by Peter Walker
‘And yet your subjects want peace as much as his,’ said Pole.
‘Oh, he is a very learned and virtuous person,’ said Granvelle, now speaking as if Pole was not present, ‘but he knows nothing about the world.’
‘In fact, he has performed more harm than good,’ said the Emperor. ‘The demands of the French are so impudent, he would have done better to have kept them to himself.’
‘He would have done better to have gone to France and stayed there,’ said Granvelle.
‘He would have done better never to have left Italy in the first place,’ said the Emperor. ‘That young hothead’ – he meant the King of France – ‘has wronged me more in a year than his father managed in a lifetime.’
‘And now he fetches in the Turks, the enemy of all Christians, to join the fight on his side.’
‘And we are supposed to sit down at a table together, as if we were equally to blame.’
‘There, you see?’ said Granvelle, ‘We are in an impossible position – and it is all his fault.’
Then they both turned to glare at Pole, and continued glaring as he was led to the door at the far end of the great chamber.
‘In fact, short of using cudgels, they could not have been more violent towards me,’ said Pole afterwards.
After that, there was no question of his going to England, even when the wedding was held, and the marriage of the Queen was an accomplished fact. Pole’s punishment was to extend far beyond that date. Yet it was judged that he should be represented, for the people of England held him in high regard, and looked with grave misgivings on the whole proceeding.
For that reason, it fell to me to go to court a day or two after Philip married Mary, and to speak on behalf of the illustrious Cardinal.
I was rather nervous, I will admit, as I went into the great Presence Chamber. This was in the palace at Winchester. Outside, the rain poured down. Within was the greatest gathering of lords, nobles, prelates, dukes and duchesses ever seen in England.
I had to wait a long time, watching various ceremonies, before my turn came to speak. The Queen was just then receiving her new relatives from Spain. The last to enter was one of the most exalted, the Duchess of Alba, who came to pay her respects.
The Queen went to the door to greet her, took her by the hand and led her to a chair, and then, sitting on a cushion, begged her to be seated. The Duchess utterly refused, imploring the Queen to take the chair. The Queen declined. Two stools appeared – the Queen sat on one and invited the Duchess to have the other. At that, the Duchess sat on the floor. The Queen then sat beside her on a cushion. The Duchess begged her to rise; she relented; she was back on a stool again; she then commanded the Duchess to take the other.
At last, all honours completed, both ladies were seated side by side and could begin to discuss the weather. It seemed the Duchess had suffered badly from storms on the voyage from Spain.
During these proceedings I was standing in the midst of a group of insolent young lords from Spain and Italy who were watching the Queen and commenting on all they saw, imagining that no one nearby understood what they said:
‘She’s old,’ said one, ‘she is old and she is flabby. I’ll tell you what – I hate to see our Prince with such an old bag.’
‘But look how happy she is,’ said a second. ‘He treats her kindly and hides the fact that she’s no good from the point of fleshly pleasure.’
‘She should dress in our fashion,’ said a third, ‘which might improve her appearance.’
‘She is short and has no eyebrows.’
‘She is a perfect saint but dresses badly.’
‘They all dress badly here. Their petticoats have no silk admixture in them at all as far as I can see, and the dresses themselves are badly cut.’
‘Look at the expression on the Duchess’s face – she won’t be back here again in a hurry.’
‘They show their leg to the knee, which is passably immodest even when seated, but when it comes to dancing . . .’
‘Dancing? Do you call that dancing? I call it mere strutting and trotting about.’
‘None of us is going to fall in love with any of them, nor they with us.’
‘There’s already been knife-work here in the palace, between their servants and ours.’
‘They’re afraid of us. They think we have come to manage everything and steal their wives.’
‘They’ve been robbing us in broad daylight from the minute we landed.’
‘They have the advantage over us – we steal by stealth and they by force.’
I was so intent on this that I did not notice a hush had fallen and that the chamberlains were gazing at me and making strange gestures with their eyebrows. It was time for me to make my address.
