by David Field
Thomas frowned, unsure of what was being proposed. ‘It is your wish that I become a pluralist, My Lord? Surely, and with the deepest respect to your office, that will require the authority of the Primate of All England.’
‘Indeed it will, Thomas, indeed it will, but how better to send a message to Sir Amyas that I will not be dictated to in the affairs of my office? Not only will I have formally answered his demand that the two empty benefices be filled, but I will be leaving him in no doubt that the choice of incumbent is mine, and as an additional rebuke for his insolence I will have done so by installing the one man who can inflame his wrath.’
‘And you will intercede for me with his Grace of Canterbury?’
‘No, Thomas,’ the bishop smiled. ‘I shall send you in person to argue your case, but shall arm you with a note under my hand that you may present to Archbishop Deane in person, assuring him of your suitability for three benefices.’
Thomas lost no time in riding to Canterbury on a donkey that he had purchased a year previously at Yeovil Market, and which seemed to him most fitting, given that Our Lord had chosen a similar beast on which to ride into Jerusalem on his final journey to the cross.
He spent the night before his audience on his knees in his humble cell in the hospitium of a local monastery, praying to God to honey his tongue in the manner best suited to address the head of the Church of which Thomas was only a humble parish priest.
Archbishop Deane had a promising smile on his face as he put down the letter from the Bishop of Bath and Wells and indicated for Thomas to take a seat.
‘It seems we at long last have priests of the same stern mettle displayed by my predecessor in office, who shared your Christian name. Thanks to Thomas Becket, the Church has always been afforded its rightful place — until now. The recent wars seem to have robbed men of their love for their fellow men, and as yet we have no way of knowing how far our new King Henry will be guided by Christ in his conduct of affairs of State.’
‘I have heard that he is most pious,’ Thomas offered tactfully.
‘Indeed, he has demonstrated a desire not to interfere with God’s holy ordinance during my meetings with him, although those have been mainly in my capacity as Keeper of the Great Seal. Closer to hand I am obliged almost daily to engage in disputes with the town authorities regarding the crowds that flock to Becket’s Shrine.’
‘These pilgrims no doubt bring great wealth to the town, as I’m sure your Grace regularly reminds the town bailiffs,’ Thomas replied diplomatically, unsure where the conversation was leading.
‘Indeed, had I the time, I would be constantly reminding them that without the cathedral, there would be no town,’ the Archbishop confirmed. ‘Unfortunately, as Primate of All England, and Keeper of the Seal, I have other matters with which to concern myself than the state of the local streets. Perhaps a man such as you could do battle in my stead?’
Thomas deflected his eyes to the floor in a submissive glance while urging his heart to beat less exaltedly as he took in the implication. ‘You have God’s work for me to do here in Canterbury, your Grace?’
‘The Bishop of Bath and Wells advises me that you are ambitious, competent, diligent and most persuasive in argument. I am inviting you to become my chaplain, Thomas.’
Thomas could hardly draw breath to reply, which Deane took as a sign of uncertainty.
‘Since you already have three benefices you should not look for any great financial reward here at Canterbury. However, the nature of the position I am offering you is one that would appeal to any man of your ambition. It will involve regular attendance upon me wherever I go, which these days seems increasingly to be the royal Court. Richard Foxe, the Bishop of Winchester and Lord Privy Seal, is ever seeking clerics who can negotiate matters of State without being overawed by nobility, and it may be that between us we can commend you to His Majesty for diplomatic duties across the Channel.’
‘Your Grace does me great honour, for which I will swear before God to prove worthy,’ Thomas mumbled.
‘See that you do, Thomas, see that you do,’ the Archbishop admonished him. ‘And now your first duty must be to chase me to the bottom of this jug of excellent claret.’
