King's Fool (18 page)

I gave her the name, and knew it to be in safe keeping. Then, realising that the two ladies were still chatting in soft undertones at the far end of the room, I got up from my stool. And, as if suddenly aware of them too, the Princess said in a more ordinary voice, “I have had a most lovely letter from my mother, but there is something in it which I do not understand.”

She rose and crossed the room to a writing desk carved with the pomegranates of Aragon. Lifting a key which hung on a chatelaine chain from her waist, she set it in the lock and drew out a letter sealed with the same device. Skimming through the well-worn pages, she paraphrased for me some of its contents. “Her Grace urges me to obey my father in all things, save only if it should offend God. Should I be recalled to Court, she warns me not to meddle. For my studies she recommends various books, which she will be sending me; and, lest I should mope, for my recreation would have me make music with my virginals or lute. After all, there would be little hope of our happy evenings with masques and dancing now, would there, Will?” Mary Tudor broke off with one of those tender smiles which were becoming all too rare, and turned to the last page. “My mother asks me to recommend her to Lady Salisbury and pray her to keep a good heart in these trials because, she says, we seldom come wholly to the kingdom of God but by suffering. Those are very beautiful words, do you not think, Will?”

“Very beautiful—and true,” I answered, out of my own experience.

“Save that she signs herself—and always will—‘Katherine the Queen,’ that is all. And there is nothing, nothing in that lovely letter—a letter which might be written by any wise and loving mother to her daughter—from which even the most suspicious man could impute evil—or treachery—is there?”

“Why, nothing, of course,” I agreed, looking at her with surprise.

“Yet my lady mother writes here—and underlines it, look you—‘I think it best you
keep your keys yourself.
’ As you see, I have obeyed her. But what does she mean?”

I saw the words myself in the fine Spanish script of a woman proud enough to ignore intrigue, and took a thoughtful pace or two about the room. After a childhood so enriched by security and love, such words must indeed have been bewildering to Mary Tudor, who already seemed to age too quickly and to become more withdrawn. “No one could gain anything by taking any of my letters out,” she murmured, glancing back at her unlocked desk.

“No. But someone could put an incriminating letter
in
,” I explained, hating to add to the sum of her unhappiness. “Her Grace, in her wisdom, may have thought of that.”

For a few moments there was silence in that dull, sunless room.Then the King’s elder daughter said in a voice which had already broken from childish lightness to a rather attractive deep duskiness, “Are we indeed so beset by enemies, my mother and I?” And with those simple words she set the stage for future family drama, showing quite clearly upon which side she stood.

Presently she roused herself from that dark reverie and locked away her precious letter. “Well, now we know why she warned me to obey the King my father in all things,” she said, with a new, uncurbed bitterness, careless of who might hear. “Tradition demanded that as heir presumptive I must come here to be present when my father’s second daughter was born, and now, so Lady Salisbury tells me, I may have to carry the chrisom at her christening. Walking meekly behind the woman who was once my mother’s least and most flighty attendant.”

She was spared that. She went back to Beaulieu next day, and it was the Duke of Norfolk’s daughter Mary, she who was married to Henry Fitzroy, who carried the anointed cloth for the babe. But the respite was only short. After all the fuss of establishing the Princess Elizabeth’s nursery home at Hunsdon, with healthy country air, a conduit of fresh water specially laid for the infant’s use, more baths and jakes than in any of the King’s own palaces, and Lady Margaret Bryan installed as Governess, I met Lord Hussey hurrying to the water steps at Greenwich, looking more harassed than ever.

“The thing which I feared has come to pass,” he told me, thankful, I think, to speak to someone whom he could trust.

“You mean, milord, that your position as Comptroller to the Princess Mary is lost?”

He nodded wretchedly, although, to give the man his due, I believe his concern was as much for her as for himself. “I have the King’s orders to disband her house and dismiss all her people and to bring her again from Beaulieu, but this time to Hunsdon, where she will be treated, I fear, as little more than another attendant to her stepsister.”

“And live under the supervision of the new Queen, who will show her every spite!” I exclaimed in horror. “But how can this be expected of a Princess of Wales?”Lord Hussey paused on the landing-stage, staring down unseeingly at his waiting barge. “Between ourselves, Will, she will no longer
be
Princess of anything. By a new Act of Succession she is to be declared a bastard and disinherited. The King is making the offspring of Anne Boleyn his heirs.”

We stood silent in the wintry sunshine, the thoughts of both of us going out to a girl who must suffer greatly—and to a sick, wronged woman in lonely seclusion at Buckden. “I am sure that Lady Bryan, who has much past affection for the Lady Mary, will do all she can to soften the position in such an anomalous household,” he said, as if trying to drag comfort from a threatening thunder cloud. “But nothing can console her for parting from the Countess of Salisbury.”

I had that morning received by John Fermor’s servant a posy of late rosebuds lovingly pressed in a letter from Joanna. I drew the precious packet from my breast and, dividing them, thrust half into my companion’s hand. “I beg you, good milord, give these to milady when you get back to Beaulieu,” I entreated.

He looked surprised, but obligingly folded them into his pouch, enquiring gruffly if there were some message to go with them.

“Only that they are from the King’s fool, who will ever love her,” I said.

LIFE WAS VERY DIFFERENT at Court. A kind of hectic gaiety had to be maintained, with revels and masques, but little of the old spontaneous homeliness. For some months the enamoured King had little need of me, which suited me very well because half my heart was at Neston and most of my pity at Hunsdon. Much of the modern trend in wit and music was supplied by the new Queen herself and by her brilliant group of personal friends, and although they continued pleasant towards me Anne’s black eyes frequently snapped unconcealed dislike. She was ever bringing to her husband’s notice an ill-mannered young musician called Mark Smeaton who languished for her far too openly. He could certainly sing, and maybe I disliked him because I was jealous of his voice and feared that he might supplant me.

About this time Lady Butts, the wife of the royal physician, told me that the Lady Mary was really ill and that Katherine of Aragon had written imploring Henry to send her daughter to her that she might nurse her in her own bed at Buckden. But urged by Anne and fretted to brutality by Katherine’s unbreakable persistence in signing herself as his wife, Henry had disregarded her plea and sent Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, instead.

“With five hundred men-at-arms,” Lord Vaux, home on a visit from his governorship, told us afterwards.

“To intimidate one obstinate old woman,” grinned George Boleyn, who was now milord Rochford.

“And my good brother-in-law did not mince his words, I hope?” said Anne the Queen, listening bright-eyed. Thomas Vaux had been sent to Buckden more or less as the King’s spy, and like many others Anne made the mistake of supposing that his sympathy as well as his instinct for survival drove him to obey.

“He told her that she must cease appealing to Rome and accept Archbishop Cranmer’s decision, and that she and all her household must take this new oath of supremacy over which so many of our priests are in trouble. That she must acknowledge his Grace to be head of the Church in his own realm.”

“And myself as his lawful wife,” added Anne, coming with dancing steps down from the window seat of her sunny room.

“I fear she will never accept either,” reported Thomas Vaux sadly. “Although the alternative put to her was removal to Fotheringay.”

“Fotheringay!” I remember how the ominous word escaped the lips of several of us, because even for a woman in robust health that notoriously unhealthy fortress amidst ill-drained river marshes might well spell death. Even Anne’s closest friends averted their eyes from her shamed face, guessing that it was she who had first suggested the place.

“One would think that for her women’s sake she would have given in,” snapped milady Rochford reproachfully.

“Oh, no. She let them go, and had the laugh of us,” said Vaux. “For as quickly as Suffolk turned them out into the snow, there were the local gentry waiting with warm cloaks and horses to take them hospitably into their own houses. And, worse still for poor Suffolk, Buckden courtyard was full of local men hastily armed with a travesty of out-of-date swords and bill-hooks whom he himself had called in to augment his regular troops outside. And when the Aragon woman walked painfully to the open door of her manor with the assistance of a handful of women and a priest and an apothecary whom, out of pity for her sickness, he had left her, all these ragged locals shouted and doffed their caps in passionate loyalty. ‘Take me to Fotheringay if you must, milord,’ she said, making sure that every man-jack of them heard her. ‘But I warn you before all these honest folk you will have to carry me over the threshold by force.’”

“And there is where we get this new word ‘arrogance’ that Will Somers here has so expressively coined,” sighed Hal Norris, half admiringly. “What did milord of Suffolk do, Thomas?”

“Do? What
could
he do? Charles Brandon is no fool. He knew as well as I did that the moment he laid hands on her even the rawest cowherd in that rabble would have killed him.” Thomas Vaux, whose own family priest had been imprisoned like Father Thayne, probably did not admire himself over-much for the non-committal attitude which he took, although, with the Tudor becoming daily more despotic, he was no more despicable than many of the rest of us. “And so we left the poor lady and rode home together,” he concluded drearily.

“With an escort of five hundred which had failed to get the better of her,” I could not forbear from remarking.

“But we were sometimes rather glad of them when the people shook their fists at us in Huntingdonshire and the outskirts of London,” he admitted, with likeable honesty.

An uncomfortable silence fell on the assembly, so that the new Queen called to the ever-hovering Mark Smeaton to make some cheerful music. As usual I prepared to take myself off from a voice which I could not emulate and a personality which I disliked. But Thomas Wyatt, scarcely conscious of the conceited fellow, stopped me by the door. “It is not natural cruelty which makes the Queen so inhuman towards her predecessor and our poor Lady Mary,” he said in a low voice—though why he should have troubled to defend her so loyally to me, the King’s jester, I do not know, save that he was ever sensitive to the unspoken thoughts of others. “No girl, as I knew her before this blaze of glory burned her, was ever more open-hearted. It is so often
fear
, do you not think, Will, which makes people relentless?”

“Fear?” I answered in astonishment, my mind harking back with a kind of retrospective pity to poor, powerful Wolsey whom I had so often baited and she had so successfully expunged. “With
all
her enemies laid low?”

“Yes, growing fear,” insisted the man who understood her best. “Fear first implanted months ago when at the apex of her triumph she was carried to her Coronation and felt the people’s hatred—and sensed their awful justice. And unconsciously increasing fear
now
lest she should repeat the pattern and fail to produce a son.”

I shrugged, half flattered that he should care what I thought. “It may well be so,” I agreed from the doorway. But Wyatt, like Vaux and Surrey, was a poet. He exaggerated, and imagined things, I told myself. Until the day when we heard that Katherine of Aragon was dead. And that should have been Anne Boleyn’s most triumphantly secure day of all.

The poor sick woman had been moved after all, but to Kimbolton not Fotheringay, although there was little to choose between the two places, people said. As soon as Henry heard the news, he had left Greenwich for Westminster. He would have to hold a special Council meeting, compose as tactful a letter as he could to her nephew the Emperor, and make arrangements for her funeral.

Before leaving, with his second wife still abed, he had given orders that all our half-rehearsed masques and mummeries for Twelfth Night were to be abandoned, and told Master Heneage, who had charge of the household, to see that Court mourning was provided for all. So, having no work to do and sensing that my master would have need of men who cared for him, I flung a cloak over my motley and crowded into the royal barge to be rowed up the half-frozen Thames. The oarsmen’s breath hung like smoke in the still January air and the rushes stood like stiff, silvered rods along the ice-bound banks. And save for the barge-master’s curt orders no one spoke a word save the King and Thomas Cromwell, deep in private discussion in the shelter of the richly painted cabin in the stern.

As soon as he arrived in the palace of Westminster, Henry sent for Fritton, the master of the royal wardrobe, telling him to bring some of the mourning garments which had recently been worn for his late sister Mary, and for his tailor, who was soon loosening the seams of his Grace’s black velvet doublet until such time as a new suit could be ready, while his assistants were rigging out the royal attendants in an anteroom. Before going in to a hastily summoned Council meeting Henry stood patiently enough for Dragonot’s ministrations, but most of the time he was talking over the man’s bent head to Archbishop Cranmer who had come along from Lambeth, or to Thomas Cromwell, who had been appointed Vicar-General so that he might the better enforce the Act of Supremacy.

“The widowed Lady Willoughby—mother of Suffolk’s new wife—begged permission to go to Kimbolton,” said Henry, expanding his chest to the tailor’s tape and throwing out orders at random. “If the spirited woman was prepared to ride there through this weather, I would not have had her refused admittance. After all, as Mary de Salines, she was with my brother’s betrothed when they first came from Aragon. Over all the years there has been great love between them and such a visit should give a dying woman comfort….”

“The Spanish Ambassador was also with her,” remarked Cromwell, in that flat voice which expressed nothing of his thoughts.

“That we cannot help,” said Henry, pursing his small mouth.“A little more fullness to the shoulder pads, Dragonot, ’tis more slimming. And be sure to send enough cloth to Kimbolton for Lady Bedingford, the custodian’s wife, and at least half a dozen other ladies to attend as mourners. And black jerkins for eight yeomen who will bear the coffin. Peterborough Abbey, you suggest for the interment, milord Archbishop?”

“It is near Kimbolton and,” added Cranmer, with a gentle, deprecating cough, “not too near London.”

It was characteristic of Henry Tudor that he was quick to appreciate these two convenient factors and then covered them with another which satisfied the nice fastidiousness of his conscience.“And beautiful enough for the last resting place of so virtuous a lady. Have the comptroller of our household send the very finest linen we have for her—for the head.”

Tears were suffusing his light-blue eyes as he gave this last intimate instruction. At that moment I swear he had forgotten how abominably he had treated her, and saw himself only as the bereaved husband. The fitting was finished, and as he turned towards the door of the Council Chamber with a black-feathered cap on his head the sight of my garish motley in the midst of so much sobriety must have offended his sense of fitness. “Here, Will, my friend, you always loved her and we shall be out of tune with jesting,” he said with a gusty sigh, pressing my shoulder as he passed me. “I will have one of Dragonot’s men fit you out with that black doublet and hose that young Richmond wore.”

So after everything had been arranged even to the colour of the pall, and the news of Katherine’s passing was generally known, we were rowed back to Greenwich on the evening tide looking like a boatload of decorous ravens.

“All your labours and John Thurgood’s spent for nothing, Will!” muttered some of the younger men, lamenting only that Court etiquette would deprive them of their Twelfth Night fun. But as we trooped wearily up the water stairs at Greenwich it seemed that they were going to see something of it after all. There were lights streaming from the Queen’s Gallery, and as we went under the gateway into the inner courtyard we were greeted by strains of gay dance music and a surge of excited, laughing voices.

Henry stood as if rooted to the spot at the foot of a wide flight of stone steps, listening with incredulous anger. His head was raised towards the lighted windows, and presently he snapped his fingers impatiently in my direction. “You and Thurgood obeyed my orders and stopped all your preparations for that Twelfth Night mummery?” he demanded.

I was at his side in a moment. “Sir, you must know that even without your Grace’s orders we should have had no heart for it,” I said quietly. And I know that he believed me.

“Then who has dared to disobey me?”

Servants and torch-bearers flattened themselves against the stairway wall and dared not answer. Nor dared they move to warn those who so heedlessly romped above. And so the King went up with his sad-faced jester and the rest of his sombrely clad attendants close at his heels, and stood in shocked amazement within the great carved screens, staring incredulously at a scene of joyous revelry. Every torch was lighted, musicians scraped their fiddles in the gallery above us, costumes and discarded draperies cluttered the disordered dais, young men and girls capered in some strange dance, and by the blazing central hearth Anne, the Queen, dressed in flaunting yellow with some exotic fur flung about her bare shoulders, played Circe to a group of young men prowling in imitation of enchanted beasts. Mark Smeaton, mounted on an upturned barrel, was raising his baton to start the musicians off in a fresh tune when he caught sight of the King.

His face went white, his mouth sagged open, his baton hung suspended. “What is the meaning of this orgy?” roared the Tudor.

Warned by the sudden silence, Anne turned and saw him.Even then her gasp was more of surprise than fear. Probably she had seldom seen him dressed in black before. It made him look like a stranger, with all the semblance of a widower’s grief about him, even to his puffed and reddened eyes. To her less complicated nature it must have seemed that he only indulged in some tiresome, necessary display of mourning which was a mere farce compared with his recent genuine grief for the loss of his sister Mary.

“Did Heneage neglect to give my orders for Court mourning?”he asked, with cold and terrible politeness.

“N-no, your Grace,” admitted Anne, glancing down at the flaming skirts spread so dramatically between her outstretched hands, and halting uncertainly on her eager way towards him.