The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  ‘Frank will not believe the word that Rafe sent me from Marrick, sweetheart.’

  ‘No,’ said Bigod, ‘I will not think Master Aske a man to accuse his fellows to the King in London. Rather I fear that it’s true what they are saying at Fountains – that when he came to London the King had him headed.’

  ‘Jesu Mercy!’ cried Meg, but Sir John, giving over for a moment biting his nails, muttered that whether it were so, or t’other way about, yet Rafe’s counsel was good – ‘that for no fair letters nor fair words we should not stir forth of the North country.’

  Sir Francis looked from one to other of them with that lit, wild look of the Bigods.

  ‘I tell you, Jack, that’s not enough – to stay still nor stir not. For my part I am sworn to go forward again with the commons.’

  ‘No!’ Sir John said, ‘No!’ with his fingers at his mouth. ‘When my Lord of Norfolk comes—’

  ‘When he comes I doubt he will rather bring us into captivity with them of Lincolnshire, than fulfil our petitions.’

  ‘But,’ Sir John persisted, ‘the commons’ll not follow you, Frank. See how near they came to killing you at Pomfret for your traffic with Cromwell and your known learning in these English Scriptures.’

  ‘Yea,’ Sir Francis cried, ‘but now it is not so. They know me and acknowledge my truth,’ and he began to explain, not for the first time, how he had come to take arms with the commons, saying that it was manifestly against God’s will for a secular man, a King, to be supreme head over the Church; and he went on from there, subtly dividing what authority might belong to the Pope, what to a Bishop, and what to a King.

  At the end of it all Sir John put up his hands to his head and tugged at his hair. ‘So it may be. So it may be. But to rise again—! And if Aske hath betrayed us – or is taken – what can we do?’

  ‘Shame!’ cried Meg so suddenly, and with such a sharp and ringing note in her voice, that they who had taken no account of her at all in their argument were astonished into silence. And then she began, urging as Francis Bigod had urged, but with more vehemence, that to stay still was to lose all, that these ships which Rafe Bulmer wrote of from Swaledale were sent north by the King so that they might set on the North Country; that it was now, or else never, and that the commons were ready if only they should find leaders; and she caught a hand of each and looked into their eyes, eagerness quickening her beauty as wind draws up a flame, so that for a moment they could only stare at her.

  Sir Francis cried, ‘God be my Judge, all this is true,’ but Sir John tore his hand away and went off, crying that he’d hear no more – not one word.

  Yet he did hear more, and that which came nearer the truth, when he lay beside Meg that night in the darkness. For when he tried to fondle her she struck his hands away and would have none of him.

  ‘You,’ she cried, ‘you, of a great house, yet who will take no part, but to follow other men, littler men such as Robin Aske! And now he is high in the King’s favour, and you—’

  ‘Or he is dead – headed or hanged as Frank says.’

  ‘He?’ she cried. ‘Never! He’s not one to let himself be tricked, but to climb upon other men’s heads to a high place. Did you not see it in the old days? But I did. I knew it in him. As the devil he is ambitious.’

  ‘Well!’ He was sullen. ‘What then can I do?’

  ‘Do? Nothing. You’ll do nothing. No, but if the commons need a leader it shall be little Robin Aske, or that madman Bigod, but never Sir John Bulmer.’

  They wrangled for a time, but at last he pleaded, half promised, then wholly promised that he would be forward to lead, if there were those who would follow. Only then would she yield. When he slept she lay awake awhile in the dark, remembering how this morning, when both Sir John and Frank Bigod left her, she had stood alone by the coldly shining, lightly shivering pool. She had leaned forward, to see her own face in the water; it showed there, wan and deathly, but she knew it well enough in her glass to know what beauty it was that that proud fellow, whom she had once loved, had despised. For that was the truth, which she had known all along; though she had made a pretence to herself that he loved her only too well; the truth was that he had despised her. And this was he, forsooth, who, if he were dead, all the courage of the North Country must die too.

  But, truly, she could not think him dead. Then, if alive, he was at Court, high in the King’s favour, richly rewarded. ‘Yet,’ she told herself, ‘the last word’s not spoken. If one, then another can prosper by that same means. And shall, if I can goad him to it.’

