King's Fool

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  I FOUND IT DIFFICULT to believe that the King had told me of this momentous decision which Lord Mayor, prelates and people all hung upon. It was not so much that he liked my company, I told myself, as that he could be comfortably unaware of it. To him I must seem a familiar, impersonal being, midway between mountebank and monk, to whom he could lay bare his inmost thoughts. If they shocked me my reactions were too unimportant to matter, and if he suffered I could give him human understanding.He had taken me into his service as a jester, but it was rather my instinct for the moment to stop jesting which had brought us into touch. That, and our mutual love of music. And however much I strove not to become too puffed up, at least I knew that the King of England trusted me.

  From that time I had no need to fear other entertainers, however ambitious and clever they might be. They performed their act, won their applause and passed on. But the Tudor family had accepted me as part of their daily life and I belonged. John Fermor, going home to visit Neston, could truthfully report to his father and Joanna that I was a success at Court.

  And success, I found, can be judged as accurately by the attitude of one’s fellows as by that of one’s master. When it became known that I was sometimes called to spend quiet hours alone with the King all manner of people began to tell me of troubles and injustices in the hope that I could get them righted.

  “But I am not the Chancellor of England!” I would protest.

  “No,” they would come back at me. “But you can say things to the King which even milord Chancellor Wolsey dare not.”

  This was true enough, providing that I chose my moment and wrapped the kernel of the grievance in good enough entertainment. Several times by cracking a topical joke about some unnoticed hardship I was able to draw royal attention to it. And sometimes, if he were in a good humour, Henry would rap out an order which would serve to remedy it. Not with the carefully weighed justice of Wolsey’s law courts, but with the swift, more spectacular kindness of a king. And sometimes my sly efforts worked the other way, as when the royal auditors came bowing to their master and I was able to raise a laugh by forestalling the usher and announcing them as his Grace’s frauditors because, as most of us knew, they were waxing fat on his careless extravagance and their needless cutting of a thrifty Queen’s household allowance.

  I would not accept bribes as Budge had, but because quite humble people often laid small offerings outside my door I was not surprised when an unknown woman followed me one afternoon along my favourite riverside path. The September sun was hot and I was tired with trying to distract an unusually irritable master, and when I stretched myself out on the grass and leaned against a stile I saw her standing by the oak tree beneath whose shade I lay. She had brought a cushion which she tucked deftly between my weary back and the hardness of the wood.

  I suspected that the cushion was stolen, but it was soft, so I thanked her for her pains and settled to rest, but she would not move away. “What do you want with me?” I asked testily.

  Solicitude for my comfort turned all too swiftly to supplication. “It is about my son,” she said. And through half-closed eyelids I noticed her work-roughened hands twisting in a kind of vicarious agony against the soiled darkness of her skirt.

  “Who told you that I come this way?” I snapped.

  “I have a cousin among the scullions,” she answered, as if that were immaterial. “My son is to be hanged tomorrow.”

  “Then he has probably done something that well merits it.”

  She did not deny it. “He is a sailor,” she went on in the same urgent voice. “He was caught on a pirate ship which had sunk one of those accursed French merchantmen off Dover. Not so long ago he was sent to fight them. Now Chancellor Wolsey’s new laws punish piracy with death.”

  “And quite rightly,” I said, wanting only to be rid of her.

  “And so he was dragged to London and is to be hanged at noon tomorrow.”

  “And, having brought him up badly, you come to plague me in my rare hour of peace and quiet.”

  “He is all I have.”

  I closed my eyes, but felt sure that she was still there.

  “Have you a mother, Master Somers?”

  “What is that to do with you?” I asked shortly, hating her persistency.

  “Because if you have you must know that were your life in danger she would be as importunate for you.”

  It was a stab in the dark, but it went home. “Touché,” I admitted.“What is your son’s name and where is the hanging to be?”

  She told me his name was Miles Mucklow and that it was to be at Blackwell and I calculated that, if I could catch the King’s ear, it might not be too late to save the man. All the same I do not think that I should have bestirred myself to help if it had not been for the way in which she found opportunity to show her gratitude.

  It was deliriously green and cool beneath the sun-dappled leaves of my oak tree, with the silver Thames rippling through brown rushes almost at my feet. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was with Joanna at Neston. But all too soon the snap of a twig wakened me and I saw that the woman had come back. “What is it now?” I grumbled.

  “A man at the kitchen door.”

  “There must be scores every day.”

  “But he is a stranger. And he is asking for you.”

  “Another beggar,” I said ungraciously.

  “He is certainly crumpled looking, as if he had been sleeping out in the fields. That is why they are all laughing and throwing things at him. Because he looks so odd and says he is a relation of yours.”

  “An old ruse,” I said, idly throwing a pebble into the water.“And where does this one say he comes from?”

  “From Shropshire.”

  I sat up straight and really looked at her for the first time. She must have been handsome once, before the hardness of her life left her lined and scrawny. For the first time I saw her smile. “Like me, he will not go away however cruelly they bait him,” she said. “So I thought perhaps he really is a relation and loves you.”

  “What is he like?” I asked.

  “Short and fresh-faced, with straw-coloured hair and the funniest country hat.”

  In a moment I was on my feet and hurrying back along the path to the back premises of the palace, woman and cushion forgotten. But even as I neared the garden wall my eagerness became mixed with dismay, so that my pace slackened. Just as Frith farm had seemed poor compared with Court life, so would the social status of its owner. Hot into my mind shot the contemptuous epithets used by men who hated our up-climbing Cardinal. “Butcher’s brat,” “Ipswich cattle boy,” and the like. My father had been possessed of dignity, but even in his own setting Uncle Tobias would have seemed a figure of fun had we not been so affectionately accustomed to him. And now the very cooks and scullions were laughing at him.

  Reluctantly, I rounded the palace wall and looked through the open gateway. And there I saw him—hot, dishevelled, his strong country hose all torn by briars and his sun-baked face half hidden by a rustic hat. Smart kitchen underlings, in cheap clothes that aped the fashions of their betters, were mimicking his broad Shropshire accent, and scullions were pelting him with stinking wet refuse from their sinks. The dinner dishes were washed, the fires damped down, and here was a God-sent persistent old comic to provide their spot of afternoon amusement. “Says he’s Will Somers’s uncle, does he?” laughed the dapper Clerk of the Kitchen, happening to cross the courtyard at that moment. “Then I must be the Pope’s grandfather!”

  Shame and dismay possessed me. How unkind, how inconsiderate of such a relative to come, debasing me where I had so laboriously built up success. Were he to see me I could not be callous enough to disown him. But no one had seen me. And how easy it would be to slip away!

  “The poor old man must have walked a long way,” I heard someone murmur pityingly at my shoulder, and realised that the condemned man’s mother must have followed me again. And, enlightened by her words, I noticed how, even with blobs of bas
ting fat dripping down on to his broken shoes, my uncle held his ground. And how his resolution made his tormentors look like yapping, insignificant curs.

  I walked briskly across the yard and swung him round to me, gripping him by the shoulders. “Uncle Tobias!” I called loudly, so that all should hear me. And the welcome sounded glad because I was thanking God that my treachery had been but momentary, in mind rather than fact. Even then I had sense enough to know that shame of family may be a sharp dismay, but that the memory of having felt it could stick in one’s conscience all one’s life.

  “Will!” he cried, with so much relief that I am sure he had already forgotten this Court scum and all he had been through to reach me.

  His tormentors had drawn back towards the kitchen doorway, gaping and abashed. Some young nitwit giggled, supposing my greeting to be part of a jester’s play-acting. And so to leave no uncertainty in their minds I turned on them in anger. “Is this the way you represent the most hospitable Court in Europe?” I rated them. “Go back to your spits and sinks. And if you are so ignorant that you cannot read, then learn by rote the rules which milord Chamberlain finds it necessary to hang on the wall for such louts as you. ‘Do not snot at table. Do not claw your back for fleas. Do not mock old men.’ And now get out of my way, all of you, and bring my visitor something to eat.”

  I took him by the arm and hurried him along a passage to my little room overlooking the carpenter’s court. “What brings you?And how come your shoes and hose to be in such a state?” I asked.

  “Trouble brings me. And scarce was I out of Shropshire when my horse went lame. I had not the silver in my purse to hire, and so I walked.”

  “But could you not have sent one of my cousins?” I asked, seeing that however brave a face he might put on all his misadventures he was tired out.

  “They had to stay and do the best they could for the herd.”

  With contrite celerity half a dozen shame-faced servants were setting up a table and laying the best dishes they could find before him and, instead of fogging him with foreign wines, an older man from the brew house produced a tankard of good Kentish ale. “Forgive us, Master Somers,” he entreated before closing the door upon us. “It was just that we did not believe him.” For which, upon reflection, I could scarcely blame them.

  “Then learn to know an honest man when you see one,” I admonished, with a friendly buffet and a groat or two for their pains.

  Seeing that the honest man was famished, I did not plague him with questions, but as soon as he had laid down his knife and folded his hands across a comfortably filled stomach the explanation came. “It is that grasping landlord Tyrrell. He has enclosed the common which we small farmers have always had the use of for our cattle, we an’ our fathers afore us. An’ now there be nowhere for the fine herd I’ve spent my savings on to graze.”

  “Why did the old lick-penny do this?”

  “Surely you know that the price of wool is soaring. ’Tis happening all over our part o’ the country. The lords of the Manor always want to keep more sheep. Quick wool export, more profit and less labour. What easier than to fence in a bit here and a bit there of the village common-land? But this devil at Frith has taken the lot.”

  I sat in the window seat staring at him aghast. “But our commons were granted years ago by Royal Charter. It is plain robbery. And yet for stealing a loaf a tinker or a pedlar would have his ears cut off.”

  “Aye. An’ that’s not all of it. One old man with a good dog can care for a flock of sheep. So with our pastures gone where are our sons to get even hired work?”

  I had been living in a world of luxury too long. It was not only a whole family’s tragedy, but a menace to a whole hard-working rural class. “There be them as pulls up the stakes by night, but ’tis time someone did summat more permanent about it,” he said, in that deliberate, determined way of his. “An’ so I came to you, Will.”

  They all came to me—the man with royal favour and a foolish heart. And what was I to do? Yet something I would do in this case, having so often done small kindnesses for people who were nothing to me, while families like the Boleyns were forever begging favours for their kin. I now saw this upright, kind old relative through the clear eyes of long affection, unblurred by shibboleths of class. And I remembered that only by his recommendation, however characteristically impartial, had I got my chance in the world and met the girl I loved.

  I slid briskly from the window seat. “We must go and see the King,” I said.

  “I—see the King?” he gasped. Then, supposing me to be joking, he laughed loudly, got up from the table and looked down ruefully at his stained and sorry garments. “In these rags?What would your aunt say, my lad, who keeps all our Sabbath wear so clean and patched?”

  “No, not in those rags,” I agreed, looking wildly round the bareness of my room for inspiration. “But we must go now if we are to catch him before he leaves the council chamber and goes hunting.”

  “You are serious, Will?” I have seen my uncle face a maddened bull with less terror on his face, but he had put himself in my hands and made no further protest.

  I remembered that my new jester’s suit had come from the tailor and was hanging, as yet unworn, behind the door. Quickly I bundled Uncle Tobias into it, struggling to make the green worsted doublet meet across his belly. It was lined with stiff buckram and fringed with red bells, and if he had looked a figure of fun before he looked even more ludicrous now. “Two of us?” he panted, looking from my shabbier motley to his creakingly new outfit.

