King's Fool (10 page)

With the Queen sick, the King so preoccupied and all the festivities for the departed Frenchmen finished, a cloud of depression seemed to hang over the palace. Instead of hunting or playing in his newly roofed tennis court, my master seemed to be for ever closeted with the Cardinal or discussing his marriage and his conscience with the learned Doctor Longland, his confessor. He was seldom in the mood for merriment. “Devise something to cheer us, Will,”he would say occasionally at supper, but he no longer joined in with that whole-hearted zest which had made our efforts go with a swing. But sometimes afterwards he would call me into his private room to play to him while he rested, withdrawn from statesmen and sports-loving friends alike. “You are half a Welshman, Will, and your music soothes me,” he would say. And I would play tune after tune, softly, on my small Welsh harp. Every now and then he would join in and sing some of his favourites, but as often as not he would just sit pulling at his lip in thought or seem to be dozing.

“I have not been sleeping well,” he explained one evening, rousing himself with a nod and a start.

The fire had burned low and the room was mostly in shadow, else I do not think he would have begun speaking before me as he did. Almost as if he were speaking to himself, saying over something for the hundredth time. “Small wonder that I sleep ill, with my conscience so troubling me. Suppose what Tarbes says be right, then I have been living in sin all these years. However wise my father’s policy for Spain, I should not have obeyed him and taken Arthur’s widow.” His strong, square hands pushed restlessly up and down the carved arms of his chair, and presently he turned, aware of my sympathetic presence, and spoke as man to man. “But when I look back over all the sunlit years of our married life a priest’s pedantic words seem to make little sense. Getting on for twenty years. That is a long time, Will. And it has been the kind of marriage that men pointed to with envy.”

I laid aside my harp, and my heart throbbed with excitement that he should be talking to me so. He rose from his chair and stretched his great arms above his close-cropped head—arms which could throw most of his own archers in the wrestling ring.“Consider my vigour!” he challenged. “It is incredible that I cannot beget sons. I—who need them so desperately for England—when half my subjects’ hovels crawl with ’em.”

His massive shadow on the wall seemed to writhe in a fury of frustration. “You had Henry of Richmond,” I dared to remind him.

His manhood clutched gratefully at the thought. “And again and again I begat sons on my own virtuous wife. But they all died—or never even breathed their way into this life. So this must be the hand of God, punishing us—punishing us for living all these twenty years in sin.”

He slumped back into his chair. “Her Grace the Queen has been ailing for months,” I pointed out.

“But she was radiant then.” He sat upright, suddenly smiling at proud memories. “I can see her now, crowning me and Charles Brandon and the other winners at some tournament—golden-haired, gay and kind—”

A short silence fell. He was gazing into the dying embers and I guessed that he was still remembering those golden days. “Sir,” I said—the familiar Harry being a word I would not presume to use in serious privacy—“you have her most lovable and accomplished daughter.”

He laughed then, short and sure. “And what would happen to this country in the hands of a woman? With a new dynasty at home and all the powers of Europe yapping like hungry curs abroad? I tell you, Will, there never was such need for a strong hand and ruthless diplomacy.”

I leaned forward from my shadowed stool, too absorbed to be afraid to voice my eager thoughts. “God grant your Grace long life. But come the time, there could be able men around her. Some of these brilliant young scions who are growing to maturity now.”

He smiled and shrugged indulgently at my untutored visionary sophistry. “And because she is a woman they would all squander their brilliant abilities in struggling for precedence.”

“But is it not conceivable—just conceivable—that a woman, not great in herself, could produce a great age? Being served by a very rivalry of chivalric love?”

“I might have imagined so once,” he admitted, a little sad, perhaps, for his disillusionment. “But you talk out of romantic legend, Will. Take Wolsey—or that bull-faced secretary of his, Tom Cromwell—the new men of business ability whom it has suited us Tudors to use. By means of them my father amassed a fortune, broke the power of the contentious barons and the unending threat of civil war, and made England strong. But chivalry is not in their make-up. What woman, I ask you, could control them?”

“Or what man?” I thought, considering to what heights of power the Ipswich grazier’s clever son had come. Or was it only that Wolsey
seemed
to rule both king and country? Was he, after all, perhaps only one of those able men whom Tudors use? I seemed to have learned more in this past half hour than in a lifetime. “And failing milady Mary there is no one?” I said, thirsting for knowledge and fearing that never again could I hope to stand so near the source.

