King's Fool (11 page)

I remembered that my new jester’s suit had come from the tailor and was hanging, as yet unworn, behind the door. Quickly I bundled Uncle Tobias into it, struggling to make the green worsted doublet meet across his belly. It was lined with stiff buckram and fringed with red bells, and if he had looked a figure of fun before he looked even more ludicrous now. “Two of us?” he panted, looking from my shabbier motley to his creakingly new outfit.

“Yes, two—which is bound to attract the King’s attention,” I said firmly, pulling the hood more closely about his face. In spite of the difference between his ruddy face and my high cheek-bones and deep-set eyes there appeared to be some family resemblance which made us look alike.

Straight to the royal apartments I hurried, choosing all the most populated corridors and ante-rooms. “Make way! Make way for his Grace’s jesters!” I shouted as I went. And high and low made way, stepping back to stare and then entering into the spirit of the thing without knowing quite what was afoot. “Way for my uncle, the King’s new jester!” I called, coming within sight of the great closed door of the King’s privy council chamber.

Some benevolent guardian angel must have flown down to open it at that very moment, and there in the doorway stood King Henry, flushed and frowning, with a handful of anxious lords and clerics behind him. At sight of us he stopped short in bewilderment and put up a hand to scratch at his auburn pate. “God save us, Will, are there two of you?” he exclaimed. “Did your mother have twins?”

“No, but she had a brother, and because he has come a long way to see you and his clothes are travel stained I have lent him the fine new suit you had made for me.”

“And I hope you have given him some food,” said Henry, his frown smoothing into a smile as he examined my double. “Is he as amusing as you are?”

“Not intentionally. In fact, Harry, he is a very sad man at this moment. But he has an interesting tale to tell.”

“Then let us hear it,” said the King, seating himself in a chair which a page had set before the hearth. “It is time we heard something more entertaining than fruitless conferences.” He looked sourly at milord Cardinal and Bishop Fisher of Rochester, who excused themselves and moved away, presumably to confer apart.

My uncle looked imploringly at me, but I knew that his simple sincerity would be worth all my babbling. “It is about a farmer and some cows and a griping old miser,” I said. “But he will tell it better than I.”

And tell it better he did, for any man talking of his own trade is worth listening to. And Henry Tudor listened, for was it not a story of the ordinary, everyday workings of his kingdom? “What is this landlord’s name?” he asked.

“Master Tyrrell, your Grace,” said Uncle Tobias.

“And what Tyrrell ever did his king any good?” I put in, to help things along. And, seeing Henry look at me questioningly, I ventured to jog his memory with one of those items of history which had been dinned into me in my father’s classroom. “Was it not a Sir Walter Tyrrell who shot King William Rufus through the eye?”

“An accident, when they were hunting in the New Forest,”recalled Henry. But perhaps he felt the name boded him ill, for he sent for a clerk and there and then gave orders that the fencing was to be taken down. “Does that satisfy you?” he asked, scrawling his all-powerful signature across the paper.

To my amazement it did not, and Uncle Tobias, having once overcome his shyness, made no bones about saying so. “The old scurrimudgeon will but enclose all over again when your Grace has forgotten,” he said bluntly.

The Tudor’s sandy eyelashes blinked at him in surprise, but he was sportsman enough to appreciate a man who spoke his mind.

“Can you write, Tobias?” he asked, after a moment’s thought.

“Well enough to keep my farm accounts, since my brother-in-law was a schoolmaster,” answered my uncle.

“Then I tell you what we will do,” said Henry with a chuckle.“We will make you bailiff of this Frith Common. At a fee of twenty pounds a year. And I make no doubt you will know how to keep this Tyrrell on his own side of the fence.”

My uncle was overcome with gratitude, but my own thanks had to wait. I remembered the woman who had pestered me by the riverside and how, but for her, my uncle would have suffered penury and I would have suffered shame. I must make an effort to save her son. And now, while the pen was in Henry’s hand, was as good a moment as any. I hated asking for another boon, but somehow I managed it. A reprieve was signed and a royal servant sent with it to London.

