King's Fool (14 page)

Men turned and stared, mouths agape, and all that was decent in most of us momentarily envied him from the safe distance of our contemptible subservience to easy living. He had been confessor to the King’s learned grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, and had probably never hesitated to say what he really thought since Henry was small. He was John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. His name should be written somewhere in gold. When his unequivocal words dropped into the murmuring stillness of the hall it was as if a shining sword had suddenly fallen point downwards from Heaven and pierced a pool of mud, striking it into alarming and prophetic flames.

The King swung round and glared at him but, seeing who it was, passed the matter off with admirable nonchalance. But even as he spoke, milord Bishop must have known that sooner or later sword or flame of bitter controversy must strike him, too. But, as I say, he was old; and even in this world walked so closely with rectitude and compassion and things of the spirit that probably being despatched with violent cruelty to his God would disturb him scarcely at all.

WHETHER THE BISHOPS AGREED or not, the trial was not conclusive. How could it be, with the Pope held prisoner by Queen Katherine’s nephew? In order not to offend him, his Holiness recalled Campeggio without any decision having been made.

I was there when Wolsey brought his fellow Cardinal to take leave of the King. We had been dicing on the chances of a coming tournament—his Grace, milord of Suffolk, young Hal Norris and I—when they were announced. And they came in upon us with all Wolsey’s usual fanfare of silver staves and scarlet hat and Great Seal of England carried before him, which made the elderly Italian look shabby. “God Almighty and Old Father Time!” I whispered, ducking behind the nearest arras and peering out in pretended terror. And poor Norris, who was Gentleman Usher, had to rise and bow them in while struggling to hide his irreverent laughter. But laughter was soon wiped from the faces of all of us when Campeggio plucked up courage to tell our master that the decretal authority which the Pope had vested in him had been withdrawn. The poor old man had come with reluctance and left with conscientious formality. Had I been in his shoes, I should have mounted my mule and made off quietly one dark night for the coast.

Henry, with the dice box still in his hand, was rendered scarlet and speechless. But his impetuous brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk, sprang up and banged the table with both fists. “It has never been merry in England since we have had Cardinals amongst us!” he shouted rudely.

Yet even then our own magnificent Cardinal had the last word.“You, of all men, have little cause to say so, Charles Brandon,” he pointed out, with truth and dignity. “For when you married the King’s sister in Paris without leave, certain it is that but for my intervention you would have had no head upon your shoulders.”

But that was over and done with, and radiant Mary Tudor, who had been so briefly Queen of France, had already borne Suffolk two daughters.

“Where is that decretal of the Pope’s?” bellowed Henry, cutting through their quarrel.

“Since his Holiness declared it invalid, I have burned it,” said Campeggio, courteous to the last.

But Henry did not believe him. “We still have one Papal legate in our realm, and if we can but lay hands on that precious piece of parchment I may be able to persuade Wolsey to use it,” he said, as soon as they were gone.

“And probably find all the bullion which he is sure to be sending out of the country by his fellow bungler, now he has incurred your displeasure,” snarled Suffolk, still sore from that just rebuke.

From my lair behind the arras, before Hal Norris had well finished ushering them on their way, I heard the King give orders that half-a-dozen trusty pikemen of his guard should ride after the “crafty Italian” and search every saddlebag in his baggage. I was indeed seeing the workings of diplomacy from behind the scenes, and their incredible baseness shocked me. Yet I swear that a few months back, while the influence of the Queen was still with him and he had not yet come beneath the spell of that Boleyn witch, Henry would have been incapable of offering such a brutal indignity to Papal authority and hospitality. It was contrary to all his early training and to his true love of the Church. But his gouty foot was probably paining him like fire, and his need for Anne was certainly like fire in his veins. Never had a king been kept waiting so long for so tantalising a girl, and his patience was wearing thin.

An evening or two later, the King waved his gentlemen of the bedchamber away and called for me to sing to him while he slumped dejectedly before the fire. The news had just been brought to him that Cardinal Campeggio’s baggage contained nothing but a pitiful assortment of shabby soutanes and worn and comfortable shoes. But I do not think it was only the loss of the decretal he was thinking of. I think he was remorseful for having caused a fellow-sufferer from the gout such shamed embarrassment, and hating himself very thoroughly.

