The Courier's Tale Read online

  Peter Walker

  For Marie and Don

  He, Michelangelo, is never less alone than when alone . . . yet he willingly keeps the friendship of those in whom rays of excellence shine forth – for instance, the illustrious Monsignor Pole, with his rare talents and singular goodness . . .

  – Ascanio Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, 1553

  Contents

  Main Characters

  Prologue

  BOOK I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  BOOK II

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  BOOK III

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Afterword

  Note on Sources

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Main Characters

  Reginald or Pole, or Poole, born 1500, cousin of Henry VIII

  Michael Throckmorton, Pole’s courier

  Pietro Bembo, Italian writer, poet, connoisseur

  Michelangelo

  Vittoria Colonna, poet and patroness

  Henry VIII, King of England

  Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, ruler of Spain, the Netherlands, Sicily, Peru, etc.

  Francis I, King of France

  Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister

  Mary, Henry’s daughter by Katherine of Aragon, later known as ‘Bloody Mary’, born 1516

  Philip of Spain, the Emperor’s son, Mary’s husband

  Margaret Plantagenet, the ‘Lady of Sarum’, Reginald Pole’s mother

  Judith Tracie, Throckmorton’s cousin and first love

  Agnes Hide

  Sir George Throckmorton, Michael’s elder brother

  Marc’Antonio Flaminio, Italian writer and poet

  Lord Montagu, Pole’s brother

  Marquis of Exeter, Pole’s cousin

  Edward Courtenay, Exeter’s son

  Gian’pietro Carafa, Pope Paul IV 1555–1560

  Ercole Gonzaga, Regent of Mantua

  Stephen Gardiner, Chancellor of England

  Prologue

  One night some time ago three men broke into a room which is now famous all over the world and which even then, while under construction and shrouded in secrecy, was the subject of intense curiosity in Italy and beyond.

  The term ‘broke into’ perhaps conveys the wrong impression. Using a key illicitly obtained, they made their way through the dark in almost complete stealth.

  Right at the entrance, however, two of them stumbled, one after the other. This was because the door, which is framed in marble, has an unusual high threshold or ‘saddle’, to use the technical term. You walk into the room as if stepping through a window frame. Even today, in our own perilous but well-lit age, this can trip the unwary.

  The first man cursed in Italian: he knew the obstacle was there but had forgotten. The second cursed, in English, because he stubbed his toe.

  It would do no good to tell you what they said. Nothing dates with such finality as an oath. The ‘fuck you’s of the 1960s and the ‘sink me’s of the 1690s share the same doom. But two of those shadows slipping into the Medici chapel in Florence that night were young men in their twenties, for whom even the idea of their own death is hard to believe, much less the fact that one day they will have died so long ago they will seem no more than stick-figures from an antique age.

  The Italian who led the way in was a workman on the site. Following him were two Englishmen. One was a scholar named Tom Lupset. The other was considered the most brilliant and accomplished young man in Italy. His name was Reynold or Reginald Pole. In Italy he was known as Il Signor d’Inghilterra, the English lord, or even the lord of England, although he was in fact an ordinary ‘Mr’.

  But he was a cousin of Henry the Eighth, and a much cherished cousin at that, which was itself unusual, for Henry preferred attention to be directed to his own accomplishments. As King of England, however, he was not in a position to shine in person in the Italian universities. And his cousin’s reputation there reflected well on his own genius. Henry paid Pole one hundred pounds a year to maintain a magnificent household among the students.

  The Italians for their part were very pleased with Pole. His lineage alone made him a figure of romance. He seemed to have arrived among them straight out of the beautifully named, if confusing, War of the Roses, la rosa bianca e la vermiglia. His mother was the last person to bear the surname Plantagenet. It was his grandfather who drowned in the famous butt of Malmsey.

  As well as all that, young Pole was noted for scholarship and virtue. Not only the Doge of Venice and the political establishment of the Republic paid him compliments; he was befriended and praised by the leading scholars and intellectuals of the day – Erasmus, Bembo, Giberti, Sadoleto . . .

  What amazed people about him most, however, was this: he put himself to bed.

  We have a contemporary description of Pole: ‘Of medium height, in complexion white and red, as commonly are the English, his face a little broad, with merry and benignant eyes, and in youth his beard was rather fair. Robust of body, seldom sick . . . he did not care for much personal service and often went to bed without assistance.’

  And furthermore: ‘He rose before daylight and dressed himself without any man’s help.’

  Pole had been a student in Padua since 1521. In 1525 he made his first visit to Rome. It was on the way back from Rome that we see him slipping into the construction site in Florence.

