King's Fool (23 page)

Everyone was smiling good-humouredly around us. “An excellent idea,” he agreed, making a last effort to restrain his plunging mount. “And when do you propose to go?”

“Now, this same moment as yourself,” I told him. “For were we not both born in the month of June under the self-same sign?”

He laughed again and waved his plainly-gloved hand. “We must compare our experiences later.
Amuse-toi bien, mon brave!”
he called back over his shoulder.

The three of them, followed by a groom or two, clattered through the gateway, and it was as if the exciting centre of things were gone. Courtiers and servants went back in twos and threes to their various occupations. The courtyard began to empty. “A lanky, nonsensical fellow, that fool! But for some reason the King allows him far too much liberty,” I overheard a long-nosed, ambitious bishop say disapprovingly, as I passed him and the parson-poet Skelton on my way to the stables.

And then I heard from behind me John Skelton’s mocking voice answering him in ribald rhyme,

“How good for kings

To hear of things

From fools who find

No axe to grind.”

Probably he shocked his ecclesiastical superior, but he delighted me immensely.

And the funny part was that because I had told the exact truth in open courtyard no one had dreamed of believing me, and if anyone missed me during the following week probably the last place in which they would think of seeking me would be the City of London.

One of the grooms had my grey gelding ready saddled for me.And I rode like the wind to Thames Street—or it might well have been to Heaven—where the Festings were already gone and my bride awaited me. And whatever romantic surprises or gorgeous spectacles of nuptial welcome royalty may have been enacting to an amazed world outside our ken or caring, Joanna and I had no need of them. No matter what other homes we might live in, that narrow, typical London house among the docks would always remain in our memories as the enchanted casket of our first married ecstasy.

During those few precious uninterrupted days we scarcely ever left it save for an evening saunter across Tower Green beneath the stars. We had waited so long and so hopelessly to be together.There were so many things to talk of, so many years of lovers’ longings to assuage. And we found that we satisfied each other in mind, body and emotions. Poor as my parents had been, the education my father had given me was much the same as that enjoyed by merchants’ sons. Contact with her father had dispelled much of my youthful gaucherie, and Court life had given me a worldly wisdom which, save in social graces and experience in managing a gracious manor, Joanna lacked. We valued intensely every facet of a happiness which we had never hoped to possess. If we had waited long enough to lose the shy romance of very early youth, we had found an undreamed depth of magic in our marriage.

But when the bells of St. Paul’s and all the other London churches began to ring out, and we saw the wealthy Flemish merchants setting out from the steelyard in all their best finery to welcome their Princess, and a wild scurry of small boats filled with sightseers rowing down-river we knew that the bride must have arrived at Blackheath, and that soon the King would be escorting her with all the bejewelled company into Greenwich Palace. And that I, the Court jester, should be expected to be there.

“I shall often be back,” I promised, making my hurried preparations. “Late at night sometimes, or when the King is out hunting or having a long session with Cromwell or one of the foreign ambassadors. This is our
home,
Joanna.”

But she was standing disconsolately by the window of our bedroom staring out across the Thames, perhaps to hide her tears. “I believe I can see the Marshalsea prison from here—tall and grim on the Surrey side,” she said, and I knew that her tears were mostly for her father. “Oh, Will, have we been wickedly selfish, being so happy here in this warm room while he is imprisoned over there across the water? With family and freedom gone, his full life all in ruins. Even hungry, perhaps—”

I turned her from the window and held her tight, so that she wept for a while against my shoulder. Any evening we might have walked across London Bridge and stood beneath those prison walls, but what good would it have done? “If only we could see him—speak with him,” she murmured, making a brave effort to dry her eyes.

“Cromwell’s orders about visiting are extraordinarily strict. You may be sure I made every enquiry,” I said. “I even woke in the night with a wild idea—”

“Yes?” she asked eagerly.

“It was useless, through my own carelessness. You see, my sweet, I was once able to save a man from hanging. And I believe he became a gaoler at the Marshalsea.”

“You mean the sailor accused of piracy whose mother pleaded for him?”

“Yes. Did I tell you about it?”

“When I was in London. She caught you in a softened mood, you said, that day your Uncle Tobias came about Frith Common.Miles Mucklow, you mean?”

I held her at arm’s length and stared at her in amazed admiration. “Joanna! Joanna! I always said you had a marvellous memory for names. But how, in Heaven’s name, when I myself had long since forgotten?”

