King's Fool

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “How is—Mistress Joanna?” I brought myself to ask at last.

  “Much stronger in health. But dispirited, I thought. That kind old man, Father Thayne, says she misses the good cheer you made. It was he who told me to be sure to speak to you if I should see you.”

  Kind old man, indeed—kind and ever full of Heavenly understanding. I kissed Mistress Fermor’s hand with a passionate gratitude which probably amazed her. “After today’s entertainment I will believe all the good things they say of you,” she vowed laughingly, before hurrying to rejoin her impatient husband.

  I do not know how long I stood there, lost to my surroundings. The noble towers and gardens of Greenwich had faded into the beloved memory of Richard Fermor’s manor. The diminishing chatter of departing courtiers and the advancing shouts and hammering of servants were lost in recollection of the homelier, more rural sounds of Easton Neston. Joanna remembered me, spoke of me, missed me.…

  “Had you not best get changed into your motley?” John Thurgood was urging.

  “Hurry, Will, they are going in to hall for supper,” some other kind fellow was warning me.

  Could she, too, have remembered, when she told me to choose a green suit, that green was the colour for constancy?

  My heart was warm with the thought that she cared, torn by the thought that she needed me to cheer her. And I must go to entertain a king. My desire was all to be with her, yet I must go and think up some damnable lunacy to make the great hall at Greenwich ring to the rafters with guffaws of laughter.

  IT WAS TOWARDS THE close of Midsummer Day when I came upon the King’s daughter sitting weeping on a stone bench by the sundial. She had been playing at shuttlecock, and her ladies were still playing on a river-side lawn near by. Thinking that she might have hurt herself, I stopped on my way to the landing-steps to ask what was amiss and whether I could call one of them to her.

  “No, no. Please do not tell them,” she begged.

  I realised that royal ladies of Spanish descent, even at the tender age of ten, might be trained not to manifest their emotions. But I could not leave her in such distress. “Then why do you cry, my sweet poppet?” I asked, sitting down beside her as I would to comfort any child.

  “B-because I do not want to leave my parents and go so f-far away,” she answered, between sobs.

  “But you will not have to. It is all finished now,” I said, supposing that she spoke of the marriage with her cousin the Emperor.

  “Oh, not across the sea to Spain. Only across the Severn to Ludlow.”

  “And only on a visit? Like you go sometimes to Westminster or Windsor,” I said soothingly, not realising the implication.

  “No. I am to live there. I am to have my own household. My father has just told me so. He is going to make me Princess of Wales. ‘I love you dearly and will not see you humiliated,’ he said.‘I will show the Emperor and the whole world that my daughter is of an estate fit to marry a King.’”

  The King of France. The words sprang into my mind as they may well have entered hers. A gust of feminine laughter and the smart slap of parchment-covered battledores came from the near-by lawn and I thought, In truth, it is she who is the shuttlecock. Who would be a high-born girl, to be slapped so smartly from one prospective husband to another? And how often does worldly ambition pass for parental care?

  “I am to hold my own Court and rule Wales. And I am so f-frightened. Oh, Will, I am so glad you came!” She threw her arms about my neck and sobbed afresh; then, with a brave effort at composure, pulled herself erect and settled her skirts sedately about her. “I must never show fear in front of my household,” she said, as if reciting some oft-repeated lesson. “But I can tell you.”

  I was touched to the heart. There must be something about motley that sets a man apart, but I do not think it was wholly that.Whether I am wearing it or not, people do tell me things. And this tearful wench looked so pathetically young that I did not know whether to laugh or cry at the thought of her ruling Wales. She must have seen the painful working of my face. “Did you feel the same way when you came here?” she asked.

  “I was gibbering with fright that first evening when I called your royal father Harry—”

  “And made a dragon for me.…”

  At last she was smiling, and I jerked a silk kerchief from the little velvet pocket hanging from her belt and handed it to her so that she could dry her eyes. “I expect you had to leave people whom you loved dearly, too?” she said.