III
Although not yet thirty years of age, Thomas was now, in financial terms, comfortable if not quite wealthy. Given his taste for extravagance, this was perhaps as well, but once Archbishop Deane had formally granted the necessary dispensation for Thomas to enjoy the revenues from three benefices at the same time, while ministering to the prelate in a purely ecclesiastical capacity, Thomas was clearly in need of more than one house, which in turn would require a somewhat flexible and portable household.
He began with a modest four-roomed house in Canterbury itself, in which he installed a steward and a cook, while acquiring several ushers, footmen and servers locally from the town on a ‘live out’ basis. Given his need to occasionally show his face in one or other of his livings in Somerset, in order to justify their stipends while leaving the actual conduct of the services and other holy offices to lesser clergy upon payment of a pittance, he also required a house further north than Canterbury.
He chose a comfortable dwelling in Putney, close to the old bridge that would allow him to cross the Thames with speed should he be needed in Westminster when the Archbishop was in attendance on the King, while being only a mile or so down the road from Fulham Palace, the ‘country’ residence of the Bishop of London, regularly served by wherry from Westminster steps.
In this house Thomas appointed his own chaplain, a young man called Thomas Larke, a fellow East Anglian a few years younger than Thomas and the son of a Thetford innkeeper. Thomas saw in Larke a kindred soul who did not possess the wit to rise as quickly as he had done, and therefore was no threat to his ambitions, but was perfectly competent to carry out simple clerical duties such as conducting Mass twice daily.
The choice of a house just outside London proved to be a wise one, since Archbishop Henry Deane seemed to be more in the King’s service than he was in the service of God, and was almost permanently resident in one of the lesser suites of rooms in Richmond Palace, the favoured residence of Henry VII and his queen, Elizabeth of York.
Here was installed a royal nursery for the princesses, while the princes Arthur and his younger brother Henry were, as tradition demanded, housed in Westminster, where Arthur in particular might be tutored for the regal role that he would one day occupy.
Henry VII was more inclined toward international diplomacy than he was the expenditure of vast sums of money on foreign wars, and he had sought to ally himself with the growing power of Spain by marrying Arthur off to the young Infanta of Aragon, Katherine. Katherine was welcomed into London by a massive crowd that threatened to sink London Bridge by its sheer weight, and proudly heading the triumphant procession was the young Prince Henry, already displaying the love for knightly display that would epitomise his later life.
The wedding was fixed for 14th November 1501, in St Paul’s Cathedral, and was to be conducted jointly by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London. While the Archbishop was in attendance on the King, Thomas opted for a stroll through the gardens of the Palace. Approaching him from the opposite direction was a young couple walking sedately arm in arm, and as the distance between them and Thomas narrowed, he realised that he was about to confront he old adversary, Thomas Howard. Thomas smirked as Howard’s face fell, and he couldn’t resist the first word.
‘Cross yourself — here comes a priest.’
Howard managed a pale smile in response, then turned to the elegant fair-haired lady on his arm. ‘May I introduce my wife, Anne? Dearest, this is Thomas Wulcy, with whom I went to school. He was the finest scholar in our class, and as you can observe he has since taken holy orders.’
‘Indeed he has,’ Thomas replied, ‘and were you to push him into the mud today, you would incur a penance of many thousands of Pater Nosters. You might also incur the royal wrath, since my maste
r the Archbishop of Canterbury is even now in attendance upon His Majesty.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Howard replied with an ingratiating smile. ‘I omitted to give my dear wife her full entitlement. She is Anne of York, the former Princess Anne, daughter of the late King Edward, the sister of the Queen, and therefore the sister-in-law of King Henry. That makes me a royal brother-in-law, as I calculate.’
‘The last I heard, you were destined for the Tower,’ Thomas sneered back ungraciously, invoking another superior smile from Thomas Howard.
‘I was never destined for the Tower, and my father only resided there for a short while until His Majesty realised his mistake, and honoured him with the duty of putting down a rebellion in the north, by which process I became Sir Thomas Howard. I was knighted on the field by my father, who has been restored to his title of Earl of Surrey, a title that one day will of course be mine. Now, if you will excuse us, the Queen awaits us for an early dinner.’
