King's Fool

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “Perhaps because, men being what they are, it is difficult for them to be both good and gay,” I suggested, playing over the sweet air of his own “Greensleeves” on muted strings.

  “We look for perfection every time we fall in love,” he grumbled, half singing to his harp.

  “Women are but human, poor creatures. And it would be uncomfortable to live with an angel, would it not, Harry?”

  Unconsciously, we were turning our conversation into a kind of part-song, twanging a string of lute or harp at the end of each sophistry.

  “At least this one puts up with my vile sores.”

  “And does not have lovers in odd corners.”

  “Only Seymour in her heart,” I thought.

  “A woman above par,” punned Henry, with regained good humour and something of his verve.

  “And kind to clever, motherless Elizabeth.”

  He stopped drawing odd sounds from his harp, and became all serious. “That was the worst thing I ever did, Will. To render a young child motherless. It is the one relationship in which we do find something of the security of Heaven.”

  “All women are not real mothers because they are capable of giving birth,” I said, remembering how Anne Boleyn had seemed to care above all for wit and gaiety.

  “Then I must have been fortunate in mine. You scarcely remember yours, Will?”

  “And was still unconsciously aching for her when, as a grown man, I came to Court. But now I have found some part of her in my wife.”

  “Who, miraculously, contrives to be both good and gay.”

  I beamed upon him fatuously for the compliment. “She is going to give me another child,” I told him. And I like to think now that he was the first person I told. And that the glance he shot me held pure, friendly pleasure unmixed with envy. Then he sat quite still against his pillows, blinking his sandy lashes. “What are you going to call this one?” he said.

  More than anything I had wanted to call him John for my faithful friend Thurgood, and because this was Joanna’s brother’s name it would have served well. But I knew what Henry wanted and was touched beyond measure that he should care for that souvenir of himself in my son. There was so little I had to give him, so short a time in which to give it. “We hope to call him Henry,” I said, after the most infinitesimal pause. And if ever an actor tried to put conviction into his lines, I tried then.

  “Your second son, after your second best master,” he said, without rancour and with a most satisfied and ungrudging smile.

  We sat in silence for a while, he in the great bed and I on my stool, until a gleam of wintry sunset began to glint on the diamond panes. It slid round the richly embroidered wall tapestries, illuminating an English lion and Henry’s Welsh dragon standing on their hind legs to maintain a crown. The bed curtains hung open about the posts at the foot of the tester. A log fire burned cheerfully on the hearth. It was the hour before the candles were brought—the hour for confidences between friends.

  And Henry, the old reprobate, gave me gift for gift. He laid the little harp across his raised knees and rested his arms across it, allowing me a look into his mind, not as King but as a human being—a more intimate résumé of his life, perhaps, than he had ever allowed even to Charles Brandon of Suffolk, whose father had been his own father’s standard bearer at Bosworth. “It is strange to look back,” he said slowly. “Not at the Field of the Cloth of Gold and the political hagglings and the glittering feasts and tournaments which all the world knows of. But at my own private life—now that it is nearly over. One comes to realise that one’s parents are so much wiser than one knows. You see, my first wife was the only one brought up as I was, with all the skills and learning and sense of responsibility to fit her to be a Queen. Looking back, it was a golden time—the years with her—full of contentment and success. And Katherine loved me. Probably she was the only one of them all who ever did. But I was never in love, hungrily with all my senses, save with that witch Anne Boleyn. God knows how I denied my body, waiting for her! I wrote her some of the most beautiful love letters a woman ever had. I turned my world upside down to get her.

  “Oh, my heart, and oh my heart

  My heart it is so sore!

  Since I must needs from my love depart

  And know no cause wherefore,”

  he sang softly, in that exquisite tenor of his. For a while he seemed to be caught back in time, right away from age and sickness. Then he sighed deeply, as if letting go of something which had been all the core and colour of life.

