King's Fool

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “But after Francis has so far committed himself as to send this deputation?” objected Wyatt.

  “He can always fall back on the old suggestion that she is a bastard.”

  “Nan, for Heaven’s sake!” intervened her brother, glancing hastily over his shoulder to see who was within earshot. “Do you want to get us all beheaded?”

  “Mon cher George, what cheerful things you suggest!” she exclaimed, stretching up a fondling white hand as if to press his own handsome head more firmly to his shoulders. “But whether I say it or not, surely all the world is aware that the Queen of England married her deceased husband’s brother?”

  “With a dispensation from the Pope,” Norris reminded her firmly.

  “Whose opulent Legate is approaching us at this moment,”warned Wyatt.

  With their flair for swift invention they had switched smoothly into an innocuous discussion about the merits of some lively poet called Skelton by the time Cardinal Wolsey came past. Wolsey, deep in conversation with the Bishop of Tarbes, and surrounded by gesticulating Frenchmen. Wolsey, resplendent in Richard Fermor’s rustling silk, with his scarlet hat carried before him and his obsequious jester, Saxton, scampering behind. He seemed to wait with haughty impatience for the King’s procession, after which came the Queen and her ladies bringing the Princess. A Princess who looked pale and remote, who did not even glance at me and who was dressed more grandly than I had ever seen her.

  When they had all passed into the great hall I realised that for more than a year the merriment of the King’s table must have been mainly in the hands of Saxton and a cumbersome, black-bearded fellow called Budge who had wormed his way into my place. With my mind still shocked by the cruel, careless words of Anne Boleyn, I was obliged to brace my wits for the fray so that now on my return I might recover my own secure place.

  It had been easy enough to entertain a young Princess and her household, particularly in Wales where everyone could sing. Jesting for the King had suited my pattern, partly because of that odd blend of scholarship and simplicity which was in him, and partly because broad, good-natured English humour is much the same at Court as at any country fair. But the prospect of having to crack jokes which would be comprehensible to sardonic, sophisticated Frenchmen unnerved me. Yet somehow I must out-shine the two thrusters who had for months been feeding on my pastures. After a few laboured bits of buffoonery had fallen flat I tried popping out suddenly from behind a wall tapestry and firing a riddle at the resplendent company, and then retiring behind it again to give my audience time to call out their various answers and—more important still—to give myself time to devise the next one. By setting an eager page to time them by the King’s gold clock, and by roping in John Thurgood to record all successful scores on a chequer-board, I found to my relief that I had introduced a game which gave French wits a chance to sparkle and which would probably help to pass our own winter evenings.

  That supper was a vast success. Never had there been such a blending of French and English voices, such an unbending of politely veiled criticism and formality. And the King, in the heyday of his manhood, was the merriest of hosts. His Greenwich cooks had excelled themselves in providing an unending procession of fish and meats and venison. And while his guests were still admiring a marvellous sugared confection made in the shape of a fleur-de-lys, the musicians in the gallery above the serving screen struck up a favourite dance tune. King Henry, anxious to show off the maiden in the marriage market, danced with her himself. All his life he had loved dancing and excelled at it, but the sight of his tall, stalwart frame linked with her short, child-like one seemed to me, the professional showman, a ludicrous mistake. How much more to advantage she would have shown, I thought, if partnered by someone of her own age such as the young Earl of Surrey, or even by her half-brother, Henry Fitzroy.

  “That lad is still at Court, I see,” I muttered to Thurgood, who was counting out the wagers which had been thrown on to his chequer-board.

  “And has been created Duke of Richmond since you left,” he muttered back.

  “And the Queen tolerates it?”

  “What else can she do, poor lady? Could she but produce a son this Blount boy would soon be sent back to obscurity.”

  “And who is the demure-looking child sitting beside him?” I asked, looking round for fresh faces at Court while waiting for the royal dance to stop.

  “Mary Howard, young Surrey’s sister.” Thurgood lowered his voice still more, so that I had to incline my head to catch his disturbing words. “Rumour has it that the King intends to marry her to this by-blow of his, and that her father, proud old Norfolk, jumped at the chance.”