“And what do I get out of all this?” my master asked, handing the pen back to his clerk and looking up at me with a rueful grin.

I joined my palms and bowed my head. “Your reward will be in Heaven,” I said, in a really fine imitation of the Cardinal’s most unctuous baritone.

Henry sprang up in exasperation. He gave me a friendly cuff on the shoulder, and even a friendly cuff from his massive hand could be painful. “So those sanctimonious advisers of mine are always telling me. But there are times in a man’s life when he wants some of the reward here and now!”

And off he strode in a flurry of handsome brocade to join the merry group of youngsters clustered, as usual, around the tinkling laughter of Anne Boleyn.

ALTHOUGH KING HENRY WAS beginning to thicken into middle age, such was his vigour that he seemed to regain his youth when in the company of this group of gay young courtiers. More and more often he sought escape in their vivifying and irresponsible levity from the weightier matters thrust upon him by his counsellors. And in doing so he emphasised, all unconsciously perhaps, the difference in years between himself and his too rapidly ageing wife. When Cardinal Wolsey took up residence at his new Manor of Hampton and invited his royal master to a house-warming feast, it was an excited company of youngsters who crowded into the royal barges to escort him, while Queen Katherine, who was beginning to suffer from dropsy, stayed in her apartments to rest.

Seeing that Lord Vaux and Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Boleyn family had been invited into the King’s own barge, I scrambled after him and squatted beside the gorgeously arrayed bargemaster in the stern. The sun was shining, and up river with the tide we went, the eight oarsmen with the great Tudor rose on their doublets pulling as one. Through a cluster of foreign shipping and past our own busy wharves where clerks and wherrymen all stopped work to gaze and cheer at the fine sight we made. Past the grim silence of the Tower. Then shooting skillfully through one of the arches of London Bridge, where the rush of water between the stone piers was so murderous that most of the women screamed—all except Mistress Boleyn, whose slender body tensed adventurously to the thrill of swiftly approaching danger. Through the city of London itself, with the tall spire of St. Paul’s on our right and the brothels of Bankside on our left. And then past the stately Palace of Westminster and out into the country between green meadows again until we came to Richmond.

“The lovely palace where I was born and where my mother lived,” said Henry, and I swear that his thoughts were back in those gardens and galleries with her, for he never turned his gaze from them until we were past. “Only a good woman should live in that peaceful place,” he added, with a sigh for his happy boyhood memories.

But almost immediately everyone was exclaiming at the beauty of Hampton as the tall gatehouse towers of Wolsey’s new home came into view, and the portly prelate himself was seen to be standing at the top of his watergate steps to welcome his royal guest.

“Trust a churchman to find himself a fine site!” Sir Thomas Boleyn was saying enviously. “I am told that he bought the lease from the Knights Hospitallers.”

“Who could scarcely refuse, seeing that he was the Pope’s legate,” laughed Wyatt. “But it was in sad repair, having been used as a kind of theological school, and one must admit that he has done wonders to it.”

“It is fairer even than Greenwich!” exclaimed Anne Boleyn tactlessly.

“And so much more convenient for Westminster and the City,” added Vaux, who was beginning to acquire the practical viewpoint of his merchant relatives.

“With all the wealth which a bishopric brings

He makes him a mansion to rival the King’s,”

I chanted maliciously, from my precarious perch abaft.

A few months ago the King would not have tolerated such sly thrusts at his all-powerful Chancellor, and between us I scarcely think we had added to our prospective host’s popularity. But it was true of Thomas Wolsey that although few men can have been more efficient, few men have been less loved. As a hard-working statesman he impressed all Europe, but as a priest he lacked spirituality. It always seemed to me that he was without a vestige of that rare virtue humility, which most inspires affection.

