King's Fool (12 page)

“But for how long? Thomas Vaux says that if the Butcher’s Dog cannot bring about a royal divorce soon he will be kicked out of the kennel.”

“But is not milord Cardinal doing everything he can to persuade the Pope?”

“Not quickly enough, it seems, now that the Tudor is hot on the scent of that Boleyn bitch.”

“How should that affect Wolsey?” I asked. “The King would not want to
marry
her.”

“No, I suppose not. Any more than her sister. But any passionate interlude at this juncture will make him yet more restive about his present bonds of matrimony.”

“Everything Thomas Wolsey has is of the King—save his own ability,” I agreed musingly, comparing his state with my own and glad that my own was so incomparably humbler. “To fall from such a height would be to shatter hopelessly.”

We sat in silence for a minute or two, considering the consequences of such a wild possibility. Then John Fermor kicked back his stool and rose with a sigh, as one who has done all he can and now shrugs off further responsibility. “Well, all merchants have their mishaps,” he said, almost cheerfully. “If Fermor trade be bad this year, now is the moment for my sister Joanna to make a wealthy marriage.”

I, too, had risen to gather up his cloak and sword. “With whom?”I asked, and could feel the blood draining from my face.

“There are plenty of young blades in the county whose fathers have made bids for her, but she would do better to marry someone of importance in London. There is that old man Pickering, for instance, for whom my father is executor—wadded with money and recently widowed.”

“And sixty if he is a day,” I cried hotly.

“Well, well, she would see life and have all the jewels and gowns she wanted, and my wife could bring her to Court sometimes.”

“Do you suppose that is all Mistress Joanna wants?”

“A girl must marry as her father thinks best. And last time I was with my father I strongly advocated this.”

“He loves her and would not for any cause see her unhappy,” I said, with more brave conviction than I felt. “And what would he do without her at Neston?”

John Fermor flung his modish cloak about his shoulders and laughed. “Marry again himself,” he suggested. “Surely you know that Northamptonshire is full of rich widows who are only too willing to throw themselves at him for his likeable personality alone.”

I knew it all too well. I was still holding the cocksure young fellow’s sword in my hands and could cheerfully have murdered him with it. But he was my first master’s son and I a kind of mountebank who had no right to mind whom my sweet Joanna married.

I DO NOT KNOW how people tolerated me during that winter.My heart was sore and my tongue sharp. And specially I could not keep the edge of it off Wolsey. Because we all knew that he was trying to persuade the Pope to sanction a formal court of enquiry regarding the validity of the Queen’s union, I had to twit him whenever I dared on the subject of his own wife’s second marriage. She had borne him a son and a daughter, but as soon as the glaring light of fame began to search out the hidden corners of his life he had sacrificed her to his ambition, passing her on, complete with wedding dowry, to a wealthy landowner, called Lee. So my pointed little ditty, “With freedom not for you and me, the lark’s now nesting on the lea,” was quite popular about the palace, and must have enraged him every time he heard the pages whistling it.

And once when he was strolling in the privy garden with the King—suggesting, I dare swear, that our poor Queen might be persuaded to retire to some convent—I rushed up to them and announced that a crowd of people were asking for his Eminence at the kitchen court gate.

“What people?” demanded the King testily.

“His creditors,” I told him, “all clamouring to be paid.”

Wolsey turned on me like an enraged bull, for which I do not blame him. “I will wager anything—anything I possess—that I owe no man a penny,” he declared pompously.

I shrugged as if the matter could not concern me less. “Your Eminence has so many enviable possessions, and the King may take you up on that. What will you have as wager, Harry?”

“His new manor at Hampton,” answered Henry promptly, beginning to smile.

I turned and pointed along the low wall which separated garden from river, and from where we stood we could see a crowd of people waiting outside the back entrance by which my uncle had once entered. I knew, of course, that they were the daily horde of beggars waiting for the palace almoner to distribute bread and scraps of meat left over from the midday meal, and Henry must have known this, too. But probably the Cardinal did not.

“There seems to be a vast number of them,” remarked his Grace, gamely playing up to me.

“There is one, for instance, who claims a considerable sum for silks,” I said.

I do not know whether Wolsey really believed that some Fermor agent was waiting there, or whether he was merely embarrassed that I, who had been in their employ, should know of this debt and dare to bait him with it in the King’s presence. He fished in some pocket deep within the folds of his voluminous soutane and threw six golden sovereigns on the flat coping of the wall. It must have been all that he had on him, for at that moment I am sure he would have paid anything to prevent further revelations in his royal master’s presence. “Take these, you impudent knave, and send them all away!” he ordered, turning back hastily in the opposite direction.

“Then it seems that Hampton is yours, Harry!” I said, batting an eyelid at the grinning King as I gathered up the scattered coins.

How Thomas Wolsey must have hated the sight of me!

Left alone with the sovereigns glittering in my palm, I was suddenly reminded of those testing moments at Neston when I had held six of Richard Fermor’s in my hand and been tempted to rob him. It seemed incredible now. A glad sense of spiritual freedom possessed me, and I found myself smiling with grateful affection at the memory of Father Thayne’s words, “That is
one
dragon which you have slain, Will.” God knows there were many more lurking in my soul needing the attack, but having won for myself some of my first master’s integrity I hurried to divide my takings among the maimed and aged beggars at the King’s gate.

Most of them knew and seemed to hold me in affection, and while the almoner’s clerk doled out the food I tried to hearten them with a kindly jest or two. And while I stood there beneath the great archway leading to the kitchens a huge bearded man came rolling up to me with a seaman’s gait. “Have you, too, come to say a
Deo
Gratia
?” I asked, thinking that he looked too strong and well fed to be seeking alms.

“Aye,” he answered. “But for more than bread. For life itself. I am Miles Mucklow, that pirate whose mother begged you to save him from the gallows.”

“Then be good to her all the days of her life,” I said, recalling the incident. “You have in her a consolation which I lack. But I thought they threw you into the Marshalsea prison in lieu of hanging?”

“I did not have to serve my time. I had the good fortune to save the prison master from two murderers who beset him and, having use for my strength, he made me one of his gaolers.”

I told him I was glad to hear it.

“My life is yours,” he said sententiously.

“And what should I do with it?” I asked, giving him a friendly shove. “I am at enough pains sometimes to live my own.”

“The more reason why you should remember me if ever I can be of service to you,” he pointed out, with something of his mother’s flat persistency.

“I will remember you, Miles Mucklow, if only for your extraordinary name,” I promised, and straightway went indoors and forgot all about him for many a month. For the thoughts and conversation of all of us within the palace were at that time centred upon this so-called “secret matter” of the King’s divorce.

It was beginning to dawn upon those of us who were nearest to him that he had no intention of contracting the matrimonial alliance with France for which Wolsey was so devotedly trying to pave the way. And that Anne Boleyn was far too clever to allow herself to become his mistress. Of two things I felt certain. She had truly loved Percy of Northumberland, and she would never forgive Wolsey for so brutally breaking off their betrothal, although he had been but acting on the King’s instructions.

When she first came back from France Anne Boleyn had been a gay, affectionate, high-spirited girl: but now she was growing into a calculating, cynical woman, with a wit as sharp as her pointed chin. With an ambitious father egging her on, she intended to recompense herself for lost happiness with more than a brief, gaudy hour of royal lust to be followed by the obscurity that was now her sister’s. She was attractive enough, God knows, in her slender black and white way, to bewitch a man utterly. But it was now borne in upon us that she meant to keep her virtue until the Tudor’s passion drove him to pay top price for it. Though how she held him off all those months I cannot imagine, for he could have crushed her between his ten strong fingers and was hot with desire for her.

The Queen herself must have been aware of her skittish maid’s ambition, for I was in her apartments one evening when she and her ladies were playing those new card games which we had from France. The stakes ran high and some of us crowded round to watch. Katherine of Aragon laid down a queen with the face of her late mother-in-law Elizabeth of York painted upon it, as was the fashion. But Anne Boleyn, who was always lucky at games of chance, trumped that high card with the king of hearts, so winning both trick and game. “Ah, my lady Anne, I see that you will have a king or nothing,” said her Grace with a wry smile, motioning to another of her ladies to pay the girl her winnings and rising wearily from the table.

But the getting of him was to be a more difficult sport, subject to plague and parting and procrastination. And for the poor Queen a long-played-out tragedy, subject to every kind of cruel delay.

Henry sent envoys to the Pope, entreating his Holiness to sanction a divorce and a second marriage to Mistress Boleyn so that he might beget an heir. And Wolsey, who had so glibly called Anne “a foolish girl about the Court” when rating Percy of Northumberland for wanting her, was obliged to arm them with a wordy testament lauding her gentle birth, her virginity and her virtue. But by the time the earnest prelates reached him poor Pope Clement had fled from the Castello Sant’Angelo in Rome and was the Emperor’s prisoner in Oriento, and could receive them only in the shabbiest of rooms. He promised to send a wise old Cardinal called Campeggio to arbitrate, but so poor was his Holiness’s state at that time that Wolsey had the choir in Canterbury cathedral sing
Ora
pro papa nostro Clements
instead of
Ora pro nobis
.

