King's Fool

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  Bowling was a game for the gentry. By his new law it was forbidden to most of us in order that we should spend much of our leisure at the butts and so be ready in the defence of our country, and no one grumbled because the Tudors kept no standing army, relying, since Crécy and Agincourt, upon the fact that the marksmanship of England was feared throughout the world. But I had watched my master bowling with his friends often enough to follow the finer points of the game. “It is almost the last end, and his Grace’s and milord of Suffolk’s team score almost even,” a London craftsman told me with the camaraderie engendered by sport. And by the tenseness of players and spectators alike one might have guessed it. There was one fat, grey-haired little gentleman upon the Duke of Suffolk’s side who kept muttering “Too short!” or “Too wide!” and urging his wood along with gestures of tragic despair, and a tall, lean nobleman in purple who never made a cast but what he pranced sideways after it, following its bias down the rink like an anxious crab. Their unconscious antics enthralled me, and it was all I could do to restrain my own limbs from imitating them.

  The last end was excitingly close, with all the woods clustered in a bunch, and when the King himself scattered the lot of them with a final firing shot which carried the jack the tension finished in a deal of back-slapping and a burst of applause. Men threw their caps in the air and, for the benefit of the good-natured fellows about me—or for sheer joie de vivre—I stepped out on the grass in front of them and began imitating the players, particularly the tall, important-looking crab-like gentleman. For how was I to know that he was Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, Hereditary Earl Marshal of England?

  Everyone about me laughed or tittered, but the noise they made so spontaneously and tried to stifle so swiftly was drowned by a great guffaw of laughter from behind me. I swung round, and there was King Henry himself, leading the players off the green. A page was handing him his feathered velvet cap, and he was standing there within a few yards of me, bare bronze head thrown back, convulsed with mirth. “Beshrew me, cousin of Norfolk, if he hasn’t got you to the life,” he spluttered, seeming to relish the discomfiture of a powerful relative who probably had quite as much Plantagenet blood as he himself. “What is your name, young man?”

  “William Somers, in the service of Master Richard Fermor of Easton Neston in Northamptonshire,” I answered, snatching the cap from my own head, and trying to seize so auspiciously good-humoured a moment to draw his attention to my waiting master.

  I knew that my quick seizing of the situation had been successful. I saw Lord Vaux step forward to present him. I saw my master bow, as fine a looking man as any of them in his brown velvet, and the King made a gracious gesture to them both to accompany him back to the palace. But his florid, laughing face was still turned towards me.

  “By the Holy Rood, Will Somers, I like you for a witty, impudent knave! And by your master’s leave, who brought you here,”

  he said, to my utter dumbfounded amazement, “we will keep you at Court as our Jester.”

  I FOUND THE MOTLEY spread out on a table in the little room they took me to. The servants who led me there were still babbling congratulations on my extraordinary good fortune, but I was longing to be alone in my bewilderment. I pushed them outside and stood staring with aversion at the strange trappings which were to be the sign of my new calling. The green worsted doublet stiffened with buckram and all fringed with bells to attract attention. The parti-coloured hose. The cap fashioned like a monk’s cowl, but ornamented with a gaudy coxcomb. The belt with leather pouch and foolish wooden dagger. Most horrible of all, the painted bladder on a stick.

  I picked up each symbol, one by one, and laid it down again. Once I had donned them should I become a different person? Should I never see Easton Neston again, nor any who lived there? I covered my face with my hands and sank down on a stool by a little lattice window overlooking the carpenter’s courtyard. There I must have sat for hours trying to accept the fantastic change of fortune which had been thrust upon me. And there, just before twilight, my first master found me. He was on the point of leaving for London, but would not go without seeing me.

  “Why, Will,” he exclaimed, coming suddenly upon my obvious dejection where he had expected to find at least some measure of jubilation.