  “Then there was Jane—pale, gentle Jane,” he said, with the relieved smile of a man who comes to something infinitely easier to deal with. “Perhaps I chose her by contrast. Jane, who gave me my son. Jane, whom I shall probably be joining soon—at Windsor.”

  “And that other Anne?” I prompted, striving to keep his melancholy thoughts from death, which he had always so much feared. “Surely no two women called by the same name could have been less alike?”

  He laughed, with the same kind of affectionate raillery I kept for Emotte. “I cannot think now why I ever found her ridiculous,” he admitted. “But, truth to tell, I often have a strong suspicion that she and those Flemish vrous of hers are laughing at me. And do you know, Will, when—when I was widowed this last time the Duke of Cleves quite thought I would take her back. Poor Cranmer had the oddest letter from them urging me to do so. He asked me how he should answer it. And when I remembered her kindness to your Joanna and that happy day at Richmond and—” Henry began to chuckle richly, “and that eel pie, I found myself sorely tempted.”

  In his shoes I should have been more than tempted, but I scarcely dared to contemplate the utter consternation which such magnanimity would have caused tall, sensible, inestimable Flemish Anne.“The people would have been pleased,” I was forced to admit.

  “Because she has the common touch, as my first Katherine had,” he agreed. “Some people are born with it, and it cannot be acquired. Not to have it is a cruel handicap to many a good ruler, and often the only salvation of a bad one. Consider my father.The most tolerant, hard-working, progressive king this country has ever had. He made men respect him, but no one could have called him popular. And when they shouted for me so eagerly at my accession it was partly because I was eighteen and tall and open-handed and had my mother’s Plantagenet hair. But mostly because I could compete with my own archers or wrestle with a blacksmith on his own village green and laugh at their jokes and use their own oaths.”

  “And because you had what all the distinguished visitors from Europe called ‘immense promise,’” I added softly.

  “Promise,” he repeated sleepily. “God knows I meant to confirm it—then.”

  “And now these other two Katherines,” I prompted.

  “The one so deceitful and the other so much kinder to me than I deserve. You knew them all, didn’t you, Will?”

  “All six of ’em,” I answered.

  “And in your stubborn old heart loved only the first,” he accused, with a yawn.

  The harp would have slid to the floor had I not saved it. Henry turned his head wearily on the pillow and fell into a light doze, which was good for him. And a few minutes afterwards a page opened the door quietly and his wife came in. There was a lightness to her step and a smiling happiness in her eyes, so that I wondered if she had seen or received a letter from Thomas Seymour. But she looked instantly, in duty bound, at the bed. I rose, with a finger to my lips.

  “Ah, he sleeps,” she whispered, with relief. She had no special liking for me, but I think she spoke to me more freely because I was now distantly connected with her nephew, Lord Vaux. “I have been listening to the Lady Elizabeth playing on the virginals. She is a talented child. I must try to persuade the Council to let her live with me.”

  And I knew by the new happiness in her eyes that she was not picturing Elizabeth in any palace, but in Thomas Seymour’s home. It was rumoured that he would be made Lord High Admiral, and some fine house shoul
d go with the appointment. He had a way with women and the precocious child always sparkled for him, so such an arrangement in the future should make up to her for much neglect in the past. Never a dull moment, they say, with a sailor in the house.…

  JOANNA BROUGHT A LIVELY young Richard back from Wapenham in time to spend Twelfth Night with her aunt and uncle in Aldermanbury, and several times I visited her there. With the King lying so ill there were no festivities for which my services were needed at Whitehall. John Brown and his wife were grateful for what I had been able to do for her father, and in these changed times showed only relief at my having married her, and took great pleasure in our boy.

  Towards the end of January, on the last afternoon of her visit, they left us to talk alone in the great hall. Richard was with his great-aunt and we sat side by side upon the fireside settle.