  “The chance of a crown, you mean?” I gasped, incredulously, under cover of the music.

  Thurgood shrugged. “A desperate solution. But bolstered by the Howards’ Plantagenet blood—”

  “But, John,” I protested, “the people would never submit—”

  “They hate the very thought. Many of them would sooner go back to the Plantagenets.”

  “But what of the Princess Mary for whom they shout themselves hoarse in the streets?”

  “As to that,” Thurgood reminded me, “if the result of all this lavish display proves successful her Grace will be living in France.”

  The sweetness of lutes and hautboys ceased. The dance was over. Mary Tudor made an enchanting curtsy to her father. And he, telling the company that she was his pearl beyond price, led her back to a chair beside the Queen. The servants were bringing in great gold dishes piled with grapes and Spanish oranges, and scarcely had the applause for the dancers died down before that bungler Budge was on his feet reciting some ill-scanned poem he had been concocting. So tedious was it that I recall no more than a few lines towards the end—something mawkish about “This king did dance with his fair flower, the mother standing by,” and then, playing for popular approval with complete tactlessness, “I pray God, save father and mother, and this young dancer fair, and send her a brother to be England’s rightful heir.”

  He stared pointedly at Fitzroy as he spoke the last line, and, turning, I saw the look on the Queen’s tired face and the embarrassed fury on the King’s. I overheard a man sitting just behind Budge mutter, “The time is gone past, you fool. The Queen is too old.”

  And the gay tinkle of Mistress Anne Boleyn’s laughter as she leaned forward to whisper behind her hand, “You speak truth, Master. Doctor Butts says so. And being of the Queen’s household I should know.”

  I had just begun to string together a short, stinging parody of Budge’s illiterate verses, but in sudden pity for the King and Queen I abandoned it. Once again some words of Anne Boleyn’s had shocked me into a presentiment of insecurity—not for myself, but for them, and for the whole of our familiar, comfortable life.

  I sprang up on the dais, intent upon creating some diversion—anything to wipe that distressed look from the Queen’s plain, motherly face. With no precise idea of my intentions I seized a dish of half-cold frumenty from a side table and began ladling some of the white milky stuff into four small bowls. “After sitting through so much poesy we need more sustenance, royalty and fools alike!” I declared. I handed a bowl to the suffering Queen, unobtrusively kissing her hand as I did so, and handed a second, on bended knee, to my frowning master. I set down one for myself and beckoned to my rival to come and take the fourth. He was nearly twice my size, with four times the self-complacency, and when he came strutting up to the top table I picked up his share and, driven by instinctive dislike, flung the whole helping in his silly face. The horrid glutinous mess hung upon his eyelashes and dribbled down his bristling beard to the tawdry finery of his coat. My motive was inexcusable, although the action itself passed for ordinary slapstick humour and raised a storm of cheap laughter from the lower tables.But the victim was furious. Instead of meeting it with professional buffoonery before our public and making a great to-do of mopping up his face, he rushed at me in grim earnest and, with a flamboyant gesture, so
far forgot where we were standing as to draw his sword.It was only the foolish wooden sword which some jesters wear as a part of their stock in trade. But instantly Henry Tudor roared to him to put up his weapon, and milord Chamberlain rapped out an order and the servants were bundling my unfortunate rival from the hall. Because I was but country bred, I took some moments to realise the enormity of the offence, and to remember that a sword drawn in anger in a sovereign’s presence could mean death. But Henry was no longer gratefully amused. Briefly his glance met mine in a kind of reproach. Then, like a good host, he swept the incident lightly aside, bidding some official pay the unfortunate man his wages and let him go.

  Only Sir Reginald Pole, the Countess of Salisbury’s son, referred to the incident again that evening. “Why did you do it?” he asked, stopping to speak to me a few minutes later as he came down from the high table.

  “Professional jealousy,” I said jauntily, because my conscience was sick with shame.