As they moved past Thomas down the path, Anne Howard looking at him sideways with curiosity as he gave her a polite bow, he concluded, with some regret, that the arrogant young buck had probably got the better of their exchange. But nothing lost, he reminded himself. ‘He that lives by the sword shall die by the sword’, or so it was foretold in the Gospel of St. Matthew, and in these uncertain times a false word or an unwise alliance might result in death by the axe. Howard’s reference to dinner had set Thomas’s stomach rumbling, and he headed back towards the Great Hall.
Thomas was allocated a place in the nave of St. Paul’s for the wedding ceremony and from there, as he stood craning his neck over the feathered bonnets and gable hoods of half the nobility of the realm, he watched the solemn procession of the bride. Prince Arthur was waiting with the Archbishop, the Spanish Legate and nineteen other mitred clergymen in all their ecclesiastical finery, for the ceremony that would make a fifteen-year-old Spanish girl the Queen-apparent of a nation of whose language she knew very little.
While the remainder of the congregation gazed in awe at the magnificence of the ceremony, the beauty of the bride and the solemnity of the wedding rites, Thomas looked in jealous fascination at the pectoral crosses on the chests of the bishops, their gilded mitres and their jewel-encrusted croziers. Was he not one of the foremost Latin and Greek scholars in the entire land? Could he not speak many of the languages of the nations immediately across the Channel? Did he not possess diplomatic skills honed in the settlement of petty parochial disputes between the parishioners whose causes he occasionally judged during his rare visits to his benefices?
Yet here he was, still a humble priest, dressed in a plain black soutane that contrasted sharply with the colours of the rainbow by which he was surrounded. If there was justice in this life, he should by rights be one of those on the raised platform, waving the incense and administering the Host with a jewelled hand upon which sat a fine gold ring of office.
Two days later, it was time to return to Canterbury, but when Thomas was admitted to the Archbishop’s chambers in the Bishop’s Palace, his patron was not alone. Seated across from him was a man who looked as if he had died some months previously, to judge by the skeletal set of his skull and the thinness of the frame under his simple ecclesiastical robes. Thomas stood uncertainly in the doorway until Henry Deane waved him over.
‘This is the chaplain of whom I spoke earlier, Richard. Thomas, may I introduce Richard Foxe, Bishop of Winchester? He has need of your linguistic skills.’
‘In what regard, my Lord?’ Thomas enquired of the corpse-like visitor, whose mouth broke into a rictus smile that was both encouraging and repellent at the same time. He held out a parchment to Thomas.
‘It is a despatch for the French Ambassador from King Louis, which in accordance with our normal practice has been intercepted and opened. We are currently engaged in diplomatic negotiations with Louis regarding his intentions towards Italy, in the hope of further ingratiating ourselves with Spain, and we wish to know what instructions the Ambassador has received regarding how to progress these negotiations. Take as much time as you require, and while you do so feel free to refresh yourself with some of this excellent Rhenish wine.’
Foxe beckoned to a page for an additional goblet to be placed at Thomas’s disposal, and as he poured himself a generous measure Thomas read through the two-page vellum. After some five minutes he looked back up at Foxe and announced his conclusions.
‘The Ambassador has been instructed to proceed slowly. See here — “doucement”? That means “slowly” in our language. However, he is not to positively obstruct any prospect of eventual agreement, simply to leave the door open wide, depending upon the outcome of his king’s latest armed venture south of his borders. See here again, “ne fait pas dilatoire” — that best translates as “do not act in an obstructive way”.’
Foxe’s face relaxed into another sepulchral smile. ‘It is as we had hoped. Our own King needs time to see the direction in which the wind blows. He will be most comforted by this, as indeed am I, since the King in one of his stubborn tempers is not a man with whom to discuss matters of fine diplomacy.’
