The Courier's Tale (33 page)

And there also, while turning over the private papers of Cromwell just as I pleased – something neither he nor I could have dreamt of eighteen years before – I came across a letter which I had never dreamt of either. It was sent from Padua in the year 1538:

My lord – Since writing last I have twice spoken with Michael Throckmorton since he was in Padua buying linen and household stuff . . . The first time he was merrily disposed and boasted how he deceived you, my lord, and Master Morison, when in England in message for his master, thinking that but for his crafty and subtle conveyance, you would have beheaded him – as if he was a person whose life mattered to either you or the King, or that you or the King would violate the security of a messenger! He is much simpler and less discreet than he thinks, and is more in credence and trust than authority with his master.

The second time was the eighteenth day of August, rathe in the morning, when he came clothed in a coat of wolf skins and a cap of mail, as pale as ashes, blowing and puffing like unto a raging lion. He said he had not slept all night – the cause was one Harry Phillips who had arrived here in Padua from Flanders arrayed like a Swiss, or a ruffling man of war, with a pair of German boots.

Throckmorton thinks he was sent by you, my lord, to destroy his master. How could anyone try such a deed alone and in a strange country, I asked. He said it could be very easily done. When Poole rode out as usual with five or six unarmed men, they could be attacked by three or four hardy fellows who could then escape to the mountains in four hours.

Throckmorton then went about hunting for Phillips and beset the gates to know which way he went and with whom.

A few hours later he returned somewhat merrier, having done off his wolf skins and coat of mail, and remitting his fierce countenance and old fox’s conditions and returned again to the nature of a young sheep. He had found Phillips was in poverty, with no friends and nowhere to go. But ever since, for a whole fortnight, Pole has been very much afraid. Yet it was nothing but a fantasy engendered by continual fear for his holy body and delicate flesh. I think these gentlemen have a very weak and slender faith and little hope in Christ and the life to come, seeing their mortal security does so move and torment them. Every wagging of a straw now makes them afraid . . .’

This was addressed to Cromwell. I had trouble at first deciphering the name at the bottom, then I made it out:
Thos. Theobald
.

I stared at this in wonder. My friend, Tom Theobald!

Never had it crossed my mind, even in the bleakest hours when anything can be imagined, that he was in fact my enemy.

‘Great God!’ I said to myself. ‘Tom! Tom Theobald! Why, you—!’

But then I thought: ‘Well, well, well – I tricked Cromwell and the King, which no one else in the world ever managed, but Tom Theobald hoodwinked me, so I suppose he must take the prize.’

Then strangely enough I began to feel sad, not at the loss of friendship or of youth but just at the thought of the summer morning long ago, which now came back to me in all its details, and I almost wished myself back there to see it all again. I marvelled how everything – those young men themselves, their fears and deceits and jokes – had vanished as completely as the sunlight of that distant morning.

Even my coat of wolf skins, I thought. There was a time when I would hardly let it out of my sight. Now I could not even remember where I had cast it aside.

Before finally giving up the searches and leaving the King’s paper room for good, I came across one other important document.

This was a letter to Cromwell from the renowned divine and preacher Latimer. He wrote it just after the murder of Pole’s family had commenced:

Blessed be the God of England . . . whose minister ye be. I heard you once say after you had seen that furious invective of Cardinal Pole that you would make him eat his own heart, which you have now brought to pass, for he must needs eat his own heart, and be as heartless as he is graceless.

Why this struck me so forcibly at first I hardly knew. It was merely an opinion, common enough at the time, expressed to Cromwell by one of his friends. But then I understood.
It had come true
. The writer’s prayer had been granted. It was just as I had thought over the years: from the death of his family on, Pole had indeed become
heartless
, that is to say, he had lost heart, he had lost his courage. I thought of the Pole who would not grasp the pontificate offered at midnight, the Pole who left Rome rather than stay and moderate the inquisition, the Pole who loitered on the road at Dillingen rather than go marching off to his native land.