  “Or human pity for those in high places?” he suggested, laying one of his fine scholarly hands on my shoulder. “It is hard to see those whom we love hurt, and keep silence.” He was recently home from Italy where, I understood, he had been studying for the priesthood, and when he was a very young man much of his time must have been spent in the company of the Queen and her infant daughter. He looked at me appraisingly and then, as if deciding that he could trust me, he broke through that barrier of shyness which held him from familiarity with most men. “The Queen and her daughter will soon have need of all their friends. Though I imagine,” he added, with a singularly charming smile, “that we may be called upon to do more dangerous things than flinging bowls of frumenty in order to help them.”

  I stared after him. “Tall as a Pole” was how his young relative, Mary Tudor, had often teasingly, adoringly described him. Tall and slender, he was, with that red-gold hair, that effortless charm and that devastating smile. And belatedly the fact established itself in my rustic mind that he was pure Plantagenet—grandson of that murdered Duke of Clarence and great-nephew of two kings. And there followed a dangerously inevitable comparison between him and that over-dressed, newly ennobled youth, Fitzroy of Richmond.

  One could not doubt Reginald Pole’s unself-seeking sincerity. And how soon his warning was justified; and the Boleyn girl’s disquieting prophecy fulfilled. Although how she, a mere Kentish knight’s daughter, could know these things before the rest of us amazed me, unless she had some spy in the King’s council chamber. It was soon common knowledge that Francis preferred to marry the widowed Queen of Portugal rather than a child Princess of England. And that in order to delay the present negotiations he had instructed the Bishop of Tarbes to question the legitimacy of the proffered bride.

  We at Court were shocked and, as the news filtered through, the whole of the country was indignant. The King’s Privy Council sat day after day, and an ecclesiastic enquiry was set up regarding the validity of her parents’ marriage. Although King Henry must have tried to keep this from the Queen, she soon heard of it. She was sick abed at the time and one could only imagine her distress. And because she had never wanted this French alliance it must have been all the more bitter to find that Francis could be the cause of such hurtful humiliation.

  “His Grace, to calm her natural distress, had assured her that he permitted the enquiry only to dispel all disadvantage towards their marriageable daughter,” I overheard Wolsey assuring the anxious Lord Mayor of London, whose barge was often at the Greenwich watergate.

  With the Queen sick, the King so preoccupied and all the festivities for the departed Frenchmen finished, a cloud of depression seemed to hang over the palace. Instead of hunting or playing in his newly roofed tennis court, my master seemed to be for ever closeted with the Cardinal or discussing his marriage and his conscience with the learned Doctor Longland, his confessor. He was seldom in the mood for merriment. “Devise something to cheer us, Will,”he would say occasionally at supper, but he no longer joined in with that whole-hearted zest which had made our efforts go with a swing. But sometimes afterwards he would call me into his private room to play to him while he rested, withdrawn from statesmen and sports-loving friends alike. “You are half a Welshman, Will, and your music soothes me,” he would say. And I would play tune after tune, softly, on my small Welsh harp. Every now and then he would join in and sing some of his favourites, but as often as not he would just sit pulling at his lip in thought or seem to be dozing.

  “I have not been sleeping well,” he explained one evening, rousing himself with a nod and a start.

  The fire had burned low and the room was mostly in shadow, else I do not think he would have begun speaking before me as he did. Almost as if he were speaking to himself, saying over something for the hundredth time. “Small wonder that I sleep ill, with my conscience so troubling me. Suppose what Tarbes says be right, then I have been living in sin all these years. However wise my father’s policy for Spain, I should not have obeyed him and taken Arthur’s widow.” His strong, square hands pushed restlessly up and down the carved arms of his chair, and presently he turned, aware of my sympathetic presence, and spoke as man to man. “But when I look back over all the sunlit years of our married life a priest’s pedantic words seem to make little sense. Getting on for twenty years. That is a long time, Will. And it has been the kind of marriage that men pointed to with envy.”

  I laid aside my harp, and my heart throbbed with excitement that he should be talking to me so. He rose from his chair and stretched his great arms above his close-cropped head—arms which could throw most of his own archers in the wrestling ring.“Consider my vigour!” he challenged. “It is incredible that I cannot beget sons. I—who need them so desperately for England—when half my subjects’ hovels crawl with ’em.”

  His massive shadow on the wall seemed to writhe in a fury of frustration. “You had Henry of Richmond,” I dared to remind him.

  His manhood clutched gratefully at the thought. “And again and again I begat sons on my own virtuous wife. But they all died—or never even breathed their way into this life. So this must be the hand of God, punishing us—punishing us for living all these twenty years in sin.”

  He slumped back into his chair. “Her Grace the Queen has been ailing for months,” I pointed out.

  “But she was radiant then.” He sat upright, suddenly smiling at proud memories. “I can see her now, crowning me and Charles Brandon and the other winners at some tournament—golden-haired, gay and kind—”

  A short silence fell. He was gazing into the dying embers and I guessed that he was still remembering those golden days. “Sir,” I said—the familiar Harry being a word I would not presume to use in serious privacy—“you have her most lovable and accomplished daughter.”

  He laughed then, short and sure. “And what would happen to this country in the hands of a woman? With a new dynasty at home and all the powers of Europe yapping like hungry curs abroad? I tell you, Will, there never was such need for a strong hand and ruthless diplomacy.”

  I leaned forward from my shadowed stool, too absorbed to be afraid to voice my eager thoughts. “God grant your Grace long life. But come the time, there could be able men around her. Some of these brilliant young scions who are growing to maturity now.”

  He smiled and shrugged indulgently at my untutored visionary sophistry. “And because she is a woman they would all squander their brilliant abilities in struggling for precedence.”

  “But is it not conceivable—just conceivable—that a woman, not great in herself, could produce a great age? Being served by a very rivalry of chivalric love?”

  “I might have imagined so once,” he admitted, a little sad, perhaps, for his disillusionment. “But you talk out of romantic legend, Will. Take Wolsey—or that bull-faced secretary of his, Tom Cromwell—the new men of business ability whom it has suited us Tudors to use. By means of them my father amassed a fortune, broke the power of the contentious barons and the unending threat of civil
war, and made England strong. But chivalry is not in their make-up. What woman, I ask you, could control them?”

  “Or what man?” I thought, considering to what heights of power the Ipswich grazier’s clever son had come. Or was it only that Wolsey seemed to rule both king and country? Was he, after all, perhaps only one of those able men whom Tudors use? I seemed to have learned more in this past half hour than in a lifetime. “And failing milady Mary there is no one?” I said, thirsting for knowledge and fearing that never again could I hope to stand so near the source.

  “No one save that feckless boy I had of Bessie Blount—or a Plantagenet through the male line.” The last words sounded like a muttered curse. The Tudor heaved himself out of his chair and padded with that panther-soft tread of his across to the moonlit window. I think he had momentarily forgotten me again, and, having risen when he rose, I stood there feeling as if I watched a piece of play-acting. He banged his fists with a kind of controlled and weary fury against the emblazoned glass. “After Bosworth—after all my father’s careful building—back to the Plantagenets!”

  I saw then the naked thing that nagged him. The usurper’s fear which had driven his impostor-ridden father to murder Margaret of Salisbury’s brother Warwick. The lurking canker that no one could suspect, seeing his boisterous splendid state. “What have I done worse than other men that God will not give me a legitimate son?” he demanded of the indifferent moon.

  After a while he turned and stood staring into space, emotion abated, his strong hands slack at his sides. “The Princess Elizabeth of York, your Grace’s mother, was a Plantagenet,” I reminded him.

  He crossed himself, remembering her with devotion. Perhaps he thought, too, of his favourite sister Mary, who had married Suffolk.I am sure that he thought, too, of Katherine the Queen. “I have been singularly blessed in my women,” he said.

  During that moment or two of reverie, love seemed to have subdued frustrated rage. He came back almost lightly to the hearth and to the former points of our incredible conversation. “And so you see, Will,” he summed up, with a soft, sibilant intake of breath, “there is nothing for it but for me to marry again.”