The Courier's Tale (23 page)

King Enrico of England [he wrote] desires the utmost welfare of the illustrious family of Gonzaga, and wishes me to visit and to offer you his favour, authority and all his forces. It should be remembered the power of the King of England is not inferior to that of any other king. His immense wealth is much greater than that of many princes, and the valour and dignity of his well-proportioned frame may vie with any other sovereign. In Italy he already has more than mediocre allies, through whom in future he will have much more power and opportunity for obliging his friends and injuring his enemies.

The other powers – Venice, Rome and France – argued the opposite case with the Gonzagas. The Regent of Mantua, Ercole Gonzaga, was a friend of Pole’s but he was also a
statesman
which is a very different animal from a mere
man
. They think differently. They have a certain heartlessness: the weak must accept the decisions of the strong. The mouse must be sacrificed to the cat. If great and powerful Venice was swayed by Henry’s wishes, how could little Mantua resist?

The question hung in the balance for a month. Then the Mantuans replied. The Duchess and her son, the Duke, who was still a minor, sent a letter to the King of England thanking him for his recollection of the devotion which the Gonzaga family had always borne towards him; and for his offers of alliance, which could not be more dear to them and which they accepted heartily with the intention of availing themselves of them in full accordance with opportunity.

Unfortunately an ancient law has just been remembered, which forbids the recruiting of men or the building of bases on Mantuan soil by any foreign power.

Pole was so pleased at this that he sent a gift to the Regent – a drawing by Michelangelo, which had been commissioned by the Marchioness, who then gave it to Pole, and which showed the dead Christ lying across the knees of his mother, who raises her arms to heaven.

Above her on the vertical beam of the cross, Michelangelo had put the words: ‘men little think how much blood it cost’.

I was sent to Mantua carrying this valuable and envied gift in a special leather quiver with a round cap. You have to realise at that time, just as they do today, every prince and king, not to mention mere dukes and cardinals, desired above all to own a work by Michelangelo, even a sketch, and they were almost always disappointed.

‘Tell the Regent,’ Pole said, ‘that it is no loss to me; I can easily get another.’

The Regent was delighted. That was the first time I saw the city of Mantua with her strong walls and shining lake – ‘the brilliant eye of Italy’, Flamminio used to call it – and her handsome shuttered houses, which always remind me of a crowd of people closing their eyes against the rays of the sun.

This gift of Pole’s had several consequences. The Regent gained a Michelangelo. Ludovico was sent packing and went back to Venice where he continued to cause uproar. And I discovered the city where I now live. But there was another result, sad, lamentable, which Pole had not foreseen. The Marchioness was cut to the quick on hearing he had given away the drawing. I may even say it was a mortal wound, for at the news she fell ill and never recovered. I was in Rome at the time – but why say that? It was I, unfortunately, who delivered the blow.

After leaving Mantua, I went on to Rome to open up a house for Pole, who intended to take up residence in the city again. After a day or two I sought out the Marchioness simply to pay my respects. I went first to her lodgings with the sisters at S. Caterina. There I was told she could be found at the Lateran palace where she had had some business. And there I saw her crossing the piazza, just a few minutes after I set myself in the shadow of the pillar to wait for her, as if we had made a rendezvous.

She had aged a little – two years had passed – but was still as pretty as ever, with her noble and placid air, kindly, well disposed, complacent. No matter how evilly some people might act, her blue eyes seemed to say, one should take no notice; the world was more richly determined by what
she
deemed right.

At the sight of me walking over the wide stones to accost her, her eyes shone. Then I realised what a mistake I had made.

‘You have brought a letter from your master?’ she said eagerly.

But I had not.

‘A message?’

I had nothing. I had come empty-handed. For a moment I thought of at least attempting a standard salutation – ‘His lordship sends you his most cordial greetings, etc.,’ – but I could not find the formula and she knew it.

At that moment I was as uninteresting to her, I saw, as the stones we were standing on. She attempted to pass this off and began to talk gaily enough on various matters, but always returning to Pole – asking when he would return, where he was to live, and shaking her head over him, as he had failed to write to her for six months. I saw how hurt she was.

To cover my confusion I talked on, I described my trip to Mantua and the excellence of the Regent, Lord Ercole, and then I mentioned the drawing I had taken to him.

In my naivety, and ignorance of women, I expected she would be pleased with this fact, that her gift to Pole had played a noble part in the great rebuke to the enemy. She looked at me with a peculiar expression, I felt as if I had caught her staring at me through a keyhole.

‘My drawing?’ she said. ‘The
pieta
?’

I nodded dismally, aware I had embarked on a second blunder.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘oh!’ – and then, speaking to herself, she said, ‘He gave it away!’

And she began to laugh, a strange, careless laugh, rather deep, quite unlike any I had ever heard uttered by that noble lady, Marchioness of Pescara, princess of the Colonna race. And then, as if remembering another engagement, she called her secretary, who was standing discreetly nearby, and she went away, telling me to call on her, but without any lustre in her voice.

A few weeks later, having fallen ill, she went to the lengths of sending a message to Pole to upbraid him for his cruelty, his hardness of heart, his pride, his vanity, his carelessness and so on and so forth.

This was not written down. She sent someone to sling these reproaches in his face, poor John Lily, one of the household who had remained in Viterbo with the Marchioness, when we had all gone north to Trent and who, during our absence, had fallen under her command.

