by S. J. Parris
The palatine simpered unattractively. “Well, that is not for me to say, of course, but I think it is well-known by now at the English court that the palatine Laski is granted the very best of Her Majesty’s hospitality.”
“And now that she will not have the Duke of Anjou, I wonder whether we her subjects may begin to speculate about an alliance with Poland?” Sidney went on mischievously.
The palatine pressed the tips of his stubby fingers together as if in prayer and pursed his moist lips, his little piggy eyes shining with self-congratulating pleasure.
“Such things are not for me to say, but I have noticed in the course of my stay at court that the queen did pay me certain special attentions, shall we say? Naturally she is modest, but I think men of the world such as you and I, Sir Philip, who have not been shut up in a cloister, can always tell when a woman looks at us with a woman’s wants, can we not?”
I snorted with incredulity then, and had to disguise it as a sneezing fit. The minstrels finished yet another insufferably jaunty folk song and turned to a more melancholic tune, allowing me to lapse into reflective silence as the fields and woods slid by and the river became narrower and less noisome. Clouds bunched overhead, mirrored in the stretch of water before us, and the heat began to feel thick in my nostrils; it seemed Sidney had been right about the coming storm.
“In any case, Sir Philip, I have taken the liberty of composing a sonnet in praise of the queen’s beauty,” announced the palatine, after a while, “and I wonder if I might recite it for you before I deliver it to her delicate ears? I would welcome the advice of a fellow poet.”
“You had much better ask Bruno,” Sidney said carelessly, trailing his hand in the water. “His countrymen invented the form. Is that not so, Bruno?”
I sent him a murderous look and allowed my thoughts to drift to the horizon as the palatine began his droning recital.
IF ANYONE HAD predicted, during those days when I begged my way from city to city up the length of the Italian peninsula, snatching teaching jobs when I could find them and living in the roadside inns and cheap lodgings of travellers, players, and pedlars when I could not, that I would end up the confidant of kings and courtiers, the world would have thought them insane. But not me—I always believed in my own ability not only to survive but to rise through my own efforts. I valued wit more than the privileges of birth, an enquiring mind and hunger for learning above status or office, and I carried an implacable belief that others would eventually come to see that I was right. This lent me the will to climb obstacles that would have daunted more deferential men. So it was that from itinerant teacher and fugitive heretic, by the age of thirty-five I had risen almost as high as a philosopher might dream: I was a favourite at the court of King Henri III in Paris, his private tutor in the art of memory, and a reader in philosophy at the great Collège de Sorbonne. But France too was riven with religious wars, like every other place I had passed through during my seven-year exile from Naples, and the Catholic faction in Paris under the Guise family was steadily gaining strength against the Huguenots, so much so that it was rumoured the Inquisition were on their way to France. At the same time, my friendship with the king and the popularity of my lectures had earned me enemies among the learned doctors at the Sorbonne, and sly rumours began to slip through the back streets and into the ears of the courtiers: that my unique memory system was a form of black magic and that I used it to communicate with demons. This I took as my cue to move on, as I had done in Venice, Padua, Genoa, Lyon, Toulouse, and Geneva whenever the past threatened to catch up; like many religious fugitives before me, I sought refuge under the more tolerant skies of Elizabeth’s London, where the Holy Office had no jurisdiction, and where I hoped also to find the lost book of the Egyptian high priest Hermes Trismegistus.
THE ROYAL BARGE moored at Windsor late in the afternoon, where we were met by liveried servants and taken to our lodgings at the royal castle to dine and rest for the night before progressing to Oxford early the next day. Our supper was a subdued affair, perhaps partly because the sky had grown very dark by the time we arrived in the state apartments, requiring the candles to be lit early, and a heavy rain had begun to fall; by the end of our meal, the water was coursing down the tall windows of the dining hall in a steady sheet.
“There will be no boat tomorrow if this continues,” Sidney observed, as the servants cleared the dishes. “We will have to travel the rest of the way by road, if horses can be arranged.”
The palatine looked petulant; he had clearly enjoyed the languor of the barge.
