Q by Luther Blissett (poetry books to read txt) 📕

Gustav Metzger, Lucas Niemanson, Lienhard Jost, Gerrit Boekbinder.

Lot.

‘No one is what he seems to be.’

I don’t know if the words were spoken by Gotz or myself, or whether it was just a thought bouncing around in my head.

The questions come flooding out of their own accord. ‘Who opened that credit?’

‘I’ve never known. Probably some high-up in Rome.’

‘Describe that man to me, the one who came to collect the money.’

‘His face was covered, as I told you. His voice suggested that he wasn’t all that old, but four years have passed since then…’

He’s following me, he’s understood, he’s making an effort: ‘I remember wondering what he was going to get up to in M�nster with that kind of money, although it wasn’t a huge sum, two or three thousand florins as far as I remember, but why set off on a journey of that kind with a full purse?’

‘To avoid leaving a trail or raising suspicions.’

I look at him. Now it’s my turn to think out loud and provide a story in exchange.

‘Early in ‘34 the Baptists of M�nster received their first conspicuous cash donations, contributions to the cause from various communities, and also from single brethren.’

‘You’re saying that the money could have been used to make friends with the Baptists…’

‘What better passport for a spy?’

Once again we listen to the slow lapping of the waves and the creaking of the wood.

He’s the first to speak, somewhere between false modesty and disbelief. ‘I don’t know too much about religious issues. Tell me why Rome would have wanted to infiltrate an agent into the Baptist community of a little town in the North.’

The answer takes shape as I utter it. ‘Maybe because that little town in the North was becoming the beacon of Anabaptism. Maybe because that community was going to kick the lords up the arse and raise up the people where no one else had ever succeeded in doing so. Maybe because someone far-sighted, down at the Pope’s court, was shitting bricks.’

Gotz shakes his head: ‘No, that doesn’t work: the cardinals have other things to think about.’

‘They have to think about defending their power.’

‘Then why not break the balls of the Lutherans?’

‘Because the Lutherans are sometimes the best allies against the rebellion of the humblest classes. Who massacred the peasants in Frankenhausen? The Catholic princes and Lutherans together. Who lent cannon to the bishop of M�nster so that he could retake the city? Philip of Hesse, an admirer of Luther.’

‘No, no, that one won’t wash. Luther brought the Pope low, he chucked him out of Germany with a series of kicks up the arse, and all the goods of the Church were impounded by the German princes…’

‘Gotz, it takes two pillars to hold up an architrave.’

The ex-merchant thinks about it and looks across at me. ‘Adversaries, yet allies. Is that what you mean?’

I nod. ‘A secret agent active in the imperial territories. For how long?’

‘More than ten years, was what they told me.’

Once again that dark presentiment, an excruciating pressure behind my eyes.

Metzger, Niemanson, Jost, Boekbinder, Lot.

The many and the one. The ones I’ve been.

The many and the one. Someone.

The man in the crowd. Hidden within the community. One of ours.

‘“For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”’

Gotz is perplexed. ‘What does that mean?’

The pressure eases, the presentiment melts away. ‘It’s the conclusion of Qo�let’s book, Ecclesiastes.’

*

The estuary broadens as far as the eye can see, as the ship glides quickly towards the sea, already visible on the horizon. The dawn casts its rays on the mirror of water before us and lights our way.

The sea. Eloi was right: it gives you a sense of freedom to detach yourself from a coast, to cast your eye over that infinite mass of waves. I’ve never sailed the sea: a strange anxiety, an intoxication, eased only by thoughts of the night just past.

The crew consists of a bo’sun and eight sailors under the orders of Captain Silas, all Englishmen who have already worked with Gotz, whom we can trust implicitly. They speak their strange language, of which I can already make out a few of the more frequently-used expressions: what I take to be expletives and curses.

I had come to Antwerp with the idea of sailing for England and never coming back. Now I’m going to do business there. You never know how things are going to turn out: yesterday I was a ragged man being hunted down by the police, today I’m a respectable sugar merchant, with an insurance of fifteen thousand florins on my cargo and ships.

I glance back, the second boat is following us a quarter of a mile away. It’s under the command of Silas’ deputy, a young Welsh buccaneer who has sailed in the Indies.

The merchant Hans Gr�eb is going to sell sugar in London. The flat, gull-crowded islets of Zeeland, land clawed back from the sea, stretch out ahead of him. Gradually they thin out, and the North Sea receives him placidly with its intense blue, as dark as the thoughts that have been crowding his mind since the previous night.

The incredible story of Lazarus back from the dead forces me to return to my memories of M�nster, perhaps more vivid today for having been told to Eloi.

The question is always who. Who was the spy? Who was working for the Papists from the start? Who put up cash for the cause, having himself welcomed by the regenerate?

Who.