We were lavishly entertained at Hampton with banquets and jousting and dancing, and as usual I enjoyed pitting my wits against those of Saxton, the Cardinal’s pretentious jester. During the days which we spent there we were shown all the fine features of the place. The exquisite linen-fold panelling and the gold and silver hangings in milord Cardinal’s private apartments overlooking the river, and the splendid ceilings ornamented with the pillars and cross-keys of his badge. Men like Vaux and Wyatt, who were familiar with the famous buildings of Italy and France, admired the outer walls of the base court where narrow, dark-red bricks were patterned with black ones—an effect achieved locally by burning hay in the mortar, so Wolsey’s usher Cavendish told us.And we could not but marvel at the two hundred and eighty rooms always kept in readiness for guests, and at the fine galleries which connected them and were lighted by beautiful mullion windows.Yet with such palatial impressiveness Wolsey had managed to preserve a kind of mellow homeliness.

It was a privilege to share so interesting a visit. Such a home was indeed a proud symbol of a successful career. Yet, watching milord Cardinal showing it off proudly to the royal master who had always been his friend, I thought involuntarily, “You learned Ipswich fool! Can you not see where friendship, over-taxed, begins to fray? Did you never hear, when you were a bright grammar-school boy, the good old adage ‘Pride goes before a fall’?”

Perhaps Wolsey was always so busy advising Henry that he had less time to listen and to observe than those of us who earned our bread by waiting upon the King’s pleasure and so had urgent need to find out what it really was.

Henry took his leave sooner than we expected. Although the entertainment was good, his laugh rang out less boisterously than usual. His farewell to his host was a shade less cordial. On his way to the water steps he looked back pensively at that attractive house, pulling at his small, pursed mouth with thumb and forefinger as he often did when his thoughts were none too pleasant. And when we were all back in the barge I overheard him say to Sir Thomas Boleyn, “As a second son I was trained for the Church and, by Heaven, I might have done better for myself had I remained in that lucrative profession!”

“What does a celibate priest need with all those guest rooms?” asked Anne Boleyn, in that clear, penetrating voice of hers. “Oh, of course, George, I know as well as anybody that he has not really been celibate,” she added, seeing her brother grin. “But surely that Lark woman has been dead these many years?”

“Not dead, Nan, but comfortably married off to someone else,” he told her.

“Perhaps our good Cardinal intends to take a second wife,” laughed Henry, charmed back to good humour by her very impudence, and throwing a red rose from the prelate’s garden into her lap.

Anne Boleyn sighed as she withdrew her gaze reluctantly from the receding beauty of Hampton. “I would almost marry him myself to become mistress of that manor,” she declared, turning her dark eyes upon the King in a provocative manner which must have maddened her enamoured cousin, Wyatt.

And, numbskull that I was, I did not even then suspect that anything less natural than the need of sons drove the Tudor into contemplating divorce. That very evening, back at Greenwich, in full view of all, I made a cruel kind of blunder worthy of that clumsy, bearded Budge.

The Queen, pale-faced and bravely pretending to have recovered from her indisposition, appeared at supper in her usual place beside her husband. Kindly, ungrudgingly, she listened to all the accounts of our pleasant visit. And because my heart was full of pity for her I had squandered a week’s wages on a basket of golden Spanish oranges, which she loved.

“See what the King has brought your Grace from Hampton,” I said, sure that he had never once thought of her and that nothing would please her so much as the belief that he had.

She turned to smile at him, the warm light of pleasure beautifying her tired eyes. And then some nosey old busybody had to spoil it.

“Oranges and lemons

Said the bells of St. Clement’s,”

he gurgled, having been too freely at the sack. “But I saw our Will buying them from a ship’s master at the Fermor wharf.” And instead of letting his tipsy
faux pas
go, I must needs enlarge upon it defensively.

“Better that poor Will should bring home an orange or two from the wharves than that the King should bring home a
leman
from Hampton,” I said, making play with our popular word for a light o’ love. And immediately I realised by the lack of laughter, the embarrassed titter or two, and the awkward silence that I had spoken amiss. Worse still, I saw the warm light die from the Queen’s plain face, and the embarrassed red flush Henry’s.

“You certainly exceeded your licence just now, Will,” Lord Vaux warned me in an undertone as we all rose with a fluster of silks and a scraping of stools from the supper tables. “The most favoured of fools had better keep his tongue caged on the matter of mistresses.”

Even then I thought he was just giving me a well-merited rebuke for the cheap coarseness of my
double entendre
before the Queen.