In short, he had become afraid of the world. Which, after all, had shown itself more dreadful than he could have imagined. His aged mother led out to meet a boy of fourteen with an axe, another boy of ten or twelve dying alone in a cell, while his uncle feasted in the family house . . .

When I went to give Pole the result of my searches, I saw that he was surrounded by new troubles. Shadows were gathering around Mary’s reign. Along with many others, Hugh Latimer himself – just to take an example – was in prison, waiting to go on trial for heresy. At times I have wondered whether, in his own cell, Latimer remembered what he wrote that day to Cromwell, and perhaps regretted that his hope had been so thoroughly fulfilled.

Chapter 3

I did not attend any of the great ceremonies of reconciliation in the first week of Pole’s return, when parliament revoked his death sentence and he in turn absolved the kingdom of the schism, and all that had happened was said to be
cast into a sea of forgetfulness
. I was no longer a member of his household – now at least a hundred strong – nor of the King’s, nor the Queen’s, nor of either house of parliament, nor of the convocation of clergy. I was merely a certain Mr Michael Throckmorton, Esq. of Warwickshire – a remarkable nonentity when it comes to drawing up a list of the guests of state.

At the end of that first week, however, I did go along to the public mass of thanksgiving held at St Paul’s. The King had come from Whitehall with a vast retinue and four hundred guards, Pole came by barge from Lambeth, and they both then stood at a window of the cathedral to hear the sermon preached at Paul’s Cross in the churchyard. It was there, in a crowd that stretched from the east door through the graveyard and beyond as far as Bread Street and towards the river, and indeed up into the sky, what with men leaning against chimney pots and boys in the bare branches of trees and women leaning out of windowsills, that I – along with Tom Rutter breathing down my neck – heard the famous sermon preached by the Lord Chancellor, Gardiner, to mark the reconciliation between England and Rome.

He took as his text ‘Now is the time we wake from sleep’.

We who have slept, or rather dreamt, these last twenty years . . . First, as men intending to sleep, separate themselves from company and desire to be alone, so we have separated ourselves from the See Apostolic and have been alone, no other realm like us . . .

Then, as a man who wishes to sleep puts out the candle, so writers were condemned, libraries broken up, books torn up and burned, and a thousand images – which are the books of the poor – taken down or covered up in every corner of the land . . .

But now the Pope has sent this Reverend Cardinal, not to revenge injuries done by us against him, but to bless those who defamed and persecuted him. Rejoice in this day that such a noble man of birth has come – I mean my Lord Cardinal Pole, who speaks to us in our own language as brothers, not as strangers – a prophet, yea, a minister angelical—

It was then I heard a strange sound; a kind of sigh ran through the crowd, that immense crowd stretching as far as Bread Street and beyond.

‘Yea, this minister angelical . . .’ said Gardiner again, and there came that sigh once more, a rustle, like the wind in the shrouds.

At first I could not place it. After all it is rarely heard. But then I knew it: it was the sound of fifty thousand people trying not to laugh. For everyone there knew how much Gardiner always hated Pole.

‘Hark, how he
claweth
the Cardinal!’ said Rutter, and he kneaded my forearm like a cat to make the point. And it was at that moment I began to see why Pole had been allowed back into England. The laughter, suppressed, of fifty thousand is an infallible guide. Gardiner had not changed. He still hated Pole, and Rome, but he wanted him back for his own reasons. I listened more carefully:

And as in sleep men dream of horrible things, sometimes of killing, sometimes of maiming, sometimes of drowning or burning, sometimes of beastliness as I dare not name but will spare your ears . . .

‘Oho!’ I said to myself, ‘what sort of fellow has dreams of this kind to report?’

The answer then seemed as clear as day:
one who is planning a persecution
.

