King's Fool

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  Not knowing what else to do in such bewildering, brilliant surroundings I set myself as unobtrusively as possible to amuse the Princess, and whenever a spontaneous spurt of laughter broke from her I noticed how her parents, whatever their immediate preoccupations, would turn to glance at her with pleasure, as though she were the light of their lives. If her mother called her to order sometimes, forbearing to spoil her as her father did, it was clear to see that her Grace the Queen was all concern about her daughter’s upbringing, and when I heard Queen Katherine telling the King what her lessons had been that day I realised with surprise that in certain subjects it was she herself who instructed their child.

  “Recite to his Grace that lovely prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas which you have been learning this week,” she bade Mary, and the ten-year-old’s expressive face changed from gay to grave as she stood within the circle of her father’s arm and spoke the Latin words right through with clear and sweet perfection.

  “That is far more than I could do, poppet, and merits a reward,” declared her uncle, Charles Brandon of Suffolk, handing her a box of comfits when she had finished. It was the kind of affection she was surrounded with, and clearly she loved him. All England knew how he had been sent to fetch home Henry’s young widowed sister, after her husband, the doting old King of France, had died. And how he had braved Henry’s wrath by marrying her in Paris—that first beloved Mary Tudor for whom our young Princess had been named—and so had graduated from King’s friend to King’s brother-in-law.

  The long June evening was drawing to a close and the Countess of Salisbury, who had always had charge of her, summoned the child’s ladies to take her to her bed. Her elders fell to talking quietly of personal matters, with an occasional nostalgic laugh at some foolish, threadbare family joke. A young man called Hal Norris stood by a darkening lattice singing softly in French to the accompaniment of his lute. And once the King, lured by the melody, joined in for the length of a stanza in a sweet, lingering tenor such as I would have given my ears to possess.

  Looking around me and holding my peace I realised with a warm flood of reassurance that this place to which an incredible destiny had brought me was not a Court, but a home. And that, in the midst of it, the Queen herself stood as the epitome of motherhood for which I had always hungered.

  Dog tired, grateful and unnoticed, I slipped away in the wake of the young Princess’s women. Seldom can any one day in a man’s life have brought him so much to think about. Neston seemed a lifetime and a thousand miles away. But I was weary beyond marvelling or grief. Carefully folding my fool’s motley and as carefully avoiding my fellow members of the royal household, I lay down in shirt and hose to sleep among the King’s spaniels on the rushes in the hall.

  FROM THE FIRST KING Henry showed himself indulgent towards me. He often led the laughter at my quips and topical rhym-ings; but, at that time, having so many spontaneous friends and so few troubles, he had little time or need to talk to me. Nor did I dream that by reason of the apartness of his exalted state and the humble uniqueness of my own he might ever come to find solace in so doing.

  But a King’s jester, to be successful, must somehow keep abreast of all that goes on around him. He must have a finger on the pulse of both national events and private lives. For how else can he barb topical comedy with shrewd comment? I found my country up-bringing a disadvantage, and during my first homesick weeks at Court my greatest source of information was the unguarded conversation of the young men and women to whom time had not yet taught caution, who had perforce to idle away much of their time while waiting to attend upon the King or Queen.

  There was one coterie of them who particularly attracted me.Beneath a surface gloss of careless frivolity they were nearly all gifted youngsters with ambitions of their own who, given the chance, might prove of value to their country. Being sprigs of families with vast country estates, many of them were related.All of them were modishly dressed and most of them were good to look upon. The most outstanding, perhaps, was that poet, Thomas Wyatt, whom I had heard reading his fine verses to the King and whose swordsmanship, I learned, was even finer. Then there were his cousins—a family trio from Kent—Mary, George and Anne Boleyn. Three modish sportsmen, Weston, Brereton and Bryan, and a sharp-nosed girl who, I gathered, might marry George Boleyn. Usually with them, when his duties permitted, was that likeable young gentleman-of-the-bedchamber, Hal Norris, who had been singing to his lute that first evening when I came. And sometimes the young Lord Vaux whose sister was married to Master John Fermor. I would find them grouped together, gossiping on some sunlit terrace, or sitting apart from the older courtiers at the end of one of the long galleries, the girls scarcely pretending to touch their embroidery frames and the men discussing anything from the bold anti-papal preaching of a German called Martin Luther to the King’s bold innovation of putting guns on ships. They seldom bothered to lower their voices, and as often as not I was within hearing, waiting also for the coming of our royal master.