Thomas looked across at the Archbishop. ‘Your Grace, we must depart without much further delay, if we are to reach Canterbury by nightfall. Even then it will be a hard ride, and my old donkey is hardly the fastest mount on which to progress.’
Henry Deane smiled back indulgently. ‘Bishop Foxe here has asked that you be allowed to remain, since there are other matters of translation upon which he would value your counsel. He is accommodated at Richmond, while you are comfortably housed here in Putney. I shall not require you again until Mass next Sunday.’
Thomas bowed from the presence, having promised to call on Foxe on the following forenoon.
For the next few days Thomas learned much of the devious machinations of King Henry around the thrones of Europe, the importance to England of its trade links with Burgundy, but the threat to it posed by the heir to the Holy Roman Empire, Maximilian, who was allied to Burgundy by marriage. Henry required to maintain good relations with Maximilian, and he was officially allied with him in seeking to keep the French out of Italy; at the same time, diplomatic overtures were being made to Louis XII of France in the hope of preventing him from further attacking principalities in Italy, since this would be likely to result in both Spain and the Emperor demanding that Henry commit English troops to a war with France, which he could ill afford.
Foxe was amazed by the alacrity with which Thomas grasped the essentials of this diplomatic puzzle, and by the second day of their discussions Thomas was even able to venture a few suggestions of his own as to how the impasse might be skirted around.
King Henry had a delicate matter for Foxe to negotiate. Henry had recently been obliged to put down a challenge to his throne by a pretender claiming to be the Duke of York, son of the late King Edward, and one of the ‘Princes in the Tower’ who Richard III had been accused of having murdered. His real name was Perkin Warbeck, and he had been given considerable support and encouragement by the Scottish King James IV.
King Henry was anxious to seal the northern door to his kingdom by means of a perpetual peace treaty with Scotland, possibly cemented by intermarriage between the two royal houses. Unfortunately, it seemed that James was reluctant to enter into any treaty directly with Henry, given that his army had suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands of the Earl of Surrey. In the circumstances, any face to face confrontation between the two monarchs would seem, to the rest of the world, like a capitulation on unfavourable terms by a defeated monarch, and James was a proud man.
Richard Foxe, as Lord Privy Seal, had been given the thankless task of bringing James to the bargaining table, and had delegated it to the Keeper of the Seal, and his old friend, Henry Deane, with a helpful suggestion that he leave the actual organisation of it to his chaplain.
Within twenty-four hours Thomas had identified the most appropriate channel of communication, and organised a meeting, via their chap
lains, with the Spanish Ambassador, Don Pedro de Ayala, who was also the accredited ambassador to the Scottish court, and could act as a speaking tube between London and Edinburgh without exciting comment.
Thomas advanced his plan while they sat in Don Pedro’s suite of rooms in Westminster, drinking a fine Shiraz and sizing each other up.
‘How would a treaty between England and Scotland benefit Spain?’ Don Pedro began.
‘Simply in this,’ Thomas replied. ‘Scotland has long been an enemy of England, and the need to secure his northern border against incursion necessitates King Henry keeping back many troops that might be employed elsewhere.’
‘Where exactly?’
‘France, for one. Scotland and France have a sad history of aligning against England. They call it the “Auld Alliance”, and on many past occasions, when England has been at war with France, the Scots have harassed it from the north.’
‘Then why should my master of Aragon not simply let the Scots stir the French? That way, England would need to wage war on France, which is what my master would have you do anyway.’
‘Because, for the reason I just explained, any war with France would bring the Scots down upon us, necessitating that we withhold a sizeable number of troops from direct warfare with King Louis, troops that might be sent to assist the Spanish cause.’
Don Pedro thought for a moment, before nodding slowly, then taking the discussion to its next logical stage. ‘And what seeks King Henry as the terms of such a treaty?’
‘A vow of perpetual peace, and a marriage between the two houses. This might even result in Scottish troops being loaned to England to fight against France.’
‘And who are to be the partners of this marriage?’
‘King James himself, obviously, since he is currently unmarried.’