And for that Pole’s presence was required in England. Gardiner still hated him, but he hated others more, namely Cranmer, Latimer, Ponet. Yet they had all been Henry’s men. Henry made Gardiner Bishop of Winchester. At the coronation of Anne Boleyn, it was Gardiner who bore up the laps of her robes. He wrote a book,
De Vera Obedientia
, denouncing the Pope. But at the same time he had fallen out with the others over questions of theology. When the King died, Cranmer and Latimer struck. They degraded him, stripping him of crook and mitre, and sent him to prison. A new man, John Ponet, was installed as Bishop of Winchester.

Ponet was famous for running away with the wife of a butcher who sued for her return.

In the Tower, Gardiner remained intrepid.

Asked by a visitor if he thought he would ever be Bishop of Winchester again, he said: ‘Why not? The butcher got his wife back.’

When Mary came to power, everything was reversed. Ponet fled from England, Cranmer and Latimer were locked up. Gardiner became chancellor and was determined to have his revenge. But here a problem arose. It was impossible to attack his enemies as heretics when the Queen herself considered her kingdom to be in schism. The position with Rome must therefore be regulated. And for that reason, Gardiner had changed his mind and wanted Pole back into the country.

It was that, I think, which caused the rustle of laughter, gentle as a breeze through a wood, that passed through the vast crowd outside St Paul’s. The Cardinal was back, but a great trap had been laid for him . . .

And that is just what happened. A few weeks later, a new parliament met. The laws for burning heretics were restored. No monastic lands were to be given back. The Church was penniless, but the stage was set for a persecution. Gardiner managed everything. Pole had no say in these matters. Before leaving Brussels he had been made to promise not to interfere in the administration of the laws. He had returned to England after many years, and sailed up the Thames in triumph, but in fact he was now
trussed up
by Gardiner better than Henry or Cromwell ever could have dreamt.

That was my view, and events proved me right. I tried to warn Pole when I next saw him, but he rebuked me, saying I had no faith in human nature.

‘The Chancellor has a stern and harsh exterior,’ he said, ‘but even he is susceptible to the power of grace. Why, that sermon he preached at Paul’s Cross was, I believe, the finest I ever heard in my life.’

That same week, just as the laws against heresy were going through parliament, Rutter came home to Throckmorton Street one night, his eyes starting out of his head. He had been over the river to see the sports and while he was there the great blind bear at Bankside burst his chain and ran through the crowd and caught a poor serving-man by the leg and bit out a great piece of his calf. The man’s life was despaired of. In fact, he was to die three days later. I had to tell Rutter that even in London he could not expect to see that every day.

Chapter 4

The heresy trials began immediately across the river at Mary Overies, which was Gardiner’s own church as Bishop of Winchester, in London.

After the first day’s hearings, Pole summoned all the bishops, some of whom were judges in the trial, and ordered them to go back to their own dioceses, there to treat their flocks with gentleness and win them with love and mildness, not harshness and rigour.

This caused a great stir. It seemed that a battle of wills had commenced between Chancellor and Legate. For several days the trials were suspended. Then, on the Friday that week, they began again. Everyone was amazed. Pole was papal legate. How then could the Chancellor, in defiance of papal authority, try people for rejecting papal authority?

I left my searches in the paper room and went over the river to Southwark to watch the proceedings. When I arrived, the first defendant, who had been heard on the opening day, was on his feet again. John Rogers, a preacher, married with ten children, had been held in prison for many months, though under what law no one knew, after preaching a sermon at St Paul’s in which he denounced popery, idolatry and all such superstition.

‘If Henry VIII was alive now,’ he cried, ‘and if he called a parliament this day, and determined an act which, for example, made the present Queen a bastard and himself the Head of the Church again, then
you
,’ he said, pointing to Gardiner, ‘and you and you and you’ – pointing to all the other judges – ‘would say: “Oh, Amen to that!” and “Indeed, most excellent” and “
If it please your Grace
.” ’