  “God knows I did, my sweet lady. But we must both be brave and look for the happy things in our new lives,” I said, realising as I spoke that I was only passing on to her some of the courage which her mother the Queen had inspired in me.

  And then Mary Tudor said something which made me understand the root of her unhappiness. “They say that Ludlow is a fine castle, but my mother lived there when she was Princess of Wales and married to my late Uncle Arthur. He died there, so she has no happy recollections of the place.” Seeing that her ladies had finished their game and were coming towards us, she dabbed hastily at her button of a nose and asked in a whisper, “Are my eyes still red, Will?”

  “It is growing dusk, your Grace. No one will notice,” I assured her. And springing up so that I shielded her from view, I seized a battledore from one of them and began a spirited attack upon the rising gnats, scratching myself the while, and so drew their laughing attention to myself until they all trooped indoors to bed.

  What the Princess had told me in private was soon the talk of the whole country, and the Welsh were said to be wildly delighted. “It is high time they were properly requited for their loyalty when my late father landed at Pembroke and for the numbers of them who followed him to Bosworth,” said King Henry to the Duke of Suffolk, whose father had been standard-bearer to his own at that momentous battle.

  “You do for them now what was intended when your elder brother was sent,” said Suffolk.

  “It must have been a bitter blow to them when he died within a few months,” sighed Henry. “So there must be nothing niggardly now.”

  “Two groats for the Welshmen, three for the French,” I dared to sing, parodying a popular ballad from my lowly stool. For I had already noticed how often the Tudor had two separate motives—one to further political ends, and one with which to salve his own conscience.

  “The Princess of Wales will keep a revelry this coming Christmas which will be the talk of Europe,” he went on, ignoring me. “I will not have her mope.”

  “Then she will need a jester,” I said, letting my foolish heart spur me against my own interests.

  “Not a bawdy one like you!” laughed Henry, recovering his good humour and making a pass at my backside with his hefty foot.

  But the seed of the idea may have been sown, for the following evening the Queen sent for me and questioned me about homely things, such as my life in Shropshire, where I learned to sing so truly, and how I came to be in the merchant Fermor’s household.And all the while I felt that she was assessing me. She asked if I were married or like to be, and because of her goodness I found myself telling her that there was one in Neston whom I loved and to whom I should ever remain constant.

  “I will remember you in my prayers, that God will bring you together again and grant you both great happiness,” she said.

  “That is impossible, Madam, for she is far above me in estate,”I told her.

  “Nothing is impossible with God,” she said. Words of faith and courage which I was to cling to through many a lonely hour of my life. And then she told me that she intended to try to persuade the King to send me with her daughter to Ludlow. “I want her to enjoy life, but if she is to dance and sing and take part in masques as young people now do, such entertainments must be presented with suitable restraint. I want her to grow up gay without becoming légère, as I am afraid some of my younger ladies have. She has taken a great liking to you, Will Somers, and I have observed how you can suit your fooling to catch a child’s fancy, so tha
t you may be able to help her if she should be unhappy.”

  “Your Grace fears that she will be very homesick?”

  The Queen sighed profoundly. All day I had noticed how ill she looked, and could guess how much this parting tried her.“Perhaps I am foolishly apprehensive,” she said. “But I have such unhappy memories of Ludlow. As you know, I spent the short six months of my first marriage there. I did not speak your language very well then and Prince Arthur was so ill all the time. How he suffered, poor lad!” The words were said involuntarily, as of one younger and weaker than herself, and the impersonal pity of them convinced me as no arguments or protestations could have done that poor fifteen-year-old Arthur Tudor had never been a husband to her.

  “Her Grace is very young to rule a principality, even nominally,” I ventured, being assured in my own mind that her mother felt the same.