“Oh, my dear foolish one,” she cried, “do you not see how your life has been such a full one—so busy with becoming a celebrity—while mine has been so quiet that I have lived on your letters and all the interesting stories you ever told me? I wrote them down, some of them, lest I should forget any part of you—after I grew older and must be married to another.”

I held her to my heart in silence. What could a man say in return for so sweet a confession? An ordinary, low-tongued, timeserving buffoon like me? Life would not be long enough to show her how gratefully I loved her.

She brought my riding cloak and smoothed down my fine maroon doublet. “Fit for a new Queen,” she teased, quick again to laughter. “But I am glad you wore it for me first.”

“What will you do while I must leave you?”

“Tatty and I will furbish this dear house from attic to cellar while you are gone lest dear, kind Gerda should find fleas!”

“Au revoir, my love,” I whispered. “Even though I should be set upon by footpads between the bushes in St. Martin’s Lane for my new velvet purse I shall die the most fortunate of men, dumb with gratitude for all you have given me.”

“I cannot imagine my Will dumb. Call loudly ‘Oh, mihi beati Martin!’ so that honest men run to your aid and the saint of travellers will let you live for me,” she adjured me gaily, following me to the stairs. But at the open door she caught at my cloak and entreated with sudden seriousness, “And you will try to speak to the King about my father?”

I wished that she would not ask me. I knew how unlikely the Tudor was to interfere with any clever move of his Chancellor’s. “Perhaps—if this new marriage mellows him—or if God makes something unexpected happen to smooth the way…” I promised hurriedly, with small conviction.

IF I HAD ENTERTAINED any hopes of speaking to a King who was a mellowed bridegroom, they were rudely shattered from the moment I re-entered Greenwich Palace. The courtyard was crowded with hangers-on from the gorgeous spectacle on Blackheath, but many of them seemed to be already preparing in a subdued manner to return home. Instead of the wild bridal merriment I had expected to have to lead that evening, an awed hush had fallen over the interior of the palace. Ushers stood about looking frightened and uncertain, even the incorrigible pages moved decorously, and the servants laying the tables for supper might have been preparing a funeral meal for a batch of mourning relatives. Thomas Cromwell, who had brought off the whole diplomatic
coup,
and whom one would have expected to find very much in evidence, was nowhere to be seen. And the only sight I caught of the King was a brief glimpse of his back-view, as he strode along a gallery, with his short coat flapping out on either side of him like the wings of an enraged swan, and then disappeared through his bedchamber door which a couple of scared-looking ushers pulled firmly shut behind him.

Thoroughly nonplussed, I went in search of John Thurgood, whom I found in one of the smaller galleries putting his new troupe of tiny monkeys through their tricks, while Hans Holbein sat in one of the wide window seats moodily sketching them. “What line do you want me to take this evening, John? Has anything cropped up that I can use for a topical joke?” I asked, rather conscience-stricken that I had left him to make all the preparations for so important an occasion.

“Not unless the whole Flemish marriage is a joke. And even so, in the King’s present mood, it would be dangerous to be funny about anything. That is why I am playing safe with these,” he explained, flicking his fingers towards the monkeys.

Since the German painter must just have returned from Cleves, I looked to him for enlightenment, but he went on sketching glumly.

He had been about the palace for years and spoke English fluently, and most of us liked him personally besides admiring his work. “But surely there was never such a state welcome,” I said. “What went wrong at Blackheath?”

“Everything went wrong
before
Blackheath,” vouchsafed Holbein at last, with a brush between his teeth.

I remembered Joanna’s indignation on behalf of a bride who would not be looking her best. “You mean—it is always a mistake to take a tired woman unawares?”

Holbein looked up then, his expressive brown eyes smouldering with anger. “She had been horribly seasick. We all had. She had even taken off her stays, so her women tell me.”

I gave a low whistle of comprehension. “And the King did not like her.”

“He called her a Flemish mare.”

How brutal the Tudor could be! And how hurt in his liking for the lady was Holbein! “But I myself heard him extolling that exquisite miniature you sent,” I said.