I was at first not only surprised but amazed at the whole episode, but later I understood it better. For her, the
pieta
was more than a drawing. It had been a declaration of love. She loved Pole – he was still a handsome young man – but it was not a carnal love. The separate pinnacles they stood on, their different ages, hardly permitted thought of intercourse. But ingeniously, with her woman’s heart, the Marchioness devised ways to be in his story. She even wished, I think, to suffer alongside him, to share his pain. That was what the drawing meant. It was not really a picture of Christ and the Madonna at all, but of the Cardinal of England and his
second mother
.

Pole, at a loss how to respond to the many proofs of her affection, gravely accepted the gift.

And then he carelessly gave it away.

I do not think she ever recovered from the blow. When Pole came back to Rome there was a reconciliation of some kind. I was not present, Flamminio was the chief negotiator, he bent all his thoughts to the matter, finding as ingenious a way out of the trouble as she had found into it. It was something to do with the new theology, in which he followed Luther – that just as God’s love is too great to be repaid, payments should not be demanded between human lovers. Perhaps the Marchioness accepted this. In any event, their friendship was restored, although, like a piece of earthenware that has been broken and then repaired, it was perhaps less valuable than before. But it was her earthly frame that gave real cause for concern. The Marchioness’s illness had struck deep. By Christmas no one expected her to live. All her friends were aghast. Pole, Flamminio, Michelangelo gathered at her sickbed.

I stayed at a distance. Strangely enough, although she forgave Pole for the hurt he had given her, she never forgave me for providing the information. That is one of the hazards of being the messenger. But I was rueful all the same, in fact I felt very hurt myself. I had not gone to the Lateran that day as a courier but as the humble friend, almost the son, of a great lady who had been kind to him, and who then, that day, looked at him as if he did not exist.

She died in the new year of 1547. Everyone was stricken with grief – the Marchioness of our hearts had gone! From a distance, I thought how strange it was as well. Her prayers had in fact been granted: she had entered Pole’s story, and suffered greatly, as she wished. But it was not the King who tortured and then killed her, it was her own loving heart.

During all this time, the threat from the King had not gone away. Ludovico da l’Armi continued his outrages. Towards the end of the year, as the Marchioness lay dying, he surpassed himself and sent his men to murder a certain Venetian agent – or spy, or traitor – named Maffei, in the pine forest near Ravenna. Don’t ask me to explain it – I doubt if anyone understood the whole story – but what was clear was this: Maffei was stabbed many times and all his secrets bled away into the earth under the pines. In this, Ludovico gravely affronted the state of Venice which considered itself the owner of those secrets. As usual, however, nothing was done.

‘We must have some consideration for the serene King of England.’

Then one day in early spring in the year 1548 there came surprising news. Ludovico had been arrested, in Milan, and then, surrounded at first by forty, then a hundred, then one hundred and sixty men, all heavily armed, he was taken by road and ferry to Venice to be tried for many crimes.

I myself was in Forli at the time, looking for new horses for the household, when I first heard of his arrest and transportation and I had difficulty making sense of it. But the next day, while I was walking across a field with a gentleman who had just arrived from Padua, he mentioned the da l’Armi business, and then he uttered a sentence which explained everything, and also made me stop as if thunderstruck.

‘In Venice, of course they have now reached an end of consideration for the serene King of England, as he is dead.’

Chapter 8

That was how the news reached me – Henry VIII was dead! For the first time in my life I was no longer his subject. I had never drawn a breath but he was my sovereign lord – although he sought my life for the last ten years of it – and now . . . he was gone.

And I was still here, in a green field, near Forli. I looked all around. I saw the water-trough half-mantled with green, the gateway mud was thronged with hoofprints, in the next field was a big bay stallion with his yard hanging down. All these things I saw very clearly as if the world itself, and not just a gentleman from Padua with tan boots, was the messenger:
Henry is dead
.

I did not feel joyful but rather sombre, like an orphan who now must face the world alone. The mares and foals were watching us uneasily as we came over the paddock towards them, and then suddenly I lost all interest in the business I had come for, I apologised to the others and left at once, taking the road for Rome.

Several times on the road the same fact kept striking me anew.
He’s gone!
But even then if I wanted to stand in the stirrups and shout or wave my hat or embrace a passer-by, that other sombre self forbade it.

My thoughts led me straight to Coughton, though it was very strange – I had not permitted them to fly there for so many years, they seemed halting, as if unsure of the way. ‘Why,’ I thought, ‘it’s . . . possible . . . that I will see Judith again. No. Surely not. Who knows what has happened to her? And yet . . . there must be someone there still. Perhaps I will see them all alive again, after all. Perhaps very soon. Yes! That’s true! I may see Judith within a month. In a month, I might be standing in front of her and then take her by the hand.

‘Impossible!’ I thought a minute later. ‘In any case, they will have forgotten me. Why do I feed on these fantasies? And yet I have not forgotten them. Perhaps someone there remembers me still.’

In short, I did not know what to think or to hope for.

Over the next few weeks everything remained uncertain. Edward, son of the third Queen, Jane, was now the King. But he was a child, ruled by his upstart uncles, and no one knew where they would lead him.

Then certain signs of change began to appear in the world. From a prison cell in Venice, Ludovico da l’Armi had been sending frantic messages to England for help.

The new government in England at length replied to the Signory: ‘We have no knowledge of such a person.’

That was the end of poor Ludovico. I admit I felt some pity for him – the thought of any man on the road surrounded by one hundred and sixty others all bent on his death – that displeases me. But his fate was sealed. Sentence was passed: ‘Ludovico da l’Armi shall be taken on Saturday next to a high scaffold between the two columns where his head is to be severed from his shoulders so that he dies.’

So it was there, between the two columns by the sea, in the heart of Venice, that the many years of English policy – to kill ‘Traitor Pole’ – came to an end.