The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (20 page)

The king’s life was really thought to be in danger, not from the fever, but from the leg which often troubles him because he is very stout and marvellously excessive in drinking and eating so that people worth credit say that he is often of a different opinion in the morning than after dinner.
⁶⁹

Shrovetide came and went quietly at Hampton Court, while Henry, sequestered in his secret apartments, exploded in tantrum after tantrum. Life there passed ‘without recreation, even music which [the king] used to take so much pleasure [in] as any prince in Christendom’. With visitors turned away at the gates, Marillac said there was so little company in the palace ‘that the court resembled more a private family than a king’s train’.

On 14 March, Henry was still ‘indisposed’, but then surprisingly made a good recovery, enabling his energetic royal progress to the North to show off his new queen, Katherine Howard. But he was to fall into the hands of his doctors again at the end of December, taking their prescribed medicines as he ‘did not feel quite the thing’, possibly because of his shock and dreadful despair at her adultery.

Henry was now huge. As a young man in 1514, his harness of armour, specially made for him, shows that he was 6 ft. 3 in. in height and had a trim waist measurement of 35 in. and a chest diameter of 42 in. – a powerful, muscular picture of chivalry. That manly physique had now gone. At the age of forty-nine, Henry’s waist had swelled to a gargantuan 54 in. and his chest to 58 in. The deterioration in his appearance was awe-inspiring.

Gone were the magnificent propaganda images painted only five years or so before when he was in his mid-forties,
⁷⁰
showing the barrel-chested king in familiar three-quarter view. In these portraits, an arrogant monarch stares back defiantly at us out of the canvases, daring us not to be humbled by his bravura. His haughty, regal glance is designed to bring us to our knees. He is clearly fit and healthy, swaggering, overbearing and domineering. This is an imperious Henry, God’s true deputy on earth, shown at the peak of his powers.
⁷¹
At the time these portraits were created, the Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys wrote tellingly of Henry: ‘He has no respect or fear of anyone in the world.’
⁷²
The king’s contempt for all around him radiates out malevolently from his eyes. No wonder Henry was the first English king to adopt the word ‘majesty’.

Half a decade or so later, how things had changed! The
metamorphosis is dramatic. Now the artist portrays him as a pathetic, hugely overweight old man. The years of misuse and abuse of his body have patently had a dire impact on his frame. His small eyes peer out pig-like from a jowled, fat, lined face. He holds a heavy embossed staff in his left hand for support.
⁷³
He is the personification of geriatric decay. One can almost smell the putrid stench of the rank pus oozing from his ulcers, staining the bandages on his swollen legs. Chapuys labelled them ‘the worst legs in the world’.

Henry could no longer fully pursue his much-loved pastime of hunting: although he was still able to ride, long hours in the saddle were now beyond him. Instead, the quarry was driven before him to be shot by crossbow, or he was forced to watch as an impatient onlooker while his keepers drove the game towards a choreographed kill before him.

Yet the coming years of 1544–5 were a critically important period of high mental and physical activity for Henry, during which he personally led his last campaign in France and superintended plans to protect England from invasion,
⁷⁴
despite being in continual pain and suffering from the debilitating effects of his massive bulk. His driving determination to lead, to rule effectively, to succeed, must have been terrible to behold.

In March 1544, the ulcers on Henry’s legs flared up yet again, confining him to bed with a fever. The royal doctors urged him not to personally lead the 42,000 English troops then being assembled for the Anglo-Spanish invasion of France and his ministers flapped about in the same cause, ever fearful of provoking another of the king’s rages. But for Henry, the issue was clear cut: he
was
the king, and the king belonged at the head of his army. To do otherwise on such an important international military undertaking would be a great dishonour both to him and to the prestige of England. The practical and realistic Chapuys urged his imperial master to intervene to persuade Henry against taking to the field of battle, with all the discomforts and inconveniences of campaigning. The emperor sent a special envoy who ‘found Henry so determined upon the voyage that he dared not try to dissuade him’. Once
again, with a grim fortitude, Henry recovered and in early June wrote to his ally, promising that he was sufficiently well to embark for Calais ‘where he would resolve whether to go further’. In the event, he crossed the Channel to the field of battle, but it is very doubtful whether Henry went particularly close to the fighting. A mere whiff of gunpowder in the siege of Boulogne was probably enough for the proud old warhorse to prove his point to himself and the watching world.

