King's Fool

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  But they were all too late, for he had married his mistress secretly.So secretly that even we of the royal household were never sure of when and where the short ceremony took place. Whether immediately on our coming ashore at Dover, during their brief visit to the Boleyn manor of Blickling, or in some unfrequented attic after the Court came back to Whitehall. All we knew was that Anne had been created Marchioness of Pembroke—the Welsh stronghold where the first Tudor had landed—and that her father was now Earl of Wiltshire and her brother Viscount Rochford. I believe now that the royal marriage had just been celebrated soon after daybreak one bleak January morning when I passed an unknown monk hurrying furtively down the west turret stairs. But at the time, had I passed a whole procession of monks in that improbable place, they would have made no impression on my mind, for Joanna Fermor was to be married that very week. To Oakham Skevington, from John Brown’s house in Aldermanbury.

  It had to come. A man must get his daughters wed. And God knows I had tried to steel myself to accept it. Ever since I had entered the King’s service I had tried to find compensation in the hundred and one interests which crowded my days. But since the Fermor family had sent me their “glad news” life had become a blank, with only the cruel picture of Joanna’s fragrant loveliness in that solemn money-maker’s arms for my ever-present torment.I had been bidden to the wedding, but would sooner have faced the gallows tree at Tyburn than go. Even though Father Thayne, who was coming down to London to marry them, had written me with rare understanding, reminding me that only by endurance and renunciation can we acquire the power to help the sorrows of others. Which power, he added in his inimitable way, must be attended by rare opportunity for one who met so many different kinds of people as I.

  But I could not reach up to the level of his goodness. Whether they needed help or not, I banged the door of my own small room to shut them all out, and jerked my hated motley from its hook.There were to be many guests and great festivities at dinner that forenoon—a sort of unacknowledged wedding feast, presumably. I should be expected to scintillate with wit, and I had not thought up a single line of appropriate patter. John Thurgood, my good friend and Master of Revels, had warned me that I was becoming too quiet of late, and that some of my jokes had fallen flat, so that expectant company had been heard to murmur, “Poor Will Somers is losing punch.”

  Well, Will Somers’s jesting would be sharp enough today, striking out like a sharp sword of criticism in all directions, thrusting without pity at men’s vulnerable hidden weaknesses, in an effort to pass on some of his own hurt to others—which was the reverse of what good Father Thayne would have me do. I would have a stab at priests like Wolsey, who kept wives in private and got rid of them when the bright light of success began to shine, and at secular scholars like Cranmer, who let themselves be ordained hurriedly into vacant Archbishoprics so as to do their royal master’s dirty work. I would slip in a sly thrust at milord of Suffolk for casting a matrimonial eye on his wealthy ward, Lady Willoughby’s daughter, while his sweet wife Mary Tudor lay mortally sick, but still alive, in their country manor at Westhrope. And I would flick all present with an uncomfortable reminder, in the midst of their gluttonous revelry, of that other sick woman who had been a fêted queen, and who had now been ousted from this her home to live in loneliness in some borrowed country house at Buckden.

  And for a finale I could, with John Thurgood’s connivance, arrange a topical little allegorical scene in which half-a-dozen prosperous-looking middle-aged men, each with a wife beside him, anxiously searched the intertwining boughs of half-a-dozen trees.“Landowners with a promising crop of mulberries,” some wit in the audience might guess, raising a spate of giggling.

  “Nothing so juicy,” I would correct him. “These are their family trees. All pleasantly entwined and growing ever upwards. Grazier to merchant, merchant to titled gentry. Upward and rich.” And I would snap my fingers for the actors in fustian to come in, each with his axe.

  “Then why do they now call their servants to cut out a bough here and a bough there?” someone would surely ask.

  “Because they grow too close!” I would interpret. “Ask yourselves, my friends. Is it not going on all over England? In your own homes, perhaps. People suddenly worrying whether their marriages be right and lawful, where once there was security. Middle-aged people, grown comfortable to each other as old shoes, beginning to worry about their marriages, where once we had a pattern in high places. And fathers bringing in lawyers—see, here they come, with deeds and inkhorns—stuffing their purses by proving, with all this intermarrying among the top crust of families in this island of ours, that your children’s betrothals will not be in any degree incestuous.”