  January 5

  There were several young gentlemen sitting at cards outside the door of the King’s Privy Chamber at Greenwich. ‘He must,’ said one of them as another dealt from the pack, ‘he must have been with His Grace the best part of an hour.’

  ‘They say the King favours him greatly.’

  ‘Were I the King,’ cried one of them, ‘I’d have sent him home with never a tongue, the scurvy little traitor with his one eye.’

  ‘Did you hear how he spoke to the King’s Grace?’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘It wasn’t the words. I heard them not. It was how he spoke.’

  They fell to play again, but at the end of that game one of them, who had lost more than he could well afford, got up saying he had played enough, and began to ramble about the room, picking up a book and ruffling the leaves, twanging with his fingers the strings of a lute which lay on a bench. His aimless wanderings brought him near to the door of the King’s Chamber. He stood still a moment, then beckoned to the others. ‘Listen!’ he said.

  They cried fie on him! and told him he’d be losing his ears in the pillory.

  ‘I cannot hear their words. It is, as you said, how he speaks.’

  The others did not leave their play, but he stayed a few moments listening. Inside the King’s Privy Chamber a man’s voice, confident, resonant, positive, went on and on. It was not the King’s voice.

  Master Aske came out at last. He looked hard at the young men with his one eye, but saw them not at all. He saw instead a work accomplished, and it was a work that he had never fully believed could be brought to a good end. It seemed to him now a small thing that this morning a man had come to the Cardinal’s Hat – a man he did not know – bringing news of fresh trouble in the North. This fellow said he had it from a friend at Buntingford, who knew a man at Royston, whose cousin... Aske could guess that if you went back over the slot you would trace it stage by stage, from mouth to mouth, all the way between London and Yorkshire.

  The news was that the North was all of a floughter. Some were saying that the Grand Captain had been bought by the King; some that he was dead, or in the Tower. And the man who had a friend at Buntingford put into Aske’s hand a soiled strip of parchment which must have been torn from an old book of church-wardens’ accounts, for there were on the one side of it entries of money spent on candles for the rood-loft, wine for the altar, and beer for the ringers, But on the other was written in a staggering, scrawling hand—

  ‘Commons keep well your harness. Trust you no gentlemen. Rise all at once. God shall be your governor and I shall be your Captain.’

  It was signed at the bottom by the word ‘Poverty’, and at each of the four corners the parchment was rent, because it had been snatched from the church door to which it had been nailed. So now Aske thought, ‘I must make haste home, to stay the people with the good news.’ But he thought that would be an easy thing to do.

  A few minutes after he had left the King’s bell jangled. That young gentleman who answered it came back and went away towards the gallery. The others questioned him in silence with lifted eyebrows, and he answered them in a whisper – ‘Privy Seal.’

  When Cromwell came to the Privy Chamber the King sat at the table bent over some papers. He gave no sign that he knew of Cromwell’s presence, but, after Privy Seal had been on his knees a second or two, the King’s hand made a motion for him to stand. So he stood, an
d let his eyes flicker lightly over the King, from his hair, once red-gold but grizzling and paling now, by the round roll of fat above the gold-stitched collar, the wide purple brocade shoulders, and so to the hands; as the King stooped over a bundle of papers his fingers drummed upon the table. It was certain that the King was angry; Cromwell would have given much to know against whom his anger was directed.

  ‘This,’ said the King in his sharpest voice, ‘is the declaration of Aske. I have dismissed him to go North again.’ He looked up and suddenly cast the papers across the table. ‘Read it,’ he said, and sat back in the chair, his chin sunk on his chest.

  Cromwell sat down, and began to read – ‘The manner of the taking of Robert Aske in Lincolnshire, and the use of the same Robert unto his passage to York.’ It took a long time, but the King now sat in silence, and quite still, except that the fingers of one hand twined and untwined about themselves the gold chain that hung round his neck, so that the jewel which swung from it tinkled on the emerald buttons of his doublet.

