King's Fool (15 page)

Such pleasant idling ended when Henry brought the King of France for a return visit to his own town of Calais. Our Governor greeted them at the landgate. Merchants, sailors and bi-lingual English colonists cheered wildly as they rode through the streets. And Francis and his modish courtiers soon flattered Anne Boleyn back into good temper. They treated her as if she were already Queen of England. And, carried away by the semblance of that royal state, she must have been sure enough of the coming reality to throw aside discretion at last and give herself utterly to her lover.Any of us who were responsible for the entertainment of that gay, sparkling company were far too busy to find time for gossip, but it was clear to see that these carefree weeks away from the conventional restraint and the outspoken condemnation of England were for Henry Tudor and his “sweetheart Nan” their
lune de miel.

And the proof of it came one evening a few weeks after Christmas when we were back at York House, which the King had renamed Whitehall. I was teasing the Countess of Salisbury’s ladies while we waited for his Grace to come to supper. Hal Norris, George Boleyn, young Weston, from Sutton Place, and William Brereton were grouped about the window-seat discussing a new type of siege gun. And Thomas Wyatt, standing by a side table, in the throes of some poetic composition no doubt, had just helped himself absent-mindedly from a dish of those delectable apples with which his estates at Allington always supplied the royal table.When suddenly, on a gust of laughter and followed by her crowding women, Anne appeared.

“This new man, Thomas Cranmer, is going to prove a very useful Archbishop of Canterbury, now that old Warham is dead.About Thomas More as Chancellor I am not so sure—he is less biddable,” she announced, addressing all her friends collectively in that wild, careless way of hers. For, callous as she was towards people who did not please her, nothing, I think, ever changed her affection for that group of friends. She trusted them, and no royal elevation ever made her in the least haughty or condescending towards them.

Wyatt looked at her across the half-eaten apple in his hand.Possibly, like me, he wondered what she had been drinking. “Is
everyone
called Thomas these days?” he asked fastidiously.

“At least there is one fewer of you since Wolsey went,” she said. For Wolsey, summoned back by an angry master, had died on his journey to London, declaring to the kindly monks of Leicester Abbey that had he but served his God as faithfully as he had served his King, Heaven would not have left him so naked to his enemies.

“That man must have worked prodigiously,” remarked young Weston, from the window steps. “Apparently it takes
two
men now to perform his clerical and lay functions.”

“Or perhaps,” suggested George Boleyn, “the King has learned the wisdom of not vesting so much power in one person.”

“It leaves more for himself, and of course he could always play off one against the other,” corroborated Anne boldly. And, picking up her skirts, she danced across the room from her brother to Wyatt—Wyatt, who had enough diplomatic sense to scowl at their indiscretion and who had long since written to her that lovely sonnet of renunciation
Forget not yet
. And she begged sweetly, “Give me an apple, Tom.”

I saw him stretch out a hand to choose one from the dish, but she snuggled wickedly against him and reached for the one he already held. “No, no, a bite of yours will do, Tom. Why should we two not share an apple? After all, is it not true that I might have been an ordinary country wife and mistress of Allington?”

White-faced and furious, he pushed her from him, but she only went into fresh gales of inexplicable laughter. And when George Boleyn, seeing his friend tormented, asked curtly what there was to laugh about, she answered, “Only that several times this week I have found myself yearning for a good Kentish apple.”

Embarrassed by her strange, uncontrolled behaviour we all stopped whatever we were doing to stare at her; and the Countess of Salisbury, who had been sitting by the fire, gathered up her embroidery as if to go.

“Do you know what the King says that means, Tom? My foolish hunger for apples?” Anne persisted, without attempting to lower her voice.

Wyatt stood there by the table, rigid and wretched. Only his hurt gaze followed her as she went laughing hysterically about the room. I think he did not realise how much she cared for them all and how near she was to regret. “He says it is because I am with child,” she boasted triumphantly, brutally, to the man who had always wanted her for his wife.