“I am no horseman,” he complained. “We will need a carriage at the very least. Or we could wait here until the weather clears,” he suggested in a brighter tone, leaning back in his chair and looking covetously at the rich furnishings of the palace dining room.
“We have no time,” Sidney replied. “The disputation is the day after tomorrow and we must give our speaker enough leisure to prepare his devastating arguments, eh, Bruno?”
I turned my attention from the windows to offer him a smile. “In fact, I was just about to excuse myself for that very purpose,” I said.
Sidney’s face fell. “Oh—will you not sit up and play cards with us awhile?” he asked, a note of alarm in his voice at the prospect of being left alone with the palatine for the evening.
“I’m afraid I must lose myself in my books tonight,” I said, pushing my chair back, “or it will not be a disputation worth hearing.”
“I’ve sat through few that were,” remarked the palatine. “Never mind, Sir Philip, you and I shall make a long night of it. Perhaps we may read to each other? I shall call for more wine.”
Sidney threw me the imploring look of a drowning man as I passed him, but I only winked and closed the door behind me. He was the professional diplomat here, he had been bred to deal with people like this. A great crack of thunder echoed around the roof as I made my way up an ornately painted staircase to my room.
For a long while I did not consult my papers or try to put my thoughts in order, but only lay on my bed, my mind as unsettled as the turbulent sky, which had turned a lurid shade of green as the thunder and lightning grew nearer and more frequent. The rain hammered against the glass and on the tiles of the roof and I wondered at the sense of unease that had edged out the morning’s thrill of anticipation. My future in England, to say nothing of the future of my work, depended greatly on the outcome of this journey to Oxford, yet I was filled with a strange foreboding; in all these rootless years of belonging nowhere, depending on nothing but my own instinct for survival, I had learned to listen to the prickling of my moods. When I had intimations of danger, events had usually proved me right. But perhaps it was only that, once again, I was preparing to take on another shape, to become someone I was not.
I HAD BEEN in London less than a week, staying as a guest of the French ambassador at the request of my patron, King Henri, who had reluctantly agreed to my request to leave Paris indefinitely, when I received a summons from Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s principal secretary of state. It was not the kind of invitation one declined, yet the manner of its delivery gave me no clue as to how a statesman of such importance knew of my arrival or what he wanted of me. The next day I rode out to his grand house on the prosperous street of Seething Lane, close by the Tower in the east of the City of London, and was shown through the house by a harried-looking steward into a neat garden, where box trees in geometric patterns gave way to an expanse of wilder grass. Beyond this stood a cluster of low fruit trees in the full swell of their blossom, a magnificent canopy of white and pink, and among them, gazing up into their twisted branches, stood a tall figure dressed all in black.
At the steward’s nod, I stepped toward the man under the trees, who had turned to face me—or so I believed, for the late-afternoon sun was slanting down directly behind him, leaving him silhouetted, a lean black shape against the golden light. I could not gauge his expression, so I paused a few feet away from him
and bowed deeply in a manner I hoped was fitting.
“Giordano Bruno of Nola, at Your Honour’s service.”
“Buona sera, Signor Bruno, e benvenuto, benvenuto,” he said warmly, and strode forward, holding out his right hand to clasp mine in the English style. His Italian was only faintly coloured by the clipped tones of his native tongue, and as he approached I could see his face clearly for the first time. It was a long face, made the more severe by the close-fitting black cap he wore over receding hair. I guessed him to be about fifty years of age, and his eyes were lit with a sharp intelligence that seemed to make plain without words that he would not suffer fools. Yet his face also bore the traces of great weariness; he looked like a man who carried a heavy burden and slept little.
“A fortnight past, Doctor Bruno, I received a letter from our ambassador in Paris informing me of your imminent arrival in London,” he began, without preamble. “You are well-known at the French court. Our ambassador says he cannot commend your religion. What do you think he could mean by that?”
“Perhaps he refers to the fact that I was once in holy orders, or the fact that I am no longer,” I said, evenly.
“Or perhaps he means something else altogether,” Walsingham said, looking at me carefully. “But we will come to that. First tell me—what do you know of me, Filippo Bruno?”
