The Courier's Tale

by Peter Walker

  On my way home I saw that in the bankers’ shops all the wagers were for England, the only cry was ‘England! England!’ and no one else was even mentioned.

  Chapter 11

  On the day the conclave began, I found myself back in the Sistine to help install Pole and his baggage into his temporary lodgings. It was the first time I had been there since going with Flamminio to see the new fresco, and I cast a glance at that great blue field of sky to see if I could see it in the same light again, but that was impossible – the crowds of servants, conclavists, baggage handlers, pot-boys, butlers, footmen, candle-men, sightseers from every country, even England – Master Hoby was present, a great Lutheran who by then was the owner of Pole’s family seat at Bisham – German barons and baronesses, bankers’ spies, carpenters hammering away as they finished the cabins, each of which was hung with silk curtains – green for cardinals made by the last pope, purple for the rest, or was it the other way around? – and then the cardinals themselves, sweeping past among their attendants – it was hard even to keep a footing in that throng, much less stand there and consider the final meeting of heaven and earth, as imagined by M. Michelangelo. Then at about four in the afternoon a loud voice rose above the tumult – ‘Depart, who must depart!’

  At that, everyone except the cardinals, each with two conclavists and a few servants to assist them, went away, and the great outer door swung closed.

  Half an hour later, it swung open again and certain interlopers who had been found there, as expected, under beds and behind curtains – two madmen, three spies from the bankers’ shops, four gentlemen merely curious to see the election of a pope – came forth and bowed to the crowd who greeted them with many jeers and whistles.

  Then everyone stood outside and watched as the highest windows and the lesser doors were mured up, and finally the bricklayers came to the main outer door itself, and set to work. Only one small opening, called the wicket, was left.

  It was at the wicket that I spent the next three days and nights, along with a crowd of prelates, ambassadors, Roman barons and officials.

  The prelates guarding the door were negligent. Servants of the cardinals came in and out as they pleased, their boots stuffed so full of letters that they went over at the ankles and could scarcely totter along at all. In short, everything taking place inside the conclave in great secrecy was known across Rome within an hour.

  At the first scrutiny, Pole won twenty-one votes, six short of the two-thirds majority. At the second, he won twenty-four. At the third, twenty-five. If he found one more supporter, and chose to vote for himself, then my master, Mr Pole, of Staffordshire birth, aged forty-eight, and with a death sentence still on his head, would become the Roman pontiff.

  That night at midnight (this was on the third day of the conclave) not a single cardinal, except for Pole, remained in his cabin. From the wicket, you could hear a distant din and buzzing as from a beehive.

  Then, at one in the morning, we learned that Farnese had gone with another cardinal to Pole’s cabin. The two men knelt before him.

  The extra votes had been found, said Farnese. The matter was therefore concluded.

  All the other cardinals had assembled in the Pauline chapel and were waiting there to elect my master by acclamation.

  From that point on, at the wicket, it was impossible to follow exactly what was happening. First we heard that Pole had set forth from his cabin to be made Pope. Then that he had retired again. Then he stepped out once more and set off on his way to the Pauline. And finally, it seemed, he had turned back again, saying: ‘If God wants me to be Pope, he will still want it in the morning.’

  The vote, therefore, was to be held the next day.

  By morning, this was known across the city and the campagna beyond. By four in the afternoon a great crowd had assembled in front of St Peter’s, along with the papal troops and city militia, all with flags flying. From within, you could now hear the sound of splintering and cracking. The cabins were being demolished; the servants were packing up their masters’ belongings and sitting on the baggage in readiness for the Roman mob, which always honours a new pope by bursting in and looting the electors. Everyone was filled with speculation as to the future of the world with this English pope: he would ban the inquisition, he would reach out to the Protestants, the schism in which new hatreds flourished like weeds would come to an end.

  This was early December and dusk was already falling. A great rain-cloud hung over the city.

  Then the announcement came: ‘Their lordships have ordered supper.’