“No one save that feckless boy I had of Bessie Blount—or a Plantagenet through the male line.” The last words sounded like a muttered curse. The Tudor heaved himself out of his chair and padded with that panther-soft tread of his across to the moonlit window. I think he had momentarily forgotten me again, and, having risen when he rose, I stood there feeling as if I watched a piece of play-acting. He banged his fists with a kind of controlled and weary fury against the emblazoned glass. “After Bosworth—after all my father’s careful building—
back to the Plantagenets!”

I saw then the naked thing that nagged him. The usurper’s fear which had driven his impostor-ridden father to murder Margaret of Salisbury’s brother Warwick. The lurking canker that no one could suspect, seeing his boisterous splendid state. “What have I done worse than other men that God will not give me a legitimate son?” he demanded of the indifferent moon.

After a while he turned and stood staring into space, emotion abated, his strong hands slack at his sides. “The Princess Elizabeth of York, your Grace’s mother, was a Plantagenet,” I reminded him.

He crossed himself, remembering her with devotion. Perhaps he thought, too, of his favourite sister Mary, who had married Suffolk.I am sure that he thought, too, of Katherine the Queen. “I have been singularly blessed in my women,” he said.

During that moment or two of reverie, love seemed to have subdued frustrated rage. He came back almost lightly to the hearth and to the former points of our incredible conversation. “And so you see, Will,” he summed up, with a soft, sibilant intake of breath, “there is nothing for it but for me to marry again.”

I FOUND IT DIFFICULT to believe that the King had told me of this momentous decision which Lord Mayor, prelates and people all hung upon. It was not so much that he liked my company, I told myself, as that he could be comfortably unaware of it. To him I must seem a familiar, impersonal being, midway between mountebank and monk, to whom he could lay bare his inmost thoughts. If they shocked me my reactions were too unimportant to matter, and if he suffered I could give him human understanding.He had taken me into his service as a jester, but it was rather my instinct for the moment to stop jesting which had brought us into touch. That, and our mutual love of music. And however much I strove not to become too puffed up, at least I knew that the King of England trusted me.

From that time I had no need to fear other entertainers, however ambitious and clever they might be. They performed their act, won their applause and passed on. But the Tudor family had accepted me as part of their daily life and I belonged. John Fermor, going home to visit Neston, could truthfully report to his father and Joanna that I was a success at Court.

And success, I found, can be judged as accurately by the attitude of one’s fellows as by that of one’s master. When it became known that I was sometimes called to spend quiet hours alone with the King all manner of people began to tell me of troubles and injustices in the hope that I could get them righted.

“But I am not the Chancellor of England!” I would protest.

“No,” they would come back at me. “But you can say things to the King which even milord Chancellor Wolsey dare not.”

This was true enough, providing that I chose my moment and wrapped the kernel of the grievance in good enough entertainment. Several times by cracking a topical joke about some unnoticed hardship I was able to draw royal attention to it. And sometimes, if he were in a good humour, Henry would rap out an order which would serve to remedy it. Not with the carefully weighed justice of Wolsey’s law courts, but with the swift, more spectacular kindness of a king. And sometimes my sly efforts worked the other way, as when the royal auditors came bowing to their master and I was able to raise a laugh by forestalling the usher and announcing them as his Grace’s
frauditors
because, as most of us knew, they were waxing fat on his careless extravagance and their needless cutting of a thrifty Queen’s household allowance.

I would not accept bribes as Budge had, but because quite humble people often laid small offerings outside my door I was not surprised when an unknown woman followed me one afternoon along my favourite riverside path. The September sun was hot and I was tired with trying to distract an unusually irritable master, and when I stretched myself out on the grass and leaned against a stile I saw her standing by the oak tree beneath whose shade I lay. She had brought a cushion which she tucked deftly between my weary back and the hardness of the wood.

I suspected that the cushion was stolen, but it was soft, so I thanked her for her pains and settled to rest, but she would not move away. “What do you want with me?” I asked testily.

Solicitude for my comfort turned all too swiftly to supplication. “It is about my son,” she said. And through half-closed eyelids I noticed her work-roughened hands twisting in a kind of vicarious agony against the soiled darkness of her skirt.