“Which is said now to have been over-flattering—to please Cromwell. As if I, whose whole life is painting, would prostitute my art to please any man!” He got up, scattering a genius’s unfinished sketches of monkeys in all directions. “She looked as I painted her, Master Somers. She
is
like that, for all who have eyes to see. A tall woman—angular if you will—with calmly hooded eyes looking out straightly on to the world.” He had screwed up his eyes as if visualising his recent model, the stick of black crayon in his hand seemed to be measuring her, and his deep voice shook with enthusiasm. “The nose too long for beauty, but the mouth kind, with a suggestion of quiet humour. There is a placidity—a beauty of the soul—a—a—how do you say?—sensible healthiness.”

His enthusiasm almost discomforted us. “A pity the poor lady had to travel in such a storm,” was all Thurgood could think of to say.

“Yet, ill as she felt, she persuaded Sir Thomas Seymour to teach her English words and card games, to fit herself for her future lord.And your seamen, who had hated the thought of crossing with a boatload of foreign women, finished up by swarming up the ratlines to cheer her when she disembarked at Dover.”

“Where will you go, Hans Holbein?” I asked, watching him gathering up his plain cloak and cap, and realising that his brilliant career must be momentarily blighted.

“As far as possible from palaces,” grunted that unostentatious son of Augsburg.

“To paint some more rich Flemish merchants down at the steelyard?” I said, having seen some of the fine portraits they had commissioned him to do, and suddenly wishing that he had made a picture of Richard Fermor to hand down to posterity.

“Till this blows over,” he said with a shrug.

I stooped to pick up two of his half-finished sketches, folded them carefully and put them in my pouch. Even the most casual lines of the artist who had so splendidly depicted Henry, the late Queen Jane, her infant son and half the notables at Court, must be valuable. “I suppose that Cromwell’s stock has fallen, too?” I asked my friend, as soon as Holbein was beyond earshot.

Thurgood’s clever little monkeys had finished the rehearsal of their act and he sat back on his heels, while they jumped about him clamouring for the tit-bits with which he always rewarded them.“All I know is that the moment the great guns boomed out salutes for the royal arrival, the King conducted his bride-to-be to her apartments. Then he snapped his fingers sharply to Cromwell—as I might do to Mitzi here—to follow him into his own room. They were closeted there alone for nearly an hour, so Culpepper, that new young gentleman of the bedchamber, says. Then Cromwell comes glowering out and calls a Council meeting. This afternoon, of all times! So there were no more festivities and most of the guests took themselves off. And no instructions from milord Chamberlain for this evening. Heaven alone knows what it all bodes!”

“Perhaps the meeting was called to make final arrangements for the wedding,” I suggested, trying to keep my thoughts from straying back to the quiet happiness of my own.

“If so, surely the King himself would have been present. But those two Dutch gentlemen who came with the bride were called in—Waldeck and Hostoden, or some such names—together with the Duke Philip of Bavaria, who seems to have come as a suitor for the Lady Mary. And Holbein, who speaks their language, was telling me just before you came that the poor men were bewildered at being cross-questioned about some pre-contract between the Cleves Princess and the young Marquis of Lorraine. Some idea that was mooted years ago by the late Duke of Cleves, her father, but never implemented.”

“Then the King has changed his mind and must be trying desperately to find means to avoid marrying her,” I said, bitterly disappointed, because it seemed to wash out any faint hope of begging a mellowed bridegroom for Richard Fermor’s release.

“A pity he ever sent for her!” said Thurgood, not relishing another uncomfortable period like the end of the Boleyn reign.

“Or that he noticed that young Howard girl first!” I said. I had not meant to speak of it, but this was our common misfortune, and I understood my master all too well.

“You mean the auburn-haired orphan sired by that fine soldier Lord Edmund Howard, who was younger brother to the Duke of Norfolk?”

“Yes. The Duke’s detestable old stepmother brought her up, it seems. And now, after neglecting her since childhood, I suppose they suddenly realised that she had big appealing eyes and the right colour hair, and that the King is at the age to make a fool of himself over a cuddlesome girl of seventeen.”

“But surely he would never look with more than a passing lascivious eye at a penniless chit like that?”

“He might. Like all the Howards, she has royal blood. I saw him watching her from one of the windows in the long gallery while she was playing shuttlecock on the terrace with some of the Lady Mary’s maids. Young and fresh as a rose, she looked, although her cousin George Boleyn once told me she was no better than she ought to be. ‘Who is that sweet child, Tom?’ Henry asked. And poor Tom Culpepper, who clearly wants to keep her charms for himself, had to tell him, ‘Katherine Howard, my cousin, Sir!’”

“And you really think that Norfolk has pushed her upon his Grace’s notice purposely, Will? In the hope of getting another royal marriage in their family at the expense of this carefully planned Protestant one?”

I got up from the stool on which I had been sitting. “Bear me witness that I always refused to credit it when people said that Thomas Howard rushed to his other niece, Anne Boleyn, to tell her that her husband was at the point of death so that her son might be born dead, and leave the pathway for his own daughter open. But now—now I am willing to believe anything.” As I passed behind him I pressed my hands affectionately upon his shoulders.“Oh, John, John!” I exclaimed sadly. “How Court life stinks!”

“There are certainly some men about who make me prefer my monkeys,” he said, finally shutting them into their cage and beckoning to one of his property men to take them away. Then he uncoiled his lithe body from the floor and came and threw an arm about my shoulders, his round, cheerful face quite serious. “It is because you are freshly come back to it—from an unblemished happiness which is the nearest we humans get to Heaven. Come and tell me about your new home, Will. It must be hard indeed to leave the sweetness of a new wife, but never forget the odd sparks of goodness which you and I have often found in the most unexpected people even here.”

Most certainly it had been hard, and most truly I stood in need of such invaluable friendship. “The goodness of people whose devotion to truth as they see it ignores worldly gain or safety,” I said, enlarging on the comfort of his theme. “People like Queen Katherine and Sir Thomas More and frail, brave old Bishop Fisher.Though they died, their names burn like a row of steady candles lightening the darkness of our world.”

“And the gay young goodness of men like Hal Norris,” supplemented Thurgood.

“And the thrice-blessed goodness of all those kind kitchen folk who bring us surreptitious plates of food when we have had no time for a decent bite all supper time,” we both spluttered laughingly, almost in unison, coming down to everyday things.

At supper we saw our prospective Queen, dressed in a strangely round-cut gown of cloth of gold strung with jewels, and surrounded by the plainest bunch of
jantlewomen
imaginable. Some unkind rumour was going round that the fair hair showing beneath her elaborate headdress was a wig. She certainly was not the type for Henry who, like most big men, liked his women small, feminine and dainty. To those of us who knew him well it was evident that he was making an immense effort to play his part as chivalrous host. But from the hurt glare in his eyes, coupled with the fact that few of his guests had sufficient English to understand the subtlety of a joke, any attempt at humour seemed out of place. Thurgood had solved the difficulty nicely, I felt, by entertaining the foreign ladies with the charming antics of his monkeys, who danced and pranced and curtsied to them to the lively strains of a jog played on the virginals. For myself, I attempted nothing, save when some time-serving wit tried to be funny about our defenceless foreign guest and I took it upon myself to teach him better manners.

“And speaking of monkeys,” he said in a high, mincing voice, “how amusing is this new fashion of ladies wearing wigs to ape the Tudor hue!”

I had no means of knowing how much that is English Anne of Cleves understood, either of our language or of the reason for the strained atmosphere which prevailed. “Had you travelled much in Europe, Sir, you would know that for a great lady to wear her own hair would be as mean as for her to wear a coat of her own spinning,” I told him sharply. I thought she looked towards me, but it was difficult to tell. As Holbein had said, and shown—her eyes looked straightly out on the world. And they were very tired and anxious eyes just then. She and her ladies asked leave to retire early, which was just as well, because at the crack of dawn on the next day, which was Sunday, Henry sent word to the Princess’s apartments that he would be ready to marry her at eight o’clock—perhaps on the principle that things which cannot be avoided are best done quickly. We watched him, all resplendent in cloth of gold and crimson, striding up and down impatiently because the poor woman kept him waiting. “If it were not to satisfy my realm, or to avoid making a ruffle in the world where you have arranged it, I would not do what I must do this day for any earthly thing,” I overheard him complain to Cromwell.

And one of the captains who had fetched her from Cleves and who happened to be standing within earshot, too, said to me regretfully, “Well, it pleased his Grace to dislike her, but to me she always appeared a brave lady.”

The King went to her bedchamber that night in ceremonial nuptial procession and, according to her women, for many nights afterwards, but during each day he was as irritable as an ill-mated bull. More often than not he looked through me or waved me out of his way. Which was a blessing in disguise, because it left me free to go more often to Thames Street for stolen hours of happiness, and at the first opportunity I crossed London Bridge to try my fortune at the Marshalsea.