  A groan went up from the crowd. The scrutiny had failed. And then the rain began to fall, and did not cease for many days and weeks until the Tiber began to give cause for alarm.

  The only people who were pleased were those of the French faction who were at the wicket.

  ‘It is just as well,’ said the French ambassador, M. D’Urfé, the corners of his mouth turning down eloquently. ‘My king could scarcely bear an English pope, but one of the English blood royal – it is unthinkable!’

  ‘You are always absurd,’ cried the imperialist ambassador, Don Diego Mendoza. ‘Do you imagine that your master’s wishes have anything to do with the election of God’s vicar on earth?’

  ‘Oh! – and yet your master sends you bustling along here every hour of the day and night, causing tumults and smuggling in his orders. It is well known why he wants Pole elected – to prevent him marrying the princess Mary, should she ever come to the throne. What a way to use the chair of Peter, which is after all the seat of Moses, to put a marriage rival on the shelf!’

  ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen!’ said several voices in the tone that is heard just before a brawl breaks out in the tavern.

  ‘All I will say is this,’ said M. D’Urfé. ‘My king cannot, in any case, accept a result reached before the cardinals of France have entered the conclave.’

  ‘Oh, yes, and where are they now?’ said Mendoza, laughing, ‘I suppose we shall see them come down in the rain in the next half hour.’

  M. D’Urfé, over the course of the previous two days, had announced the miraculous progress of the French party, from Marseilles to Corsica, to Genoa, and then almost within sight of the Roman port of Ostia.

  Over the next days we found out what had happened in the scrutiny which had failed.

  On that morning, when all the cardinals gathered in the Sistine to vote, a tall figure, his eyes burning, stood up and demanded the right to speak before it was too late. His conscience, he said, required it. It was impossible for Cardinal Pole to be pope, he said, for a simple reason: he was a heretic. He could not therefore be Head of the Church, for the head must be a part of the body, and a heretic was not a member of the body. In a word, Pole was not a Catholic.

  The charges he made were these: first, Pole was a Lutheran: he endorsed Luther’s doctrine on justification by faith alone. His views on prayer and the mass were suspect. His friends were suspect as well: some had fled to Geneva and England. Under his government, Viterbo was a sink of liberty and licence. No one was ever prosecuted for heresy. The civil administration was lax. The hangman and the axe-man languished and fell into despair: their services were so little in demand they had quite forgotten their skills, greatly adding to the demoralisation of the people.

  As well as that, Pole’s personal life was scandalous. His household was full of whoring and sodomy; his own affair with a certain woman (he meant the Marchioness) was well known. He also had a love-child, a daughter, now hidden in a convent in Rome. He, the speaker, could name the house.

  The speaker was Pole’s old friend, Carafa, who, years before, riding forward like Mars, had urged Pole to give up his family and go to Rome.

  All this took place beneath the Last Judgement, which Carafa had already denounced as ‘a furnace of naked bodies’ and at which he now glanced from time to time, as if to confirm that a thousand heresies were creeping towards the chair of Peter . . .

  During this speech Pole defen
ded himself stoutly, now laughing, now quoting holy writ and in general, it was said, treating his attacker como un loco – like a madman. He rebutted the charges: if Luther was heretical in some respects, that did not mean he was a heretic in all. His own friendship with the Marchioness had always been – to the fury of the malicious – entirely above reproach. The girl in the convent was an orphan whom Pole took care of when her parents died penniless. If the hangman in Viterbo had forgotten his trade, surely that was a cause for congratulation: the people there chose to live good lives. In any case, he added, it was not part of the clergy to rule the flock with grim authority, but to try and win them with love and gentleness.

  All the same, it was reported, during this speech my master had gone very pale. In all the years he had known Carafa, he had never suspected this burning hatred.

  When Carafa finished speaking there was a long silence. Many of the cardinals then began to wag their heads and abuse him, calling out that they would all ostracise him from now on.

