Chapter 3

A quest, driven by curiosity

 

 

 

 

I was spending more and more time in my hotel room on the rue de la Comet or sitting at a table in the central court yard of the place. There, I was transcribing what I could decipher from Henry Howard’s journal, and I was starting to piece together some early accounts of a rough channel passage from Dover to Calais and an equally uncomfortable coach ride through Amiens and Beauvais to Paris. I had to remind myself how tedious and, sometimes, dangerous this journey must have been in the mid-sixteenth century. Howard must have had an enormous amount of time on his hands to think about everything that had brought him to this moment and everything that he must have expected to encounter in Paris. His thoughts went randomly from one subject to another, as I turned the pages. This is, after all, a diary, and Howard never intended it to be published or read as a book.

Still, I had the feeling that he was skirting certain subjects that he preferred not to think about, or if he couldn’t avoid thinking about them, he was endeavouring not to relive them through these pages. While Howard knew what had happened before, events that were colouring what he saw and recorded on these pages, I, the reader, didn’t have a clue. I was certain that what had happened before the coach ride and before the sea journey must have contributed more to his sense of turbulence, discomfort and, perhaps, danger, than the storms crossing the Channel and the highway robbers on the road to Amiens. It wasn’t until I had gotten further into the journal, to the accounts of his later conversations with his circle of friends, that I found references to events that he was finally able to confide to, of all people, this very same Dr. Michel whose name I had encountered in my first random perusal of the pages. Here is one such passage, occurring, as many of them did, in the public room of a tavern:

“’The aspect thou wearest is distracted and distant this evening, young Howard,’ said he to me while fixing his black gaze on my visage as if he could plainly discern the shelves and goblets on the wall behind me, that my figure blocked from view. I tried to look away and evade his suggestion, thus returning my thoughts to the secret confines of my own, inner musings, but, to my consternation, I could not. ‘Consequuntur actiones omni causa,’ quoth he to insist on knowing the cause of my inattention and evasion, but I, with a dismissive wave of the hand, decried the existence of any formidable cause for so feeble an effect. I could not look away, and still his gaze demanded to know wherefore I was thus distracted. Without meaning or wishing to, I acquiesced and spoke my thoughts to this dark robbed figure as if needing to make confession of my frequent descents into melancholy.

“’Oft I think of when last I saw my father. He was wont to call me to his side, to regale me, at the end of the day, of his itinerant journeys about the estates, his meetings with tenant farmers and town tradesmen, his musings over accounts and legal documents.

“‘On such a day in Reigate Manor, we spoke of events no doubt far beyond the ken of a child of 7 years, events that would envelope my family in the rolling tides of history and the ebbs and flows of England’s fortunes. He wanted me to know, to prepare me for events and happenstances from which he knew that he could not shield me.

“’The old King was sick and riddled with pain, spreading from the stinking sore on his leg to the whole of his once much praised body. He was tired of the endless battles between courtiers who tore at each other like cats, to claw their path to a position of favour before the old hunk of rotting flesh should succumb to the final agony. For years, had he held them at bay, seeming to favour one faction and then the other, so as to preclude either from total dominance and power. Now he wished only to die in peace, knowing that his son would not be split in twain, like the child of Solomon’s tale, by the envious and ambitious rivals of power.

“’King Henry, however, was nursing another injury, not of his body, ravaged and rotting though it was, but of his manly countenance and princely pride. Six times did he take to bed a wife, and all but one, it seems did hurt him, mock him, betray church and state at once in their pride or lust. Two of them he had executed, their heads dispatched on Tower Green, and both of those unfortunate recreants had been of our blood, Howard women, cousins of my father, though as far from him in temperament as is a hawk from a nightingale. My grandfather, whose Norfolk lineage stretched back four hundred years, was already chap fallen from loss of the King’s favour, and my father, who had wanted nothing more than to raise his family and write his lines, found himself the object of Edward Seymour’s jealous calumny.

“’Seymour knew that the King would not last much longer, and that, in the hands of the guardian and protector of the boy who would succeed him, rested the unchecked power and pleasures of the realm. So did this Seymour set about to dispatch his only possible rivals for the guardianship. Who else but Norfolk and Surrey, father and son of royal, Plantagenet blood, whose family had been at the forefront of every battle to crush England’s enemies and secure her crown?

“’Seymour, whose sister, Jane, had been the young prince’s mother, enjoyed, thereby, kinship with England’s heir. To counter this, my father changed the heraldry of his standard, and that of my grandfather of Norfolk, by superimposing thereupon the three lions rampant of Plantagenet – still the royal emblem of our sovereign lord. Upon this did the envious Seymour seize, and did at once protest to the King that Duke and Earl, of Howard blood, were traitors and usurpers. Thus swiftly did the King’s armoured lancers steal into the dead of night to lay hold of my father and dispatch him, shackled like a brigand, to the Tower.

“‘I never saw my father again. He was made to pay an onerous price for three golden lions rampant on a field of crimson, for imprudence, yes, but for treason, never.’

“Doctor Michel had not ceased to hold me with his piercing gaze, but had all the while said nothing. Now, without releasing his penetrating stare, he spoke, as if of something he could plainly see, among my thoughts:

“’…Strange how such seeming little things determine who shall live and who shall die? So you were orphaned for the name and pedigree of a family, for three golden lions, by three golden lions?’

“‘I could not stop those evil men who spirited my father away that night. I would not stop them. I did not stop them, nor did I try to stop them…’ I repeated as if it were the antiphon of a Litany of the Saints.

“I finally broke the lock of his gaze and, with all my strength, forbore to turn again my eyes to where I knew his own awaited. I looked only at the knotted oak table before me and said nothing. Thus sat I sullen for a long while, and all the talk around me had ceased. I raised my gaze and saw each eye fixed on my surely troubled face. I saw in each face a singular look, in each look a singular concern, a question unformed. When next I commenced my narrative, I spoke not only to Doctor Michel, but to all of them.

“’I will never forget the sound of knocking at the great oaken door of the keep: pounding, pounding like the paws of a great beast at the wooden barrier, a rhythmic drumming as if to wake the dead.’ The room fell silent as I lowered my gaze to indicate that my tale was done.

“Gaudin was the first to speak. ‘None could have foretold thy father’s fate, nor could any man have saved him from his predestined end.’

“‘My friend,’ spake I in patient tone to tell that of which I was so certain. ‘I knew he would die, knew it as if it had already happened, yet I cowered in fear at the sound of the knocking. I did nothing to change or forestall the course of events the ends of which were so certain.’

“After this, we all fell silent, and drank our maudlin draughts.”