by Peter Walker
And so, said Brancetor, the King had the Lady of Sarum led from her cell and across the grass, where a youth was waiting with an axe.
This was Brancetor’s view of that event, and he put himself in the centre of the story, as people will, yet there may be something in it.
As to Pole’s nephew, Montagu’s son, a child who had shared his grandmother’s dungeon and who from time to time had been allowed out to run around the castle, he now disappeared from view. On the same day that she died he was taken to another cell – much worse, it seemed, than the first one.
This was not intended to be kept a secret.
‘He is but poorly and strictly kept, and not desired to know anything,’ one of the ambassadors reported from London. In other words, it seemed that he was put into solitary confinement, and left there cold and hungry and in the dark. But no one ever knew, for he was never seen or heard of again.
Chapter 4
When Pole’s family was first arrested, the Pope refused to grant him an audience, saying he could not look him in the face. This time he did not turn away. On the news of the death of his mother, Pole was summoned to Rome, and there he was appointed governor in Viterbo.
This was the capital of the Patrimony, the oldest and most beautiful of the papal dominions, the land of ancient Etruria, bounded to the north by Umbria, by Tuscany to the west, by the Tiber to the east, and to the south by the rolling waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
In effect, Pole became the ruler of his own princely state. And the fact, which may sound heartless, is this: then began a period of happiness for many of us in Pole’s household. When all is said and done, the world is a very strange place: the cruel murder of an old lady in one country opened a door into a kind of delightful and princely garden for about twenty people far away in another.
I do not include Pole among them. His mother’s imprisonment and murder, as a result of his own actions, at the very time of life when most men are planning to take care of their parents in their old age, had a profound effect on him. But by ‘profound’ I also mean well-hidden. The subject was hardly ever mentioned. But I knew him well and I saw a change in him – beneath concealed grief there was now a certain motionlessness to him, an immobility of soul, as if some part of his inner being stood rooted to the spot in horror, and he would never move free of care through the world again.
Yet for me, I have to confess – the first year or two at Viterbo was the best time of my life up until that point. I was still at an age when sorrow can’t get a good grip on you. My duties, as chief body-guard, were less alarming than before. Without doubt he was safer there in the hills, with his own government, small as it was, than in Rome where the world’s currents surged in and out every week. And his high office distracted him, I suppose, from his grief. There was some irony in this: Pole had never sought the magistracy of state.
‘I have never wanted that office,’ he used to say. ‘I never wanted – as so many do – to tell one man to go here and another one there and a third to stand on the spot and await further orders.’
The world being what it is, this is what he got. And for several years we lived in Viterbo and he governed there, carrying out the office perfectly well. It seems there is much less to the business than our rulers like us to think: their demands for grandeur and splendid rewards would have to be reduced if it was known that all that is required is the application of some reason, moderate foresight and a mild interpretation of the laws. But perhaps I’m wrong: perhaps Viterbo was a special case. Only fifty years earlier the city had been infamous for bloody feuds. Then one day a group of youths dressed in white began going around the town saying: ‘Pace, pace, si con noi’: ‘Peace, peace be upon us. The Madonna commands it.’
The streets fell silent. People put down their weapons to consider the idea. The Governor and the Bishop came out of their fortresses to give their approval. And ‘pace, pace’ has reverberated in the air ever since above Viterbo. There was hardly any crime to speak of in our years in the governorate. It’s true there was a cat-burglar who plagued us for a while but, one night, seeing the local policeman approach, he jumped back into the palace and was collared by Priuli, whereupon he burst into tears and then confessed all. Now this was a clear miracle since the officer in question was, as usual, at home and fast asleep in bed at the time. In short, a phantasm had been sent to aid us.
Only the shepherds outside the walls never rid themselves of the habit of sliding a dagger between one another’s ribs, but they lived widely scattered and did not meet every day. In general, the administration of justice in Viterbo was completed by noon or, at the most, by two in the afternoon. After that, the members of the household devoted their time to conversation, books, painting, riding out and so on. The Marchioness came to live nearby, and as Viterbo was just over the horizon from Rome, beyond Mt Soracte, which in winter could be seen shining with snow from certain high windows in the city, many visitors came out: Carnesecchi, Piombo, Michelangelo, Farnese, the secretary of state (‘not a mouse stirs in Europe or Asia but Farnese hears it’), Bembo, Gianotti, Lily and Pate.
It was there that Marc’Antonio Flamminio and I became close friends. By then he was about forty-five, an old man in my eyes, with a tawny beard, but there still seemed to be a cheerful boy behind that mask of age, still looking for adventures. He used to come out hunting with me early in the mornings – hunting was banned in the Patrimony but who would enforce such a law? – and we would slip out of the gates before the sun came up, Flamminio the strangest hunter you ever saw, stalking along through the vines wearing a Turkoman’s padded jacket embroidered with roses or a conical hat that he had picked up on the wharves in Venice. In his youth he had been famous for his amorous verses, on the ‘sweet thefts of love in the woods’ or a certain flute which his girlfriend liked to fondle. Now he had become ambitious for salvation and was busy translating the Psalms. Even so, on cold winter mornings, when he saw the hillside turning russet from the summit down, or glimpsed two hares dancing on frosty ground at the end of the vines, he would stand and gaze, and declaim a verse or two addressing some nymph or dryad or sylph or Nature herself.