There was the sound of men’s cheerful voices and the smart thud of halberdiers coming to attention outside the door. One of her ladies whispered to Anne warningly, and she instantly restrained herself. And then the King came in and led her in to supper. He may not have heard what she said, but everybody else, from milord of Norfolk to the greasiest scullion, must have known of it before morning.

ALL THE WAY FROM Dover the people, watching the King’s procession pass through their towns and villages, had stood in sullen silence. Now, in the streets of London—not having seen their beloved Queen for months—they were shouting, “We do not want the Bullen whore!” When the Pope at last listened to Queen Katherine’s pleading and pronounced her marriage to be valid, the Commons, led by some brave man called Terns, sent a petition to King Henry begging him to take her back. And the Pope, who had no wish to quarrel with him, wrote privately warning him of ex-communication if he did not “put that woman Anne Boleyn away.”

But they were all too late, for he had married his mistress secretly.So secretly that even we of the royal household were never sure of when and where the short ceremony took place. Whether immediately on our coming ashore at Dover, during their brief visit to the Boleyn manor of Blickling, or in some unfrequented attic after the Court came back to Whitehall. All we knew was that Anne had been created Marchioness of Pembroke—the Welsh stronghold where the first Tudor had landed—and that her father was now Earl of Wiltshire and her brother Viscount Rochford. I believe now that the royal marriage had just been celebrated soon after daybreak one bleak January morning when I passed an unknown monk hurrying furtively down the west turret stairs. But at the time, had I passed a whole procession of monks in that improbable place, they would have made no impression on my mind, for Joanna Fermor was to be married that very week. To Oakham Skevington, from John Brown’s house in Aldermanbury.

It had to come. A man must get his daughters wed. And God knows I had tried to steel myself to accept it. Ever since I had entered the King’s service I had tried to find compensation in the hundred and one interests which crowded my days. But since the Fermor family had sent me their “glad news” life had become a blank, with only the cruel picture of Joanna’s fragrant loveliness in that solemn money-maker’s arms for my ever-present torment.I had been bidden to the wedding, but would sooner have faced the gallows tree at Tyburn than go. Even though Father Thayne, who was coming down to London to marry them, had written me with rare understanding, reminding me that only by endurance and renunciation can we acquire the power to help the sorrows of others. Which power, he added in his inimitable way, must be attended by rare opportunity for one who met so many different kinds of people as I.

But I could not reach up to the level of his goodness. Whether they needed help or not, I banged the door of my own small room to shut them all out, and jerked my hated motley from its hook.There were to be many guests and great festivities at dinner that forenoon—a sort of unacknowledged wedding feast, presumably. I should be expected to scintillate with wit, and I had not thought up a single line of appropriate patter. John Thurgood, my good friend and Master of Revels, had warned me that I was becoming too quiet of late, and that some of my jokes had fallen flat, so that expectant company had been heard to murmur, “Poor Will Somers is losing punch.”

Well, Will Somers’s jesting would be sharp enough today, striking out like a sharp sword of criticism in all directions, thrusting without pity at men’s vulnerable hidden weaknesses, in an effort to pass on some of his own hurt to others—which was the reverse of what good Father Thayne would have me do. I would have a stab at priests like Wolsey, who kept wives in private and got rid of them when the bright light of success began to shine, and at secular scholars like Cranmer, who let themselves be ordained hurriedly into vacant Archbishoprics so as to do their royal master’s dirty work. I would slip in a sly thrust at milord of Suffolk for casting a matrimonial eye on his wealthy ward, Lady Willoughby’s daughter, while his sweet wife Mary Tudor lay mortally sick, but still alive, in their country manor at Westhrope. And I would flick all present with an uncomfortable reminder, in the midst of their gluttonous revelry, of that other sick woman who had been a fêted queen, and who had now been ousted from this her home to live in loneliness in some borrowed country house at Buckden.