  Nevertheless, one of his listeners had been shaken by what he heard. When the votes were cast, Pole’s total had dropped back to twenty-six. And there it was to remain week after week, month after month, as the rain fell outside.

  The missing French cardinals did not appear for another ten days. Bourbon arrived first, bespattering the whole world, as mud had become the universal element. More Frenchmen followed, and then the deadlock became intractable. Conditions in the conclave grew worse; the stench and smoke from a thousand charcoal braziers at which their Lordships warmed their fingers was intolerable. In the dim light, servants no longer doffed their bonnets even to the most eminent lords.

  The physician-general of Rome, Dr Norsia, was sent in to tell the cardinals they would all be brought out dead if they carried on much longer. No one took any notice.

  ‘Very good,’ said Norsia. ‘One by one you will succumb to the falling sickness, which commences with a little giddiness. It will then proceed to sweep these rooms clean.’

  ‘Ah well,’ said the imperialist cardinals. ‘But at least we will die with Pole’s name on our lips.’

  ‘For our part, we are happy to stay for a thousand years,’ said the French. ‘In fact, compared to conditions in the French court, we consider ourselves to be in a sort of paradise here.’

  Some days later several cardinals came to the wicket to discuss the problem.

  ‘You must reduce our meals to a single course,’ one said.

  ‘To bread and water,’ said another.

  ‘Bread and water, certainly,’ quavered Cardinal Pacheco, putting his head almost through the wicket. ‘And perhaps a little drop of wine.’

  ‘No!’ cried several voices behind him. ‘No wine!’

  Pacheco vanished abruptly, and Farnese appeared in his place.

  ‘Bread and water will not do the trick here,’ he said. ‘You’d better send in swords and daggers. Nothing else can settle this.’

  Disputes rose between the prelates guarding the door and the barons of Rome who wanted to stop the messages getting in and out. And daily the populace stormed before the palace, demanding a pontiff.

  One day, after two or three months of this, I met the Venetian ambassador in the street. He was very downcast.

  ‘It is quite hopeless,’ he said. He explained that the balance of power in the world was so exact and complex that a fiend could not have contrived it better. And this state of affairs was reflected precisely within the conclave.

  ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘your master will win in the end. You may depend on it. His vote never wavers. And it is still “England!” in the betting shops, where they know far more than anyone else, except the Holy Ghost.’

  That same night, when I was at home having supper with Judith, I heard a great clamour outside. There was the sound of shouting and running feet. I looked out. Everyone had armed and was hurrying towards the Vatican.

  I went out after them and there in the street I heard the news: a Pope had been elected. He was a compromise candidate who had the great advantage that each faction knew the other did not want him.

  Chapter 12

  The new Pope, Del Monte, had every disqualification for high office in a crisis. He had a great dislike of bad news, which upset his stomach, so he could not be told any. He loved music, theatre and architecture. He also owned a pet ape, an animal of such savage temper that no one dared approach it.

  With the ape came a youth from the gutters named Innocenzo. Innocenzo was the only person who could manage the beast, which he did by leaping on it and beating it into submission.

  Before he was elected, del Monte was told by the other cardinals that if they chose him he would have to give up the ape and Innocenzo. This he refused to do. As there was no other way out of their prison, the cardinals relented and elected him.

  The Imperialists outside the conclave were furious at the outcome. Del Monte had not been on the Emperor’s list of acceptable candidates. The ambassador went to see him at once and found him still robing.

  ‘Here am I – Don Diego Mendoza,’ he said.

  ‘Do not look so dismayed, Don Diego,’ said the Pope.

  Don Diego offered to kiss the pontiff’s foot.

  ‘No need for that, it is neither the time nor place,’ said the Pope. He made him rise and then embraced him.

  On leaving the chamber, Don Diego said with a laugh: ‘It is possible I may not care to kiss him again.’

  It was then remembered that the new Pope had a passion for onions. Soon cartloads of them were to be seen on their way to the palace.