  I rose stiffly and asked how he had fared. For him, it seemed, the day at Greenwich had been one vast success, as he deserved.He had spent some time with the great Cardinal who had thanked him for his son’s financial help in Florence, and ordered one of his clerks to repay the loan. And Wolsey had also been delighted with the samples of Italian silk, and ordered more than one hundred and twenty pounds’ worth of the scarlet alone, so that it seemed reasonable to suppose that Fermor ships would continue to supply the Papal Legate’s needs. And the King himself had walked with Master Fermor from bowling green to palace, talking and laughing, and enquiring how trade went with Flanders. Being still in high good humour over his spectacular winning shot on the green, he had promised to persuade the Duchess Margaret of Savoy to allow my master to export a certain amount of wheat from Flanders free of tax. “When I explained that I needed this concession to offset the expense of laying down a new ship, his Grace readily understood that in the end this would bring in more trade,” said Master Fermor. “He takes vast and knowledgeable interest in ships. ‘The more the better, for they are our larder and our defence,’ he said. So now everything should go well. What with gaining the Cardinal’s custom and a hundred thousand bushels or so of wheat tax free from Flanders, my trading this year should be doubled.”

  “I am indeed glad for you, Sir,” I said soberly.

  “And to think that it all came about through your clowning, Will. As it happened, you could not have timed it better, for Lord Vaux and I were standing right beside his Grace when he stopped and laughed at you. ‘We will keep that crazy mimic of yours as hostage for any future taxes you may incur,’ he said jokingly afterwards, when I began thanking him. And here is your own fortune made too, Will. Though God knows I shall miss you,” he added.“We shall all miss you grievously at Neston.” And then, as I stood silent, the depth of my grief must have pierced his consciousness.The pleased smile left his face and he said with genuine regret, “My daughter will miss you.”

  But who was Richard Fermor to refuse a king? Or I, to refuse to stand hostage, even jokingly, for a good master’s improbable debts?

  “You will explain to my little lady that I had no choice—that I could not come back as I promised to—to make her see it all?”

  “Yes, I will explain—everything,” he promised. “I know that Neston has been a home to you, and am glad of it. But be a man, Will, and grasp at Life’s opportunities. This is a chance in a million for you.”

  “If I can do it.”

  He slapped me on the back to cheer me. “I know that you can. Everyone in Neston knows it. And when I go home and tell them they will be so proud.”

  “I owe it to you, Sir,” I said.

  He must have remembered then how I had cheered his daughter back to health, for he answered very earnestly, “We owe much to each other.” Now that it had come to parting we stood for a moment or two tongue-tied, and to hide how much he cared he pointed to the array of motley strewn across my bed and said laughingly, “You certainly earned your new suit, though it is not I who will be paying for it.”

  “At least it is the colour which Mistress Joanna advised,” I answered, with an effort at equal levity. Green, she had said, and green it would be for years, perhaps. Tudor green.

  Richard Fermor nodded and shook me by the hand. “Strange, that I once asked if you were honest,” he muttered.

  “Let me have news,” I entreated, as he reached the door. He nodded and was gone. To visit his son, to see the sights of London, to be entertained by fellow merchants at their Guild, and then to ride quietly and contentedly home to Neston—without me.

  Soon they came to call me to supper in the great hall. An uproarious mob of Court underlings,
seemingly. I was far too emotionally upset to care who they were. With shouts of mirth they helped me to don my unfamiliar clothes, laughing all the more no doubt because of the tragic expression on my face. A clown, the saying goes, is always funniest when broken-hearted. “You have liberty to say anything you like,” they kept repeating. “Things that neither blue-blooded old Thomas of Norfolk nor Charles Brandon of Suffolk, the King’s familiar friend, would dare to say. Nor even milord Cardinal, Pope’s Legate in this country as he is. Why, you can walk without knocking into the King’s own private rooms. You can even call him Harry to his face.”

  They were telling me these things to please me. Or because they envied me, perhaps. But the bare thought of calling the King of England Harry filled me with terror. And how could I explain that not so long ago I had been cutting corn and catching broody hens in strawstacks?