This was cast as a speech to Philip alone, on the occasion of his becoming King of England.
I made my way forward and began.
‘Serenissime Rex!’
A great silence had fallen. I heard my own voice as if I was listening far away, though also much closer than I had ever heard it before. But I was no longer nervous. ‘After all,’ I said to myself, ‘what’s the worst that can happen? There may be dangers here, but none worse than the brown stallion at Forli that tried to kill me, or the robbers who live in the forest near Chambery,’ and then I played a trick on myself, imagining that those savage beasts were also present, along with the hundreds of people staring in my direction. This fancy worked; my voice grew stronger.
‘Cum maxime antea laetatus essem,’ I declared, ‘cognito ex fama ipsa et litteris meorum optatissimo majestatis tuae in angliam adventu et felicissimus nuptis quae cum Serenissima Regina nostro summo omnium gaudio et gratulatione celebratae sunt tunc hanc meam laetitiam— ’
And so on and so on . . .
I had the impression that my great audience of lords and ladies, stallions and robbers, was a little disappointed. Everyone knew who Pole was, and why he was not present, and his great reputation for telling the truth. Yet here was nothing to be heard but gratulatione and felicissimus.
That was the pinnacle of my career as a messenger. It could scarcely carry me higher. And yet, I thought to myself, as I heard my voice from far away, it was sad, as well, that there, on the pinnacle, I should for the first time hear myself telling many great lies in Pole’s name.
But what else could I expect? After all, this was the celebration of a wedding, when it is far too late to go about telling the truth.
That was roughly the view that Pole himself took, when I reproached him later. He had not lied, he said. His words were quite sincere. After all, the marriage was a fact, and, as such, providence must have played some part in it. Therefore there was nothing to do but hope for the best, or at least hope that his worst fears were proven wrong.
BOOK III
Chapter 1
During my splendid oration before the court at Winchester something quite unexpected happened: I realised that the time had come for me to leave England. In the very midst of the speech, an ardent picture of Mantua suddenly came to mind. I had a great desire to be there, to see all my children, my little centaurs as I called them. And it also became clear to me that it would be a long time before Pole would ever set foot in England. This I learnt from my nephew Inglefield. Everything in England, he told me, was now decided by Stephen Gardiner, the Lord Chancellor. This was the same Gardiner who once, years before, had gone on his knees to the King of France, begging him to hand Pole over so he might be trussed up and conveyed alive to England.
He still greatly hated Pole, said my nephew, so much that the very sound of his name induced in him such fits of jealousy that his secretaries and fellow councillors and even foreign ambassadors were obliged to soothe him.
Gardiner’s great fear was that once the wedding was over, my master would be summoned to England, and then, basking in the Queen’s favour, would replace him as the highest minister of state. This, at all costs, he intended to prevent.
I decided, therefore
, that my task as Pole’s agent in England had come to an end, and in fact I would have ridden off from Winchester there and then and not stopped until I came to the door of this very house in Mantua, but I found certain obstacles, strange and unfamiliar, in my way.
For the first time in my life I had property to detain me. Pole used to call wealth ‘golden shackles’. Mine was more like a forest I could not get out of. My acres, my woods and houses and chimneys and windowpanes – they were fine, excellent in every way, but with them came bills, leases, rents, many tangled briars (lawsuits were pending), all of which had to be attended to.
This, however, is not something a man can decently complain about; I went to Coughton to attend to them and was there nearly three months. It was not a happy house. The family was not a happy one. I had never imagined I would miss George so much. Of course I dearly loved my brother up to a point, but never thought him very wise. Now I saw how well he had kept order under that roof. In his absence, there was endless arbitration about everything under the sun from the food bills to the weight of the horseshoes, but most of all it was religion that caused the perturbations. We had not, in Warwickshire, yet got to the stage of Essex and Suffolk, where rapiers were appearing in the churchyards, but that didn’t seem far off. Dinner was a convocation of enemies. One hardly dared to speak, for discord rushed in. Nicholas was a great Lutheran. Long John held the mass an abomination worse than murder. George wanted things back as they were under King Henry. Robert preferred things as they were before the Divorce. My nephew Clement was a hot gospeller who wanted no more ceremonies of baptism. My aunt, who had been a nun until convents were torn down and who still kept a ‘poor door’ at the house to feed beggars who came wandering our way, sat at table with her lip trembling. I myself was now the owner of former monastic lands.