  “But the King thinks it will provide excellent training for one who may become a queen,” said Katherine of Aragon, with that forthright honesty which must often have disconcerted his more tortuous mind. “She will have wise advisers in whose hands all practical matters will rest. And of course our well-beloved Countess of Salisbury will be with her, as she has always been.”

  I was duly presented to that great Plantagenet lady and to Sir John Dudley, who had been appointed Chamberlain to this newly founded Court. All manner of preparations were begun. Greenwich seethed with tailors, dressmakers and scurrying clerks. The Thames was congested with barges plying between our watergate and London. The King and Queen accompanied their daughter as far as Langley, and by the time we set out for the Welsh border there was certainly nothing niggardly about our cavalcade, which included more than a dozen ladies of honour and four bishops. “And if that does not keep you from telling the kind of stories with which you regale the King and his sporting friends…” chuckled John Thurgood, wringing my hand at parting.

  Ludlow was certainly a fair castle. The King’s father, Henry of Richmond, had restored it, but parts of it were much as they must have been when it was the Mortimers’ border stronghold during the Wars of the Roses. “Milady of Salisbury says she can remember when the little princes lived here. They must have studied their lessons in this very room,” the Princess told me when her tutor had departed and I had slipped in to lift her heavy, leather-bound books back from table to shelf.

  “The little princes?” I repeated, my mind being on a jumble of newer things.

  “Edward and Richard Plantagenet, of course. The young king and his brother who are said to have been murdered in the Tower of London. If they had lived I suppose my father could not have been king.”

  “You must not let that sadden your Grace,” I said.

  But I know that she often thought of them. And once I saw Margaret Plantagenet of Salisbury, who was their cousin, pass her long white hands along the table edge in a gesture of infinite pity, and then go and stand for a long time before the window from which their eager young eyes must so often have looked.

  Yet life at Ludlow was far from being sorrowful. That lady, in her own wisdom, made sure that our young Princess walked in the sunshine, practised dancing and made music on her virginals, and, according to her mother’s instructions, was never over-tired by her studies. And in spite of the heavy Latin books and the four bishops, I saw to it that there was plenty of revelry and that Christmas was kept right royally at Ludlow, as the King had ordered.

  Two things happened during our sojourn there which gave me singular pleasure. I acquired and learned to play a small Welsh harp, an instrument little used in England but in which the King delighted. And I was able to visit my relatives at Much Wenlock.The Countess provided me with a fine suit of brown velvet for my journey, and Princess Mary had her ladies ransack the kitchens and stuff my saddle-bags with all manner of dainties for my aunt.“There is so much that you have done for me,” she said. “Enjoy your visit, Will, but come back to us soon.”

  Bestriding a good horse, I found it was no more than a day’s journey. But after life in a palace, how the farmhouse and fields seemed to have shrunk! Perhaps it was my imagination, but there seemed to be an air of poverty about the place. The haystacks looked smaller and the rain butt by the door, near which I had made my bid to serve Master Fermor, leaked from a broken stave.But the family welcome was as warm as the fire crackling on the hearth, and my Uncle Tobias, though his straw-coloured hair was beginning to grey, had always been kept fit by hard work. My cousins crowded round me, half over-awed by my good mount and my fine new clothes and covering their embarrassment with rough badinage. For, in spite of my new appointment, had I not always been the one to be teased? The clumsy dolt who could not plough a straight furrow? My aunt, recovering from my exuberant embrace, burst into tears at sight of all the good things I had brought them, and then, on hearing that our beloved Princess had sent them to her, seemed almost more inclined to keep them as objects of veneration than to allow her family to slake their ever-ready appetites. It was only when I was helping my cousins to put away the remnants of the feast for another day that it struck me how strangely bare the familiar old pantry looked. “Is the farm not paying as well as it used?” I asked anxiously, remembering how, during all my motherless youth, Frith farm had seemed the home of plenty.

  “’Tis the weevil,” my eldest cousin Colin explained. “And with all that drought we’d a mighty poor harvest. But now we’re making up a better herd and I’ve hired myself out to Squire Tyrrell till the new heifers be paid for.”

