Paul Doherty: The White Rose murders

My Lord Cardinal did not give Benjamin actual honours but rather money, as well as opening the occasional door to preferment and advancement. At least that was the Cardinal's plan though it came to involve treason, conspiracy, murder and executions… but that was for the future. If I had known the end of the business at the beginning, I would have run like the fleetest hare. There, I speak as lucidly and clearly as any honest man!

Benjamin was twenty when I met him again as Clerk to the Justices. I was two years younger and quickly learnt to play the role of the clever, astute servant, ever ready to help his guileless master. Well, at least I thought him guileless but there was a deeper, darker side to Benjamin. I did hear a few rumours about his past but dismissed them as scurrilous (I never really did decide whether he was an innocent, or subtle and wise). Do you know, I once met him in a tavern where he sat clutching a small wooden horse to his chest, gazing at it raptly, his eyes full of religious fervour. Now the toy was nothing much, any child would play with it. This particular one looked rather old and battered.

'Master, what is it?' I asked.

Benjamin smiled like the silly saint he was.

'It's a relic, Roger,' he whispered.

Oh, God, I thought, and could have hit him over the head with a tankard.

'A relic of what, Master?'

Benjamin swallowed, trying hard to hide his pleasure.

'I had it from a man from Outremer, a holy pilgrim who has visited Palestine and the house Mary kept in Nazareth. This,' he lifted it up, eyes glowing as if he was Arthur holding the Holy Grail, 'was once touched and played with by the infant Christ and his cousin, John the Baptist.'

Well, what can you say to that? If I'd had my way, I'd have smashed the toy over the silly pedlar's head but my master was one of those childlike men: he always spoke the truth and so he believed that everyone else did. After that I decided to take him in hand and help him make full use of the Lord Cardinal's favours. In the spring of 1517, Wolsey granted Benjamin a farm, a smallholding in Norfolk on which to raise sheep, and my master gave me gold to buy the stock. In an attempt to save money I bought the sheep from a worried-looking farmer who pocketed my silver at Smithfield, handed over the entire flock and ran like the wind. No sooner had I returned these animals to my master's holding than they all died of murrain which explained the farmer's sudden departure. Of course, I did not tell my master about their former owner or how I had kept the difference between what he gave me and what I had spent. I am not a thief, I simply salted the money away with a goldsmith in Holborn in case Benjamin made further mistakes.

Cardinal Wolsey's rage can be better imagined than described. He angrily despatched his nephew to serve Sir Thomas Boleyn, a great landowner in Kent. You have heard of the Boleyns? Yes, the same family which produced the dark-eyed enchantress, Anne. Now she may have been a bitch, but once you met her father, you knew the reason why! Lord Thomas was a really wicked man who would do anything to advance his own favour with the King – and I mean anything. Of course, like all the arrogant lords of the soil, he hated Cardinal Wolsey and plotted with the other great ones to bring the proud prelate low. Although a powerful landowner, Lord Thomas had still married above himself, one of the Howards, the kin of my old general the Earl of Surrey who slaughtered the Scots at Flodden Field. Now Boleyn's wife, Lady Frances Howard, was the proverbial drawbridge, going down for anyone who asked her. Bluff King Hal's hands had been under her skirts and well above her garter many a time. The same is true of her eldest daughter, Mary, who had the morals of an alley cat. She bore Bluff Hal an illegitimate child but even he had grave doubts about its parentage and locked it away in the convent at Sheen. Mary and her sister Anne were sent as maids of honour to the French court. That's a gauge of Lord Thomas Boleyn's stupidity – it was like putting two plump capons down a fox hole.

King Henry may have been lecherous but King Francis I of France was the devil incarnate when it came to lewdery. Well, he was in his younger days. I met him later on when he had lost all his teeth and suffered from great abscesses in his groin as his whole body rotted away with syphilis. In his youth, Francis brought the best and the worst of Italy to Paris: Italian painters, Italian tapestries and Italian morals.

In his heyday he was tall, sardonic in looks and temperament, high-spirited, a virile devil with a grand air, smiling, insouciant, glittering in his gem-encrusted doublets and shirts dripping with lace. He was surrounded by women, in particular three voluptuous brunettes who formed his little band of favourite bedfellows. He was always most anxious to know about the love affairs of his ladies, being especially intrigued to hear of their actual joustings or any fine airs the ladies might assume when at those frolics, the positions they adopted, the expressions on their faces, the words they used. Frances even had a favourite goblet, the inside of which was engraved with copulating animals but, as the drinker drained it, he or she saw in its depths a man and woman making love. Francis used to give this cup to his female guests and watch them blush.

Now Anne Boleyn kept to herself but Mary took to this lechery like a duck to water, even acquiring the nickname of the English Mare, so many men had ridden her! Nothing abashed her, not even when Francis's fiery young courtiers played evil jokes by placing the corpses of hanged men in her bed.

Now, I told all this to my master, giving him a detailed description of the morals and habits of the Boleyn women, and what does he do? One night at supper he innocently turns and asks Lord Thomas if my tales had any truth in them? An hour later we left Hever Castle, and the world-weary Lord Cardinal, hearing of the incident, decided his nephew needed further education. We were despatched to the halls of Cambridge. However, a year later, when my master came to give his dissertation in the Schools, a parchment was found in his wallet containing quotations from the Scriptures, St Cyprian as well as the other fathers of the Eastern church. Benjamin was accused of cheating and promptly sent down. I never confessed that I put it there in an attempt to help him. The Lord Cardinal, so Benjamin reported later, informed him, in language more suitable to a butcher in a shambles than to a man of God, exactly what he thought of him, and we were dismissed to our own devices at Ipswich. Suffice to relate, many was the occasion when my master would grasp me by the hand.

'Roger,' he would declare proudly, 'God is my witness. I don't know what I would do without you!'

In a way I am sure he was right and I constantly prayed for an upturn in our fortunes. My step-father died but his house and possessions went to others and I became rather worried because Benjamin had given up his place as Clerk to the Justices and Scawsby would scarcely hand it back. Moreover, he must have listened to the tittle-tattle of the court and realised Uncle Wolsey was now not so sweet on his blessed nephew. Nevertheless, in the late summer of 1517 my prayers in the Chantry chapel of St Mary the Elms were answered. The great Cardinal, in one of his many pilgrimages to Our Lady's shrine at Walsingham, decided to stop at the Guildhall in Ipswich on his way home. He arrived in the town in an aura of splendid pomp, flaunting his purple cardinal's robes, his tall, silver crosses and heavy gold pillars carried aloft before him. A vast army of gentlemen and yeoman tenants arrayed themselves on either side of him. His arrival was heralded by criers wearing splendid livery who parted the crowds in the streets shouting, 'Make way! Make way for Thomas – Cardinal, Archbishop of York and Chancellor of England!'