In short, we were all at sea over religion. And yet that itself rises from our deepest thoughts and it’s no use saying we should do away with it. For my part, sitting at dinner at Coughton, I began to think that when I reached Mantua and found my family again I would not bring them back to live in England after all, despite my acres. Life in Mantua under the Regent seemed to take on a new and serene aspect. In the end, after weeks and months, I signed over the house and land at Haseley to Clement, who had a wife and child and was therefore most in need of them, and then, putting all the rest of the property in the stewardship of old Walker, I left Coughton and set off for London and Dover.
By then it was mid-November. I stayed in London a few days, and one morning I rose early to ride down to the sea. I had gone downstairs – this was in the old house in Throckmorton Street – and was standing in the dark with my hand raised to unlock the door, when, at the very same moment there came a very rapid knocking on the other side.
‘Who’s there?’
‘A herald.’
‘What herald?’
‘Inglefield herald.’
‘What does he want?’
‘Open the door.’
I opened the door. I saw a very small man standing there, a Moor, very black of skin. His aspect in itself surprised me, though why I don’t know – messengers may come in any shape or size they like, and why should you care?
‘My master, Inglefield, sends to tell you that your master, Pole, is now on the sea,’ he said.
I can still see the brass key in my hand, and the lock stile, and the dwarf who brought me the news at that moment just before the day had begun to light the street behind him. Mr Pole, Traitor Pole, the Cardinal of England, after many years of exile, of danger, long journeys, great fame and final mortification, was on his way home.
This astounded me. I could not understand how it had come about. From all I knew Gardiner had not changed his mind about Pole, and the Queen, besotted with her new husband, gave little thought to her cousin in exile. But I could not stand there all day and debate the matter with myself. Nor was the messenger a likely source of insight – he was a saucy devil and cocked his hand on his hip as he looked up at me, as if to say he was well aware that I was someone of little importance.
Without going to the lengths of strangling him, I learnt that Pole would land at Dover, cross to Gravesend and come to London by water. Hearing that, of course I changed my plans and decided to take the barge downriver to Gravesend to meet him.
Everything then went wrong – the tide was flowing; I turned back and rode instead, and arrived at Gravesend after dark; there was no Pole. In the morning he was still not there. I set out on horse to Canterbury, puzzled as to how all this was to fall out – and then, suddenly, coming around a corner, I met my Lord Cardinal.
It was not, of course, a face-to-face encounter. On the opposite side of a valley somewhere near Ospringe I saw flowing down the hill a vast crowd of thousands and thousands, moving forward as the honeycomb flows, and as dark as the wintry woods on either side of the road. It seemed that the whole county had joined the Cardinal on his route to London, and even as I watched I could see more people on foot and horse hurrying across the fields to witness what was passing.
I was somewhat nonplussed. I had forgotten how I used to imagine Pole’s eventual return to England but it was nothing like this. I rode forward and met the crowd. There was no chance in the world of speaking to Pole or even seeing him clearly in the crush of lords and bishops and ordinary folk, half of Kent, who rode ahead of him and behind him and on either side and who came on as far as Gravesend.
And this, I could see, was how things would be from now on. For ten years these folk would have lost their lives if they mentioned my master’s name except with a curse; half of them, I suppose, would have handed him over to the hangman without a second thought. But now he was back and approaching power, things were different. Ah well, I told myself, this is the slightly bitter taste of long loyalty. But then I became impatient and seized the nettle. By dint of speaking sharply in Italian to the English who swarmed around him, and sternly in English to the Italians who swarmed about him, I managed to get near my master and old friend – he gave me his hand briefly with a look as if to say ‘Don’t blame me if I scarcely recognise you, everything is changing before my eyes’ – and he was whisked away again.