  Entry into the Medici chapel was strictly controlled. Michelangelo, the architect and sculptor of the work, kept the keys; he was the last to leave at night and first back in the morning. A few months before, at the end of 1524, there had been a series of nocturnal break-ins. Nothing was stolen; the sole purpose seems to have been to look around the chapel, where, it was reported, a marvellous group of figures was coming into existence – gathering, as it were, at the tombs of two young Medici dukes, Giuliano and Lorenzo.

  Michelangelo was furious at the incursions. To his mind, making a work of art was like making a child – something best done in private. For a week or two he made his foremen stay on site and keep watch all night. But it was midwinter, it was bitterly cold, they missed their lovely wives, and in any case nothing ever happened. After a while he had to let them go home again.

  Cautiously, the midnight visits were resumed. This, after all, was Italy. In other countries, aristocratic pastimes were different – hunting, tournaments, mock battles where only the blows given to the peasants were real. But in Italy there was a great passion for art. Duke
s and cardinals spied through keyholes, lured away painters, sculptors and medallists, swooped on commissions made by others. The Pope himself slipped into the Sistine one day to inspect the ceiling frescos before they were finished, only to be met by a rain of curses, and, so it is said, planks, thrown down by the painter, working alone high above him.

  In the Medici chapel, however, any such seclusion was out of the question. Dozens of stone masons, carpenters, bricklayers and labourers were employed there. We have their names, we even know their nicknames – Chicken, Liar, Gloomy, Babyface, the Goose, Horse, Nero, Antichrist, Woodpecker . . . And when Antichrist and Babyface are on the payroll, even the best security arrangements tend to go awry. Which particular workman let in Lupset and Pole that night is uncertain. Let’s say it was Woodpecker, if only because his name brings him closer to us than the others: across the centuries, you can still hear the very light, rapid action of his chisel . . .

  So there they are – Woodpecker leads the way in, Lupset and Pole follow. Woodpecker stumbles, Lupset stumbles, then all three are inside the ‘chapel of the princes’. High above them the cupola is unfinished; only a little starlight shines in. But then Woodpecker brings out the little lantern he has kept until now under his cloak, and suddenly, here and there among the builders’ gear, they begin to see human forms, strange, splendid, some alone, some in groups, some carved in white marble and others, their direct forebears as it were, full-sized models made of dark tow, pitch and rags.

  For five hundred years people have been trying to describe the peculiar melancholy conveyed by the statues in the Medici chapel. The figures are sublime, august, yet the atmosphere is muted, full of doubts and speculation, modest; it suggests something remote but commonplace, domestic almost, and inevitable. In short, the subject is the hour of death itself.

  Pole and Lupset have no opportunity to consider their impression of the chamber. Woodpecker is in a hurry to leave. Temporary custodian of the Medici tombs, Woodpecker is a tyrant. His modern equivalents, glaring over their morning paper at American tourists, are not much better. Suddenly Woodpecker puts his finger to his lips. Then he blows out the lantern. He has heard a noise. They must not be caught there, especially not by Michelangelo, the terrible maestro with his ‘eyes the colour of horn’ (according to his contemporary, Vasari) ‘flecked with bluish and yellowish sparks’, of whom even the Holy Father in Rome is afraid. The three men stand there stock-still in the dark. But nothing happens. There was no noise. There never had been one. Michelangelo is still fast asleep in his house around the corner. Nevertheless the tour is finished. In a few moments Pole and Lupset are hustled out of the chapel, down the aisle of the outer church and then out into the street and away, through the city under the stars.

  By that time, in 1525, among the nine or ten models made of pitch and tow, two or three of their marble descendants were almost complete – the figures of Duke Lorenzo, and his two companions, the Dawn, a beautiful young woman, reluctantly waking, and Dusk, a middle-aged man, looking back sadly at the end of the day.

  It was this trio which stayed in Pole’s mind when the lantern went out, and the next day, and indeed, for the rest of his life – the naked girl, the middle-aged man and the figure of Lorenzo, eyes shadowed by a helmet, the pupils un-engraved, the whole figure somewhat inert, withdrawn, elegant, sunk in thought . . .

  BOOK I

  Chapter 1

  I was just a boy when my father died and left me his second-best ambling mare – a grey, milky in colour and with the eyes black, a sure sign of good disposition in a light-coloured horse.

  My father was on his way to the Holy Land at the time, but his journey ended in Italy. In fact, it was on the road between Florence and Rome that he closed his eyes and ended all his journeys. Even as a young child, I knew that Florence was a long way off – further than Alcester, further than Bredon Hill, which I sometimes saw on the horizon, and away over the sea, which I had never seen but envisaged quite clearly. I knew exactly where Florence was, as my father had always promised that one day, when I had finished my studies, I could go there with my brother Anthony. Anthony, who was already in Italy, inherited my father’s best horse, but I did not mind that. My eldest brother, George, inherited much more than both of us, which is to say almost everything, and I did not care about that either. Every day I hurried out to watch for my grey mare. I must have spent hours sitting on the gatepost at Coughton looking down the road. This was partly to avoid the gloom in the house – my mother and aunts and sisters all wept a great deal on hearing of the death of my father, which made me feel sad, but I don’t think I understood that he was in fact never to come back. So I stayed well out of the way, watching the road for my inheritance.