  I looked into his candid, patient eyes. “You must hate that,” I said.

  “But ’twill tide us over. And then I hopes to get wed—one of them Tarleton girls up at Condover. The tall, honey-haired one. Only thing is, Will, Squire Tyrrell be such a sly brute.”

  Around the fire that evening, when I had entertained them with some idea of my life at Greenwich, we talked of family affairs, and my uncle explained more fully how they had used more of their poor soil for growing cattle fodder and staked their savings on buying a bigger herd. “At least we have free grazing on the Frith Common,” he said. “And as you may remember, my beasts have always brought in more money than the crops.”

  Next day I visited the old school cottage and spoke with my father’s successor, and the whole village turned out to welcome me and to gape with pride and curiosity at a Wenlock man who was now the King’s jester. “Is it true that you sit at meat with him?” they asked, crowding round me.

  “Not quite,” I had to admit, explaining how I usually had a stool placed for me before his table or squatted on the dais steps.

  “And that you actually talk with him?” they asked, round-eyed.

  “Aye. And call him Harry,” I boasted.

  The women fingered my fine doublet, and the children seemed to be disappointed because I had not travelled in cap and bells. Also, I imagine, that off duty I did not seem particularly funny.

  I managed to give them all the slip and went alone to kneel in the Priory at High Mass. Once again I heard the exquisite music soaring up to the roof, and was soul-satisfied. Here was a beauty which nothing which I had seen or experienced of material grandeur could shrink. I had been brought up in invaluable proximity to perfection and, kneeling there, I understood in all humility that because I had been granted the sensitivity to appreciate it God would ask more of me than of some unheeding clod. King’s fool as I was, a compassionate Christ could use me.

  When I left Much Wenlock my aunt gathered all the best herbs from her poor garden and pressed them into my hands for the richest Princess in Christendom, and I rode back to Ludlow considerably wiser than when I came. For it is good for a man to know his roots, and to acknowledge them, even as he grows upwards.

  Mary Tudor pressed some of the sprigs of lavender between the pages of her missal, because she was that kind of child, and listened carefully to all the details of my visit. She herself was full of the possibility of a visit from her own family. But before another Christmas came round we were all back at
Greenwich because the French Ambassador was coming specially to see her.To look her over like a young mare at a fair, I supposed angrily.Because our clever Cardinal had at last persuaded King Francis the First to make a bid for her. Francis Capet, who was more than twenty years her senior and the Devil alone knows how many in dissolute experience.

  THE EVENING AFTER THE French Ambassador’s arrival we were waiting as usual to attend the King and his guests to supper. Word had gone round “Will Somers is back,” several people greeted me with the welcome information that the Court had been a duller place without me, and to my surprise I found that now, possibly owing in part to Lord Vaux’s patronage, I was more or less persona grata with that brilliant group of young courtiers whose conversation I had previously hung on from afar.

  “Spain, France and England. The three countries between whom a balance of power must be adjusted if we are to have peace in Europe,” Thomas Wyatt was explaining to me with his usual courtesy. “Any two of them tend to unite their weight against the third. And so you see, Will, how it is forced upon our King, having broken with a friendly Spain, to ally himself with our old foe France or stand odd man out.”

  “And against the security of a nation how can the feelings of his Spanish wife or the future happiness of his daughter matter very much?” added the elder Boleyn girl, who, after being for a short time the King’s mistress, had disappointed her father’s hopes by marrying a penniless younger son, and who was at last blissfully happy.

  “All the world over, women are the pawns that rulers play with,” sighed Hal Norris, too loyal to criticise his beloved master even among trusted friends.

  “Why perturb yourselves about something which may never happen?” asked Anne Boleyn, not even troubling to lower her clear young voice. “Have I not wagered you that Francis will not marry her? His second son, Henry of Orleans, may be offered as a sop, perhaps.”