  Before long it was announced that the Pope intended to raise Innocenzo to the cardinalate. Everyone was amazed. Pole went to see him and argued with him until the third hour of night, but he would not change his mind.

  ‘Popes have always promoted their nephews. I do not happen to have one, so my brother has adopted this fellow. And he is a youth of great spirit – just what’s needed in the hour of danger!’

  Pole came away shaking his head. At the same time as this, Flamminio was dying. I went to see him constantly, but it was a sad, irksome duty. My Marc’Antonio, the best friend I ever made among the Italians, had already departed. It was a replacement, it seemed to me, who was doing the dying, a man I hardly knew. On almost the last day of his life I went up the stairs to his room – he had taken shelter in Pole’s house – and found a haggard figure lying there, his beard springing round sternly compressed lips, expressive of great authority and impatience.

  There was no conspiracy between us to pretend he would be up and about any day now.

  I asked him whether he was afraid of what lay ahead.

  ‘Afraid?’ he said. ‘Of course I am not afraid. Haven’t you seen the frieze of little demons, carved on the tombs of the ancients, laughing at mankind’s fear of death? And quite right too. Nothing could be more improper, and especially for a poet.’

  ‘Why a poet?’

  ‘Why a poet! What else is poetry, and indeed any art, but a rehearsal of that moment? That is why artists are always forgiven their misdeeds. Mnemosymne, the god of memory, is the mother of the muses, but she is also the chamberlain at the hour of death when a man sees his whole life for the first time as clearly as if it were a painting or a poem. That is why people come to watch us form so many things in front of them – in his heart every man knows at the end he too will compose the shape of his life.’

  ‘I never heard this before,’ said I.

  ‘Of course not – what do you know about anything?’ said Flamminio rudely. ‘That’s why I’m taking the great trouble to tell you. If art is splendid, that is because life is, and therefore so is death. After all, remember: “Why fear death, which comes from the hand of the same master who made life? ” ’

  He was quoting M. Michelangelo, I think, and I wanted to ask him more, but he shut his eyes and waved me away. He was very sick by then. It was always his stomach with Flamminio, or his liver. And so I went away, promising to return, but
in fact I never saw him again. He was dead two days later. In his final hours, two men slipped into his room, one concealing himself in a wardrobe while the other bent over him and urgently plied him with questions. The subject was theology or specifically Flamminio’s doctrinal beliefs.

  At length the questioner was satisfied. The second man then came out of his place of hiding and began chatting easily to the dying man on other matters. It was Carafa, the arch-inquisitor. He had come to make sure that Flamminio, celebrated poet and friend of Pole, was not escaping to the next world in possession of heretical opinions.

  That, in a way, marked the end of our life in Rome. Everywhere there were new men and new ways of doing things. Pole was no longer a member of the inner circle. It was about this time that he began to make his plans to depart from Rome. He intended to go to some retired place and resume his studies – always his favourite occupation in any case.

  On hearing this, many people began to blame him bitterly and accuse him of desertion. The Pope, for instance, to show his high regard for Pole, had appointed him as a member of the court of the Inquisition. By taking himself off to some lonely hill town or monastery, he would abandon the field to the zealots, Carafa and others.

  At the same time as this, the true extent of the disaster or tragicomedy of the conclave was becoming clear. The new Pope threw himself wholeheartedly into the design and construction of a beautiful pavilion on the banks of the Tiber, leaving the gravest matters of state to underlings. Innocenzo was not only made a cardinal but appointed Secretary of State, replacing Farnese. Universally known as Cardinal Monkey, he at once began to disgrace himself and his order, climbing over roofs, rioting and getting the girls pregnant.

  All of this would have been averted, people said, if another pope had been elected. People began to think back, looking for the missed turning on the road. It was then remembered that in the conclave Pole refused to canvas any votes, showed no ambition, declared himself to desire no magistracy or high office. In short, as one cardinal said, ‘one might as well have been voting for a log of wood’.