And Thomas Wolsey, the magnificent, was left to bear the brunt of it all.

The King sent for him one gruelling day in July. They were closeted together for over an hour, as they had so often been during the past years, with Wolsey holding forth and a younger, easier master content to do as he advised. What was said between them this time no man knows. But I happened to be loitering on the landing stairs when Wolsey came glowering down to his waiting barge. He brushed past me unseeingly, his sagging jowls atremble, and did not so much as acknowledge the raised oars of his watermen. “A hot day, your Eminence,” remarked the amiable Bishop of Carlisle, who was waiting to be rowed back with him to York House steps.

And I saw the bleak look on Wolsey’s face as he snapped back, “You might call it hot indeed, milord, had you been so chafed as I have!”

I went on whittling at the small wooden puppet I was fashioning as though I had not heard, but as the splendid barge pulled out into midstream I wondered how long it would be before York House was handed over as a sop to royal displeasure, as Hampton Manor had been because a Kentish girl coveted it. Although I had many a time mocked him, at that moment I remembered with gratitude how much Wolsey had done to put learning within the reach of ordinary young men like myself and how hard he had worked in the cause of equal justice for all. If he must indeed fall from kingly favour, as Suffolk had foreseen, the descent of one so high would be painfully steep, and he, in his self-confident importance, so ill-prepared.

He took himself off, rather belatedly, to attend to his bishopric of York. The King, having cooled down, sent Norris after him with a ring in token of continued friendship, and invited him to live, withdrawn from Court, at Esher in Surrey. And during those uncomfortable, uncertain weeks, Katherine, unbecomingly swelled with dropsy, still appeared in public as Queen.

Her daughter, now sixteen, was old enough to wonder why no princely bridegroom was forthcoming, and to wish, no doubt, that she might marry the Countess of Salisbury’s lovable son, Reginald Pole. For all I know, now that there was to be neither French nor Spanish marriage, the Queen may have wished it too, for, although he had never sought political power, Pole was a Plantagenet. But Henry unwittingly stamped out that romance when he asked his learned, self-effacing cousin to support him in the matter of divorce, and Reginald Pole, driven by his honesty and his affections, spoke out for the Queen. Perhaps he was the one man from whom Henry Tudor ever took such plain speaking. But after that there was nothing for it, as far as the scion of the Plantagenets was concerned, but to live abroad, where he entered the priesthood, and so silenced any suspicion that he might have been courting the King’s daughter with an eye to the throne.

When not too occupied by his own concerns, Henry tried to show the young Princess even extra affection, and I am sure he took it for granted that, when the break came, she would prefer to stay with him. She adored him, and he had always been the fount of fun and lively Court life, whereas her mother, who seldom spoiled or petted her, had always been devotedly concerned with the training of her mind and character. But during those last weeks when Katherine was still the Queen I used to watch them together.The Princess, looking younger than her years because she was so short, would stand closer than ever to her mother’s chair, and often her small fingers would be gripping tensely at the carved arm of it, while her short-sighted brown eyes scanned the company present, as if watching for any movement which might threaten to part them. Often I have seen a doe stand like that—a small creature knowing nothing but the softness of the bracken and the warmth of protecting fur, rising, piteously vulnerable, on some hillock to take its first alarmed look at approaching danger from the hunt.

And so we of the royal household lived in uneasy service, covering our own sympathies or ambitions as best we could. And in the end the glittering crown came to rest upon the Boleyn girl’s sleek, raven head, not by means of solemn convocations of Pope and Cardinals, but by the chance remarks of an unimportant tutor, teaching privately in Essex. A modest man with modern Lutheran views and a remarkably fine feeling for the beauty of words. Save as a fellow of Jesus College he had no renown, but during a royal progress Gardiner and Fox, the King’s secretary and almoner, happened to be lodged in the house of Master Cressy, whose young sons this man taught. Finding a kindred spirit, they must have sat and talked, as scholars will. And as with everyone else in England at that time, their conversation soon turned to the all-engrossing subject of the royal divorce, of which naturally a royal secretary and almoner were well equipped to give an unworldly tutor all the latest news.

He came fresh to the problem with unconventional and uncluttered mind. “If the Church can give his Grace no definite decision, why not turn to the Universities? To all the best and most disinterested theologians of Oxford, Cambridge, Padua, Bologna, Paris?” he suggested, probably more for the sake of enjoying a good evening’s argument than because he cared much what happened to Henry Tudor’s wife.

I can just imagine their shocked faces. “But it would mean offending Holy Church!”

“Not the Church. Only the ineffectual head of it,” he may well have said, in the relaxed company of congenial friends.

And although it must have sounded to them like blasphemy, his suggestion opened up a whole vista of new ideas. When the Court was back at Greenwich, and all the scare of the sweating sickness over, Gardiner and Fox told the King about it. And Henry, in his eagerness for any fresh means of escape, threw aside the weighty theological books he had been studying and the excellent treatise on the subject which he himself was composing. “That man has got the right sow by the ear!” he declared inelegantly. “What is his name?”

“Thomas Cranmer,” they said, in unison.

No one at Court had ever heard of the man, but from that moment events began to move towards more than a second marriage—towards far more than most of us Englishmen had ever imagined. To something which was going to shake all Europe.

Already the King began to feel free. He took Anne Boleyn to visit the King of France, in the hope, I imagine, of winning his fellow sovereign’s approval. And this time there was no polite subterfuge about her going as one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, because the ailing Queen was left at home.

I well remember the wild excitement among the younger women, with Anne herself trying on new gowns and singing happily about the palace, preening herself to please King Francis, who had spoiled her with flattery when Mary Tudor had been Queen of France. But Mary, now Duchess of Suffolk, refused to accompany her. And the King of France’s sister, also sympathising with Katherine, saw to it that this Mistress Boleyn, whom everyone was talking about, should not get beyond English territory. She was too sick to receive guests, she said, and very cleverly offered as deputy hostess a lady whose reputation would have done Anne’s no good. So when Henry and all his fine gentlemen, dressed almost as sumptuously as they must have been for the Field of the Cloth of Gold, rode out to be the guests of Francis in Boulogne, Anne Boleyn was forced to remain fuming in her lover’s town of Calais.

I was left with her, to “lighten her spirits,” the King said. But, having no desire to get my ears boxed by a woman in a fury, I spent most of my time more pleasantly down at the wool staple and the harbour. Richard Fermor’s Calais agent welcomed me, but he was an extraordinarily busy man, so I spent many enthralled hours watching ships come in from a score of different countries, many of them—to my vast interest and delight—belonging to my former master or bringing merchandise to stock his warehouses.

And there by chance I met Thomas Cromwell, either keeping an eye on some private business of Wolsey’s or both eyes on the chances of more fortunate employment with the King. To which end, perhaps, he thought it politic to be civil to me. He had a precise, lawyer’s way of talking, and as he had been in Calais several times he was able to point out to me several interesting features. He, too, appeared to be interested in the ships, though less as craft than for the volume of trade they represented. “Look at that merchantman coming alongside now, flying the lion of St. Mark. She will be bringing spices from the East to enrich our merchants,” he said. “One wonders how much such a cargo is worth.”

I was able to tell him approximately, and he looked sharply round at me, surprised no doubt that a jester should have solid knowledge of such things.

“I served Master Fermor of Northamptonshire, one of the biggest staplers of London and Calais,” I explained proudly. “See, Master Cromwell, that is one of his ships being laden down by the sheds now. The
Joanna
. He exports more wool than any other merchant in the midlands.”

“Fermor of Northamptonshire,” he repeated, as if catching up some train of thought. “He married one of his sons into the Vaux family, I think?”

“And his father-in-law was Lord Mayor of London,” I added, quite unnecessarily.

We leaned elbow to elbow on the harbour wall in the late October sunshine, and it so happened that that morning half the bales of wool and sacks of wheat in Calais seemed to be marked with the name of Fermor. “He must be a very rich man,” observed Thomas Cromwell, before moving on to some more profitable occupation. And, chattering fool that I was, I felt vicariously flattered. For how was I to know that before long Thomas Cromwell would be Chancellor of England, and that his memory was as long as his bulging black eyes were sharp?