  It was from their idle chatter that I first learned about the plans for the Princess Mary’s marriage.

  “A gold sovereign to that new falcon of yours the King won’t want us at the tennis court this morning, Wyatt,” wagered Francis Bryan. “Where is he, Hal?”

  “Still closeted with Wolsey,” Norris told them. “They are fuming with rage over this rumour that the Emperor Charles will refuse to marry our Princess.”

  “But they have been betrothed since she was six!” exclaimed the younger and more vivacious Boleyn girl.

  “All the same, the Emperor is entering into negotiations for the hand of Isabel of Portugal. The Spanish Ambassador is in there with them now. Between Wolsey’s blighting sarcasm and the King’s storming, I would not for a fortune stand in his fine Cordova leather shoes!”

  “This Isabel is said to be very beautiful and the Emperor Charles must be getting on for twenty years older than the lady Mary,” said Sir Thomas Boleyn’s elder daughter.

  “As if that would deter him if he wanted the alliance!” scoffed her sister Anne. “You may be sure there is some deeper reason than that.”

  There were always men hanging around this sloe-eyed, slender Anne. Although to me Mary Boleyn seemed the more beautiful, there was a tired, defeated look about her, and she accepted her younger sister’s pert superiority without protest. “If the King does come he will be in a vile temper!” she observed flatly.

  “And small wonder, for this sudden spiteful unfriendliness will wreck all his efforts to balance the power in Europe,” exclaimed Surrey indignantly. “And think what a position it puts our Queen in. She has always been set on a Spanish alliance and now it is her own nephew who throws this deadly insult at us.”

  “It will put her in a still more unenviable position, poor lady, if Wolsey persuades the King to angle for an alliance with rival France,” observed George Boleyn.

  Anne, who never let people forget that she had been with that first Mary Tudor when she was Queen of France, gave a contemptuous little laugh. “King Francis would not look at a chit of ten!”she said.

  “Because he looked too often at you!” teased Sir Thomas Wyatt, leaning over the back of her chair.

  “All the same,” she went on, “Henry Percy, who as you know is in Wolsey’s household, tells me that the Cardinal is so anxious for a French alliance that he plans—”

  Before she could voice any further indiscretion her brother clapped a hand over her mouth, and Wyatt said sadly, “Harry Percy is another who has looked at you too often for my liking.”

  “If Henry Tudor wants a French marriage for their daughter, Queen Katherine will hide her hurts and do exactly as he wants,”said Mary Boleyn, just as if neither of them had spoken.

  She spoke with an odd kind of bitterness, and there followed a puzzling silence during which everyone seemed to avoid looking at her.

  “Ah, well, mercifully our little Princess is too young to be overmuch hurt by all this,” said Norris, moving away to throw open
a casement to the beauty of the June morning.

  But I was not too sure. A girl of ten who could speak four different languages and begin to read the classics must mature in mind if not in body. Standing there, half hidden by a tall armoire half-heartedly trying to jot down a line or two of topical doggerel which had occurred to me, I recalled how I had seen her earlier that morning coming from her mother’s apartments and how, instead of hurrying back to the instructions of her learned Doctor Vives and her lesson books, she had stood quite still by an open garden door, leaving her women in an uncertain huddle behind her. Naturally I had supposed that she stopped to watch the birds fluttering between the budding roses and the low box hedges, but now I doubted if she had really seen any of these sweet things.

  “How doth the beauty of an English rose

  Beguile a maid from Latin prose!”

