worse calamity, Pole used to say, can befall a country than to be ruled by a ‘circle of the scornful’. I said nothing about this as we took the path to the summit, but perhaps Brancetor guessed what was troubling me. At any event, he began to talk.

  Until then, he had told me nothing about his famous journey to Persia, but as we took the path upwards in the heat and then, sitting among the lichen-covered rocks on the summit of Mt Pilon, he told me the whole story, how he had been on a pilgrimage to Mt Sinai and from there, using a false passport, had travelled all the way to Babylon. He described the deserts of burning sands which he crossed alone, the language of the inhabitants which is close to the original tongue of mankind before Babel. Then he came to the Persian camp and was led to their king. He described the marvellous courtesy of the Persians, who live among their rose gardens and guard the tomb of the prophet Daniel, and the infinite condescension of their king, the Sophy, who with his own hand shaved ice into Brancetor’s cup of wine. Then he described how, when the time came to leave Persia and he could not go back through Turkish territory, he set off for home by the new route, sailing with the Portuguese around a very distant cape where the men can outrun deer and at night a cross is seen among the stars.

  As he talked, I could just see the sea like a blue porch away to the south, and for the first time I realised how small my own travels had been, what a tiny portion of the globe I had seen, and how slight, by comparison, were the dangers I had faced so far. And it was there on the summit of Pilon, above the cliffs where the falcons were breeding, that I felt my courage come back to me.

  Perhaps in turn I transmitted some of this to Pole. When we came to leave Provence and go back to Rome, I persuaded him, at any rate, to turn off the road and visit the cavern, which is called St Beaumes.

  I waited outside among the globe flowers and white rocks while he was in the cave.

  When he came out I saw at once that he was changed. His step was firmer, his eye clear. We rode on a few miles before he cared to tell me what had happened. There is a little altar at the far end of the cave, and on going towards it he felt his despondency with renewed force. All his sorrows resolved into one image – that of the King as a young man, his cousin whom he had always loved, who had committed so many savage acts without remorse. Tears pricked his eyes. At that moment, from somewhere far away – either from within him or beyond him, it was not clear – it seemed that he heard a voice, a somewhat peremptory voice, saying: Why do you waste tears over one I have cast aside?

  No answer was required. At that moment, it seems, Pole came to himself. He had in the last few weeks been stumbling with his letter to the Emperor. But now, after leaving St Beaumes, he completed it in a few days and gave it to Brancetor to deliver to the Emperor, who was then on his way to visit the King of France. Then we said our farewells. Pole and I and the others departed for northern Italy, while Brancetor rode off alone to Paris.

  BOOK II

  Chapter 1

  I was always pleased to be back in Padua, and even when Pole stayed
in Verona or Treviso or with Bembo at Noniano I would jump at the opportunity to go there ‘on business’ – to look at a horse or buy linen or whatever it might be, but really to wander the streets for a few hours among the students who were my own age. This gave me a strange sensation, as if I was walking back into my own past, into the life which I had left suddenly and without warning, and which I pretended to myself I might resume just as abruptly one day, rejoining those students, whom I partly envied and partly pitied. What did they know about the world? Who else in that throng in the streets of Padua had had an act of parliament passed against their very existence? The English students I avoided, however, partly because, when they realised who I was, they would draw back in alarm, and who could blame them? And I too drew back. Which of them could I trust?

  I did have one or two English friends, though, in Padua, the closest being Tom Theobald. We became friends, it seemed, by chance, or destiny. Our paths crossed just at the moment I stood in need of ordinary companionship. I knew Thomas slightly already, and liked him; he had an open, cheerful, yet always somewhat rueful expression, which amused me; he was sandy, thin as a whippet, a good horseman, a poor fencer. He was thoughtful: he studied theology and law and knew bawdy verses in several languages. One afternoon, I saw him approaching and gave him a nod and walked on by, having determined not to have any more contact with my countrymen. This was up on the walls of the city where I liked to go to look out over the plains, especially when the crops were green and flowing in the wind like a river. Now on this occasion I happened to turn back and see Tom gazing after me with a certain fixity of expression. He then came after me and asked me to stop and then, with great simplicity, pointed out that there was no need for us to be enemies.