They make almost unbearable reading, these lists, stabbing the imagination with their meticulous, automatic enumerating of such things as ‘two old pieces of tapestry,’ ‘two old carpets,’ and ‘three old worn dripping pans.’ There is something at once pitiful and terrifying about their mechanical throwing open of cupboard doors upon the skeletons of ostentation and carefulness, the gay apparel and the gorgeous jewels, the poor little shifts and the worn-out splendours … and the memories, the standing cup with H for Henry and A for dead and forgotten Anne Boleyn on its cover, the standing cup with Henry’s Tudor rose and Katherine of Aragon’s pomegranate badge.
The Lisle documents were known to Victorian scholars, but it took Miss Byrne to grasp their full historical significance. Without her labours, the Lisle family would have remained a tragic piece of flotsam in the Henrician revolution, immersed in the tidal movements of Tudor history: the break with the Roman Church, the dissolution of the monasteries, the creation of the Tudor bureaucracy, the rise and fall of great churchmen and ministers like Wolsey, More and Cromwell, and the enduringly lubricious legend of Henry’s six wives. Miss Byrne was the first to see not only that the Lisles were acute witnesses to much of this but that by virtue of their position in Calais (perched, as it were, just outside the court’s window, anxious for every crumb of news) the letters written to them had equal, or even greater, value. They form a matchless anthology of Tudor prose, sparkling with life in a period described by C. S. Lewis as ‘the Drab and Transitional’. They show the living language that Shakespeare was heir to. For the letters written to Lisle and his wife come from all parts of English society: from privy councillors and archbishops; from country squires and yeoman farmers (on the estates back home); from bailiffs and chaplains, jailbirds and midwives. For seven precious years, a complete world comes back to life and speech.
Because of Lisle’s position, of course, that world is filled with many of the great names of Tudor history. Besides the King himself, constantly on the horizon like some brilliant summer storm, we glimpse at least four of his wives: Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves.
The period 1533 to 1540 corresponds exactly with the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, the cold and clever architect of the new state. Many other (frequently doomed) luminaries move before our eyes: Archbishop Cranmer of the Prayer Book; Sir Richard Riche, the sinister solicitor-general; the poets Thomas Wyatt and Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey; and Princess Mary (later Bloody, who died with the loss of Calais [1558] engraved on her heart).
Yet for all their glamour, it is not these figures who dominate the correspondence. It is the little people: the captain who has lost his ship; the chaplain who has preached a dangerous sermon; the serving wench who is unjustly thrown into jail; the old retainer who gives recipes or medical advice. One figure, especially, steps from anonymity straight into Tudor history: Master John Husee, the Lisles’ agent, estate manager and matchless confidant.
The collection includes no less than 515 of John Husee’s letters, making him the choric voice of the whole drama. The son of a London merchant, in his mid-thirties, bachelor and self-styled gentleman, he is a born organizer of other people’s affairs, and absolutely dedicated to Lisle and Honor – ‘Your lordship’s own man bounden’, ‘Your ladyship’s own man’. He is meticulous, gossipy, observant, wise in the ways of ‘this wily world’, and capable of turning his hand to any task, diplomatic or domestic.
Husee’s exploits in the Lisle service frequently teeter on the edge of comic epic, or comic opera: a Tudor Figaro. He will extract the contents of a man’s will before the will is read, or even before the man is dead (and then describe the death most movingly); he will curse the Abbot of Westminster, a noted bon viveur, in suitable style – ‘I would he had a tun of wine, and the cask, in his belly!’; he will wheedle away Honor’s favourite pet dog, little Porky, because he knows it has caught another lady’s fancy, and later replace it with a rare South American monkey.
Husee directs us into the heart of the Lisle letters, which is a theme straight out of Shakespeare’s history plays: the exercise of power, influence and personal affection in a dangerous world where no one is safe.
The outward sign of this is an astonishing, ceaseless carrying of gifts and remembrances to and from friends, clients, businessmen, political allies, family relations, religious advisers, ancient retainers and the great panjandrums of the Tudor state. There is scarcely a letter that does not mention some form of material benefit or bounty. Money itself was almost never sent. As Christopher Hill has observed, probably the nearest thing to ready cash was wine (just as tobacco still forms the ready currency of a modern closed hierarchy like the prison or penitentiary). Other favourite gifts included game, pies, spices and conserves, pet animals (the rarer the better), horses and armour, dress materials and jewels, and the famous cramp rings, blessed by the King, against rheumatism and chronic ills. These gifts were more than Tudor eccentricities. They express the continuous functioning of the Tudor hierarchy of power. Their emphasis on the rare and strange and special is a recognition of the critical individuality of power. Being genuinely personal, they carry genuine goodwill, although it is frail and requires constant renewal.
The ultimate gifts in the King’s power, of course, were land and position. Lisle’s salary as deputy of Calais was negligible – perhaps £200 a year. What kept him going, through mounting debts and an inability even to pay his own household, was the promise of royal reward: land, gifts, new ‘rooms’ or posts he could assign, and thus receive gifts for himself. Such a system explains a dominant characteristic of Tudor political life: that as personal wealth and prestige increased, personal security and expectation, being dependent on the King’s favour, grew more tenuous – terrifyingly so. Hence the vital importance of a man like John Husee, the go-between, the intelligencer (a word coined about 1580), the gift-presenter, the manipulator, the man who knows more than his master.
Here is Husee’s account of presenting Lisle’s New Year gift and greeting at court in January 1538, just over two years before his fall. He interprets every nuance of gesture or phrase, for each one carries perilous weight. (The Lord Privy Seal is Cromwell; Sir Brian Tuke is the steely-eyed Royal Treasurer.)
I delivered on New Year’s Day your gift to the King’s Majesty in his own hands; and as soon as I was within the Chamber of Presence, going to present the same as accustomed, my Lord Privy Seal smiled and said to the King’s Grace, ‘here cometh my Lord Lisle’s man!’; and the King spake merrily unto him again, but what his Highness said I cannot tell. So that, after I had done my duty, his Grace received it of me smiling, and thanking your lordship did ask heartily how you and my lady did. His Grace spake few words that day to those that came. As far as I could perceive he spake to no man so much as he did unto me, which was no more words but this: ‘I thank my lord. How doth my lord and my lady? Are they merry?’ It was gently done of my Lord Privy Seal to have your lordship in remembrance, setting the matter so well forward. The King stood leaning against the cupboard, receiving all things; and Mr Tuke at the end of the same cupboard, penning all things that were presented … There was but a small Court.
It is but a small scene, yet an immensely telling one. History lives. We hear the King’s bluff laughter, and then the whispered joke (about Husee? about Lisle?). We see Husee practically counting the King’s words, and we listen, like him, for the faintest trace of sarcasm in the word ‘merry’ (too merry in Calais?). We see how Cromwell has monopolized access to the King, and how he alone can ‘set matters forward’. We see the accountant’s quill pen, as much a symbol of the Tudor state as the headsman’s axe, ‘penning all things’. We even catch a hint of the King’s lassitude and obesity, as he leans against the cupboard, casual but lethal: a slumbering tiger ready to spring.
Husee’s shrewdness of observation and political tact became Lisle’s most valuable weapon in the struggle for survival. He knows, for example, the danger of Lisle’s wri
ting over-long letters to the King; and the absolute necessity of watching the shadows behind Cromwell. Most of all, he understands his own master’s greatest weakness: Lisle’s tendency to be temperamental, to be thrown into panic or depression by any hint of official disfavour or criticism. He is too nice, too anxious not to give offence. This made Lisle especially vulnerable to Cromwell, who had perfected the art of pressuring his subordinates by unspoken threats, nuances of displeasure, meaningful silences, or sudden tiny cold splinters of criticism – his notorious ‘sharp’ letters – that slid beneath the skin like glass. ‘If your lordship had received such another letter,’ wrote Husee bracingly to Lisle on one occasion, ‘I am well assured that you would not ‘a slept well in seven nights following!’
In one celebrated instance Husee actually confronted Cromwell with one of these sharp letters to Lisle, and boldly informed the Lord Privy Seal ‘that if his lordship did not the sooner write some other loving letter unto you [Lisle] that I stood in doubt that your Lordship might take such conceit [imaginary fear] thereon that might perchance put you in hazard of some disease or peril of your life’. One can almost see Cromwell’s narrow lips – in the famous Holbein portrait – draw back in a disarming, deadly smile: ‘he answered and said that he thought your Lordship was wiser than to take it after any such manner; for whatsoever he wrote, he was and is and would remain still your Lordship’s sincere and very friend.’
Part of the fascination of this interview is that it takes place between the second most powerful man in the kingdom and an ordinary citizen, a nobody who, apart from the master he serves so faithfully, is a cipher, a walk-on part in the conventional drama of history. Yet Husee and Cromwell talked, argued, even joked after a fashion (though he had spent ‘half the day in seeking of him’); and that is history too. Thanks to Miss Byrne we can still hear it as it really happened. If we were Frenchmen we would surely find a philosophical distinction to make about this: between l’histoire apprise, or history as it is normally learned and heard, and l’histoire surprise, or overheard history. The Lisle letters are overheard history, par excellence.
But we must end with our tale. Husee warned Lisle three years before his fall that anything to do with heresy, renegade preachers or religious heterodoxy at Calais must be treated like gunpowder. Regarding church matters, he cautions Lisle, ‘be no less earnest and precise than you would be in causes of high treason.’ Lisle, the genial, ageing, anxious administrator – who was not much concerned with religion anyway, except that his wife inconveniently favoured the ‘old’ Papist rituals – would have been only too happy to oblige. But in the Tudor state, events easily outstripped men and all their contrivances.
1540 was one of the deadliest years for Tudor career-makers, rivalled only by 1536, when Anne Boleyn’s fall dragged so many with her to the block. Not only was Lisle suddenly incarcerated in the Tower, but his opposite number in Dublin, Leonard, Lord Grey, deputy of Ireland, was recalled, arrested and – black augury – summarily executed. The most shattering blow, however, was the fate of My Lord Privy Seal himself. After a long battle in Council throughout the spring of 1540, Cromwell apparently consolidated his position. He was created Earl of Essex in April, at the very moment of Lisle’s recall. But Cromwell’s safety, no less than Lisle’s, was illusory. In June he was arrested on charges of heresy and expropriation, and on July 28 he was beheaded with little ceremony on the lawns within the Tower, probably within earshot of Lisle. His last letter to the King, abandoning all his wonted coolness and icy circumspection, begged for ‘mercy, mercy, mercy’. He was found guilty of, among many other things, pro-Lutheran leanings and favouring the ‘Sacramentaries’ (who challenged the conservative doctrine of transubstantiation in the Mass): there had been many such in Calais.
This sequence of events has naturally led historians to suppose that Lisle was himself dragged down in the general attack on Cromwell, ostensibly for administrative incompetence and for not enforcing religious orthodoxy among the fractious garrison and townfolk of Calais, just as Husee had feared. But the facts are far stranger and more ironic. The appalling truth seems to be that Cromwell (‘your very friend’) framed Lisle. In a desperate last attempt to defend his position against his religious right-wing enemies in Council, Cromwell used the machinations of Lisle’s chaplain in Rome to discredit Lisle’s entire administration in Calais. He thereby hoped to cover up his own involvement in protecting the Sacramentaries (or left wing) in Calais. Cromwell alone knew that old Lisle was perfectly innocent; perhaps he even meant to save him when the danger was past. But then the mantrap closed on his own head. The details are complex and fascinating, but what emerges in the end is a terrible and convincing picture of Cromwell ruthlessly and vainly sacrificing Lisle to the royal fury. The letters between Lisle’s stepdaughter and her French lover added a final twist: that they were hastily disposed of at the time of arrest could mean only one thing to the Tudor mind – treason.
So one more Tudor family fell, public life destroying private, power annihilating human trust.
The administration changed in Calais, then, but the axe did not fall in London. Ambassador Marillac, reporting Cromwell’s demise, noted perplexedly: ‘As to the other prisoners, people know not what to say except that there is good hope as regards the Deputy of Calais, of whom the King has said he could not think the Deputy erred through malice but rather through ignorance.’ It still sounded perilously like an epitaph. For eighteen months the position hung in the balance. We would give anything to know of Husee’s frantic efforts on behalf of his beloved master: but there are no further letters. Miss Byrne observes that Mistress Anne Basset, Honor Lisle’s daughter, remained a favoured lady at Henry’s court against all odds, and it is impossible not to imagine Husee’s skilful, ever-faithful hand guiding Anne’s conduct and making her bide her time.
Then, in February 1541, according to the account of a Welsh chronicler, Elis Gruffudd (yet another of Miss Byrne’s documentary discoveries), the following poignant incident took place:
The next Friday the King’s Grace moved down the river in his barge from York Place to Greenwich, and at the time Lord Lisle his uncle, who was a bastard of King Edward IV, raised his hands high, and shouted hoarsely from the Tower where he was imprisoned for mercy and release from the prison. The King took it graciously and sent his secretary to the Tower to the Lord to show him the King had given him his pardon and that he would have his freedom and release from prison two or three days later and that he would get back his possessions and offices.
It is an extraordinary scene. Old Lisle up on the ‘leads’ of the Tower (where privileged prisoners could exercise); the King’s barge floating down the wintry Thames beneath its forbidding walls; the voices echoing across the chilly waters between them. It almost re-enacts, as in a pageant play, Lisle’s whole career in Calais – exiled across the estranging sea from his King. Perhaps John Husee had planned the whole scene: ‘Be sure, my lord, to be up on the roof betimes …’ Who knows?
But that something like this did indeed happen, we can be certain, for Ralph Holinshed, the British chronicler, corroborates the royal pardon, and adds the detail that it was sealed with a gift – the last of so many that fill the Lisle story. It was a ring, and ‘a rich diamond, for a token from him, and to tell him to be of good cheer’. Miss Byrne quotes the genealogist Francis Sandford about what happened next. The night following Lisle’s receipt of Henry’s gift, his heart was so ‘overcharged’ with joy that ‘he yielded up the Ghost; which makes it observable that this King’s Mercy was as fatal as his Judgements’. Lord Lisle’s body, Sandford goes on to say, ‘was honourably buried in the Tower of London’.
But not his letters. And not their voices.
IV
A Philosophical Love Story
INTRODUCTION
I WAS NOW BACK in London, in a flat below Highgate Hill. The figure of Coleridge (glimpsed again in the Melmoth piece) was walking slowly down that hill, at what Keats called ‘his alder
man after-dinner pace', towards me. I often wandered over Hampstead Heath, up the small lane ‘by Lord Mansfield’s house’ where Coleridge met Keats one spring afternoon in 1819, and talked of poetry, dreams, monsters and nightingales. I longed to join in that conversation, and hear Coleridge’s voice myself. Instead I stood silently under the chestnut trees outside No. 3 The Grove, and looked up at the third-floor study where he had spent the last decade of his life, watching for any encouraging movement at the window. Very frequently, it seemed to start raining. Later I found that Coleridge’s room in fact looked out over the garden, at the back, where he wrote many of his last poems, and this was a lesson in the presumption of the biographer who assumes he can step like a tourist into the past.
This question of how the biographer achieves authenticity now began to trouble me. How much is constructed from broken evidence, a scattered bundle of letters, the chance survival of a diary? How much is lost, forgotten, changed beyond recognition? What secret thoughts are never recorded, what movements of the heart are never put into words? And more than this, by the very act of biographical empathy, how much does the biographer create the fiction of a past life, the projection of his – or her – own personality into a story which is dramatically convincing, even historically correct, but simply not the human truth as it happened? It was these reflections that led me to write Footsteps, an experiment in which the biographer cross-questions his own art and the impulses that drive him on a quest for understanding that may be, ultimately, ephemeral.
But if that book convinced me of one thing, it was that biography is a human exchange, what I have called ‘a handshake across time'. It is an act of human solidarity, and in its own way an act of recognition and of love. Perhaps its Romantic subjectivity is precisely its strength. It confirms our need to find the self in the other, not always to be alone.
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