‘Who is this Nature of yours?’ I would say. ‘She seems a cold-hearted minx to me – at least she has very cold fingers. You’d be better off back in bed with a nice, warm, real girl – that’s my opinion.’
‘Ah yes, but you are a rude barbarian from beyond the Alps, which God put up as a fence for our beloved Italy, and which he paints with snow every year as a sign to keep you out. And yet here you all are. Whatever are we to do with you?’
I never got used to his quips and sallies and strange fancies, which were what I liked most about him. He always had in his pocket, for instance, a little ball, a balla de mondo, with the lands and seas of the world painted on it.
‘What is that?’ I asked him one day.
‘This? Why, I have carried this ever since the Spaniards, having sailed away in one direction, one day came back in the other, thus proving the world was a sphere. Of course we knew that already, but theory and fact are very different things. Did you not observe that the world then seemed to float more lightly and that the forests and mountains to echo more than before?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I did not.’
‘Good heavens, I noticed it distinctly,’ he said. ‘After all it is a splendid thing to live on a sphere aloft among stars, thus’ – and he tossed the ball into the air and caught it again. Then he looked at it and said: ‘Is that really you, O little ball, divided by fire and sword among so many nations?’
And then, with an earnest expression, he said to me: ‘Yet think how large and fair she would be if love reigned among us.’
In summer, Marco and I used to climb into the hills, high above the shepherds’ grassy kingdoms, and fish for trout in the pools below waterfalls. When they leapt through the air – the trout, I mean – he called them ‘low meteors’; and on the way back down we would stop and drink wine and eat ewes’ milk chees
e with the murderous shepherds. You see what a delightful life it was.
Of course the idyll could not last. After a year or two, people began to drift away from Pole’s court and the shadows crept towards us. Two great friends of Pole and the marchioness fled to join Calvin in Geneva and then went on to England. Their flight created a great stir. By then the peace conference between Catholics and Protestants had failed and the schism was worse than ever. The office of the inquisition was then set up in Rome. This was done by the ever-zealous Carafa who persuaded the Pope of its necessity. There could be no more conferences with Protestants, he said, no more compromises. Germany was lost. In Italy, heresies must be detected and rooted out. He was so eager to begin the process that he paid to fit out his own house as a court for the hearings.
At this news, a cold breeze and shadow went through the air in Viterbo.
‘The inquisition was invented by Satan to destroy the Church,’ said Pole. And Flamminio recited some verses he had once written:
When harsh zealots light the fires
And poor Hieronymo writhes in pain,
‘Cruel men, desist,’ Religion cries,
‘Tis not error, but I who am slain.’
At the same time, the fact that Pole now ruled in his own princely state seemed to infuriate the King of England more than ever. Henry sent more assassins, at first in ones or twos. For a while they failed to disturb our little paradise. An angel with a sword must have been guarding the gate. Later, the King’s plan of action against Pole became much more ambitious. But that was still some time off.
Chapter 5
Some people play many different roles in their lives, like actors who take on new parts with zest, while others play only one or two and refuse to extend their range. I myself have had only a modest number – student, courier, prisoner, bodyguard – but in Viterbo one came along which I had never expected and did not relish: that of gaoler.
This was assigned to me when the first of our assassins were caught. It was my task to convey them to Rome for investigation.
Marc’Antonio came along for the ride only, he said, to see such a sight: the greatest ruffian in the world playing the part of a screw.
I told him to be quiet. I was upset as it was. I felt most uncomfortable mustering my prisoners with their hands tied behind their backs and their legs tied under the mules’ bellies, and leading them out of the castle and through the streets and out into the countryside where the sun was shining and the birds were singing sweetly. But what was I to do? In my charge was a Bolognese villain named Alessandro with a buff jerkin and a black beard growing the length of two fingers beneath his chin, and with him two English youths who had come to Viterbo disguised as his Flemish servants. They were terrible assassins – their boots were English, they spoke not a word of the Flemish language, they scarcely knew what country they were in.
That was always Henry’s downfall when it came to killing Pole – he just would not spend the money. He would only promise vast sums when the job was done. This, however, was soon to change.
In the present case Pole himself questioned the youths and announced that he was going to let them go, that he found no harm in them, they were more dupes than anything else.
At that, there was an outcry from his secretaries and chancellor. Leniency was one thing, licence to murder another. A most evil enterprise had been discovered – a plan to slay a high officer of state, the Governor of Viterbo. What the Governor himself thought was neither here nor there. At this Pole gave in, and sent them to be examined again by the Governor of Rome. So we set off – four archers, three prisoners, Marc’Antonio and I.
Flamminio was interested as well in the expression on the English faces. It was one, he said, that was new to him. They hardly seemed to acknowledge or to care about the straits they were in. ‘At most, they look slightly discontented, like a man who opens his breakfast egg and finds it’s off.’
