The Courier's Tale (31 page)

Pole then left for Paris.

He crossed the frontier in early spring. For twenty miles on either side of the border there was nothing but devastation. The very ground seemed to smoke, his secretary said, and yet, from out of the ruins great crowds appeared, from holes in the ground, as it were, weeping and strewing green branches in the legate’s path and begging him to bring peace.

That night, further along the way, Pole sat down and composed an address to both rulers.

Behold the evils for which you alone are responsible, and remember them well, because for these things you will be held to account by a most dread judge. Your trial will be different from that of ordinary people. They will be charged with their own failings. You, as rulers, will be held to account for much more – all the crimes, the torture and murders performed by the men you command and have sent to war. The very least of these offences is not found worthy of mercy in a human court. How then will you stand before that far more terrible tribunal?

On reading this, Henri, the King of France, smiled and said it was a most interesting oration. If only he had known Pole earlier, he added, he would certainly have wanted him to have been made Pope at the last conclave, thereby cutting short a drama which had perhaps gone on too long. As to peace with the Imperialists, Henri was sure it could be obtained with only one or two adjustments, such as the return of Milan, which everyone knew belonged to France.

The Emperor, by contrast, when Pole came back to Brussels, was furious.

‘You have done nothing but make blunders,’ he shouted as soon as Pole entered the room. ‘This little trip of yours to France turns out to be very costly. It makes the world think
we
are against peace.’

‘And yet nothing is more foreign to His Majesty’s righteous mind,’ said his chief minister, Granvelle, who was standing beside him.

‘Now I suppose there has to be a conference, otherwise people will say we are the aggressors,’ said the Emperor.

‘And what good will a conference do?’ said Granvelle.

‘It might bring about a good peace,’ said Pole.

‘A good peace will be made only by a good war,’ cried Granvelle.

‘Having been down there,’ said Pole, pointing towards the south, ‘I may tell you there is no such thing.’

‘Well, the French started this one,’ said Granvelle, ‘but they won’t be the ones who finish it – at least not in a way they like. In a month or two, we shall have such an army that they will be very happy to scamper home – if they can get there. Why, his Majesty has so many realms, including Peru, that I would love to know what I’m supposed to think of the King of France, who has only one, and who has already started melting down the church chalices.’

‘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.