  The lads in the stables gave me a switch so that when she saw me she would know her master. In fact, we knew each other quite well already. Once at the Alcester fair I ran out across her path and she knocked me down: I can still remember being struck by her breast, which was surprisingly soft and silken, and then she ran on sure-footedly over me. Someone screamed. A woman I had never seen before swooped and picked me up and held me to her breast, also surprisingly soft and silken.

  My father, who had been riding the mare, came back and leapt off, in a rage with everyone – with me, with himself, with the horse, perhaps with the woman holding me to her bosom. I was, however, quite unharmed.

  After that, I felt we knew each other, the grey and I; when I used to go out to the stables and look up at her in the stall, there was a kind of severe understanding between us. A few years later she was ridden away to Italy.

  She never came back. I forget the reason. Perhaps she was sold and the money was sent home, which would have been the sensible arrangement, but one which I didn’t grasp. In any event, for a whole summer I sat on one of the gateposts, a globe of stone roughly pricked with yellow lichen, watching for my inheritance. One night I even dreamt that I was on her back and riding towards her owner, that is to say, towards me, asleep in bed at the time, at Coughton. This did not unduly trouble the dream. And now when I look back at my life, I think that perhaps its whole course was laid down right there, on that gatepost at Coughton in Warwickshire, looking down the road towards the wide world. Most people, thinking back to their childhood, can see signposts which long ago were pointing to their future. My intimation, however, was simpler than most: for me, the road ahead was the road – and specifically, the road to Italy. For I doubt if anyone alive has ridden back and forth between England and Italy as often as I, Michael Throckmorton, Esq. of Warwickshire and London and now of Mantua. In short, it has been my whole career.

  Of course I have performed a good many other feats as well – married twice, fathered six children, been twice to prison, become rich, and bred some excellent horses – but chiefly in my life that is what I have done: ridden back and forth between England and Padua or Verona or Venice or Rome, almost always in service to the most illustrious Mr Pole.

  On his account I have met one emperor, two kings, a queen, two popes, and any number of lords, ladies, fools, thieves, liars and, I think, more than one murderer. On Pole’s behalf I once made a long address before a king and queen and the greatest gathering of nobles and prelates ever seen in England. My voice did not shake at all: I had become an accomplished professional – a courier.

  It was not an occupation I ever sought, although it is not entirely without honour, being carried out in the service of Mercury, who reveals to men the decisions of destiny, which are not necessarily pleasant. For this reason his servants are sometimes disliked and even hated; being in his service is not a safe occupation. This is something we couriers and envoys have to put up with, but we take due precautions: the god of the highway, the crossroads and the city gate, is also the patron of thieves, reporters and pickpockets. In short, we learn a few tricks to survive, but that in turn earns us even deeper suspicion.

  On my very first mission, I noticed the mistrustful expression that greets you even if you have just c
rossed Europe in record time.

  That was on the journey I undertook to deliver Mr Pole’s great book or letter to the King. By that time, you must know, King Henry had divorced his wife, married Dame Boleyn and, refusing any longer to recognise the authority of the Pope, declared himself Head of the Church. One day, a year or two after these events, he remembered his beloved cousin, Reynald Pole, immersed in his studies far away in Italy and, recalling also his great reputation for wisdom and goodness, he sent a message requiring him to state his opinion of the changes in England. In reply Pole wrote a long, long letter – I think more than two hundred pages – and gave it to me to take to Henry. So there I was, in front of the King, on one knee as required, holding out the leather satchel which contained the book.

  The King stood looking at me for a minute as if I was an apparition from the underworld.

  ‘You came on your own?’ he said.

  I nodded my head.

  ‘That seems very strange,’ said the King. ‘Suppose this packet had fallen into the wrong hands.’

  ‘The wrong hands!’ I said. I felt my face burn. As if I would permit some stranger to disburden me on the road. I suppose I had rather a hot temper in those days.

  ‘Ah, well,’ said the King, pacifically, ‘perhaps it’s all right. After all – here you are. And they say that good writing is like a good man: it needs no protection as it makes its way through a wicked world.’

  Then he unbent a little more and asked me one or two other questions – what I thought of the ladies in Venice, for instance.

  I said that some were beautiful, but they were haughty and that I was thinking more of an English wife.

  To this he said nothing.

  He wore a gold dagger slung on a silk girdle from his hip. It was a magnificent object, with the face of a lion on the pommel, or was it a man or a woman turning into a lion?

  He had made no move to take the satchel, and was still looking thoughtfully at me.

  ‘Why you?’ he said.