The Courier's Tale (18 page)

At Faenza’s house we were reasonably secure – there was a strong wall around the garden, and the archers and other servants watched the gate. A single elm cast its shade near the house, and two or three rows of vines led to a grove of pines which stirred every now and then in the breeze, like musicians preparing to play the fiddle, and beyond that a little menagerie – ducks and drakes, chickens, a peacock – were going about their affairs. Faenza had also planted more rows of vines on neighbouring land he had just bought.

‘They’re not much to look at now,’ said M. Donato. ‘Come back in twenty years and then you’ll see something.’

‘I cannot accept the invitation,’ said Pole. ‘Do you really hate me so much to think I will still be here, in exile, in twenty years?’

It was then that the Marchioness intervened to ask about Cromwell’s fall and what it might mean.

‘The fact of the matter,’ said Pole, ‘is that with Henry we have a tyranny of a kind not seen for many centuries. I used to think that the King had equalled Nero in his impiety and cruelty, but I was wrong. He has out-Nero’d Nero. Planning his persecution of the saints, perhaps on this very hillside where he watched Rome burn, Nero can still be counted among those for whom Christ prayed when he said ‘‘Father forgive them, they know not what they do.’’ Nero did not know that those he killed were beloved by God. Indeed, he believed the opposite: he saw that their teaching was so opposed to the old religion that it was bound to destroy it. But what can be said of the King? That he did not know that those he loved were loved by God? But he killed them for that very reason – he knew they were good and learned and saintly. He knew that only such men would be brave enough to oppose him, and he removed them for that reason, and to strike terror into the rest of his subjects. On the last day, when Nero’s victims appear as witnesses against him, their testimony will be less terrible than that given by the men whom Henry, following the doctrine of Machiavelli, attacked and slaughtered.’

Pole paused here and seemed to be weighing up his words.

‘I can tell you this,’ he said. ‘When I heard of the first murders – it was our Michael here who came to me with the news – I was stunned. I was almost speechless for a month. You will remember, my lord,’ he said to Bembo. ‘I talked to you at the time. I did not know what to think! It was as if everything was written in a language I did not know, in characters I could not read. Then quite suddenly I found I could read this strange script.’

‘Which script?’ said the Marchioness.

‘When I thought of those men, Reynolds and others, torn apart as if by wild beasts, it seemed to me that I saw God’s finger writing in their blood.’

‘I could understand you better,’ said Bembo, ‘if you said it was the King who wrote in their blood.’

‘No,’ said Pole, ‘it once pleased God to explain His will for us in the blood of his own Son, but Christ was not the last. His teaching was also written in the blood of the martyrs who followed. They were living books,
living letters
, by which both the learned and the ignorant might read the will and the judgement of God. In the limbs of those men I knew, torn apart in my own city, and nailed up in different places, I read the full truth about the King and knew what I should do.’

Michelangelo, who apparently had been sunk in thought, now spoke up, saying that this was a strange idea, one he had not thought of before, that men and women themselves might be seen as living letters.

‘I sometimes think that people are always at work painting and inscribing on the world,’ he said, ‘whether by building towers or ploughing fields or crossing the sea or, for that matter, having children or making war. But you say something more: that men’s bodies themselves may actually form an alphabet. And yet, why not? Perhaps the letters of our own alphabet are derived from the shapes of men and beasts, just as they are in the writing of the Egyptians, which no one can read today but which we still see on obelisks and other fragments scattered around this city.’

‘Yes, but they are very rare, the letters I refer to,’ said Pole. ‘The origin of our religion was written down in the blood of these martyrs. They were the original books in which the finger of God appeared. They are to be preferred to all others, written with ink on paper. And God has never ceased writing in such a way, in the blood of the martyrs. No greater honour has ever befallen my country, in fact, than to have provided the world with such living letters now, in our own time, in our own streets . . .’

The others sat pondering this. By then, late in the afternoon, bronze-coloured clouds were towering up inland – a thunderstorm was on the way. The group began to stir in the way people do just before departure. Bembo however began to speak, saying he certainly remembered Pole coming to him years ago to discuss the matter, and then he said that it was a strange fact that the book containing Machiavelli’s doctrine, which had caused so much trouble in England, was dedicated to the very same man, Duke Lorenzo, who was the subject of the statue by Michelangelo on the tomb in Florence.

‘It is a little thing, a mere coincidence of the kind that that appeals to an ordinary mind like mine,’ he said. ‘But it pleases me to think that this Lorenzo, who in a sense inspired this dangerous doctrine, also inspired a statue which provided the antidote.’

He then mentioned that Pole, many years before, had caught a glimpse of the statue of Lorenzo along with the
Dusk
and the
Dawn
,  which had helped him understand how to respond to the King.

Master Michelangelo at that point began to look anxious and puzzled. ‘You saw this statue many years ago?’ he asked

‘Oh yes, before I ever went back to England,’ said Pole.

‘Ah, well, your Excellency must be mistaken,’ said Michelangelo. ‘The statues were not finished then, and in any case, the chapel was never open. You must have seen it more recently or perhaps dreamed the whole thing.’

‘Oh, no, I assure you . . .’ said Pole, but just at that moment, Ulisse, the wretched youth I mentioned before, reappeared, stalking along between the vines behind one of the birds of the garden, a fine cock with black and golden plumes intermixed and a comb as red as bacon. As he came near, Ulisse began to call out:

‘ “Oh yes – he is keenly aware of his renown as the guardian of the night! He has been given the task of arousing men to their labours and ending their slumber. Anyone who kills a rooster like him without need is just as guilty as a man who chokes his poor old father to death. In Greek he is called
alektor
, after the sun which also makes men leave their beds; and so this noble cock surely should be praised for his courage, his brilliance, his love for his own race and for the way he fights manfully for his dear little wives.” ’

At this everyone laughed and applauded loudly, which astounded me, for I assumed he had gone mad and should be confined at once in the cellar. But it seemed he was quoting a passage by an author of great renown, Pliny, or maybe it was Cicero, I forget which. And I was the only one present who did not recognise it.