  “The King has promised me his harp—that lovely Welsh-made instrument,” I told her. But Joanna was scarcely listening to my enthusiasm. She laid aside the small garment she had been making and began to fiddle thoughtfully with the lacing of my doublet. “I have not told you before, Will, because I did not want to worry you during our Twelfth Night happiness here. But when we were bidding this short farewell to our kind friends at Richmond before Christmas, Mistress Wingfield, one of milady of Cleves’s women, drew me aside and told me in confidence that if the King should die milady may be asked to vacate the palace. There can be nothing certain yet, of course, but it is thought the Council may want it for the Prince, or for one of the King’s daughters.”

  “It is only reasonable, I suppose,” I said most regretfully. “But would this not be a great upset for the Lady Anne?”

  “It may be. But she is not one given to useless worrying, as you know. And the King has so richly endowed her that she has several other houses to choose from. Dartford and Bletchingly, for instance.”

  “Sir Thomas Carden is her tenant at Bletchingly.”

  “Yes. But she prefers Dartford. She has grown used to our river, she says, and although Dartford is in Kent it will still be a home near the Thames.”

  I put my arms about her. “I cannot have you so far away as Dartford,” I said decidedly.

  “How did you know about Sir Thomas Carden?” she asked.

  “Because for some time he has been considered officially Master of the Revels.”

  “Oh, poor John Thurgood!”

  “John works hard and is the most conscientious man alive. But—though I hate to say it—he does not move with the times. Were I not to prod him he would still be producing the same kind of masques as we had when I first came to Court.”

  “I suppose there will be a great many changes?” said Joanna anxiously.

  “There are bound to be—under a new King.”

  “Oh, Will, how strange it sounds. Almost as long as we can remember it has been great strong Henry the Eighth—and soon we shall have a child of ten! Will you have to go, too?”

  I hugged her reassuringly. “No, no, my love. Not unless I wish. Edward Seymour will be Protector of England, and he is well disposed towards me. But I am tired of living in one palace while my wife lives in another.”

  “I hope it will not be because of me—if you give up your appointment as royal jester?”

  “It will be mostly because I am tired of fooling in public, my sweet.”

  A pleasant-looking maid came in to put fresh logs on the fire, through the open door drifted the sound of Mistress Brown playing “London Bridge has fallen down” on her virginals, and our sturdy son sitting down on his behind with a bump and a shout of delighted laughter every time the bridge fell down. “I begin to wish we could build a house of our own and live in a real, comfortable, middle-class home like this with a reasonable amount of family privacy.”

  “We could borrow some money from my uncle and buy some land and rear sheep perhaps,” suggested Joanna doubtfully.

  “You know how good old Jordan always says I am at that!”

  “Then what will you do?” said Joanna the practical.

  I stretched luxuriously before Master Brown’s roaring fire. I was an odd, unpractical fellow, I suppose. “Do you remember when we walked through Shoreditch fields before young Richard was born, planning what he should grow up to be? And how you mentioned men like Caxton and Tyndale, and said that as time went on and there were more grammar schools people would want more and more books?”

  “Why, yes, I think I do,” she said doubtfully.

  “Then I have a mind to give up being the King’s fool and write a book,” I announced, seizing an imaginary pen and thrusting a hand through my wiry hair in a burst of unlikely inspiration.

  Joanna leaned back against the settle and laughed at me as she used to laugh years ago when I made shadows of little animals for her on the wall at Neston. “Wonderful! Wonderful! A harp and a book,” she jeered lovingly. “But, Will, my precious idiot, we shall have to eat!”

  “Too true,” I agreed, coming down to earth. “Specially with another mouth to feed soon.”

  “I am glad you told the poor King we planned to call him Henry,” she said. “After all, we hope that John Thurgood will be with us often, and—who knows?—if you go on loving me so extravagantly we may have other sons. No, no, Will!” she protested laughingly, fending off my immediate embrace. “I cannot have you making love to me in the great hall with the servants coming in and out. Look, it grows dark, I can hear old Bardolf bringing round your horse and you should have been back at Whitehall by now.”

  It was too true, and I was growing tired of all this coming and going. I cantered back, splashing up the mud along the Strand, with my mind still on that comfortable, cheerful house. Among these pleasant fields out Shoreditch way perhaps? And wondering if, with no appointment at Court and my wife having no dowry, I could scrape enough from my savings to buy one good enough for her.

  As soon as I set foot in the palace, although the torches and candles were lit, I felt the frightened gloom of approaching crisis. It was in the unusual hush and the secret consternation on people’s faces. “The physicians say he cannot last long,” an officious usher hurried to tell me.

  “Does his Grace know?” I asked sharply.

  The man shrugged in an affected gesture which he must have copied from the French ambassador. “No one dares to tell him.”

  There were several who might have, I thought. Archbishop Cranmer, whose place it really was. The Queen. Or Edward Seymour.

  A very young page came running up to me, life’s first introduction to the reality of death written starkly on his white, pimply face. “The King has been asking for you, Master Somers,” he blurted out, all terrified importance.

  “Now, by God’s soul, they are not going to ask me to do it!” I thought, in panic. But Sir Anthony Denny, one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber, had loyally done what the physicians dared not. They were all in a huddle outside his door when I had hurried there along endless passages, not even stopping to shake the wet of the blustery January evening from my cloak. They seemed to be holding some pretence of consultation, but the flatness of their voices showed that there was little more to consult about. Evidently, I was expected. Hurriedly, I tossed my dripping cloak to the servant who admitted me.

  Although there were several people present I did not stop to glance at them. They seemed to be grouped just inside the door. The great state chamber was very still. My eyes went straight to the monstrous mound beneath the bed covers, and that was very still, too. But when I reached the foot of the bed I saw that Henry’s eyes were open, looking at me. I hated myself for every moment I had kept him waiting.

  “I am going on a long journey, Will,” he said.

  Sickness was already toning down the redness of his face to grey. In spite of the royal composure with which he spoke, I detected fear in those small, light eyes.

  Instinctively, to cheer him, I went to the window, pushed open a casement and stuck out my head. “No, Harry, you must have been misinformed,” I sai
d, after making a great to-do of looking this way and that. “There are no horses, nor grooms, nor any baggage carts down there.”

  “The kind of journey on which one does not take—baggage,” he said.

  “It is sometimes best to travel light,” I said, coming back to the side of the great bed. I felt he had just been through enough. I did not want to let this develop into one of those awful moments of sepulchral solemnity, and because there were others in the room I tried to cling to something of my bantering fool’s way of talk.

  “There are some burdens—burdens of conscience—I wish I could go without. Like proud old Margaret of Salisbury. And that poor, misused, Howard child’s screaming.…” His voice was so thin that I had to bend down to catch what he said.

  “One takes along the good deeds, too,” I reminded him. “The courage, the long friendships, the many kindnesses.”

  “There are not so many of those as I would now wish. Not enough to outweigh those—those other deeds. Though God’s love can forgive me all my sins—even worse than those I have committed.”

  It was not until that moment that the thought came to me. “I can take at least one ugly bundle from your burden, Harry,” I said, talking in that half-fooling way. “Give Richard Fermor back his estates and make one of your most loyal subjects happy. Every day he rides to look over the gates of them like a man shut out from Paradise. And you know, Harry, where you are going you will not any longer need his money.”

  It was some moments before he answered, and then, for a moment I thought he was evading me. “Take care of my harp, Will, my old friend. I could not bear anyone else to play my songs on it. And take Richard Fermor the deeds of his estates. Better send one of those gaggling clerks to me while I can still sign my name to it.” He roused himself up a little and spoke more strongly. “My name, Henry Tudor, which has made the whole world shake.” He pulled himself up and looked challengingly about him in a most impenitent pride, while I bent to kiss the swollen hand that would just have time to make Fermor master of Easton Neston again.