  Cromwell read it through carefully, but as quickly as he might; only towards the end he read more slowly.

  And the said Aske saith that in all parts of the realm men’s hearts grudge, with the suppression of the abbeys and first fruits, by reason the same would be the destruction of the whole religion of England. And their especial grudge is against the Lord Cromwell, being reputed the destroyer of the Commonwealth, as well amongst the most part of the lords as all other worshipful men and commons, for as far as the said Aske can perceive there is none earthly man so evil beloved as the Lord Cromwell is with the commons, albeit the said Aske saith that the Lord Cromwell never gave him occasion to report of him, but he only doth declare the hearts of your Grace’s people.

  There was not much more after that, but when he had finished Cromwell sat feigning still to read, while he weighed two different means of penetrating the King’s intentions. Should he sigh and say, ‘Alas! I am content to be misjudged in Your Grace’s service,’ or should he, speaking in a frank open manner, say, ‘Here’s a very honest man’?

  He chose the latter, as being more provocative, but since he did not dare to meet the King’s eyes he shaded his own with his hand.

  The King looked across at him, then down at the table. A sluggish winter fly crept there. His Grace put his thumb down slowly and firmly upon the creature; when he lifted it again he looked for a long instant at what had been a fly, before he scraped off the mess on the board’s edge.

  ‘Honest?’ he said in a voice that told Cromwell nothing. ‘Yea, I think he is honest.’

  *

  The Duke of Norfolk, loitering alone in a small oriel that looked from the southern side of the Great Gallery towards the river, congratulated himself that it was Cromwell and not he who had been sent for by the King, and had been with him for so long a time. The Duke, and almost everyone else in the palace, knew that the King was in a rage; who had incensed His Grace mattered little; those that came near him would suffer.

  There was a small desk in the oriel, and a stool. On the desk lay a Book of Hours bound in stamped leather. Norfolk set his knee on the bench, and began to turn the pages. It was a sumptuous work, not new, for it had belonged to the King’s father before him, but none the less beautiful in the Duke’s eyes for that. He let the silky, strong parchment leaves slip crackling by under his fingers, catching glimpses of opulent gold, scarlet, lapis-blue: there were initial letters that held all of a scripture story, or only a grotesque animal: pictured pages where the golden haloes of saints beamed among English farms and fields: margins all a spray of flowers and leaves, and among the twined tendrils a monkey beating a drum, an archer aiming at a black and white magpie, half as big as himself, or a chaffinch painted to the life in his proper tinctures.

  ‘What’s the new printing,’ the Duke said to himself, ‘to this?’ and he thought scorn of all those worthy folk who must buy printed books because they could not pay the price of such craftsmanship. Yet there was uneasiness mingled in his scorn; Howards needed not to buy cheap; he might still commission as costly a book as this – yet it would not be so fair. In his mind he felt the breath of change, chilling as the east wind in blackthorn winter. Nothing new was quite the same, and God only knew how far mutation would reach.

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder and he whipped round to find the King standing beside him. Cromwell was just beyond, pale, and placidly twinkling as ever. If the King had trounced him, none could guess it from his look; not even the tips of his ears were burning, but already Norfolk felt the colour climbing towards his own eyes.

  ‘A fair work,’ he said hastily, waving towards the book the cap he had snatched off.

  ‘Humph.’ The King put out his hand, and slapped the pages over angrily and hastily, searching for something.

  Cromwell said he had seen in Italy a book printed for one of the Strozzi more perfect than a man could imagine, so exact yet flowing the letters of it, and the miniatures painted so graciously. ‘I remember,’ he said, ‘a grove of laurel painted there. A man might have walked into it to shade himself from the sun, and laid himself down under those trees, so masterly was the painter’s hand.’

  ‘Humph!’ said the King again, belittling the Strozzi’s book. Then he said, ‘Ha! See here, Thomas Howard, you that are papist at heart and a friend of naughty monks.’

  They looked down then, and saw that his finger pointed to where there was a blank in one of the prayers, where some words had been scratched and scrubbed out, leaving the parchment’s smooth surface blurred; neither of them needed to be told whose name had stood there before the King decreed that in Rome there was but a Bishop, and he no greater in honour than any other.