  I followed them along what appeared to be endless passages, my stomach seeming to turn to water at every step. At the entrance to the great hall they stopped and waited in respectful silence while I, who had free run of all the palace, cowered in a corner like a pickpocket awaiting ordeal before a justice of the peace. And presently there was a flutter in the assembled crowd and through an archway, with the swish of silk and the light tinkle of laughter, came an informal procession of ladies more grandly dressed than any I could have imagined. I shrank farther into the shadows as someone whispered with reverent affection, “Here comes the Queen.” In the swift glance I took I saw a plain, middle-aged woman with the hereditary hauteur of Aragon in her gait and the sweetness of a girlhood spent in England in her face, and then I lowered my eyes so that I could see only the stiff brocade of her wide, swaying skirt.But to my amazement she noticed me and paused a moment to say with formal kindness, “If you are the new jester milord the King has told me of, I hope you will be happy with us.” And then she added, so softly that only I and her nearest lady could have heard, “Do not be afraid.” She must have seen how my limbs were shaking. Her voice was low-pitched and gentle, and rendered the more charming by a slight Spanish accent. I went down on my knees as she passed on her way to supper, and that has ever been the way I felt towards her. From her own incredible store of courage she ever sought to give some semblance of it to others. Strengthened by it, I seized my chance as the King himself came striding into the hall. Urged by some happy instinct I slipped into his procession immediately behind him, inserting my thin body between his back and the lords who followed closest. “You can go anywhere,” my well-wishers had told me. So when he stopped in mid-hall and looked around him calling, “Where is that new jester of mine?” I slid between his wide-spaced, purple-hosed legs so that when he made to go forward again he suddenly found me begging like a grinning dog before him. He burst into a great guffaw at the unexpected manner of my arrival, and a great shout of laughter went up all round us at the way I had taken him by surprise. A poor, foolish trick indeed, but it set the ball of merriment rolling, and by the time the royal party were seated at the dais table Queen Katherine was laughing with the rest; less at my jests, I suspect, than because she was relieved that someone to whom she had been kind had so proven himself.

  It seemed to me a fabulous meal, with the servants coming and going among the tables bearing all manner of princely dishes, and the courtiers and ladies, like a bevy of richly plumaged birds, making a pageant out of everyday chatter and movements.

  Some of them I recognised as people I had seen out on the bowling green. There was also, sitting near the Queen, a young girl of about ten whom I took to be her daughter, the Princess Mary, and, deep in conversation with the King, the unmistakable scarlet-clad figure of the great Thomas Wolsey, who had entered the hall with a young man bearing his cardinal’s hat on a cushion before him. The ceremony that surrounded him as Papal Legate appeared to be more ostentatious than the King’s. Certainly his face was prouder and sterner. And, watching him converse graciously with men and women of noble lineage, I marvelled to myself, remembering that most unremarkable stretch of grazing land which Master Fermor had pointed out to me at Ipswich.

  Dodging my way between servants bearing great dishes of boar’s head and venison, I made myself stand in the midst of the company before the high table and, knowing that sooner or later I must bring myself to do this outrageous thing, I seized an empty beaker from some noisy gallant and, raising it aloft, shouted above all the conversational din, “Here’s a right good health to you, Harry!”

  I saw the proud Plantagenet lift of his close-cropped head as he turned, surprised, from some serious discourse with milord Cardinal, but all that was warm and Welsh in him was quick to smile at the licence of my impertinence. “What do you propose to drink it with?” he enquired, seeing my empty beaker.

  “With a right good Will,” I quipped.

  He laughed, recalling my name with that invaluable royal flair for remembering even the humblest. “Will Somers,” he corroborated. “May you indeed prove a right good Will and brighten all our days.” He beckoned to a page to pour for me from his own flagon, and before returning to his conversation raised his gleaming golden goblet to me in return.