All the same, I got aboard the leading barge, where in my view I deserved to be, for this, the final scene of all his years of wandering. But I was well at the back, and I never saw his face.
As an attainted traitor, Pole had been forbidden from displaying any signs of office when he arrived in England, but at Gravesend an order had come from London relaxing this command. For the last part of his long journey, up the river Thames, the silver cross of a legate stood at the bow of the barge.
The Italians, who had never seen a tidal river before, declared a miracle as the current bore us inland. From Deptford on, the banks were black with people.
At one o’clock we shot the rapids under the bridge, and a few minutes later reached Whitehall. The new king, Philip, came to the water-stairs to meet the newcomer, and then Pole was lost to sight as he went into the palace.
‘Well, that’s the end of him,’ I thought. And it seemed quite possible, since I was about to go to Italy, and he had vanished into the throng that surrounds power, that I might never see him again. But the next day he sent for me.
Chapter 2
‘I am besieged by dozens of members of my family who have lost everything,’ he said. ‘I can do little for them. There are so many grave public matters to attend to. But one thing is preying on my mind. It is a private matter, a family matter, perhaps I should ignore it, but it won’t leave me be.’
He asked me to make enquiries, as discreetly as possible, to try and find out what had happened to his young nephew, his brother’s son, who was sent to prison as a child and of whom no word had been heard for years.
‘I don’t expect good news,’ he said. ‘But we should know something – when he died, where he is buried . . . At least we should not accept knowing nothing and forget all about him.’
This meant
at least another month away from Italy, but I undertook the commission out of duty and curiosity and pity as well. I thought of my own two dead children, my newborn son and daughter who – I sometimes had the impression – came to me in dreams, bidding me not to forget them entirely either.
I set to work at once. Here was another new role, and one for which I was peculiarly unfit. I had no idea where to start, and had to ask Pole how I should go about it. Above all, he said, discretion was needed: if there were secrets to hide, those who hid them might well be in a position to prevent their discovery. On the other hand, some help would be required from strangers. So for the first time I set my foot inside the archives, going first to the King’s paper room and later to the records of past lords Privy Seal and then to the books and logs of the lieutenant of the Tower.
On the first day, I admit my heart sank at the sight of the walls stacked with rolls and folios rising higher than a man’s head, and going back, no doubt, for centuries. There were clerks there, who were neither helpful nor unhelpful. I showed them a letter from Pole, a kind of safe conduct through those dry mountains, but the clerks looked at this document with indifference. In their eyes, hunting for knowledge among their papers was great folly: the wise thing to do was to keep them undisturbed, as far from prying eyes as possible.
In the end, it was Tom Rutter of all people who came to my aid. He had come up with me when I left Coughton. I could not stop him doing so.
He came along just to see London again, and then, since I was staying on, he decided to stay on as well, as my servant and, as he saw it, my guardian.
He was now a tenant of mine and as my tenant – and a very bad tenant, at that – he regarded me as a most valuable property. He did not like to have me out of his sight.
‘But how can you stay on, Tom?’ I said. ‘What about your wife and children?’
‘Them? Right as roaches.’
When I first went to work in the paper room, Tom stayed well away, standing out in the street with a strange, innumerable acquaintance he had gathered, I don’t know how, in a matter of hours. Then the cold winds drove him inside. He began to gaze over my shoulder. Until then I had no idea that he could read. As time went on, he became interested in my progress or, rather, continual failures. I soon noticed that he could deal with the clerks better than I. They were unsettled by his unblinking stare. They gave up their secrets to him. He also had the poacher’s instinct for what lies hidden in the thicket. It was Tom who learnt of the existence of a trove of papers which had been taken from Cromwell’s own house when he fell from power. The clerks perhaps would not have brought these to my notice. It was there that we found a few faint tracks of young Henry Pole. These came in the form of memoranda which Cromwell wrote – ‘remembrances’, as he called them – on matters that he meant to refer to the King’s attention.