  ‘Before God!’ cried Norfolk. ‘Your Grace is misinformed. I am no papist, nor no favourer of naughty religious persons. Nay! by Christ’s Passion! but when I was in the North parts, and lay of necessity at one of the abbeys, several of my gentlemen warned me to take heed, for fear of poison, of what I drank there, so roundly I had spoken against them.’

  Cromwell put in eagerly, as if to help a friend, that such words had been reported to him. ‘My Lord speaks the truth,’ said he.

  The Duke blinked at that, as if a glove had been flipped across his mouth. But the King said harshly that words were easy things. ‘And what lieth in a man’s heart and stomach appeareth not so much by his words as by his deeds.’ When Norfolk began to protest that by words and deeds his true heart should appear, the King stopped him.

  ‘Do you then,’ he asked, and let his small, keen eyes bore into the Duke’s, ‘do you in your conscience approve and heartily embrace the laws that we have made in all these causes of religion?’

  Norfolk pressed his two hands together. ‘Your Majesty, I do know you to be a Prince of such virtue and knowledge, that whatsoever laws you have in times past made, or hereafter shall make, I shall to the extremity of my power stick unto them.’

  ‘Well,’ said the King, ‘if that were true, it were enough.’

  January 7

  Master Purefoy, a Master Scrivener and a very distant cousin of Laurence Machyn, sat for a while upstairs in the parlour of the Machyn house, waiting for Laurence to come home. He sat all the time with his head between his fists, never lifting it. Sometimes he muttered to himself, between his teeth, ‘He might ‘a lived. He might ‘a lived.’ And once, at a thought of one of the boy’s merry sayings, he wrung his hands together and groaned aloud. But for the most part he was too smitten to feel anything other than the great weight of loss for the son who had died yesterday; the one son, and the one child.

  At the end of half an hour he could endure his thoughts no longer. He must be moving, though he knew that far or fast as he might go sorrow would come after, close as his shadow, not to be shaken off. So he went down into the Hall below, and, finding none there, let himself out into the street, and turned in the direction of Paul’s. He had not gone far when Laurence Machyn stopped him by putting a hand on his shoulder, fo
r he had heard the news and could not let Master Purefoy go by, solitary in his grief. Yet now that he had held him up Laurence could think of nothing to say, but stood, with averted face, gripping the Scrivener’s shoulder.

  His meaning was clear though, for kind intent can speak in a silence, and after a moment Master Purefoy turned, and went along beside him, telling of the little lad, and letting the tears run as they would. Laurence walked him up and down Knightrider Street for a long time, and heard, all in a jumble, of the boy’s death, of his pretty ways, of how he had fallen sick, and what a solemn burial it should be. Laurence must see to that, ‘and stint nothing – stint nothing. For it was all for him, and now I care not to save, since now he—’ ‘Ah, peace! peace!’ said Laurence. ‘He is at peace.’

  When it was growing dusk they parted. Master Purefoy would not go back to the house with Laurence, and had not said, because in his grief he had quite forgotten, that ever he had gone in and waited, and come away again without a word.

  So when the young shock-headed prentice lad Dickon, who opened the door to Laurence, told his master that he’d let in a gentleman and set him in the parlour upstairs, and yet he wasn’t there now, and no one had seen him go, and no one knew what he had come for, Laurence could make nothing of it. ‘Who was the gentleman?’ But Dickon, who had only been a week in the Machyn house, knew him not. Of what like then? Dickon had not noticed, but to get himself out of the scrape he muttered that the mistress would know, because she had been within in the bed-chamber.

  Just then July came out of the kitchen carrying a lighted candle. Laurence cuffed the boy, but not hard, and told him he must be more heedful. ‘By not asking his name,’ said he, ‘you might have lost a customer.’

  He caught July just as she came to the foot of the stairs, put his arm about her and kissed her.

  She pushed him away crying, ‘Keep off! Your breath smells most ill-favouredly.’

  ‘It is my teeth,’ he said meekly, and let her go.