Who was the wretch?

I run faces, places, occasions through my mind. My arrival in the city, my reception, the barricades and then the delirium, the madness. Who worked to ensure that it would all end up like that? I’ve already told Eloi. They all died. No one survived. Only Balthasar Merck and his friends. The boy Krechting? Not a hope.

But that too is just another way of stifling the worst presentiment.

One of us, an ally, in a position to gain trust. And to send you off to be massacred when the right moment came.

The letters.

The letters to Magister Thomas.

A spy already active before ‘24.

In Germany.

Someone and no one.

Frankenhausen. M�nster.

The same strategy. The same results.

The same person.

Qo�let.

[Image — title page of ‘Beneficio di Giesu Christo Crocifisso’, 1543]

Letter sent to Naples from the pontifical city of Viterbo, addressed to Gianpietro Carafa, dated 1 May 1541.

To my most honoured Lord Giovanni Pietro Carafa in Naples.

My most reverend lord, the news that Your Lordship gives me about the Emperor’s defeat in Algiers, and the routing of his troops in Hungary at the hands of the Turks, fills this heart with the hope that we will soon see the Habsburg collapsing beneath the blows of his adversaries, and his vast power toppling. If we add to this the news from France, of Francis I’s intention to resume war, I feel that the moment is especially propitious to Your Lordship’s hopes and to those of his devoted servant. Never before has the Emperor had such problems controlling his immense territories; never before have his debts with the German bankers been so great, and so far from being paid.

So it should come as no surprise that he is attempting to unite Christendom beneath his banner, making concessions to the Protestant princes in Germany so that they may come to his aid in the plains of Hungary and in the Balkans in order to resist the advance of Suleyman. The Lutherans have now consolidated their position in Saxony and Brandenburg, and the Emperor is willing to take account of this, and to allow Rome to remain outside those principalities.

Yet anyone planning to see Charles V’s power diminished must hope that the princes will not yield to his flattery, and will continue to consider him a powerful enemy with whom one might forge a pact, but whom one would not choose as an ally. The sympathies of Philip of Hesse are not, in fact, a good sign: the Emperor has turned two blind eyes to the landgrave’s bigamy just in order to win him back as an ally, and the latter has struck a cowardly deal.

But be that as it may: forcing the Roman Church and the Lutheran theologians to sit down at the same table is the plan that Charles V is pursuing with all the means at his disposal, and there is not the slightest doubt that he will go into battle: since his failure to defeat the Lutheran princes, he now wants to be the champion of Christendom, united under the banner of the new crusade against the Turks, and he is sure that this would make him invincible. To this end he is willing to spend all the resources he has at his disposal.

Fortunately I have the pleasure of learning that the Diet of Worms has not yielded the results that Charles so hotly desired: the Lutheran doctors remain a menace to the Holy See and the Catholic princes.

Having met Luther and Melanchthon personally during their rise to prominence, I may add that they are too proud and suspicious to agree to a reconciliation with Rome. This plays in favour of Your Lordship’s plans, and for the time being it prevents the rapprochement between Catholics and Lutherans, which would be fatal to us.

Nonetheless the danger, rather than coming from beyond the Alps, could arise within the very bosom of the Holy Roman Church.

The new garb that Your Lordship’s generosity has allow me to don so that I may continue to serve the cause of God, and the privileged vantage-point to which I have managed to gain access, have allowed me to gather information at first hand, and to assemble many elements which my service to my honourable lord’s requires me not to conceal. Once again Your Lordship’s foresight has proved more than valuable.

So I can state with certainty that what is forming here in Viterbo, within the Patrimony of St Peter, is a genuine party that is favourable to dialogue with the Lutherans, and could lend its support to the Emperor’s aspirations. Your Lordship is in the habit of referring to them as spirituali, in allusion to those cardinals receptive to the dangerous doctrines of Luther and the new heresiarch in Geneva, John Calvin; at any rate, while it is certain that the Viterban circle gravitates around the most learned Cardinal Pole, I must inform my lord that the circle of people that has formed around him since his appointment as Papal Governor of the Patrimonium includes all kinds of men of letters, laymen and clerics from everywhere one could think of, united in their common aim to lay the Church open to the demands of the perfidious Luther. This naive acceptance of any intellect willing to serve his cause meant that Your Lordship’s diligent servant was able to become part of the circle and win the favours of its most illustrious members: they have been more than happy to have within their ranks a literate German with a good knowledge of the writings that are currently being produced in the German universities.

I should therefore like to be allowed to deliver my impressions of the man who should, beyond a doubt, be considered the inspiration behind this congregation: the English cardinal Reginald Pole. He enjoys the distinct fame of being a Catholic martyr, having been obliged to flee his country as a result of the schism of Henry VIII, and this in itself makes it difficult to