Another key player in the last days of Henry VIII enters now upon the stage: the king’s fool or jester, Will Somers. He strikes a very human note of sanity amid the recurrent bouts of anger, the low cunning and the bloody ruthlessness of his ageing psychopathic master and the plots and conspiracies being waged in dark corners as the various factions in the court began to vie for power when the king finally died. Of all the royal household, this humpbacked little man with his pet monkey was trusted totally by Henry. His ability to make the sad, pained old man laugh enabled him not only to tell the king things that others would not dare to, but to survive happily this most dangerous reign and its immediate successors.

Robert Armin (
c
.1568–1615), one of the principal actors in Shakespeare’s plays late in Elizabeth’s reign, wrote of Somers’ first meeting with Henry at Greenwich in 1525 in his
Nest of Ninnies
:
⁷⁵

A comely fool indeed, passing more stately:

who was this forsooth? Will Sommers! And not

meanly esteemed by the king for his

merriment; his melody was of a higher strain

and he looked as the noon broad waking.

Will Sommers, born in Shropshire, as some say

was brought to Greenwich on a holy day.

Presented to the king, which fool ordained

to shake him by the hand, or else ashamed.

Lean as he was, hollow-eyed, as all report

and stoop he did too; yet in all the court

few men were more beloved than was this fool

whose merry prate kept with the king much rule.

When he was sad, the King and he would rhyme

Thus Will exiled sadness many a time.

Tradition maintains that Richard Fermer, a Northamptonshire merchant of the Staple of Calais, had employed Somers and introduced him at court.
⁷⁶
Somers succeeded the elderly Sexton as the chief royal fool and constantly delighted Henry with his wicked sense of humour and his acrobatics.
⁷⁷
No one amongst Henry’s court or administration, no matter how high their status, was safe from his jokes or his dartlike witticisms. Soon the king was promising to fulfil any favour Will desired and the fool undertook to apply when he had the grace to ask, meaning that he would decide when to make the request. ‘One day I shall,’ Somers is said to have commented, ‘for every man sees his latter end, but knows not his beginning.’ With this quip, the jester left the royal presence and ‘laid himself down among the spaniels to sleep’.
⁷⁸

One story recounts that soon after his arrival at court, Somers cheekily cheated Henry’s then chief minister, Wolsey, out of £10. It is probably apocryphal, like so many of the tales about the fool, but it provides a flavour of Somers’ wit and the unrestricted access he enjoyed to his royal master. According to the story, the fool had entered the royal apartments while the king and cardinal were privately discussing state business. Somers apologised for his interruption and said that some of Wolsey’s creditors were outside, demanding their money. The cardinal pompously replied that he would forfeit his head if he owed any man a penny, but gave Somers £10 in gold on the promise that it would be paid to whom it was due. Somers then left, but returned later, asking Wolsey: ‘To whom do you owe your soul?’ ‘To God,’ came the reply. Somers then asked: ‘And your wealth?’ ‘To the poor,’ said the cardinal piously. Then, said the fool quickly, Wolsey’s head was forfeit to the king ‘for to the poor at the gate I paid the debt which he agrees is due’.

Henry laughed long at the joke and the cardinal no doubt feigned his merriment, but ‘it grieved him to give £10 away so’ – a large sum of money, equivalent to more than £4,000 in today’s purchasing power.
Somers apparently played a number of other practical jokes on the minister, who was always ready to stand on his dignity, and the cardinal ‘could never abide him’.
⁷⁹

Thomas Wilson (who thirty years later became a secretary of state in Elizabeth’s government) in his
Art of Rhetorique
, published in 1551 or 1553, quotes some pointed repartee between Somers and the king, who was then, as ever, in need of hard cash. His fool told him, ‘You have so many frauditors, so many conveyers and so many deceivers’ – clever puns on ‘auditors’, ‘surveyors’ and ‘receivers’, administrators in the Tudor government – ‘that they get all to themselves.’