“Who told you that I come this way?” I snapped.

“I have a cousin among the scullions,” she answered, as if that were immaterial. “My son is to be hanged tomorrow.”

“Then he has probably done something that well merits it.”

She did not deny it. “He is a sailor,” she went on in the same urgent voice. “He was caught on a pirate ship which had sunk one of those accursed French merchantmen off Dover. Not so long ago he was sent to fight them. Now Chancellor Wolsey’s new laws punish piracy with death.”

“And quite rightly,” I said, wanting only to be rid of her.

“And so he was dragged to London and is to be hanged at noon tomorrow.”

“And, having brought him up badly, you come to plague me in my rare hour of peace and quiet.”

“He is all I have.”

I closed my eyes, but felt sure that she was still there.

“Have you a mother, Master Somers?”

“What is that to do with you?” I asked shortly, hating her persistency.

“Because if you have you must know that were your life in danger she would be as importunate for you.”

It was a stab in the dark, but it went home. “Touché,” I admitted.“What is your son’s name and where is the hanging to be?”

She told me his name was Miles Mucklow and that it was to be at Blackwell and I calculated that, if I could catch the King’s ear, it might not be too late to save the man. All the same I do not think that I should have bestirred myself to help if it had not been for the way in which she found opportunity to show her gratitude.

It was deliriously green and cool beneath the sun-dappled leaves of my oak tree, with the silver Thames rippling through brown rushes almost at my feet. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was with Joanna at Neston. But all too soon the snap of a twig wakened me and I saw that the woman had come back. “What is it now?” I grumbled.

“A man at the kitchen door.”

“There must be scores every day.”

“But he is a stranger. And he is asking for you.”

“
Another
beggar,” I said ungraciously.

“He is certainly crumpled looking, as if he had been sleeping out in the fields. That is why they are all laughing and throwing things at him. Because he looks so odd and says he is a relation of yours.”

“An old ruse,” I said, idly throwing a pebble into the water.“And where does this one say he comes from?”

“From Shropshire.”

I sat up straight and really looked at her for the first time. She must have been handsome once, before the hardness of her life left her lined and scrawny. For the first time I saw her smile. “Like me, he will not go away however cruelly they bait him,” she said. “So I thought perhaps he really
is
a relation and loves you.”

“What is he like?” I asked.

“Short and fresh-faced, with straw-coloured hair and the funniest country hat.”

In a moment I was on my feet and hurrying back along the path to the back premises of the palace, woman and cushion forgotten. But even as I neared the garden wall my eagerness became mixed with dismay, so that my pace slackened. Just as Frith farm had seemed poor compared with Court life, so would the social status of its owner. Hot into my mind shot the contemptuous epithets used by men who hated our up-climbing Cardinal. “Butcher’s brat,” “Ipswich cattle boy,” and the like. My father had been possessed of dignity, but even in his own setting Uncle Tobias would have seemed a figure of fun had we not been so affectionately accustomed to him. And now the very cooks and scullions were laughing at him.

Reluctantly, I rounded the palace wall and looked through the open gateway. And there I saw him—hot, dishevelled, his strong country hose all torn by briars and his sun-baked face half hidden by a rustic hat. Smart kitchen underlings, in cheap clothes that aped the fashions of their betters, were mimicking his broad Shropshire accent, and scullions were pelting him with stinking wet refuse from their sinks. The dinner dishes were washed, the fires damped down, and here was a God-sent persistent old comic to provide their spot of afternoon amusement. “Says he’s Will Somers’s uncle, does he?” laughed the dapper Clerk of the Kitchen, happening to cross the courtyard at that moment. “Then I must be the Pope’s grandfather!”

Shame and dismay possessed me. How unkind, how inconsiderate of such a relative to come, debasing me where I had so laboriously built up success. Were he to see me I could not be callous enough to disown him. But no one
had
seen me. And how easy it would be to slip away!

“The poor old man must have walked a long way,” I heard someone murmur pityingly at my shoulder, and realised that the condemned man’s mother must have followed me again. And, enlightened by her words, I noticed how, even with blobs of basting fat dripping down on to his broken shoes, my uncle held his ground. And how his resolution made his tormentors look like yapping, insignificant curs.