This had a very great effect on me. In secret, and for the first time in my life, I was thoroughly ashamed of my ignorance. I truly regretted not devoting myself more to my studies, and I began to wonder how to make amends.

This incident made everyone forget the previous conversation, and just then the wind sprang up and the pines began to sough and everyone prepared to leave. The tower of cloud still looked to be half an hour away but as we rode down the hill it grew taller and taller above us and the storm broke just as we reached the marble statues of the horse-tamers where, amid thunder, we went our separate ways.

Chapter 2

If the Marchioness loved any man more than Pole, or her ‘unique friend’, as she called Michelangelo, then it was her brother, Lord Ascanio, the head of the family, a wildly imprudent head at that, who over the following months distracted her from all other affairs, brought war raging up to the gates of Rome and managed to lose all his family’s Roman estates gathered, enriched and adorned over so many centuries.

The cause of these catastrophes was what? The price of salt. The Pope, in short, raised the tax. It is true that salt is a necessity of life, and the papal salt was now the most expensive on earth, but unlike everyone else, who groaned and bore the burden for a few years until it went away, Ascanio, the most powerful of the Roman barons, contested the point. He bought his salt elsewhere. The Pope then ordered him to appear before him. He declined. Some of his vassals were arrested and thrown into jail.

At this, Ascanio was roused to fury, which was always easy in his case. His wife had long since left him, taking their six children and accusing him of violence and homosexuality and also of alchemy. Now he went on the offensive, driving off long-horned cattle, trampling the harvest and ranging right up to the walls of Rome.

The gates were shut, sentries manned the ramparts, and young and old flocked to the walls to look down at the war, just as people in England go to the coast to look at the sea in a storm.

The Marchioness tried to make peace, hurrying back and forward between the Pope and her brother, but it was no use. Secretly both men wanted a trial of arms, Ascanio in order to put popes in their place, the Pope to rid Rome of the encirclement of Colonna castles.

‘So much war over thirty cows!’ said the Marchioness in despair, but since her own vassals were naturally fighting for the Colonnas she was forced to leave the city. The time came when Pole decided to leave as well. Rome was filled with mercenaries – Gascons, German Lutherans, foreigners of all kinds, including Englishmen, roamed the streets, paid by the Pope to defend the city. At this point, remembering one of Wyatt’s threats in Toledo – that Rome was the best place in the world to kill a cardinal – we decided to follow the Marchioness’s example and find a retreat in the hills. A place called Capranica – ‘the place of goats’ – was found. We were lodged in a house in the centre of the little town, from where you could look out in all directions.

‘Petrarch came here and said it was a fearful place,’ said Pole, coming out onto the terrace on our first day there. ‘All day he heard nothing but voices crying “To arms!” and at night dreadful howling beyond the walls. And yet now look: it is the image of the golden age!’

We could see far and wide, beyond the walls and the chasm below the town. The woods were already in full leaf, the fields were already ploughed as if a great draughtsman had been at work. In the distance the cuckoo could be heard calling, just as in England, or perhaps a little faster, as if heated up more by the sun. The golden age had returned! And everywhere, in fact, that spring there were signs that the world was on the mend. A great conference was then being held at Ratisbon between Catholics and Protestants to settle their differences. Even Henry the Eighth sent a delegation, with Gardiner and young Knyvett at the head of a hundred horsemen arrayed in grey velvet with gold chains round their necks riding through the German woods to Ratisbon. The King had also taken a new wife who was said to have a kind heart and to moderate his rages.

One day Pole showed me a document which had just arrived. I should explain that little scraps of information often came from England, sent out by ambassadors and then transmitted to Pole by his friends in foreign courts.

This was a copy of a tailor’s bill. It had been sent from the Queen’s tailor, John Scut, to the Privy Council.

I doubt if any tailor’s bill in the history of the world has produced such feelings in another country a thousand miles away as this one on my master Pole. He came looking for me and found me by the main door leading onto the street and there, with the door open – we felt such security in Capranica – he displayed it to me as if it reported a great victory or the birth of a son.

Re Garments for Countess of Salisbury
, namely:

One night gown, furred

One kirtle, worsted

One petticoat, furred

One nightgown lined with satin of Cyprus

One bonnet

Four pair hose

Four pair shoes

One pair slippers

Total: £11.16.4

‘A
furred nightgown
,’ he said. ‘An excellent garment, that, a very good garment!’ He looked back at the paper. ‘And a kirtle, worsted – that’s a fine thing too, you know, against the cold.’

I hardly liked to look at his face, for happiness and fear showed there equally. The unspoken dread was that for the last two years his mother had been in the dungeon with only the clothes she had been arrested in. But we could not dwell on that. The main thing was that Master Scut’s bill proved not only that the Lady of Sarum was still alive, but that the King intended that she should continue to live. One thing was certain: he was not a man to spend £11.16.4 on an old woman he intended should die. And if she was not to die, why should she not soon be freed? The departure of Cromwell and the presence of the new queen at Henry’s side made anything seem possible.

This was in late spring in 1541.

From my point of view, the best thing about Capranica was its size. It was so small that no stranger could arrive and take up a post there – as assassin, for instance – without at once being known. As well as that, all the roads into the place were easily watched. The whole hilltop town was its own watchtower, and I was the sentinel. Even when I went out early in the morning into the country to fly my hawk I could, from several places, look up and down the length of the road and see whoever was coming.