Somers enjoyed a very close relationship with Henry, following him from palace to palace, playing with his children. One ferryman’s bill records the passage of his horse across the Thames from Lambeth on Christmas Eve when Henry and his entourage moved to Hampton Court.
⁸⁰

The strange rapport between sovereign and fool that endured for more than two decades (when many others fell so easily in and out of royal favour) and the great affection in which Somers was obviously held are reflected in his appearance in several royal portraits and contemporary illustrations. A painting of a chubby Edward, aged six, now in the Kunstmuseum, Basle, shows the prince holding a monkey, probably Somers’ pet.

Most poignant of all is a miniature of Henry, with Somers close by, that appears in the
King’s Psalter
, preserved in the British Library.
⁸¹
The 176-page book, bound in red velvet now worn through usage over time, was written for Henry on vellum in the Italian style of calligraphy by John Mallard around 1540.
⁸²
Much of it is concerned with the biblical story of David and Goliath, and its content clearly associates the king with David. It contains many marginal notes in the king’s own handwriting as well as several miniature paintings of Henry, one, for example, portraying him sitting in his great bedchamber, reading a book.
⁸³
Sometimes the king’s handwritten notes are poignant and telling indicators of his thoughts. Alongside verse 25 of Psalm 17 – ‘I have been young and now am old’ – Henry writes rather pathetically ‘
Dolus dictum
’ – ‘a
painful saying’. The years were running away for the king and he was all too conscious that his mortal span was nearly ended. In his letters, he writes that time ‘is of all losses the most irrecuperable, for it can never be redeemed for no manner, price nor prayer’.
⁸⁴

In the
Psalter
, the Somers picture accompanies Psalm 52 and shows an aged Henry as David, seated, hunched up on a coffer, his legs crossed, playing a small harp. The king has a wistful if not melancholic expression on his wrinkled face, perhaps dreaming of glories past. Although he wears a heavy furred robe, his back looks distinctly humped (of which more anon in Chapter 9). Somers, his fingers intertwined, faces right, out of the illustration, obviously rejected as the content of the psalm dictates. He is wearing a green hooded jacket, a purse and green-blue stockings, probably the ‘coat … of green cloth, with a hood to the same, fringed with white crule [wool embroidery]’ ordered for him on 28 June 1535
⁸⁵
by Henry from Lord Windsor, Keeper of the Great Wardrobe, to be made by John Malt, the king’s tailor.

Somers also appears in the huge dynastic family portrait of Henry, Jane Seymour and the royal children Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, painted around 1545 by an unknown artist, which once hung in the Palace of Westminster.
⁸⁶
On either side of the main figures are two archways, providing a glimpse of the ornate and lush Privy Gardens outside. In the right-hand archway stands Will Somers, a clothed monkey wearing a cap squatting on his left shoulder, busily scratching the fool’s bowed head. In the left arch stands a female figure who is probably Jane, Princess Mary’s own fool.
⁸⁷
Beneath the subliminal propaganda signals of the painting, intended to suggest the continuity and legality of the Tudor line of succession and the power and prestige of the dynasty, lies a very human message: all the figures depicted, both royal and humble, must then have been very close to Henry’s heart.
⁸⁸

The king’s household accounts for the last twelve months of his reign include a number of references to Somers, relating to his care and upkeep. On the bottom of a bill for 7s 4d for the carriage of two chests from the Palace of Westminster to Windsor is a note in Secretary Wriothesley’s hand: ‘Remember Will Somer shirts.’ And later
in 1546 there is a bill from Robert Callyniuod for laundry and clothing for the fool that illustrates how his movements followed the king’s: