King's Fool

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “Fermor is well served by his friends but he had his trial and now his wealth is put to other uses,” said Henry, with bull-like obstinacy. “Yet I would not keep so upright a man in prison,” he added, mellowed by his surroundings and recently stirred memories. “That is, if he has anywhere to live,” he added hastily, afraid perhaps that I might want to find place for him, too, at Court.

  “There is Wapenham. Oh, your Grace, let him have Wapenham, that he may see the fair Northamptonshire countryside again!” cried Joanna.

  Henry looked down at her consideringly, and she was fair enough to move a monster. “Wapenham?” he repeated. “What an ungainly name! What is Wapenham?”

  “An empty priest house which he owned. A few miles from Easton Neston,” she explained. “The new owner does not use it and it grows sadly neglected, with all the fields untilled. My father intended it for his unmarried sister.” I was watching my wife’s face, and to my surprise I saw her lips curve into a smile, and her eyes, bright with merry inspiration, seeking mine. “His sister is a capable, forthright woman too, who can cook,” she told the King conversationally. “Rather like milady of Cleves, who has been so kind to us all.”

  Holding our breath, we watched the King frown as he often did when feeling himself unfairly defeated. Still in painful suspense, we watched his forefinger trace the time on the dial. “Then we will let him have it, and send word to the Governor of the Marshalsea,” he said, after what seemed the longest seconds in my life. “Get up, you pretty, wheedling hussy, or you’ll have the very blood out of my heart. You and that ingratiating husband of yours make a fine pair. And I make no doubt you will bring up that unfortunate young red-head to the same kind of tricks!” He turned to milord Vaux rather in the manner of one who finds relief in being able to address someone reasonably sane. “It is high time we left or we shall find the tide against my oarsmen and our hostess wearied with us.” He slipped an arm through Vaux’s because at times the ulcer on his leg made walking difficult. But he yawned contentedly. “It is a long time,” he said, as they took the path to the river, “since I spent such an interesting morning.”

  Behind his broad back Joanna and I fell into each other’s arms in relief. We treated ourselves to a brief, ecstatic, triumphant embrace. We had to part. There was no time for words. Yet, woman-like she managed one pithy sentence which proved her a true merchant’s daughter. “Make him put it in writing,” she adjured me, cautious even in her gratitude.

  I kissed milady of Cleves’s hand with alarming fervour, and just managed to slip into the tail-end of the barge party and secure a place near the King. “Do you remember, Harry, once saying that only a good woman should be the mistress of Richmond?” I asked, as we both gazed back from the water at its fair towers and gardens.

  “Well, she does,” he answered, and made no further remark until we were back at Hampton.

  Not until after supper that evening did he address another remark to me. I had persuaded John Thurgood to amuse the company with a game of “forfeits,” which was always popular with the ladies because they usually paid theirs in kisses. But the King’s forfeit, which he owed for failing to answer a purposely impossible question about the vegetation on the moon, was that he must write his signature with a kitchen skewer in ox blood on a roll of legal parchment. And the parchment which the page brought him was an order for the return of Wapenham to its original owner. To my great relief Henry, one arm uxoriously about his young Queen, signed it and handed it to me, since I was hovering so anxiously behind his chair.

  “You are like a persistent gadfly, Will,” he said, with an affectionate grin. “And I perceive you would scarce trust me the length of this hall with my own Crown Jewels.”

  H

  AVING BEEN PERSUADED, HOWEVER reluctantly, to do a kindness, King Henry enjoyed a sense of beneficence, and so rather characteristically proceeded to do more. He sent for me next day and bade me borrow horses from the royal stables and fetch Richard Fermor from the Marshalsea and then accompany him to Northamptonshire. He himself was planning an important progress, with Queen and Court, through those northern counties which had been so disaffected during the Pilgrimage of Grace, and intended making his headquarters for some weeks at Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire. So he gave me leave of absence for a month so that I could help to put the neglected parsonage at Wapenham in order. “You have not had a real holiday since you have been with me, Will,” he said. “So take that endearing wife of yours with you and make up for all the times you have been parted from her, so that she comes back with the beginnings of another boy. Make it a happy family reunion for Fermor, who did me the service of bringing you to me. Joined, no doubt,” he added with a sly chuckle, “by that sister who is supposed to be so touchingly like my own sister of Cleves.”

  I collected Joanna and our babe from Richmond so that she might share in the joy of welcoming her father. We took him first to the house in Thames Street to which the Festings had hurriedly returned on receipt of a letter I had sent by the King’s post to Dover, so that they could bring him news of his son and of such business as was still being carried on from Calais. And I was glad to see that Master John had sent more tangible greeting in the form of cash, in case his father should need it.

  But the elder Fermor would have none of it. “The profits, such as they are, are his and Maud’s,” he insisted, “for I shall now have nothing to leave them. If I can pay my way with the glebe lands at Wapenham I must be thankful.” And before leaving London he insisted upon waiting upon milady of Cleves to thank her for her kindness to his daughter and, finding congenial interest in his practical, travelled mind, she insisted upon his staying to enjoy one of her excellent dinners.

  We sent the joyful news of his release to Emotte who, leaving the good friends she had been staying with, joined us there. She and Joanna, with Tatty and the one young maid who had remained with Emotte, worked with a will to put the old place to rights. Jordan came back and one or two of the older men from Easton Neston. More would willingly have come, even at lower wages, but Richard Fermor insisted that he could not hope to do more than make the land self-supporting.

  The month we spent there was a complete change from Court life and the exacting publicity of being the King’s Fool. I went about in an old leather jerkin, doing bits of carpentry and helping in the fields—all willingly undertaken tasks at which Jordan still told me, quite truly, that I was inept. Having Joanna at home seemed to make up for much of her father’s loneliness in prison. Small Richard throve on the good country air, and played havoc with all the pent-up maternal instincts in Emotte’s nature.

  “We shall never have the heart to take him from her,” said Joanna, watching the tall, gaunt woman, who could not sing a note in tune, pacing the room with our son in her arms while crooning him to sleep.

  “If we left him for a while and you came again at Christmas to fetch him, it would mean something for them to look forward to and might keep your father from riding so often towards Towcester and staring hungrily at the house and fields and sheep that were once his,” I suggested.

  My precious month was up and I had to be back again at Court.But since the King seemed to live more and more at Hampton I should often be able to cross to Richmond to see my wife, and we should both be happier now that our marriage was no secret.I feel sure that had I pressed him, Henry would have allowed me larger lodgings so that I might have my family with me there, but Joanna and I had discussed this and decided that our love was something which we wished to keep apart from the public aspect of my work.

  And I was glad that we were perfectly agreed about this, particularly with the present Queen. I make no doubt she would have been kind to Joanna. The trouble was rather that she was too kind, and often to the wrong sort of people. An atmosphere of ugly gossip was growing up around her. If you went into a room or gallery too quickly there were sure to be women with their heads together, whispering about her, or a group of young gallants sniggering about the latest tit
-bit of scandal, such as the oft-repeated story of the evening when the King had been kept waiting in his bedgown outside her bolted door while the tittering pages heard sounds of hurried scurryings within. Everybody watched her cousin, Tom Culpepper, with a kind of salacious curiosity. It was difficult not to if one had any sensitivity at all. He was a very personable young man and the King’s favourite gentleman of the bedchamber, and to prepare an obese middle-aged husband to go to bed night after night with the girl you love must be a tearing experience.Almost as difficult as having to dance with her beneath the indulgent husband’s adoring gaze, and try to hold her so that no one can guess how passionately you held her during those rare dangerous moments of contrived privacy, nor how the very touch of hands sets you both trembling.

  And now there seemed to be people about poor Katherine out of her dubious past—people who had come pushing their way in like bees round a honey flower and whom she, foolish child, was afraid to send away lest they would not keep their dirty mouths shut about what favours they had received or knew that others had received. There was a handsome looking braggart of a poor relation called Dereham, and a friend called Mary Lascelles, who probably knew all the goings-on there had been in the women’s dormitory in the Dowager-Duchess of Norfolk’s ill-managed household. And a low fellow who had taught Katherine music and probably much else besides.

  “Why don’t you throw yourself on the King’s mercy and tell him?” I found myself wanting to say to her. “For all you are called his wife, I know him far better than you do. He can be merciful. If you choose your moment and tell him yourself, and don’t leave it until some fiend of a busybody forestalls you. He is human enough to see that it wasn’t your fault. That it was the old Duchess’s fault for not looking after you when you came to her, an orphan of good parents whose father had fought for England. And your uncle of Norfolk’s fault for poking you forward into a position for which you have no ability, save that of being cuddlesome. For suddenly remembering you, the neglected family burden, because it occurred to him after Cromwell’s fall that another niece on the throne might serve to bring the power of King’s chief adviser back to himself again.”

  Kind and accessible though she was, a jester cannot say such things outright to a Queen. But I have blamed myself since that I did not try, more subtly, to warn her—to persuade her to tell the King something of her past. Close in his arms, she might have found pity. I am sure the worst he would have done to her would have been to send her to some convent. Though perhaps to pretty, wanton Katherine Howard this would have been a worse punishment than death? But during her brief year and a half as Queen I had been preoccupied with my own affairs and, truth to tell, the unschooled little beauty with the wide eyes and tip-tilted nose had never interested me much. And now it was too late to warn or give avuncular advice, for her mother’s nephew Culpepper was on the scene. Thomas Culpepper who was all too obviously of the present, not the past. And who—if half the tales told about secret bedchamber visits while the King was busy at Pontefract were true—would evoke no pity at all.

  “What do you suppose will be the outcome?” John Thurgood asked me on my return from Northamptonshire, under cover of the minstrels’ merry dance tones to which she and Culpepper danced.“Think of her cousin, Anne Boleyn, and what happened to her—even though, judging by the meagre evidence, she may well have been innocent.”

  “I do often think of her,” I said. “And of the bitter blow it will be to the King’s pride should he ever find out about this one.Why, only last evening, he was petting her and calling her his ‘rose without a thorn.’”

  Thurgood was not the type to wish unhappiness to anyone.“Sooner or later someone is sure to tell him,” he said regretfully, looking round at the sour, disapproving faces of most of the elder men who, like the King himself, no longer danced.

  And the telling came soon indeed. After Mass the following morning, when Henry, because it was All Souls’ Day, had asked his confessor to give special thanks for the good way of life he now had with his thornless rose, Katherine.

  As he came out from his private pew I saw Cranmer hand him a letter. I do not think any man living would have dared to say whatever he had written in that letter about the Queen. Henry read the words with a brow like thunder, turned his back on him, and so thoroughly disbelieved the whole sordid story that he read it aloud, contemptuously, to the three members of the Privy Council who happened to be with him. Probably he took it to be another Protestant attempt to discredit Norfolk which the gentle primate had been gullible enough to be hoodwinked by. Henry went on his way to the tennis court and left him standing there.But the seed of suspicion had been sown. Naturally, when he had simmered down, Henry asked how the Archbishop had come by such venomous scandal. And it came out that a woman called Mary Lascelles, who had been in the old Duchess of Norfolk’s household at Horsham, had told her brother what went on there.And he, fanatical puritan that he was, had sought an interview at Lambeth and repeated it to the Archbishop—neither for spite nor gain, but for his conscience’s sake, with a devastating honesty which carried conviction. “Go see this man and look into these palpable lies,” Henry must have said to Wriothesley or someone, when the source of Cranmer’s concern had been explained to him. “But let no alarm or slander reach the Queen.”

  But the sleuths were at work and truth will out. To the shocked amazement of all of us the next thing we heard was that Madox and Dereham had actually confessed. Madox said that he had amused himself with her when she was yet too young to be seduced, and Dereham that he had lain with her many a night and, being a poor relation of the Howards, considered himself contracted to her in marriage until the King himself fancied her.

  It must have been a blow indeed to Henry. And yet, as 1 could have foretold, he had pity. “She was too young to know better! That hell-hag of a stepmother of Norfolk’s should have cared for her as a gentlewoman and not put her with the upper servants.” I heard him say it, groaning and holding hands to head, when he came into his bedchamber after hearing Wriothesley’s report. He was grieved past caring who heard. If she had run to him then and implored forgiveness he would have protected her. But only Culpepper was there, white-faced and guilty, and his hands shook like aspen leaves as he held the royal nightgown to the fire to warm. And because of his shakiness and pitiful guilty fear it fell to me to try to comfort our master.

  “She complained of the jolting of the roads,” Henry said, pacing back and forth before the fire, “and during all our journey I cared for her tenderly, even abstaining from her bed when she complained of being tired, because I hoped—and she pretended to hope—that she was with child by me. And now the doctors say it was nothing. And I, poor duped fool, know that had she been capable of childbirth she would have been disgraced by bearing one long ago to this Dereham fellow, or who knows what menial.”

  I coaxed him to sit on the edge of the great four-poster bed. Gently, I pulled off his doublet and embroidered shirt and, stretching a hand behind me for the warmed shirt which Culpepper silently handed, slipped it over the tousled auburn head. Looking down at it so closely, I noted how that vibrant, brilliant thatch was thinning and greying. Compassion stirred in me. “And you are all the more distressed because they greeted you on your return with alarming news of the Prince’s health,” I sympathised. “By and large, it has been a sad homecoming for you, Harry.”

  “You always read my heart, Will,” he said, with an appreciative pat on my shoulder. And, to my dismay, leant forward with bowed head and began to sob. “If he—my Ned—should die—” he said brokenly.

  “You have daughters,” I dared to remind him within the shelter of the half-drawn bed curtains.

  “How could I leave England to be ruled by a woman? Mary married to some meddling foreign prince?” he demanded. But for once he seemed to review them thoughtfully with that contingency in view. “Mary is a good woman, like her mother. But obstinate as an abbot’s mule—she would drag my country back to the Pope.”
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  Trying to soften him, I told him how I had found out about her caring for the prisoners. “She was a charming child, but she has soured,” was all he said.

  “Is it any wonder?” I should have liked to ask, but even in this moment of close sympathy did not dare. “And what of the younger one?” I asked instead, trying to lead his mind away from present troubles.

  “Young Bess?” he said, and for the first time smiled. “I suppose men would say she is the spit of me, with her hair, and her man’s acuteness and the way she stands and orders people about—”

  “And her cunning, Harry?” I ventured.

  He kicked at me playfully with his unshod foot. “A pity she was not born a boy,” he said with a sigh, and sat staring for a long time at the tiled floor. But I knew it was her dark-eyed mother and not young Bess of whom he was thinking. And presently he proved me right. “Will,” he asked, “do you suppose the wench knows about—my second wife?”

  “Almost certainly. After all, she is ten and too quick in the up-take not to,” I said.

  “Then how does she—” He stopped, unable to put into words a question he must have been too proud to ask for many years.

  I was quick to remove the necessity. “Lady Bryan, who, having always had charge of her household, should know, once told me that her Grace has never been heard to mention her mother,” I told him. A sigh of relief escaped him, though I myself mistrusted the result of such repression of youthful thoughts. But his feelings towards his younger daughter must have been kindly because, although she was still considered to be illegitimate, he did not reprove me for using the title “her Grace.”