  I felt the Queen’s glance like beneficent encouragement upon me. I—plain Will of Shropshire—had called the King of England Harry to his face, and the Heavens had not fallen. Gratefully, I sank down on the lowest step of the dais at his feet and sipped at my brimming beaker. Its sparkling contents and his genial kindness warmed my apprehensive heart. Needless to say, I had never tasted such a witchery of wine. And soon after I had finished it and scooped up some well-spiced venison from a plate on my knees, the sweetmeats and pastries were being served, and through the door by the serving screens some misguided optimist had dragged in a performing bear to entertain the company. A mangy, sad-faced creature, whose clumsy antics could not evoke so much as a titter.Which misjudgment, coupled with the wine, gave me the idea to play lion, prowling up and down behind the sorry beast and waving my absurd jester’s bladder for a tail, until the hall was in such an uproar of mirth that the poor devil of a bear-leader retired before my opposition.

  Either from pity for the fellow, or because the noise disturbed his discourse, milord Cardinal evidently disapproved of my antics.“If the pushful rogue wishes to curry favour he would be better advised to counterfeit a dragon,” I heard him remark to the Duke of Norfolk, while dipping his fingers fastidiously in a finger bowl.

  “A ninny who relies on crude caricatures would scarcely have the wit to think of that,” replied that tall, sour-looking peer whom I had inadvertently mimicked on the bowling green.

  But before the heady encouragement of the King’s best vintage could be altogether dissipated, a childish voice piped out, “Yes, be a dragon! Can you make a real dragon, Fool?” And I turned, enchanted, to see the young Princess Mary leaning across the table, her red-gold hair glittering beneath a demure little head-dress in the candlelight, and her Spanish brown eyes alight with eagerness.

  I thought quickly. King, Queen and Cardinal were forgotten. My one desire was to please her. Had there not been splendid, life-like dragons carved on the lintel on the Chapter House at Wenlock? And had they not been a familiar, terrifying joy of my own childhood? “A green dragon belching fire,” I promised her. And seizing a lighted candle and a scarlet kerchief which Thomas Wolsey had dropped, I held the shaded flame to my mouth and padded with reptilian sinuosity among the company, seeming to blow out fire so realistically that some of the women screamed at my approach, while men swivelled round on their stools forgetful of their food. The royal Tudor wench watched wide-eyed, and by the time I had handed back the ecclesiastical kerchief with an exaggerated flourish she was clapping vigorously. “It is the dragon rampant on my father’s shield come to life!” she cried with delight.

  “Well counterfeited indeed—except that it should be red,” agreed her father, glancing round at the fierce-looking beast embroidered beside the Plantagenet lions on the canopy of state behind his chair.

  “I,
too, am half a Welshman,” I told him, brazenly extending a hand across the table. And Henry Tudor grasped it good-naturedly and looked well pleased.

  After that my success seemed to be assured. I felt that I had been accepted by the Court, and my torment of nervousness left me. Milord Chamberlain had had no time to explain the extent of my duties, but my fellows in the royal household had made it clear that I might go anywhere. A Fool’s familiarity was, it seemed, taken for granted. So after supper I followed the family and a small group of relatives and favoured courtiers into a room which, for all its rich tapestries and wealth of carved chairs and chests, yet had the comfortable, lived-in look of that well-loved parlour at Neston. And all the more comfortable, thought I, because the energetic Cardinal had excused himself, making a great show of denying himself an evening’s pleasure in order to attend to some weighty item of the King’s business.

  After his going, his Grace heaved a gusty sigh of gratitude that the matter should be taken from him, and settled his great frame in homely relaxation. Clearly, he wanted neither affairs of state nor professional fooling, but to talk with his friends at the close of the day as any lesser man might. He was soon reliving with them, as sportsmen will, the events of some recent tournament and then, with the younger men eager about him, making plans for the next one. And later on he was calling upon one of them, Master Thomas Wyatt, to recite to them his latest verses. Music, poetry—nothing came amiss to the gifted Tudor. There was still a kind of youthful zest about him. I heard him roaring with laughter at some whispered story of his cousin of Norfolk’s which I felt sure concerned their mutual relative, the French King, and a few minutes later he had entered into a discussion with his wife about the new Lutheran doctrine of original sin, courteously including one or two of her plain elder ladies. Yet ever and anon he would throw a kindly, teasing word to the younger ones, some of whom were anything but plain.