Like the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, The Courier’s Tale is set in
the treacherous worlds of the English court of Henry VIII, where
Thomas Cromwell holds sway, and Machiavellian Italy.
Reginald Pole, diplomat, friend of scholars, cardinals and artists, and cousin to Henry
VIII, is first seen stealing into the Medici chapel at dead of night to catch a forbidden
glimpse of Michelangelo’s masterpiece of funerary sculpture. But as the king’s
representative in Italy, and an admired scholar himself, it falls to him to make the case
for Henry’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon. And it falls to the hapless Michael
Throckmorton to become Thomas Cromwell’s courier to Pole in Rome.
In Peter Walker’s imaginative novel, in which two worlds, increasingly opposed, are
beautifully evoked, we see these famous events that saw England become a Protestant
nation through the eyes of the luckless courier. The dubious privilege of being courier to
Cromwell and the King, makes of Miuchael Throckmorton’s life a tragicomedy of endless
journeys back and forth between England and Italy. And even though in time he becomes
the loyal friend of the disgraced Pole, who can never risk returning to England while Henry
lives, this is no compensation for the childhood love who appears to have been lost along
the way.