I snapped my head round to stare at him then, wrong-footed—as he had intended I should be. I had abandoned my baptismal name when I entered the monastery of San Domenico Maggiore and taken my monastic name of Giordano, though I had reclaimed it briefly while I was on the run. For Walsingham to address me by it now was clearly a little trick to show me the reach of his knowledge, and he was evidently pleased with its effect. But I recovered myself, and said, “I know enough to see that only a fool would attempt to hide anything from a man who has never met me, yet calls me by the name my parents gave me, a name I have not used these twenty years.”
Walsingham smiled. “Then you know all that matters at present. And I know that you are no fool. Reckless, perhaps, but not a fool. Now, shall I tell you what else I know about you, Doctor Giordano Bruno of Nola?”
“Please—as long as I may be permitted to separate for Your Honour the ignominious truth from the merely scurrilous rumour.”
“Very well, then.” He smiled indulgently. “You were born in Nola, near Naples, the son of a soldier, and you entered the monastery of San Domenico Maggiore in your teens. You abandoned the order some thirteen years later, and fled through Italy for three years, pursued by the Inquisition on suspicion of heresy. You later taught in Geneva, and in France, before attracting the patronage of King Henri III in Paris. You teach the art of memory, which many consider to be a kind of magic, and you are a passionate supporter of Copernicus’s theory that the earth rotates around the sun, though the idea has been declared heretical by Rome and by the Lutherans alike.”
He looked at me for confirmation, and I nodded, bemused.
“Your Honour knows much.”
He smiled.
“There is no mystery here, Bruno—when you stopped briefly in Padua, you became friends with an English courtier named Philip Sidney, did you not? Well, he is shortly to marry my daughter, Frances.”
“Your Honour could not have found a worthier son-in-law, I am sure. I shall look forward to seeing him,” I said, and meant it.
Walsingham nodded.
“As a matter of curiosity—why did you abandon the monastery?”
“I was caught reading Erasmus in the privy.”
He stared at me for a moment, then threw back his head and guffawed, a deep, rich sound, such as a bear might make if it could laugh.
“And I had other volumes on the Forbidden Index of the Holy Office. They would have sent me before the Father Inquisitor, but I escaped. This is why I was excommunicated.” I folded my hands behind my back as I walked, thinking how strange it seemed to be reliving those days in this green English garden.
He regarded me with an inscrutable expression and then shook his head as if puzzled. “You intrigue me greatly, Bruno. You fled Italy pursued by the Roman Inquisition for your suspected heresy, and yet you were also arrested and tried by the Calvinists in Geneva for your beliefs, is it not so?”
I tilted my head, half assenting. “There was something of a misunderstanding in Geneva. I found the Calvinists had only swapped one set of blind dogma for another.”
Again he looked at me with something approaching admiration and laughed, shaking his head. “I have never met another man who has managed to get himself accused of heresy by both the pope and the Calvinists. This is a singular achievement, Doctor Bruno! It makes me ask myself—what is your religion?”
There was an expectant pause while he looked at me encouragingly.
“Your Honour knows that I am no friend of Rome. I assure you that in everything my allegiance is to Her Majesty and I would be glad to offer her any service I may while I remain under her sovereignty.”
“Yes, yes, Bruno—I thank you, but that is not an answer to my question. I asked what is your religion? In your heart, are you papist or Protestant?”
I hesitated. “Your Honour has already pointed out that both sides have found me wanting.”
“Are you saying that you are neither? Are you an atheist, then?”
“Before I answer that, may I know what the consequences of my answer might be?”
He smiled then. “This is not an interrogation, Bruno. I only wish to understand your philosophy. Speak frankly with me, and I will speak frankly with you. This is why we are walking here among the trees, where we will not be overheard.”
“Then I assure Your Honour that I am not what is usually meant by the word ‘atheist,’” I said, fervently hoping that I was not condemning myself. “In France, and here in her embassy, I call myself a Catholic because it is simpler not to make trouble. But in truth, I do not think of myself as Catholic or Protestant—these terms are too narrow. I believe in a greater truth.”
He raised an eyebrow. “A greater truth than the Christian faith?”
“An ancient truth, of which the Christian faith is one later interpretation. A truth which, if it could be properly understood in our clouded age, might enlighten men instead of perpetuating these bloody divisions.”