And for a finale I could, with John Thurgood’s connivance, arrange a topical little allegorical scene in which half-a-dozen prosperous-looking middle-aged men, each with a wife beside him, anxiously searched the intertwining boughs of half-a-dozen trees.“Landowners with a promising crop of mulberries,” some wit in the audience might guess, raising a spate of giggling.

“Nothing so juicy,” I would correct him. “These are their family trees. All pleasantly entwined and growing ever upwards. Grazier to merchant, merchant to titled gentry. Upward and rich.” And I would snap my fingers for the actors in fustian to come in, each with his axe.

“Then why do they now call their servants to cut out a bough here and a bough there?” someone would surely ask.

“Because they grow too close!” I would interpret. “Ask yourselves, my friends. Is it not going on all over England? In your own homes, perhaps. People suddenly worrying whether their marriages be right and lawful, where once there was security. Middle-aged people, grown comfortable to each other as old shoes, beginning to worry about their marriages, where once we had a pattern in high places. And fathers bringing in lawyers—see, here they come, with deeds and inkhorns—stuffing their purses by proving, with all this intermarrying among the top crust of families in this island of ours, that your children’s betrothals will not be in any degree incestuous.”

Indeed, I would lay bare the whole rotten expediency of modern marriage, which should be a spontaneous thing, for love alone, and women not mere pawns. I, who knew too much, would for once say too much. And probably the King would rise up in wrath and expel me from his service. And there would be nothing left but to go back to Shropshire and milk cows at a groat or two a day for my comic-looking, valiant-hearted uncle.

But I did none of these daring things because Mistress Emotte Fermor came seeking me, and banged peremptorily on my inhospitable door. Gaunt, ageing, invaluable Mistress Emotte in a soaked hooded cloak, who had walked all the way in the rain from Aldermanbury. And probably put half-a-dozen pert pages in their place until, worn down by her determination, they directed her aright. I embraced her as if she were a messenger from Heaven, dried her cloak and muddy shoes before my meagre fire, and put her in my only chair. “It is about Joanna,” she said.

“I know. She is being married tomorrow.”

She laid a compassionate hand on mine, knowing what it meant to me. “I am not so sure. Father Thayne, who should have performed the ceremony, cannot come.”

“Is he sick?” I asked.

“No. But I am sure he soon will be, kept without proper warmth and food this bitter winter. Cromwell’s men came while my brother was over in Calais on business. And because Father Thayne would not be talked down by them, they took him away to Buckingham gaol.”

I knew immediately what she meant, and my own heartache was momentarily forgotten. “Cromwell’s commission, enforcing the Statute of Praemunire,” I said. “And of course he refused to sign.”

It was the old law of Richard the Second’s reign, revived. By it, with the help of Thomas Cranmer, Henry had been declared head of both Church and State—denying all ecclesiastic authority of the Pope in England. And the entire priesthood must deny their former loyalties and subscribe to it.

With clever diplomacy things were made easy for the rest of us by a kind of general pardon—for what, God knows!—issued to the laity after Wolsey’s fall. We were not obliged to say what we thought or felt, so that time might gradually accustom without accusing us. Half England cared passionately for tradition and the teaching of their fathers, some were indifferent, and many of the intellectuals were all for the New Learning—the Bible to be printed so that all men could read for themselves, the call of Erasmus to see Christ more vividly portrayed in the pages of the Gospels than in gilded images, freedom to manage our own affairs without interference from Rome. Most of us, of whichever persuasion, had the sense—or the cowardice—to keep our mouths shut on the topic, save before trusted friends, and for myself it was an easy kind of comfort to find the Mass said just as ever in the King’s own chapels, with all the candles and colour and music which he loved. We all knew about this commission and the inspection of the smaller monasteries, the dissolving of the Holy Trinity Priory in Aldgate, and the cross-questioning of important Church dignitaries, but I had not realised that the hunt was going on among worthy parish priests and private chaplains in little villages as far away as Northamptonshire.

“Father Thayne is so frail—and Buckingham gaol so grim,” was all I could find to say.

A tear splashed down on to the thin, capable hands in Emotte Fermor’s lap. In the old days, when I was a lad making a crazy nuisance of myself at Neston, I do not think she had ever been seen to cry. I like to think that it was partly her coming to care for me which had softened her. “It is like one of the family gone—the best and most secure part of us.” She turned to catch at my sleeve as I came to perch comfortingly on the table edge beside her. “Is there nothing you can do, Will? Everyone says you are so popular at Court. Could you not speak for him to the King?”

I shook my head sadly. “Not about anything arising from this break with Rome. It touches his immediate need for a divorce too closely.”

“It is all that wicked Kentish harlot’s fault!” she cried angrily, as most women did. It would have taken too long to explain to her that it was not—quite. And all about the movement in Europe and at our own Universities which might eventually have made this heart-rending schism happen anyway.

So I said, to cheer her, “Well, the Skevingtons and the Fermors and the Browns between them should be able to find another priest easily enough. What about the Vaux’s chaplain, who married milord’s sister to your nephew, Master John?”

Mistress Emotte looked at me in surprise. “Had you not heard? They have taken him, too. Just when Thomas Vaux was off to Jersey for his new Governorship. It is enough to blight a girl’s wedding day. But it is not only the getting of a priest which puts us all in a pother. It is the Skevingtons themselves who are being—difficult.”

“Difficult?” I repeated roughly. “What in Heaven’s name about?They have more money than Master Fermor himself, a manor in Rutland, a fine town house—and the sweetest bride in all Christendom! And Skevington
fils
is not impotent, is he?”

“Not so far as I know. My brother says he has more than one brat in Flanders. But he
is
a kind of cousin. A nephew of Sir William Brown, who was Joanna’s grandfather. And now, with all this fuss and litigation about the Queen’s marriage—”

“But that is because she was first married to Prince Arthur.”

“Well, besides being a kind of cousin, it seems that Oakham Skevington was once betrothed to a daughter of a Fermor cousin of ours who, as far as I can recall, imported Toledo blades—”

“And he wriggled out of it when her father’s business failed through our quarrel with Spain,” I retorted, suddenly seeing with the eye of memory the page of an account book in which I had recorded the generous financial help which Richard Fermor had given him at the time.

“Oh, I do not pretend to know the rights of it all except that they say the relationship is too close and there was a pre-contract,”sighed Mistress Emotte. “But they are all there arguing about it in the Browns’ house now—Master John himself, the bridegroom and his father, and Joanna’s sister-in-law, Maud Vaux. And some creepy little lawyer whom the Skevingtons have called in.”

It was my topical allegory of the family trees come to life. I sprang up in a fury, knocking my jester’s cap with a harsh jangle of bells to the floor. “And the bridegroom is
letting
them argue? Letting them put Joanna to such embarrassing humiliation? Where is Master Fermor?”

“Not yet back from some urgent business in Calais. There was a bad storm in the Channel, they say. But we have heard that his ship is safely in and expect him before nightfall.”

“When he will soon send their lawyer packing! And tell his future son-in-law what he thinks of him. And in the meantime, what does poor Joanna herself say?”

“Joanna says nothing. She loves her father, and has ever been a dutiful daughter, as you well know. But I have seen her catch at her sister-in-law’s arm and ask, ‘Do you think, Maud, that there
may
be something in all this arguing?’” Mistress Emotte shrugged, but there was the hint of a smile at the corners of her straight-set mouth. “The wish may be father to the thought, if you ask me,” she added.

I had not asked her, but such gratuitous encouragement was enough for me. Joanna did not
want
to marry him. And, come to think of it, how could any girl with a sense of fun and beauty want to marry Oakham Skevington? “Did she know you were coming here?” I asked.

“She may have guessed,” prevaricated Mistress Emotte, rising to depart in order to avoid the issue.

I grabbed her by the elbows to detain her. “Did she—God forgive my hopeful vanity!—did she ask you to come here, Mottie?”