And as if all this was not unfortunate enough for my royal master, here in England we had the plague. I well remember the heat that June, when the Fleet river almost dried up, the street runnels stank and the sweating sickness began to kill off the citizens of London like flies.

The King was staying at York House, Wolsey’s riverside mansion by Westminster, and I had laid aside my motley and walked along the Strand into London in the hope of seeing my former master. Knowing the great pleasure that this would be to me, Father Thayne had asked one of the Neston grooms to bring me word that Master Fermor would be staying with his sister-in-law and her husband, John Brown, while attending to various affairs in the capital. It was not difficult to find Master Brown’s whereabouts. As became a wealthy merchant whose father had been Lord Mayor, he lived in one of those fine, high-gabled houses in Aldermanbury near the Guildhall—a house all ornamented with richly coloured coats-of-arms and wooden carvings of men mounted on monstrous beasts. A few years ago such solid grandeur would have over-awed me to the point of retreat, but now I gave my name to an obliging servant and was allowed inside to wait, and presently my former master came into the great hall accompanied by two other gentlemen. He did not attempt to hide his pleasure at finding me there, and without any kind of condescension presented me to them. One I recognised instantly as a son of Sir William, from his portrait hanging at Easton Neston, and the other was Master Skevington, a lean, stooping old wine merchant, reported to be of great wealth. Both of them greeted me most pleasantly, making reference to my growing popularity at Court, and then, to my secret delight, excused themselves to Master Fermor as they had to attend some meeting at the Guildhall.

It was indeed good to be alone with him again. There was an air of solid efficiency about him which struck me afresh after living among the more foppish figures at Court. Although his brown doublet was of the finest Utrecht velvet and his matching hose of the best wool obtainable, he was content to look what he was—a busy merchant and land-owner—rather than to ape the courtiers, in the manner of his son.

It was too early in the day for the midday meal to be laid, so we sat at the end of the top table in that comfortable hall with a bottle of the vintner’s own well-chosen wine which Master Brown had, before leaving, called to one of his servants to bring.

“It seems you have succeeded marvellously with the King, Will,” he said heartily. “We in Northamptonshire are proud of you, and I find that some of your
bon mots
have already spread to other counties where I do business. You even have some influence with his Grace, my son tells me.”

“I do at times have his ear, being often alone with him,” I said.“But I would say rather that by some unaccountable favour of God I irritate him less than others.”

“Which is quite understandable,” said Fermor, with a reminiscent smile. “For you have a way of entering into the lives and loves of others.”

“Having little of my own!” I thought sadly. And to amuse him rather than to exalt myself I related the incident of milord Cardinal and the creditors at the gate.

He threw back his head and laughed heartily, but almost immediately spoke with gravity. “Because I brought you to Court, Will, I would not have you ever feel constrained to beg anything for me.Not ever, in any circumstances whatever.”

And there was Richard Fermor of Easton Neston speaking—the finest master man ever had—as opposed to all those favour-seeking climbers at Court, who so often showed me kindness for their own ends.

“There can never be any question of obligation or constraint,” I heard myself saying, in the slow way one speaks when digging up a real thought from the banalities cluttering one’s mind. “If you should ever be assailed by trouble, Richard Fermor, it would be to me as my own.”

And speaking those words I knew that, in a different way, I, too, had grown to the pride of independent manhood. Across our brimming tankards we looked into each other’s eyes and knew that we were no longer master and man, but friends. He stretched a strong brown hand across the polished surface of the table and gripped my bony one. We must have made an incongruous pair. We lifted our tankards and drank, and then fell to talking of more obvious things.

“I was grieved when Master John told me about the
Cast.
”

“It was a bitter blow,” he admitted thoughtfully, “but one of the hazards of commerce. And now the drought of this hot summer is like to spoil our harvest. But I have good men, and by dint of hard work we hope to make up for it next year. In the meantime I am short of ships for wool and wheat and have just gone into partnership with Master Skevington, whom you just now met, in the ownership of two brigs.”

“I remember that when you first brought me to London he, like Master Pickering, had asked you to be his executor.”

“So naturally I am assured that he is sound,” grinned Richard Fermor. “Besides which, he is an old friend of my father-in-law.”