  Indeed, I would lay bare the whole rotten expediency of modern marriage, which should be a spontaneous thing, for love alone, and women not mere pawns. I, who knew too much, would for once say too much. And probably the King would rise up in wrath and expel me from his service. And there would be nothing left but to go back to Shropshire and milk cows at a groat or two a day for my comic-looking, valiant-hearted uncle.

  But I did none of these daring things because Mistress Emotte Fermor came seeking me, and banged peremptorily on my inhospitable door. Gaunt, ageing, invaluable Mistress Emotte in a soaked hooded cloak, who had walked all the way in the rain from Aldermanbury. And probably put half-a-dozen pert pages in their place until, worn down by her determination, they directed her aright. I embraced her as if she were a messenger from Heaven, dried her cloak and muddy shoes before my meagre fire, and put her in my only chair. “It is about Joanna,” she said.

  “I know. She is being married tomorrow.”

  She laid a compassionate hand on mine, knowing what it meant to me. “I am not so sure. Father Thayne, who should have performed the ceremony, cannot come.”

  “Is he sick?” I asked.

  “No. But I am sure he soon will be, kept without proper warmth and food this bitter winter. Cromwell’s men came while my brother was over in Calais on business. And because Father Thayne would not be talked down by them, they took him away to Buckingham gaol.”

  I knew immediately what she meant, and my own heartache was momentarily forgotten. “Cromwell’s commission, enforcing the Statute of Praemunire,” I said. “And of course he refused to sign.”

  It was the old law of Richard the Second’s reign, revived. By it, with the help of Thomas Cranmer, Henry had been declared head of both Church and State—denying all ecclesiastic authority of the Pope in England. And the entire priesthood must deny their former loyalties and subscribe to it.

  With clever diplomacy things were made easy for the rest of us by a kind of general pardon—for what, God knows!—issued to the laity after Wolsey’s fall. We were not obliged to say what we thought or felt, so that time might gradually accustom without accusing us. Half England cared passionately for tradition and the teaching of their fathers, some were indifferent, and many of the intellectuals were all for the New Learning—the Bible to be printed so that all men could read for themselves, the call of Erasmus to see Christ more vividly portrayed in the pages of the Gospels than in gilded images, freedom to manage our own affairs without interference from Rome. Most of us, of whichever persuasion, had the sense—or the cowardice—to keep our mouths shut on the topic, save before trusted friends, and for myself it was an easy kind of comfort to find the Mass said just as ever in the King’s own chapels, with all the candles and colour and music which he loved. We all knew about this commission and the inspection of the smaller monasteries, the dissolving of the Holy Trinity Priory in Aldgate, and the cross-questioning of important Church dignitaries, but I had not realised that the hunt was going on among worthy parish priests and private chaplains in little villages as far away as Northamptonshire.

  “Father Thayne is so frail—and Buckingham gaol so grim,” was all I could find to say.

  A tear splashed down on to the thin, capable hands in Emotte Fermor’s lap. In the old days, when I
was a lad making a crazy nuisance of myself at Neston, I do not think she had ever been seen to cry. I like to think that it was partly her coming to care for me which had softened her. “It is like one of the family gone—the best and most secure part of us.” She turned to catch at my sleeve as I came to perch comfortingly on the table edge beside her. “Is there nothing you can do, Will? Everyone says you are so popular at Court. Could you not speak for him to the King?”

  I shook my head sadly. “Not about anything arising from this break with Rome. It touches his immediate need for a divorce too closely.”

  “It is all that wicked Kentish harlot’s fault!” she cried angrily, as most women did. It would have taken too long to explain to her that it was not—quite. And all about the movement in Europe and at our own Universities which might eventually have made this heart-rending schism happen anyway.

  So I said, to cheer her, “Well, the Skevingtons and the Fermors and the Browns between them should be able to find another priest easily enough. What about the Vaux’s chaplain, who married milord’s sister to your nephew, Master John?”

