King's Fool

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “Then who has dared to disobey me?”

  Servants and torch-bearers flattened themselves against the stairway wall and dared not answer. Nor dared they move to warn those who so heedlessly romped above. And so the King went up with his sad-faced jester and the rest of his sombrely clad attendants close at his heels, and stood in shocked amazement within the great carved screens, staring incredulously at a scene of joyous revelry. Every torch was lighted, musicians scraped their fiddles in the gallery above us, costumes and discarded draperies cluttered the disordered dais, young men and girls capered in some strange dance, and by the blazing central hearth Anne, the Queen, dressed in flaunting yellow with some exotic fur flung about her bare shoulders, played Circe to a group of young men prowling in imitation of enchanted beasts. Mark Smeaton, mounted on an upturned barrel, was raising his baton to start the musicians off in a fresh tune when he caught sight of the King.

  His face went white, his mouth sagged open, his baton hung suspended. “What is the meaning of this orgy?” roared the Tudor.

  Warned by the sudden silence, Anne turned and saw him.Even then her gasp was more of surprise than fear. Probably she had seldom seen him dressed in black before. It made him look like a stranger, with all the semblance of a widower’s grief about him, even to his puffed and reddened eyes. To her less complicated nature it must have seemed that he only indulged in some tiresome, necessary display of mourning which was a mere farce compared with his recent genuine grief for the loss of his sister Mary.

  “Did Heneage neglect to give my orders for Court mourning?”he asked, with cold and terrible politeness.

  “N-no, your Grace,” admitted Anne, glancing down at the flaming skirts spread so dramatically between her outstretched hands, and halting uncertainly on her eager way towards him.

  “Then why are you and these other women mumming away the night in unseemly, atrocious yellow? Answer me, some of you!”he burst out, seeing a Boleyn for once tongue-tied before him.“Why do I return from arranging about my wife’s funeral to find you indulging in ill-timed festivities like a troupe of cold-blooded mountebanks when even my jester knows better?”

  It was Anne’s turn to be furious. Her sleek, dark head, crowned with a bacchanalian vine wreath, jerked higher. “Your wife!” she challenged indignantly.

  “My late brother’s wife,” he had the grace to correct himself.

  She came a step or two nearer and would have laid pleading hands against his unresponsive breast. “But, Henry, I thought… have you not said a hundred times… have we not prayed for this moment?” she whispered in a genuine perplexity, which but enhanced her strange beauty.

  But for the first time Henry did not seem to care whether she was beautiful or not. “Take off that unseemly dress,” he ordered sharply, “and go pray for some sense of decency.”

  “The hypocrite! The self-righteous hypocrite!” I heard her mutter, as I turned to follow him out. “Let him go to his dead wife’s bed and warm him.”

  But, even allowing for his facile self-pity and powers of self-deception, perhaps Henry was not wholly a hypocrite. In spite of all his cruelty, his thraldom by her Circe spells and subjection to her spite, some part of him must have felt bereaved that night. He had lived with Katherine in amity for nearly twenty years—the best years of a gifted, athletic man’s life. And this married life, as I had so recently been trying to explain to his broken, bewildered daughter, was something altogether different from the fierce desire which had burned out the better part of him in early middle age. Something far less potent, but more indestructible.

  With the inwardly excited but outwardly subdued gentlemen of the bedchamber I followed him to his room. “Have they told the Lady Mary, Harry?” I asked in a low voice when his anger had died down and Hal Norris was warming the royal bedgown before a roaring fire.

  “I sent a courier to Hunsdon immediately. I ought to have sent you, Will. You would have known how to comfort her. I wish that she were….”

  I believe he had been going to say he wished that she were here with him now, but he let them prepare him for bed and then sat down again in a fit of depressed abstraction. Only once did he rouse himself, and that was to call back a page who was carrying away his clothes and to take back from him the hastily selected black velvet wallet which had been hanging from his belt. And from it he presently extracted and unfolded a letter, and then waved his gentlemen away. Supposing that he wished to be alone I would have joined them as they bowed themselves out had he not laid a detaining hand on my shoulder. “Her last letter, sent from Kimbolton,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. And, spreading his legs towards the fire, began to re-read it.