  I had teased, breaking in upon her stillness like an ill-timed clock. For once she had not whirled lightly round, sparkling with answering fun. When she turned her brown eyes were set in a blind, bewildered stare, as though looking inward at her own destiny. I had felt momentary compassion, thinking that perhaps her parents, in their loving pride, had been forcing her to study too much. And then, to my surprise, the tall Countess of Salisbury had appeared, unattended and unannounced, motioning to the huddled women not to follow. She had smiled down at the child with infinite kindness, and taken her hand and led her out into the sunlit garden.

  There had seemed to be no question of lessons this morning, and as they moved away I had overheard Mary Tudor say in the shocked voice of a hurt child who has hitherto known nothing but security and kindness, “I gave him an emerald ring and he promised to wear it always.” Emerald green, so I had learned in my new fashionable environment, was the colour for constancy—a colour which she must often have heard her younger ladies reading about in romances, or seen exchanged by them in ribbons or posies with their lovers.

  I had no idea then of whom she spoke. But I knew now that Queen Katherine must just have endured the painful duty of telling her beloved daughter that their own kinsman, the Emperor, had jilted her.

  I do not pretend to follow all the political repercussions which followed, only the human ones which began to unfold themselves gradually before me like a play. The gay young Boleyn coterie had been right. Mary Tudor was too young for this matrimonial insult to cloud her gaiety for long. And the Emperor did have a reason for his behaviour which must have drawn the sting of resentment from his aunt’s judgment of him, even while the reason itself appalled her. But while all this may have been discussed for weeks in higher circles, I stumbled on it by chance, which—before I acquired intimate friends at Court—was my usual way of gathering up the threads of Court life.

  To my great delight and to the furtherance of my ambition I had been allowed to help Master John Thurgood, the Master of Revels, to devise and produce a masque in the gardens at Greenwich. It was to celebrate the King’s birthday, and he and the Queen had both declared it to be one of the most effective pieces of play-acting they had ever seen. And all the guests who had flocked to Greenwich by road and water appeared to agree with them. “Almost as inventive as those I have taken part in in Paris!” admitted Mistress Anne Boleyn, as she ran past us afterwards with a bevy of water nymphs in clinging green draperies.

  “Must all our fashions come from France?” demanded Thur-good, grimacing behind her back. “Give me an English morris dance any day!”

  “Or a rousing Welsh part-song,” I said. “But no wonder the scintillating lady is elated. She was right royally admired. Did you see the King call her father to sit by him?”

  With his usual generosity, his Grace had called us to the royal stand and handed us each a bulging purse and congratulated us before all the fine company, and now, as the sun went down, actors and spectators were beginning to follow him back into the palace.The day’s tension over and success assured, Thurgood and I sat down on the nearest piece of scenic rock to relax over a flagon of wine which our good friend the head cellarer had had the thought to send out to us. Because of the heat I had discarded my motley and had been rushing here, there and everywhere, directing and exhorting, in black hose and breeches and an old white shirt. And dressed like this I felt more truly myself than I had felt for weeks.

  “You are a versatile fellow, Will!” said Thurgood, seeming to appreciate some hitherto unsuspected facet in my personality. “I believe you would sooner work behind the scenes on the music and sequences of a masque than quip your way to popularity in full blaze of the royal presence.”

  Because we were of the same kind of calling and he had never shown the least jealousy of my growing success—or because after some high excitement one is apt to relapse into complete naturalness—I shared with him a soul-searching moment of truth. “We players live on applause,” I said thoughtfully. “But the fooling has been forced upon me. As a lonely fellow’s face-saver for other deficiencies, perhaps. I am a serious creature at heart, caring to the point of ecstasy for all beautiful things. Most of all for music, though to my deep regret I have no remarkable voice.”