But I was to learn the enormity of my
bêtise
with blinding suddenness. Later that evening the Countess of Salisbury sent for me to come and sing to our young Princess, who had been asking for me because she had one of her bouts of toothache and could not sleep. There was no summons which I would have obeyed with more alacrity. But I remembered that in the hurry of setting off for Hampton I had left my harp in the King’s ante-chamber, and hurried along the stairs and passages to reclaim it before his Grace should have retired to his bedchamber. It was quite dusk by then and some careless servant had forgotten to light the torch at the archway to the King’s gallery—or so I thought. But it was not too dark for me to make out the tall figure of my master with a slender woman in his arms. Or to recognise the heart-shaped whiteness of Anne Boleyn’s face. She appeared to be holding him off, but the urgent hunger of his embrace was unmistakable.

For a moment or two I stood rooted in the deep shadow of the archway. Then slipped away soft-footed, a wiser and a deeply troubled man.

I realised how my silly, tasteless words must have hurt the Queen, who undoubtedly knew that her husband really
had
brought home a leman, and from the same Kentish family as before. Or, at any rate, one whom he
desired
to make his mistress. I saw how well Wolsey had been serving his master’s interests when he had so callously crushed Anne’s betrothal to young Percy of Northumberland, and why so many favours were being shown to her ambitious father. And, retracing my steps more slowly to the Princess’s apartments, I wondered sadly how this new complication in the lives of her elders would affect her.

But I had little time to dwell on this before I became involved in troubles of my own. Knowing the King’s interests to be engaged elsewhere, I had more sense than to hang around to amuse him, and a day or two later when I went to my own room to read in peace, to my great surprise I found John Fermor waiting for me there.

“Master John! I did not know you were at Court,” I exclaimed, surprised to find him sitting patiently in so humble a place.

But most of his uppishness seemed to have been shaken out of him. “I am not here to wait upon the King, but to see my brother-in-law—and you, Will,” he admitted. “I have bad news from Neston.”

“Not sickness? Not any of the family?” I blurted out, seeing him draw from his pouch a letter sealed with the crimson cock’s head of the Fermors.

“No, no,” he assured me. “But the new ship. The
Cast
. My father says here that she went aground off the Dutch coast in a raging gale. Half the sailors were drowned and all that valuable cargo of wheat lost!”

I sank down on the other stool and stared at him in dismay.“The ship which was the pride of Master Fermor’s heart and the cargo for which he had obtained free export,” I recalled.

“My father is a rich man, but this must be a blow.”

“And for more than financial reasons,” I said, knowing how that upright merchant would feel about the lives of all those men.

“He warns me to curb my expenditure,” went on his son, gloomily tapping the letter with an idler’s bejewelled hand. “And seems to blame me for all those orders of silk which we have had from the Cardinal since I befriended his clerk in Florence.”

“But surely they should help?”

“If they were paid for!”

“The silk not paid for!” I exclaimed incredulously. “But the Queen’s ladies complain jokingly that they can scarcely hear themselves speak for the rustle of it. His splendour is the talk of half Europe. Only last week he invited the King and Court to see his new Manor at Hampton. I went with them. It is even finer than York House on the Strand and all his other places. It has everything that money can buy.”

“Which is where much of his wealth is gone. He was always one for ostentation. Yet when, at my father’s bidding, I had to go crawling to that odious secretary of his, this bull-faced Cromwell tells me bluntly that his master cannot at the moment pay—I am but now come from him.”

I knew how much young Fermor must have hated this, and began to suspect that he had come to me in the hope of help, or at least advice. “If any two men have cause to detest the sight of me, they are Wolsey and his fool, for I am for ever poking fun at them,” I pointed out.

“But you could drop a hint to the King, perhaps, in the clever way you sometimes do,” he suggested.

“Even I have exceeded my licence in that quarter of late, as milord Vaux will tell you,” I said, wishing with all my heart that I could find some way to help. “But after all, Thomas Cromwell said only that he could not make payment
now
. And milord Cardinal’s credit must stand higher than any man’s save the King’s.”