  “Yes, two—which is bound to attract the King’s attention,” I said firmly, pulling the hood more closely about his face. In spite of the difference between his ruddy face and my high cheek-bones and deep-set eyes there appeared to be some family resemblance which made us look alike.

  Straight to the royal apartments I hurried, choosing all the most populated corridors and ante-rooms. “Make way! Make way for his Grace’s jesters!” I shouted as I went. And high and low made way, stepping back to stare and then entering into the spirit of the thing without knowing quite what was afoot. “Way for my uncle, the King’s new jester!” I called, coming within sight of the great closed door of the King’s privy council chamber.

  Some benevolent guardian angel must have flown down to open it at that very moment, and there in the doorway stood King Henry, flushed and frowning, with a handful of anxious lords and clerics behind him. At sight of us he stopped short in bewilderment and put up a hand to scratch at his auburn pate. “God save us, Will, are there two of you?” he exclaimed. “Did your mother have twins?”

  “No, but she had a brother, and because he has come a long way to see you and his clothes are travel stained I have lent him the fine new suit you had made for me.”

  “And I hope you have given him some food,” said Henry, his frown smoothing into a smile as he examined my double. “Is he as amusing as you are?”

  “Not intentionally. In fact, Harry, he is a very sad man at this moment. But he has an interesting tale to tell.”

  “Then let us hear it,” said the King, seating himself in a chair which a page had set before the hearth. “It is time we heard something more entertaining than fruitless conferences.” He looked sourly at milord Cardinal and Bishop Fisher of Rochester, who excused themselves and moved away, presumably to confer apart.

  My uncle looked imploringly at me, but I knew that his simple sincerity would be worth all my babbling. “It is about a farmer and some cows and a griping old miser,” I said. “But he will tell it better than I.”

  And tell it better he did, for any man talking of his own trade is worth listening to. And Henry Tudor listened, for was it not a story of the ordinary, everyday workings of his kingdom? “What is this landlord’s name?” he asked.

  “Master Tyrrell, your Grace,” said Uncle Tobias.

  “And what Tyrrell ever did his king any good?” I put in, to help things along. And, seeing Henry look at me questioningly, I ventured to
jog his memory with one of those items of history which had been dinned into me in my father’s classroom. “Was it not a Sir Walter Tyrrell who shot King William Rufus through the eye?”

  “An accident, when they were hunting in the New Forest,”recalled Henry. But perhaps he felt the name boded him ill, for he sent for a clerk and there and then gave orders that the fencing was to be taken down. “Does that satisfy you?” he asked, scrawling his all-powerful signature across the paper.

  To my amazement it did not, and Uncle Tobias, having once overcome his shyness, made no bones about saying so. “The old scurrimudgeon will but enclose all over again when your Grace has forgotten,” he said bluntly.

  The Tudor’s sandy eyelashes blinked at him in surprise, but he was sportsman enough to appreciate a man who spoke his mind.

  “Can you write, Tobias?” he asked, after a moment’s thought.

  “Well enough to keep my farm accounts, since my brother-in-law was a schoolmaster,” answered my uncle.

  “Then I tell you what we will do,” said Henry with a chuckle.“We will make you bailiff of this Frith Common. At a fee of twenty pounds a year. And I make no doubt you will know how to keep this Tyrrell on his own side of the fence.”

  My uncle was overcome with gratitude, but my own thanks had to wait. I remembered the woman who had pestered me by the riverside and how, but for her, my uncle would have suffered penury and I would have suffered shame. I must make an effort to save her son. And now, while the pen was in Henry’s hand, was as good a moment as any. I hated asking for another boon, but somehow I managed it. A reprieve was signed and a royal servant sent with it to London.

  “And what do I get out of all this?” my master asked, handing the pen back to his clerk and looking up at me with a rueful grin.

  I joined my palms and bowed my head. “Your reward will be in Heaven,” I said, in a really fine imitation of the Cardinal’s most unctuous baritone.