  But even for the mighty Tudor it had been a tiring day. A day which dug up past memories and emotions, and had ended in a burst of justifiable fury. Sitting there in his warm, fur-lined bedgown, he began to nod and doze. His strong hands, backed with hairs that shone stiff and ruddy in the fire glow, gradually relaxed. And the letter with the dangling seal of England and Aragon slipped to the black-and-white tiled floor. I bent to retrieve it, lest a cinder should fall. Knowing that she was beyond human help or danger, what would Katherine have said to him, I wondered? Had she died haughtily, as a daughter of Imperial Spain? Or upbraiding him, as she had every right to do?I folded the letter reverently between my forefingers and thumbs, and as I did so the last sentence in her fine clear handwriting sprang, warmly illuminated, to my gaze. “More than anything in this transitory life mine eyes desire the sight of you.”

  So she really loved him in spite of all. With the kind of love which was beyond the comprehension of women like Anne Boleyn. And with those most beautiful and elemental words she had silenced unfaithfulness and ridicule and cruelty.

  I laid the letter reverently on Henry Tudor’s knee. I knew then that I was right. That whatever others said, he had not been wholly hypocritical that day.

  And as I waited for him to rouse himself and climb into his high, lonely bed the thought came to me in the stillness of that luxurious room that, just as Thomas Wyatt could see past the crude selfish-nesses into the once carefree, friendly heart of Anne, so perhaps it was given to me, the King’s fool, to see with deeper understanding than most men into my master’s mind. Perhaps he himself was half aware of this, and that was why he sometimes laughingly called me his ultra ego, and steadfastly refused to put Mark Smeaton or any other bright young performer in my place. And why he showed me so much indulgence and liked to have me sit with him and dropped defensive pretence when we were alone.

  I liked to think it was so. It seemed to make my leaving Easton Neston more worth while.

  OF COURSE, THE KING’S remorse was short-lived, all the more so because Anne was soon with child again. But this time Henry was taking no chances. He and Cromwell had their heads together drawing up some sort of statute by which the succession should pass to her male issue or, failing that, the King should be free to nominate his heir. True, there was little red-headed Elizabeth who seemed lively enough; but whoever heard of a woman ruling? And the fact that men were beginning to look again, reluctantly, at Henry Fitzroy had made bad blood between the pregnant Queen and her uncle, Thomas of Norfolk, who had given his daughter to the pasty-faced bastard in marriage. “In the end a dutiful daughter may prove of more use to me than an ambitious niece,” he had been heard to say, in that surly way of his.

  As Anne’s time drew near people even began to lay bets on the two hopes so that the strain of uncertainty affected her health, and her outbursts of temper gave her women an uncomfortable time.

  “Even her looks begin to suffer,” remarked my friend John Thurgood, while we were preparing a guessing game with which to entertain the company after supper. “See how washed out she looks beside her vivacious Rochford sister-in-law.”

  “Which is probably why she has been keeping that pale, sedate Mistress Seymour so much in attendance of late,” I answered, with my usual reluctant appreciation of her showmanship.


  “She must be sick indeed to take such an unwary chance; she who is usually so observant,” sniggered one of her women who had overheard us, and who had recently had her ears boxed for some clumsiness.

  And we, wooden-pated males that we were, wondered what the disgruntled waiting woman had meant, until it was all over the palace that the Queen had caught the King fondling Jane Seymour on his knee.

  “What happened?” we asked after supper, of the excited page who had witnessed the exciting encounter.

  “The Queen had been resting all afternoon the way his Grace said she was to.”

  “No wonder the amorous old sly-boots made such a point of it,” chuckled Thurgood incautiously.

  “But the sun was shining and suddenly her Grace took a notion to go out in the garden. You know how she decides to do a thing,” went on the lad, thrilled to find himself momentarily of so much importance. “Sir Thomas Wyatt’s sister tried to dissuade her. Maybe she knew where Mistress Jane had gone. But the Queen wouldn’t listen. Said she must go out and find the first snowdrops as she used to do at Blickling and Hever. She didn’t even stay to let us change her soft fur shoes. And that was how, when I opened the door for her and ran after her with a wrap, she came upon them in a kind of ante-room leading to the garden passage—suddenly—just like that,” explained the lad, clapping his two palms together.

  We could all picture the scene, but Thurgood, as an efficient Master of Revels, was ever one for dramatic detail. “What were they doing?” he asked, rather unnecessarily, I thought.

  The lad, having but recently left his father’s wholesome country manor for the laxity of the Court, went red to the ears. “Well, Sir, he was kissing her mouth—and the lady didn’t seem to be making any pother about trying to hold him off, if you know what I mean. Her skirts were spread across his legs and her arms about his neck. And—what with the Queen’s soft shoes and they not hearing us—well, he just went on kissing her.”

  “A pleasant sight for a woman carrying his child,” I murmured caustically. “What did she say to them, Diggory?”

  “I don’t rightly know, Master Somers. It was as if all these new cannon we heard being tried aboard ship at Woolwich were suddenly fired at their unsuspecting heads. The King sprang up, tumbling Mistress Seymour from his lap. He even moved in front of her as if to protect her when the Queen called her a mealy-faced mopsy and a Bankside bawd. You could have heard her angry screaming voice all down the gallery, and Mistress Wyatt came running and tried to stop her. She and the other ladies looked terrified, but you know how the Queen doesn’t fear anybody, not even the King, when she gets beside herself like that. And instead of roaring at her to be quiet he kept trying to soothe her. ‘Everything shall be as you wish, sweetheart,’ he kept saying, meek as a monk.I can’t think why.”

  “Because of the unborn babe,” Thurgood explained to him.

  “He’d care more about that than about any woman,” I corroborated.

  “I see. But the funny thing was,” went on Diggory, beginning to giggle, “Mistress Jane, whom we boys always call ‘the tame mouse’ among ourselves, just stood there looking far more composed than either of them. ‘By our Lady’s body, Madam,’ she said, when still more grossly taxed, ‘I promise you I am as much a maid as when I came to Court.’”

  And probably that was just what Queen Anne feared, I thought, remembering how successfully she herself had played for high stakes with prolonged chastity.

  In the end, it seems, Margaret Wyatt and some of the others who loved the Queen had borne her, half swooning, back to her room, and Jane Seymour had been sent away for a short while, to her home at Wolf Hall.

  For days Henry trod warily as if his highly strung wife were made of brittle Venetian glass. But it was the wine which the glass held that was precious to him. And certainly no one could say that what spilled it a few weeks later was the fault of either of them.

  Henry had taken up tilting again. To look and feel young before a newly returned Jane, perhaps. He was over forty and had to have a larger suit of armour made, but in order to prove his old prowess he challenged her brother, Sir Edward Seymour. We were all out there in the early spring sunshine, to watch him, and it was like old times to see King Henry in the lists again—perhaps all the more so, I thought, because Queen Anne was not present, but resting in her lying-in chamber. Everyone seemed more free and easy. Bannerets were fluttering in a stiff breeze from the ladies’ gallery, heralds blew stirring fanfares, squires were standing about holding their masters’ lances and heaumes, horses whinnied and reared. The King’s first course along the barrier was indecisive, and his great dappled charger shied at a fluttering banneret before ever he had spurred him to a second. It may have been the weight of the new armour or because he was out of practice, but for all his fine horsemanship Henry could not curb the great, restive brute. It threw him with a crash of metal down into the dust—threw him and rolled on him, breaking open the fistula on his leg so that a vein burst open and he was like to bleed to death. And after that resounding crash and the women’s screams and the urgent thud of men’s running feet, it was as if a terrible tangible silence had suddenly fallen on the world.