  Mistress Emotte looked at me in surprise. “Had you not heard? They have taken him, too. Just when Thomas Vaux was off to Jersey for his new Governorship. It is enough to blight a girl’s wedding day. But it is not only the getting of a priest which puts us all in a pother. It is the Skevingtons themselves who are being—difficult.”

  “Difficult?” I repeated roughly. “What in Heaven’s name about?They have more money than Master Fermor himself, a manor in Rutland, a fine town house—and the sweetest bride in all Christendom! And Skevington fils is not impotent, is he?”

  “Not so far as I know. My brother says he has more than one brat in Flanders. But he is a kind of cousin. A nephew of Sir William Brown, who was Joanna’s grandfather. And now, with all this fuss and litigation about the Queen’s marriage—”

  “But that is because she was first married to Prince Arthur.”

  “Well, besides being a kind of cousin, it seems that Oakham Skevington was once betrothed to a daughter of a Fermor cousin of ours who, as far as I can recall, imported Toledo blades—”

  “And he wriggled out of it when her father’s business failed through our quarrel with Spain,” I retorted, suddenly seeing with the eye of memory the page of an account book in which I had recorded the generous financial help which Richard Fermor had given him at the time.

  “Oh, I do not pretend to know the rights of it all except that they say the relationship is too close and there was a pre-contract,”sighed Mistress Emotte. “But they are all there arguing about it in the Browns’ house now—Master John himself, the bridegroom and his father, and Joanna’s sister-in-law, Maud Vaux. And some creepy little lawyer whom the Skevingtons have called in.”

  It was my topical allegory of the family trees come to life. I sprang up in a fury, knocking my jester’s cap with a harsh jangle of bells to the floor. “And the bridegroom is letting them argue? Letting them put Joanna to such embarrassing humiliation? Where is Master Fermor?”

  “Not yet back from some urgent business in Calais. There was a bad storm in the Channel, they say. But we have heard that his ship is safely in and expect him before nightfall.”

  “When he will soon send their lawyer packing! And tell his future son-in-law what he thinks of him. And in the meantime, what does poor Joanna herself say?”

  “Joanna says nothing. She loves her father, and has ever been a dutiful daughter, as you well know. But I have seen her catch at her sister-in-law’s arm and ask, ‘Do you think, Maud, that there may be something in all this arguing?’” Mistress Emotte shrugged, but there was the hint of a smile at the corners of her straight-set mouth. “The wish may be father to the thought, if you ask me,” she added.

  I had not asked her, but such gratuitous encouragement was enough for me. Joanna did not want to marry him. And, come to think of it, how could any girl with a sense of fun and beauty want to marry Oakham Skevington? “Did she know you were coming here?” I asked.

  “She may have guessed,” prevaricated Mistress Emotte, rising to depart in order to avoid the issue.

  I grabbed her by the elbows to detain her. “Did she—God forgive my hopeful vanity!—did she ask you to come here, Mottie?”

  “She said we had all been so busy with the wedding preparations—and that I needed a little fresh air.…”

  “In this torrential rain?” I enquired, grinning at her discomfiture.

  She was almost of a height with me and could not avoid my eyes, which must have been brightening from gloom to ecstatic triumph. She had to smile and surrender. “She has been like a dead thing with no laughter save in her father’s presence, to reassure him. A man must make sensible marriages for his daughters,” Mistress Emotte added, staunchly defensive. “And this, mind you, would seem to my brother a very good one. Mixing friendship with business, and a fine fortune to come.”

  “I know,” I agreed caustically. “And let her not for worlds miss the fine fortune!”

  “Only how was Richard, being a mere man, to know—”

  “To know what?” I demanded, still holding her.

  “That my poor niece could not love even the most suitable of husbands—now.”

  In that moment there was no more subterfuge between us.“While you were with us at Neston she grew to depend on you, and she is not one to forget,” said Emotte Fermor, picking her words carefully. And hope, bittersweet, sprang up in my heart.Bitter because if, with childhood left behind, Joanna had come to love me, what could it bring to her but a sharing of my pain and frustration? For, although I had her father’s trust and liking, even should this Skevington union come to naught, what match could I ever hope to be for her? She, a rich man’s daughter, connected by marriage with a lord. And I, once a rustic clerk in her father’s employ, and now a landless, jingling Fool, a figure of fun, dependent on the Tudor’s whim.