  He answered nothing, but looked at me carefully as though wishing to remember me as he saw me revealed at that moment. He laid a hand momentarily upon my knee, in a gesture of promised friendship. And then we fell to discussing our recent dramatic creation, learning pointers for our next effort, as professional entertainers must, from its moments of success or failure. And presently Lord Vaux and my late master’s son, who had been among the guests, strolled over to join us. Thomas Vaux, young as he was, was by way of becoming a patron of the arts, and royal approval had given me a new importance in John Fermor’s eyes. I was amused to find how much less condescending his manner was than it had been when I was in his father’s house. “The part of Neptune was excellently conceived, and my wife was enraptured by the little mermaids,” he said.

  “Master John Thurgood here was responsible for that,” I told him as we both rose to our feet.

  “But their singing in the caves was Will’s,” insisted Thurgood.

  “A pleasant novelty,” allowed Vaux. “But perhaps another time we might persuade my friend Wyatt to write the words.”

  “Ah, yes, indeed, milord,” I agreed wholeheartedly. “If we can but find someone to speak them well enough. For my own part, I think the loveliest thing in all the afternoon was the Princess Mary dancing alone to her shadow in that stiff Spanish dress.”

  “A child item always steals the show,” said Thurgood, smiling reminiscently.

  We emptied our well-earned beakers, basking in general approval. “But that other child—the boy of about the same age—I have never seen him before,” I demurred. “I heard some of the people at the back hissing. What made you put him in the place of the young Earl of Surrey, his Grace of Norfolk’s son, who spoke the lines so much better at rehearsal, Thurgood?”

  Both the young courtiers laughed. “Our shrewd Master of Revels probably knows that had that boy not taken part King Henry might not have been so extravagantly pleased,” said Master John Fermor.

  “Why, who is he?” I asked, annoyed that approval of our play should depend in any degree at all upon the indifferent acting of a peaky-looking boy.

  “How country green you are, Will!” snickered John Fermor.

  “He is the King’s natural son,” Lord Vaux told me more civilly.

  “By Elizabeth Blount, who is now Lady Taillebois,” elaborated Fermor, who always enjoyed seeming to be in the swim of things.

  “No wonder some of the people hissed,” I muttered to Thur-good, after they had turned aside to wait for their wives.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said that tolerant man, motioning to a posse of approaching servants that they might remove our rock.“The King has been happily married for sixteen years or more and this Fitzroy is the only by-blow that ever I heard of. Unless the elder Boleyn girl had one.”

  Mary Boleyn. I remembered how intimately she had spoken of the King’s mo
ods, and thought back on her jaded bitterness with new understanding. I was certainly learning my world. “I am not grass green enough to have meant that,” I said. “But that the people must resent this Henry Fitzroy being brought to Court because of the discomfiture of the Queen and Princess.”

  “They are both exceedingly beloved, as we all know. But, however difficult it may be, Queen Katherine is always gracious to the lad and obedient to whatever the King may have in mind for him. And it may be much. Who ever heard of a woman inheriting? Particularly with so much trouble in Europe? Henry Tudor must be desperate for a son. And Queen Katherine, they say, is now too old—”

  He ceased speaking abruptly as two ladies on their way back to the palace came within hearing. One of them I knew to be Elizabeth, Lady Vaux, the other I guessed must be his lordship’s sister, whom John Fermor had been fortunate enough to marry. They stopped to thank us graciously for an afternoon of good entertainment, and Mistress Maud Fermor tarried behind a moment or two and smiled at me. “You must be the Will Somers whom I heard spoken of so often when I was at Easton,” she said.

  My whole being seemed to spring to life. “Have you been there recently, Madam?” I asked.

  “Only on a passing visit,” she said, smiling at my eagerness.

  “Then you can tell me how my master fares?”

  “Do you never remember that you have now risen up in the world?” she teased. “He is excellently well, and busy as ever. His new ship is nearly completed.”

  “How is she called?” I asked, remembering with what enthusiasm I had clambered about her half-built hull at Ipswich.

  “The Cast.”

  I felt that I must say something—anything—to detain her. “And they still speak of me?”

  “Ad nauseam,” she assured me with a friendly smile. “My pretty little sister-in-law, Joanna—Mistress Mottie—that grumpy old Jordan, farmhands, servants—all of them.”