I walked briskly across the yard and swung him round to me, gripping him by the shoulders. “Uncle Tobias!” I called loudly, so that all should hear me. And the welcome sounded glad because I was thanking God that my treachery had been but momentary, in mind rather than fact. Even then I had sense enough to know that shame of family may be a sharp dismay, but that the memory of having felt it could stick in one’s conscience all one’s life.

“Will!” he cried, with so much relief that I am sure he had already forgotten this Court scum and all he had been through to reach me.

His tormentors had drawn back towards the kitchen doorway, gaping and abashed. Some young nitwit giggled, supposing my greeting to be part of a jester’s play-acting. And so to leave no uncertainty in their minds I turned on them in anger. “Is this the way you represent the most hospitable Court in Europe?” I rated them. “Go back to your spits and sinks. And if you are so ignorant that you cannot read, then learn by rote the rules which milord Chamberlain finds it necessary to hang on the wall for such louts as you. ‘Do not snot at table. Do not claw your back for fleas. Do not mock old men.’ And now get out of my way, all of you, and bring my visitor something to eat.”

I took him by the arm and hurried him along a passage to my little room overlooking the carpenter’s court. “What brings you?And how come your shoes and hose to be in such a state?” I asked.

“Trouble brings me. And scarce was I out of Shropshire when my horse went lame. I had not the silver in my purse to hire, and so I walked.”

“But could you not have sent one of my cousins?” I asked, seeing that however brave a face he might put on all his misadventures he was tired out.

“They had to stay and do the best they could for the herd.”

With contrite celerity half a dozen shame-faced servants were setting up a table and laying the best dishes they could find before him and, instead of fogging him with foreign wines, an older man from the brew house produced a tankard of good Kentish ale. “Forgive us, Master Somers,” he entreated before closing the door upon us. “It was just that we did not believe him.” For which, upon reflection, I could scarcely blame them.

“Then learn to know an honest man when you see one,” I admonished, with a friendly buffet and a groat or two for their pains.

Seeing that the honest man was famished, I did not plague him with questions, but as soon as he had laid down his knife and folded his hands across a comfortably filled stomach the explanation came. “It is that grasping landlord Tyrrell. He has enclosed the common which we small farmers have always had the use of for our cattle, we an’ our fathers afore us. An’ now there be nowhere for the fine herd I’ve spent my savings on to graze.”

“Why did the old lick-penny do this?”

“Surely you know that the price of wool is soaring. ’Tis happening all over our part o’ the country. The lords of the Manor always want to keep more sheep. Quick wool export, more profit and less labour. What easier than to fence in a bit here and a bit there of the village common-land? But this devil at Frith has taken the lot.”

I sat in the window seat staring at him aghast. “But our commons were granted years ago by Royal Charter. It is plain robbery. And yet for stealing a loaf a tinker or a pedlar would have his ears cut off.”

“Aye. An’ that’s not all of it. One old man with a good dog can care for a flock of sheep. So with our pastures gone where are our sons to get even hired work?”

I had been living in a world of luxury too long. It was not only a whole family’s tragedy, but a menace to a whole hard-working rural class. “There be them as pulls up the stakes by night, but ’tis time someone did summat more permanent about it,” he said, in that deliberate, determined way of his. “An’ so I came to you, Will.”

They all came to me—the man with royal favour and a foolish heart. And what was I to do? Yet something I
would
do in this case, having so often done small kindnesses for people who were nothing to me, while families like the Boleyns were forever begging favours for their kin. I now saw this upright, kind old relative through the clear eyes of long affection, unblurred by shibboleths of class. And I remembered that only by his recommendation, however characteristically impartial, had I got my chance in the world and met the girl I loved.

I slid briskly from the window seat. “We must go and see the King,” I said.

“
I
—see the King?” he gasped. Then, supposing me to be joking, he laughed loudly, got up from the table and looked down ruefully at his stained and sorry garments. “In these rags?What would your aunt say, my lad, who keeps all our Sabbath wear so clean and patched?”

“No, not in those rags,” I agreed, looking wildly round the bareness of my room for inspiration. “But we must go
now
if we are to catch him before he leaves the council chamber and goes hunting.”

“You are serious, Will?” I have seen my uncle face a maddened bull with less terror on his face, but he had put himself in my hands and made no further protest.