King's Fool

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “All they could find against her was a bedgown embroidered with the arms of England—the Plantagenet leopards before the Tudor dragon joined them—which she had a perfect right to,”Susan Toenge told me, when I hurried immediately to the Princess’s apartments.

  I found her Grace pale and exhausted with weeping. “Next to my mother I loved the Lady Margaret above anyone on earth,” she said. “I was so happy to see her again when Queen Jane had me back at Court. And now I have no one of my own left.” All her submissive protestations of filial loyalty had forsaken her, and it would have been vain at that moment to have reminded her that she had a father. “Oh, Will, Will, it was kind of you to come!”she cried. “You see how just as an ordinary act of human kindness was used as incriminating evidence against your Master Fermor, so a piece of family embroidery and a refusal to betray her sons has brought my friend and mentor to this terrible death. In public—at Smithfield—where we all used to be so gay, do you remember, watching tournaments and May Day dances.” As if only physical movement could help her to bear the horror she visualised, Mary crossed to a window to stare out unseeingly. “The Lady Margaret was proud like my mother. She refused to bow her head before a common executioner. And while the men yelled their execrations at him and the women pleaded with tears, he chased his ageing victim round and round the block. Hacking—hacking—”

  “My sweet lady, stop!” I cried, catching her blindly groping hands in mine while Randal Dod, her devoted manservant, and the women who loved her pressed around to carry her to bed. But she had sunk down upon the window seat and I signed to them to let her be a while first. To one so long shut up with grief, to sit and cry unrestrainedly must mean relief. We all remembered her as a happy, trusting child, and recognised the effort she must have made to hold such strong emotions so rigidly in check. At last she pulled herself upright, hands to throbbing temples and eyes blind with tears. “She is with my mother now in Paradise,” she said huskily. “But if ever I had the power to revoke such things…”

  “Oh, my lady!” exclaimed Bess, shocked by the set expression on her face.

  Even in that hard moment Mary Tudor laid a reassuring hand on hers. “Well, well, my young brother will be King. Perhaps it is just as well that these matters will never rest with me.” She rose with a sigh, and went, leaning on Dod’s strong arm, and followed by her women, towards her bedchamber. Although she was a fine horsewoman, ever active of gait and still young, she walked that short distance like an old woman. Which brought home to me in a rush of compassion how much she must have suffered, in humiliation, fear and hurt love.

  And as I stood looking after her with a hand still on the high, carved back of her chair, I was recalling an odd conversation I had had a few days earlier with Hans Holbein. He was already back in favour, and had been working on a portrait of the Prince which Henry wanted him to finish, and a quiet companionship had grown up between us two so that I often watched him at work, trying to learn something of his art and a good deal about my own country through the eyes of a foreigner. “His little Grace should be strong as his father when he grows to manhood,” I had remarked cheerfully, as he put the finishing touches to a pink and dimpled arm.

  “If he grows to manhood,” the great artist had said.

  He was bending over his palette and I wondered if I could have heard him aright. “But with that colour, those rounded cheeks—and Dr. Butts so pleased with him—” I expostulated, too low for the women amusing the Prince to hear me.

  Casually, as if to select a different brush, Holbein turned to make sure that no one stood behind us. “I painted young Richmond. He had them, too,” he said, adding a firmer line to the rattle which the pictured child held. “And there is that painting of your unfortunate Prince Arthur.”

  “You mean—” I had gasped, staring at him.

  But he had become absorbed in his work again. “Only that sometimes a painter sees more than a physician,” he had answered cryptically, as Mother Jack came bustling forward to make sure her charge was not over-tired.

  And now, as I watched the door close behind King Henry’s elder daughter, this strange, almost casual conversation seemed to take on a still greater significance. I had seen all the happy ties with her mother’s Court broken, everything their religion stood for swept away. And I wondered if it were a dangerous thing to make one small woman suffer so much. A woman who might, just conceivably, one day come to power—power to retaliate. A woman with a long-leashed desire to do the impossible—to build up again the world as she had first, and so happily, known it. And I wondered if the cruelties of Cromwell and the acquiescence of her father could ever bend back again, pliant as a whip, to scourge England.

  I spoke some part of my thoughts to Edward Seymour, although by now my anxiety had veered to the immediate effects of such brutalities upon my royal master. “Surely the people will never forgive him,” I said involuntarily, as we chanced to ride heel by heel behind his Grace through a sad and silent City.

  “Oh, yes, they will forgive the King anything,” said Seymour, Earl of Hertford, “as long as he appears to consult Parliament and makes our defences strong against the French.”

  “But—killing women? Even when it was the Boleyn, whom they did not love, they were sullen like this for days.”

  Seymour bent to adjust a rein more exactly. He was an exact and careful man. “Like all effective monarchs, ours has always been careful to keep a whipping boy. In the past the people blamed Wolsey. Now they will blame Cromwell.”

  “But they must know that none of these cruelties could be done without the King’s consent.”

  “True. But seeing something is so much more persuasive than knowing it, particularly with people who do not think overmuch.They do not see him daily as we do, nor realise the way in which he has gradually changed. He has always been the right kind of figurehead, bluff and hearty and popular. Listen, Will Somers. If you had never lived at Court, and saw this same hearty figure of a man at ceremonial occasions or riding through the streets, how could you know that he had become altogether different inside?”

  I could see that this was true enough. To us it had been a slow, sad realisation which we had had to live with. “It is his leg—” I began. But even the doctors were now forbidden to discuss the diseased state of his health.

  I looked at Edward Seymour with new interest. I felt that my ill-advised groping for reassurance would be safe with him. He was neither handsome nor lovable like his younger brother, the swashbuckling Sir Thomas. But he was strong and humane and more deep-seeing than I had supposed. The Prince, for all that he was said to lisp precociously in Latin, was still but an infant. And although many an arrogant lord walked before Seymour in processions, nothing could alter the fact that he was the Prince’s elder uncle and might one day become Lord Protector of England.

  But I had been playing at being prescient of late. I must shake myself out of such weighty thoughts and play the fool, which was what my wages were paid me for. I fell behind milord Hertford and some of the other riders so that I might think up some means of cheering the whole household when we got back.

  Although Mary Tudor had her own household she was now often at Court, and one bright spot in a calamitous spring was the very real liking which seemed to have sprung up spontaneously between the new Queen and herself. At first sight one might have judged them to be an oddly contrasted pair, but they were much of an age and both knew the humiliation of not being wanted. Mary helped her stepmother with the vagaries of English speech and customs and toned down her flamboyant taste in dress, while Flemish Anne, by dint of kindness and complete naturalness, broke down milady’s tense reserve and even made her remember how to laugh.

  “And now, just as we are getting used to hearing laughter at Court again,” I told Joanna later, in the precious intimacy of our little home, “the King takes a blow at both of them.”

  “Oh, Will, is it something serious?” exclaimed my wife with her ever-ready sympathy.

>   “Not perhaps as serious as some people seem to think. Or rather, I should say, the loss may prove to be more ours than theirs.” I went to fetch a couple of tankards of well-spiced sack from the buttery, and pulled Joanna more comfortably against my shoulder on the settle before a cheerful fire. “I do not know how much you have heard, my love, but the King has now actually divorced his Flemish wife and, having thus offended Cleves, he was obliged to tell his daughter to return the handsome diamond cross which young Philip of Bavaria had given her.”

  “Is every marriage negotiation for our Princess to be broken off?”exclaimed Joanna.

  I turned to kiss the tip of her small, indignant nose. “Did that prove such a calamity for us, with love waiting at the end?” I teased.“And Jane the Fool blurts out that her mistress could not send the lovely bauble back quickly enough. ‘Duke Philip is a very kind gentleman,’ says Jane, in that squeaky voice of hers, ‘but my lady will be spared the pain of marrying a Lutheran!’”

  Joanna had to laugh at my imitation of poor nit-wit, shaven-headed Jane. “But on what grounds can the King divorce this Anne?” she wanted to know.

  “Oh, the usual convocation of clergy declaring the marriage null and void. On three points. That it was unwillingly entered into by the bridegroom, never consummated and marred by the bride’s pre-contract to Lorraine. I suppose that one of the advantages of being Supreme Head of the Church is that one can make and unmake one’s wives. If one is in the unenviable position of wanting to! It was all very quickly done. After all, Cranmer and the rest should be quite experienced by now. No good purpose would be served by the defendant being present, they said, because she was not familiar with our language. There had been one or two cases of plague in London as there always are in hot weather, so an excuse was made to send the Queen to Richmond while all this was going on. Though, as the French ambassador so pungently says, had they been very grave the King himself would have been the first away. And immediately the divorce was granted Henry sent Suffolk and Southampton and that toad, Secretary Wriothesley, there to tell her.”

  “Whatever in Heaven’s name did she say?”

  “Nothing, at first. She swooned from shock.”

  “Or fear? After all, whether she understands much English or not, the poor lady must have heard about what happened to—the other Queen Anne.”

  Others had said the same, but I had always maintained that the Flemish head was safe enough. “She probably had, but the King would no more have dared to do that to her than to Queen Katherine, whom he was trying to get rid of for so long. You see, neither of them was his subject, like Jane Seymour and Anne Boleyn. He would soon have had half Europe about his ears. No, my dear, this Anne is to be styled ‘his dear sister’ and to rank after the Lady Mary, to keep her household at his expense. And he is giving her Richmond Palace. And I think she probably fainted with shock at hearing how much money he was giving her with it—particularly after hearing about the meagreness of his own daughters’ households.”

  “Oh, Will, you are making fun of it all. But after she recovered from the shock of—fear or relief or whatever it was—how did the poor Queen take it?”

  “With remarkable serenity, they say.”

  “You mean she did not insist that she was his legal wife, as Queen Katherine did? After all, you have told me that he often slept with her.”

  Since I had come expressly to sleep with my wife, I took the opportunity of kissing her closely. “Perhaps she did not enjoy it very much, sweetheart,” I suggested.

  “Neither should I enjoy having a great fat man like that in my bed,” giggled Joanna, snuggling more warmly up against me. “But what of her brother, the Duke? Surely he will make some sort of diplomatic protest?”

  “He certainly will,” I agreed, not caring much at the moment whether he did or not. “But now that France and Spain are making an alliance, little Cleves will not count for as much as Cromwell had hoped.”

  “And now Cromwell himself is in the Tower under sentence of death?”

  “Well, nobody can be sorry for that,” I said, thinking of the poor Countess of Salisbury and milady Mary’s distress, and how things might now be made easier for the Fermors. “And up to the last, while he was in the Tower, the King still made use of him, forcing him to bear witness in a letter that the marriage was made unwillingly. And they say that the divorced Queen has written to her brother, Duke William, entreating him not to make trouble and assuring him that she is well used in England.”

  “But how will she be called, being now the King’s sister?”

  “My Lady of Cleves.”

  “And you mean to tell me, Will, that after being brought to England and so insulted she has just meekly done everything the King wanted?”

  I had to laugh at recollection of the King’s face when he was told. “A shade too meekly, perhaps,” I said. “He is so accustomed to having women fight for the right to call him husband that I fancy the easiness with which she let him go must have shaken him considerably.” As I went to the door to call to young Tatty to prepare our bed half my mind was still on my master’s marital affairs. “After all, Joanna, she may not have wanted to go back to all that strict maternal supervision we heard about in Cleves, and she may prefer having her own life to having Henry. And, as I say, in his grateful relief he has heaped manors upon her and given her far more money than she would ever have had the free spending of as his wife. And Richmond.”

  “Why do you say Richmond like that, with a kind of ecstatic sigh, as if it were part of Heaven?” asked Joanna laughingly, as I pulled her to her feet.

  “Do I?” I said, as we went upstairs together. “It must be because I have seen the gardens and those bulbous fairy turrets from the river. And because the King himself always speaks of it that way. It was his family home and his mother lived there, and I suppose he thinks of it as a place full of love and sunshine and laughter, where the cares and cruelties of an ambitious world fall away.”

  I WAS GLAD WHEN Lord Vaux came back from the Channel Islands after his Governorship was ended. I knew he would do what he could in the Fermor cause, and now that Cromwell had been executed our efforts might meet with more success. Wriot-hesley would have his day, but Seymour was the coming man.

  “How different the Court seems, Will!” Vaux said with a sigh, when at last he had time to walk with me alone along the vrou walk, as the servants had come to call that pleasant path at Hampton which the Flemish Queen and her ladies had liked to use.

  “A place for older, more materially-minded men,” I said, and knew that we were both thinking of those cultured young gallants who, but for the Boleyn witch, might yet have graced the scene. “But Surrey is still with us to make verse. And now we hope to have yours, milord.”

  He shrugged my praise aside with a new and becoming modesty.He had matured during his travels.

  “What is all this I hear from my sister Maud in Calais about her father-in-law? Is it really possible that he has been imprisoned and stripped of everything? And all for visiting their priest, a crime of which I have often been guilty. You know that ours was imprisoned for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy, too?”

  I gave him all the family news and told him how I had seen Richard Fermor in the Marshalsea. And how I had had the amazing happiness of marrying his daughter.

  “Maud wrote to tell me about that also—and how relieved they were for Joanna. Then, since my sister is married to your wife’s brother, you are in some sort my kinsman, Will Somers,” he said, holding out a ready hand. “So perhaps you had best stop addressing me as milord and call me Thomas. Have you told the King you are married?”

  “I told him I was going on my honeymoon the day he himself set out to meet his bride. But, as I intended, he took it all as a part of my fooling. But I hope to tell him in all seriousness when I find an opportunity to plead for my father-in-law.”

  “I, too, will speak for him if I can,” he promised. It would, of course, be to his sister’s advantage if
he could.

  “Say rather when you can. More and more it becomes a matter of choosing one’s moment. You will find the King much changed,”I warned.

  “Physically, you mean?”

  “Ever since he has had that running fistula his temper has been more uncertain.”

  “You think it is the syphilis?”

  “The doctors are not allowed to discuss it. Whatever it is, it seems to change his nature. Though he grows more despotic, I believe that inside himself he is more fearful and suspicious.”

  “Which might account for such barbarous cruelty to the few remaining Plantagenets.”

  I nodded. “Yet in some ways his powers wane. He is amorous of Katherine Howard, but with nothing of the devastating passion he had for her cousin Anne. He is always pawing this one in public as old men will.”

  “According to Norfolk he really means to marry her.”

  “Some say Archbishop Cranmer has already made her the King’s wife.”

  “His fifth!”

  I shrugged. “I have lost count,” I said. “And interest,” I thought.From then on anyone whom the Tudor might marry would be but one of his women to me.

  “After all, in this age of grace, plenty of men—like Suffolk, for instance—run through at least four,” Vaux was saying broad-mindedly.“They marry them the moment they are come to puberty and wear them out in continuous childbirth.”

  “And then, when the first heat of their desires dies down, they marry again and again into rich families to increase their estates.”

  “Listen to a couple of old cynics in their late thirties!” grinned Thomas Vaux, giving me a friendly dig in the ribs. “Or is it that few men love and cherish their wives as we do?”