A pregnant silence fell. The sun was low in the sky now, and in the shade of the trees the air was growing cool. Birdsong became more insistent with the gathering dusk, and Walsingham continued to pace through the grass, the shoulders of his black doublet flecked with white petals of blossom that fluttered from the branches overhead.
“Faith and politics are now one and the same,” he went on. “Perhaps it was always so, but it seems to have reached new extremes in our troubled century, do you not think? A man’s religion tells me where his political loyalties lie, far more than his place of birth or his language. There are many stout Englishmen in this realm with a greater love for Rome than you have, Bruno, or than they have for their own queen. Yet, in the end, faith is not merely politics. Above all else it is a matter of a man’s private conscience, and how he stands before God. I have done things in God’s name that I must justify before Him at the Last Judgment.” He turned and fixed me with an expression of sorrow then. When he spoke again his voice was quiet and expressionless. “I have stood by and watched a man’s beating heart ripped from his living body at my command. I have coldly questioned men as their limbs were pulled from their sockets on the rack, and the very noise of that is enough to bring your stomach into your mouth. I have even turned the wheels myself, when the secrets that might spill from a man’s lips as he stretched were too sensitive for the ears of professional torturers. I have seen the human body, made in the likeness of God, forced to the very limits of pain. And I have visited all these horrors and more on my fellow creatures because I believed that by doing so I was preventing greater bloodshed.”
He passed a hand across his forehead then, and resumed walking. “Our nation is young in the
new religion, and there are many in France and Spain who, with the backing of Rome, seek to kill Her Majesty and replace her with that Devil’s bitch, Mary of Scotland.” He shook his head. “I am not a cruel man, Bruno. It gives me no pleasure to inflict suffering, unlike some among my executioners.” He shuddered, and I believed him. “Nor am I the Inquisition—I do not imagine myself responsible for men’s immortal souls. That I leave to those ordained to the task. I do what I do purely to ensure the safety of this realm and the queen’s person. Better to have one priest gutted before the crowds at Tyburn than he should go free to convert twenty, who might in time join others and rise up against her.”
I inclined my head in acknowledgement; he did not seem to expect debate. Beneath the largest and oldest tree in the orchard a circular bench had been constructed to fit around its trunk. Here Walsingham motioned for me to sit beside him.
“You are a man who knows firsthand the persecutions Rome visits on her enemies. The streets of England would run with blood if Mary of Scotland found her way to the throne. Do you understand me, Bruno? But these conspiracies to put her there are like the heads of the Hydra—we cut off one and ten more grow in its place. We executed that seditious Jesuit Edmund Campion in ’81 and now the missionary priests are sailing for England by their dozens, inspired by his example of martyrdom.” He shook his head.
“Your Honour’s task is not one I envy.”
“It is the task God has given me, and I must look for those who will help me in it,” he said simply. “Tell me, Bruno, does the French king provide for you, other than your lodgings at the embassy?”
“He supports me rather with his good opinion than with his purse,” I said. “I had hoped to supplement my small stipend with some teaching. To that end I planned to visit the famous University of Oxford, to see if they might have some use for me there.”
“Oxford? Indeed?” he said, a spark of interest catching in his eyes. “Now there is a place mired in the mud of popery. The university authorities make a show of rooting out those who still practice the old faith, but in truth half the senior men there are secret papists. The Earl of Leicester, who is its chancellor, makes endless visitations and orders enquiries, but they scurry away like spiders under stones as soon as he shines a light on them. Then, once our backs are turned, they go on filling the heads of England’s young men with their idolatry—the very young men who will go on to the law and the Church, and into public life. Our future government and clergy, no less, being turned secretly to Rome under our very noses. Her Majesty is furious and I have told Leicester it must be addressed with more vigour.” He pressed his lips together, as if to suggest things would not be so lax if he were in charge. “The place is become a sanctuary for those who trade in seditious books, and most of these missionary priests coming out of the French seminaries are Oxford men, you know.” Then he thought for a moment, and moderated his tone. “Yes, you should go to Oxford. In fact, I shall be glad to recommend you if you wish to visit. There is much you might see of interest.”