  But, as her aunt had said, Joanna had come to depend on me, and if she needed me in this crisis of her life, go to her I must. All the more so because her father, whom in my heart I still served, was inadvertently away.

  A shaft of thin sunshine was breaking through the clouds. I took my unexpected visitor down into the courtyard and asked a groom of the royal stables to take her, riding pillion behind him, back to the City. Helping her to mount from the stone block, and kissing her hand as if she were royalty, I promised to do my utmost to follow her to Aldermanbury as soon as dinner at Whitehall should be over.

  As soon as she was gone I put on my motley. I seized a pen and scribbled down some doggerel at my little table. And when the company assembled for dinner, with Anne Boleyn, resplendent in some of Queen Katherine’s jewels, on the King’s right hand, with the younger courtiers flattering her and even the older ones being politely subservient, Will Somers’s jokes were not sharp at all, but slyly broad and mellow, as befitted a wedding party. Once as I passed him the King gave me a friendly cuff, as if appreciating my understanding of what had not as yet been announced. But there were hundreds of others to whom the thing which he had done must be announced, and he was worried and preoccupied. He must have guessed the people’s mood. And it was their reaction, I think, which he feared most. He could behead a recalcitrant noble or two, but not a whole mob of citizens. His father had encouraged the enterprise of tradesmen in order to curb the power of the titled class who had made a shambles of England during the interminable Wars of the Roses. And now it was the competent sheriffs and aldermen who ruled the City of London, and the Members of Parliament who yapped at his heels. And peasants and ’prentices who dared to voice their feelings.

  If it had not been for uncertainty about their reactions I think he would have announced his marriage there and then. And in this uncertainty I saw my chance to get away. So when Anne Boleyn and some of her ladies began clamouring to see my new puppet show at supper time, and the King approved, I said as casually as possible, “But I am going to London after dinner, so must beg to
take leave of you, Harry.”

  “Going to London—now—today? With all our guests to be entertained?” said the King, glowering. “What for?”

  “To bring you all the latest Court news,” I said.

  “But why go from the Court for that?” he asked.

  I glanced meaningly from him to the new Marchioness of Pembroke, as I picked up young Harry Fitzroy’s beribboned lute.

  “London citizens can always show

  What’s done at Court e’er thou and I do know,”

  I warbled, plucking at the strings.

  “I almost believe that to be true,” admitted Henry, regarding me with undivided interest for the first time that day.

  So to the amusement of the company, and with an occasional sharp twang at the strings, I wandered about the dais, pattering my hastily composed script.

  “If an ambassador be coming over

  Before he do arrive and land in Dover

  They know his master’s message and intent

  Ere thou can’st tell the cause why he is sent.

  “If of a Parliament they do but hear

  They know what laws shall be enacted there.

  And therefore for awhile, adieu Whitehall.

  Harry, I’ll bring thee news home, lies and all.”

  I had twanged the last line or two leaning over the King’s chair, close to his ear, and he laughed with the rest, knowing it to be all too true. He wanted that news of the man in the street very badly, and there was no one he could trust better than me to gather some.“I perceive you are in a hurry, Will,” he said, “and we will await your return with uncommon interest.”

  And so he let me go to London.

  THE LAST COURSE HAD cleared before I had changed my motley for the well-tailored cloak and doublet I had bought with gifts of money given me at Christmas. As I hurried through Charing village and along the muddy Strand, some of the masthead lamps were already glimmering from the Thames, and by the time I had passed under Ludgate and come by St. Paul’s to Aldermanbury the early dusk of a dank January evening was beginning to close in. From my former visit I was not unfamiliar with the ground floor of Master John Brown’s fine house, so I asked the servant who admitted me to tell Mistress Emotte privately of my arrival and waited cautiously in the outer hall, a place of heavy oak panelling, impressive Flemish tapestries, and a great wall torch as yet unlighted.