  He was quite unconscious as we loosened his greaves and carried him indoors. While the surgeons did what they could I looked round at the strained, grey faces about me and realised that for all of us, whether high born or low, life had suddenly become an incredible, bewildering blank. Whether they liked him or not, it was certain that England needed him. Without the Tudor there was no one. No one of sufficient stature to keep the country free from invasion or the old interminable civil wars. No mastiff to snarl all the contentious, ambitious curs to silence. During those few minutes before he opened his eyes and let out an oath of pain as Butts tightened a bandage, I saw full justification for his obses-sional desire for a son.

  And it must have been during those anxious moments that Norfolk slipped away and hurried to his niece’s apartments to tell her that the King was at the point of death. There were many who made a point of remarking afterwards that unless she bore a living son his own daughter might well become Queen. Little as I liked him, I found it difficult to attribute such cruel malice to any man. But if Henry’s death meant that the world, as we knew it, would stop, what must the news have meant to her? He had made her what she was and, although she had probably loved no one but young Percy of Northumberland, during the three years that she had been married to the King only his protection had stood between her and the people’s hatred.

  She brought forth her child prematurely, and although his own life still hung in the balance Henry spared her his best physicians.But Anne’s child was born dead. And, of course, it was a boy.

  Although she pleaded that fear for his life had killed their hopes, Henry insisted that her wild hysterical jealousy of Jane had been the cause. “You will have no more sons by me!” he stormed in the hearing of her huddled women, as soon as he was able to limp to her bedside. And since he always had to have a scapegoat, in his heart he must have been blaming her for the whole up-turning of a Church and kingdom—for an upheaval which had once seemed so urgently necessary, and now, from his point of view, seemed all to no purpose.

  She seldom saw him again, but spent her time wandering sadly in the garden, wishing herself back at Hever, no doubt. And I am sure her women tried to keep it from her when Thomas Cromwell was asked to give up his rooms next to the King’s so that Sir Edward Seymour and his sister might occupy them. Sober Edward and his ambitious younger brother, Thomas, now provided the same specious sop to decorum which had once been furnished, more light-heartedly, by the presence of George Boleyn. Poor George Boleyn who, because he had once lounged late at night across the foot of his sister’s bed trying to cheer her through her terror of not being able to produce a boy, now found himself appallingly accused of having helped her to produce the still-born one.

  Nothing, however vile, could be kept from her at the trial. Jane Rochford, his wife, who had alwa
ys been jealous of his affection for his favourite sister, helped to convict him of incest. Besides this, trumped-up charges of adultery with other courtiers were brought against Anne, smearing foulness against the bright page of her friendship with a group of gifted and gallant young men. Thomas Wyatt’s former renunciation of his youthful matrimonial hopes saved him, and the King would have spared Hal Norris if he would have stooped to incriminate her by so much as a word. Only Mark Smeaton, tortured by the rack, admitted some imagined guilt. Not being of noble birth, he went out by the hangman’s rope, and his sweet voice went with him. But it was a sad day for all of us when, in spite of all Anne’s pitiful entreaties, Rochford and Hal Norris and two of the Queen’s other friends, Weston and Brereton, were executed on Tower Hill.

  Even when we had heard her sentence, few of us believed up to the last moment that Anne herself would be beheaded. Even the women of London, who had not been able to say anything bad enough about her, were shocked to pity. “No King has ever had a woman put to death before,” they kept saying, standing about at street corners or gaping outside the tall Tower walls. “Not unless she was a witch.”

  “No Plantagenet king,” some of their husbands added ominously.

  “But then,” I thought, trying to find some figment of excuse for such brutal behaviour in my master, “she really did bewitch him.”

  The King of France, who had protested in vain, sent his own expert swordsman from Paris lest her slender white neck should be roughly butchered by an axe. And almost before the Tower guns had told London of her passing Henry Tudor had married Jane—quietly, in the same little room at Whitehall where he had married Anne. And just as she had seemed unabashed when caught cuddling on Henry’s knee, so now she showed no qualms about being so summarily made way for. She had served and revered Katherine of Aragon, and so to her way of thinking it was Anne Boleyn who had never been anything else but a usurping strumpet.