I told him that he did not know how to read English faces. I could tell, from a certain pink colouration on these ones, that dismay and alarm were working away within. To cheer up the prisoners as we rode along, I told them that, whatever happened, they weren’t going to die. Pole had to send them to Rome for further investigation, but he alone would decide their punishment. As Governor of Viterbo, where the crime was to take place, this was his right.
After this, the treacherous pink – no Englishman likes to admit his fear – subsided from their cheeks. They became quite cheerful and on the way down to Rome we began to talk as if we had all just met on the road to market. One of them, who was from Maidenhead, told me news about Bisham, which was the ancient seat of Pole’s family. After the murder of Montagu and his mother, it seemed that the King had taken Bisham for himself and used it as a pleasure-house where he dallied and feasted with various women. Astounding quantities of eggs and cream were ordered in. They were supplied locally. This fact remained prominent in the young man’s mind.
‘I know some of the farmers. Why, I’ve even been to the farms,’ he said carelessly, as if personally acquainted with the cows and ducks that had been pressed into royal service. Even tied on the back of a mule on his way to prison, you see, a man does not lose sight of his distinction. This information, about Bisham, I decided not to tell Pole.
By then I had become protective not only of his body but of his morale. Yet I found it of great interest myself, and we rode down to Rome talking about farm prices, the horse-market in England and so forth, and when the time came to deliver my prisoners into the city gaol, I was sorry to lose them. In fact I felt rather despondent. Those ordinary voices from home had struck me deeply. I saw more clearly than usual my own situation. While those two might one day soon be on their way back to England, I remained in exile, and would perhaps never see my home again. It was one of the times when I disobeyed the Marchioness’s instruction not to let my mind dwell on my Judith. I could not help myself. She kept appearing and disappearing among my thoughts, and each time my heart was struck, as with the hammer in the forge, causing a new pain. On that visit to Rome I was very unhappy.
We did not go back to Viterbo at once. Pole had told me to stay until the investigation was over and then report back to him. Thus Flamminio and I had a week in the city together, and it was then that I first saw the fresco of the Last Judgement which had been finished about a year before and which the whole world had flocked to see and talked of endlessly, to the exclusion of all other matters.
We went to the sacred palace early one morning, Marc’Antonio and I, along with Pate, the ambassador who had run away from the King and who was then resident in Rome. At that hour the palace was nearly empty. It was one of those dark summer mornings that seem to ignore their proper season. I felt a certain gloom as we went through the halls. This, I’m afraid, is in my character: whenever I approach some famous scene or person I expect to be disappointed. In this case I was sure I would appreciate the painting less than people of true discernment, like Flamminio and Pate, for example, who were hurrying forward eagerly as if to a sumptuous breakfast.
What did I, Michael, in my exile, care about a fresco?
In any case, I thought, I am always more pleased with things which are not famous, and which speak to you, as it were, in private. That was my state of mind as we reached the antechamber of the chapel. Then I saw ahead of me a high, dark cave like the one I once visited France, but, even in the poor light of that dark morning, I could see was faintly inscribed with the figures of men and gods, and at that moment it seemed to me I was at the threshold of a grand cavern made not by men but by an angel. Marc’Antonio led us in and we marched boldly to the end of the chapel. There my heart sank again. It was just as I feared. Before us on the wall rose a vast blue field, a swirl of bodies, naked and clothed. In short, I could not make head or tail of it.
Flamminio had no such problem. He stood before the painting as confident as a captain inspecting his troopers.
‘Lord, what fools these Romans are,’ he said.
‘I must have heard reams of nonsense about this painting of Judgement Day already. The “harsh and terrible Christ”, “his face like thunder”, “all nature in terror” and so on. But look at him – he is merely lifting his right hand. It is “he who holds the winnowing fan”. Do you see?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t see.’
‘Well, then, I will show you,’ said Flamminio, and, like one of the pilots who lead ships through the shoals of the lagoon at Venice, he proceeded to show me the way through the blue field, pointing out how on the left all mankind – the dead sitting up and brushing the earth from their eyes – began to rise together into the sky, and then, on the right, some remained above, and others blew away to the horizon and tumbled into the fire.
‘It is the great winnowing of mankind,’ said Flamminio. ‘And here the wind is light – the light, that is, of self-knowledge. The wheat and the chaff know their own weight. Some of the damned whom you can see falling there will perhaps try and fight their way back up, but how can they get past those fierce angels, or that row of martyrs, holding out the instruments of their torture?’
Flamminio then fell silent and with his feet crossed and his thumbnail pressed against his lip he stood looking at the fresco for a long time. Then he spoke again.
‘How strange,’ he said. ‘M. Angelo is rightly called il Terribile, but he is not above following the guidance of others. I see he has listened carefully to our friend, your master, Pole.’
He pointed out three martyrs – Catherine with the wheel on which her body was broken, Blaise holding the iron hackles that tore off his flesh, Sebastian holding out the arrows that killed him . . .
‘Do you see it?’ he asked. ‘Can you read what these figures say?’
I should tell you that Flamminio had a great fondness for puzzles, anagrams, cryptic mottoes and so on; and now he began to jot down various signs and ciphers on a tablet he had with him and then held it out to show us:
