King's Fool

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  Although her sister’s beloved husband Carey died, she and Sir Thomas Boleyn had the plague but slightly. With the cooler autumnal days the infection abated, and the Queen returned to Greenwich. But Henry, brooking no more parting from his beloved, furnished Suffolk House, beside the Thames, for the entire Boleyn family, and for himself borrowed York House, which stood near to it, from Wolsey. And at last Campeggio, the aged Cardinal, came. With Pope Clement’s authority to arbitrate, it was said.

  Being a prescient old man, he came reluctantly, after a long delay occasioned by what the Boleyn girl called “a convenient attack of gout.” And he seemed to have hoped to smooth matters over by an assumption that Katherine of Aragon would make things easy for her husband by retiring into a convent. But nothing was going to be easy. “I have no vocation for the conventual life. I am a wife and mother, and my vocation is to be Queen of England,” insisted that indomitable woman. “But if your Eminence decides that my husband and I have been living in sin, then as soon as the King goes into a monastery I will enter a nunnery.” Which must have left the well-meaning old prelate speechless.

  Incongruous pictures of Henry the Eighth as a monk would have provided me with rich sources of ribald merriment—had I dared to use them. But it was difficult to be amused by this valiant feminine riposte for long, for seldom have I seen anything more pitiful than her Grace’s effort to refute Campeggio’s suggestion by entering into a round of heart-broken gaiety which was quite in contrast to her desires and a great strain on her health. The King ceased to try to be kind to her, and all that her behaviour brought her was the first bitter intimation that her daughter might be taken from her. “The Aragon woman is a fool to withstand the King’s will,” stormed Wolsey, which in turn, when the Queen came to hear of it, brought him the most forthright dressing-down which he was ever likely to receive.

  “Have I not been married to my lord the King nearly twenty years, and no objections made?” she cried, when both Cardinals went to badger her. “Are there not various prelates and lords yet alive who judged our marriage good and lawful? As all the world knows, our parents were neither unwise nor weak in judgment, and my father sent to Rome for a dispensation, which I have in my possession, showing my second marriage to be good and lawful.”

  And then she turned, perhaps with some unfairness, upon the hapless Wolsey. “For all this trouble I may thank you, my lord of York,” she said, before all present. “I have ever wondered at your vain glory, and abhorred your voluptuous life, and cared little for your presumption and tyranny. Out of malice you have made all this great unhappiness for me owing to the great grudge you bear my nephew, the Emperor, because he would not gratify your ambition by using his influence to get you made Pope.”

  She said it right out like that to a pompous scholar who had been seeing himself as Pope for years. And I would have given a year’s wages to hear her. I was not there, of course, but one of her ladies, shaken and breathless, almost swooned into my arms afterwards and, prompted by a comforting beaker of warm, spiced wine, relived the exhilarating scene for me. Never can any lonely, unprotected woman have shown such forthright courage. And never, I wager, had our magnificent, scarlet-clad Cardinal legate been so plainly spoken to in all his up and coming life.

  MOST DECENT ENGLISHMEN AND all the women sympathised with Queen Katherine in their hearts. And Henry could not have been unaware of it. So one foul November Saturday, when thick mist swirled up from the river, he called together all the great ones in the land in Bridewell Palace and put his case before them. I was not among them, of course, but more than one told me afterwards what took place. And a strange experience it would have been for me, who, unimportant as I was, had often looked behind the scenes at the man’s passion, to hear him so self-righteously setting forth his dilemma.

  “If it be adjudged that the Queen is my lawful wife nothing will be more acceptable to me,” he assured them, so a clerk who had been in the service of Lady Willoughby, the Queen’s Spanish friend, told me. And I could picture Henry Tudor saying it, with that self-righteous expression on his florid face. “Besides her noble parentage she is a woman of the utmost gentleness, humility and buxomness. If I were to marry again I would choose her above all women.”

  “‘If I were to marry again,’ forsooth! When he is straining at the leash like a dog who scents a bitch,” sniggered a Captain of the King’s guard who had kept the door.

  “But, wait, that is not all,” said the clerk. “‘Were I to marry again I would choose her of all women,’ he told them.”

  “May God forgive him!” I muttered—and meant it. For because of his goodness to me my loyalties were torn.

  “And then he assured us all that if their marriage should be against God’s laws, because of her former union with Prince Arthur, he was prepared to part from her with sorrow, as from a good lady and a loving companion.”

  “And the strange thing is that he believes it all,” I said.

  “Believes it—with that Boleyn bitch all but in his bed!”exclaimed his Captain, who probably thought none the worse of him for that.

  “Yes. The whole of it, just as he says it,” I insisted. “For whereas you and I sin and know it, Captain, he must always persuade his conscience. Oh, none knows better than I that he can be kind to the likes of us, and spontaneously generous in sport and friendship.But for the bigger moves of life he must always have two reasons.One springing from his private needs, and one to hold before his own conscience as much as to show the world.”

  They thought that I exaggerated the King’s complexity, but had I not heard him building up those reasons, brick by brick, as he paced terrace or gallery with Wolsey, his voice soft and sibilant as the swish of his companion’s scarlet robes? Not the roaring, jolly voice familiar to so many across butts or bowling green, but the voice of a naturally naïve man clumsily acquiring self-interested slyness. I can hear it yet, trying to trick conscience. “There was that page, after the wedding night, who told everyone how my brother leaned out from the closed bed-curtains calling for a drink.‘I am thirsty,’ Arthur is supposed to have said, ‘for Spain is a hot place and I have been in the midst of it this night.’ Stolid young Willoughby could not have invented that, could he?” They would pass on, the King and Wolsey, in their interminable pacing, beyond range of my pricking ears. And then when they came past again they would be discussing the verses in Leviticus about the man who marries his brother’s wife and is cursed with childlessness, or the way in which all poor Katherine’s babies had been either still-born or had died. All except Mary, and she a girl.

  But sometimes alone in his own room of an evening Henry Tudor would sigh and lay down his book or his harp, and speak the bare, indisputable truth. Once he rose and crossed the room and for a long time stood leaning with bowed head against the great carved chimney hood. “It is a cursed thing indeed to be but the second sovereign of a disputable dynasty won by the sword, and to have no son,” he groaned.

  My heart yearned for him, but probably he had forgotten I was there.

  In some way this urgent need for a male heir seemed to excuse his growing determination to marry Anne Boleyn. Though how he could stake everything on that highly-strung, narrow-hipped girl giving him one I never could imagine.

  Now that his “secret matter” had been dragged out into the open, he courted her no longer by stealth. Most of his leisure hours were spent hunting, hawking, making music or rhyming among the gay company of her contemporaries. Hal Norris, Thomas Wyatt, Francis Weston, and her brother George, to name but a few. I must admit that he was the pleasanter for it, and the flame of Anne’s inner excitement burned so brightly that none of them could take their eyes off her. Wyatt wrote love-sick verses to her which excelled the King’s, and her chattering sister-in-law, Jane, was quite extinguished by her vivacity. But whatever other women whispered in the extremity of their jealousy, I do not believe that the brilliant Boleyn girl had ever loved any but young Percy of Northumberland, who had been denied
her, or that she ever lay with any of those gifted, attractive young men, either then or later. I, who hated her for hurting the Queen and milady Mary and for breaking up my pleasant world, would wager my precious Welsh harp upon it. One had only to watch her to know that the pathway to intoxicating power stretched too clearly before her to allow her to make a false step, that the lure of a crown preoccupied her mind too constantly for any call of her body to tempt her very urgently.

  And so we were come to this extraordinary pass—that a court was set up to try the validity of our sovereign’s marriage and, as a natural sequence, the legitimacy of their beloved daughter. Out of doors the early summer sun shone, the scent of lilacs drifted from walled riverside gardens, the Maypole had scarcely been taken down from Charing village, and we might all have been much better employed. But inside the vast imposing hall of Blackfriars Palace two reluctant Cardinals—one silvery and frail, the other black-browed and strong—sat at judicially appointed tables. And at opposite sides of the hall on high, gold chairs of state sat our King and Queen, like commoners come to wash their domestic linen in public.

  This time I managed to creep in unnoticed among his Grace’s attendants, and, though the proceedings tore me to the heart, I would not have missed them for the world. It was like storing in one’s mind a momentous hour of history, besides providing a scene more colourful and dramatic than the Master of Revels and I could ever hope to stage.

  It all began with the usual legal bickering. Queen Katherine objected that the court was prejudiced because all the judges held appointments from the King. The two Cardinals denied her right to appeal over their heads to Rome. When the court crier called for “Henry of England” my royal master repeated that effective flood of conjugal eloquence which he had made before at Bridewell, lauding his wife’s virtues and professing himself to be but the slave of conscience, because his brother had had her first.

  When at last the Queen’s name was called to answer, a great hush fell and men stood on tip-toe to peer over each other’s shoulders. I suppose most of us expected her to employ some Spanish priest or clever lawyer. But she was the kind of woman who would speak in her own defence, or not at all.

  She rose from her chair and crossed the hall. Being a proud daughter of Spain, she ignored the obstructive Cardinals and knelt, with infinite dignity, at the King’s feet. “Sir, I beseech you, for all the loves there have been between us, and for the love of God, let me have some right and justice. I appeal to you, who should be head of justice in this realm.” Although every inflection of her beautifully controlled southern voice was audible to the farthest ends of the hall, such was the personal nature of her appeal that they two might have been alone. “I take God and all the world to witness,” she went on, “that for twenty years I have been a true, humble and obedient wife, ever compliant to your will and pleasure.I have been pleased and contented with those things in which you took dalliance or delight. I loved all those whom you loved, for your sake.” She spoke most movingly of their shared sorrow for their lost children, asking if it could be considered any fault of hers that they had died. And, looking around me, I saw tears standing in many a man’s eyes, even where it was least to be expected. And one had only to look at the King himself to see how deeply he was affected—to know that this was no easy thing he did.

  Still kneeling with her rich damask skirts about her, the Queen stretched wide her arms and, looking straight into his eyes, challenged him before us all. Coming direct to the crux of the matter, she reduced all their legal quibbling to feminine common sense. “I put it to your conscience, whether I came not to you a maid?” she said, asking straight out for the truth from the only other person who was likely to know.

  But a terrible silence hung in the hall. Henry neither moved nor answered. Behind his rapidly blinking eyes the thought must have been scurrying through his mind that whichever way he answered, the words would condemn him. Either he must vindicate and keep her, or admit that instead of suffering some recent qualm of conscience he had deliberately, ever since his wedding night, been living in sin.

  And presently, knowing the ethical limitations of her man, the Queen let her arms drop despairingly and went on to speak almost objectively of the world-renowned wisdom of both their parents, who had so carefully arranged their marriage. And to plead that judgment might be suspended until she, who stood so much alone, could be further advised by her friends in Spain. “If you will not extend to me this favour, then to God do I commit my cause,” she said.

  Even from my perch on the plinth of a pillar at the far end of the hall I could see that she was weeping when she arose, and I could think of nothing but how she had tried to inspire me with courage when I first came to Court and stood alone and friendless. Although it was clearly painful to her stiffening limbs, she made a deep obeisance to the King and, instead of returning to her seat, walked with unhurried composure to the great doors of the hall.“Katherine, Queen of England, come again into court!” called the crier in a fine fluster. They had not finished with her, all those learned argumentative men, although she had finished with them.But she did not so much as turn her head, and her retinue had perforce to follow her out.

  It was bravely done. But afterwards, back in her apartment, she said in Spanish to Lady Willoughby, “Never before in all these years have I disputed the will of my husband,” and went weeping to her private chapel. And Lady Willoughby—who had been Mary de Salines when she had come with her as a girl from sunny Spain—must have known how true this was.

  After the Queen’s most regal exit from Blackfriars, prelates and laymen seemed to shake themselves back into the lesser mould of legal hair-splitting and expediency. They had seen Truth personified, but descended to the calling of doubtful witnesses about the amatory scufflings of a delicate, callow youth of sixteen with a prim, convent-bred girl behind drawn bed-curtains. A lady of the bedchamber testified to having left them alone and bedded.Several scurrilous old noblemen who ought to have known better vied with each other in recalling at how tender an age they had first known their unfortunate wives. Lord Fitzwalter corroborated Prince Arthur’s youthful boast that he had been in Spain, and added to it an inconclusive remark made by the bridegroom at supper to the effect that being married was good sport. After which tasty tittle-tattle the Bishop of Ely’s dull statement that the Queen, when younger, had more than once told him that her first marriage had never been really consummated fell singularly flat.

  Henry, hating the whole proceedings, was all for a quick settlement. All he wanted was to get his hands on the paper signed by an imposing row of English bishops, confirming that in this matter they were on his side. And Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, was pleased to hand it to him. A long list, seemingly, and all in convenient sympathy with his conscience. An expression of local clerical feeling unanimous enough, he hoped, to persuade Rome. All that remained now was to get back to York House or Eltham or Windsor and ride out into the sunshine with a well-trained hawk—anywhere where one could forget Katherine’s plain, good, tear-stained face. Like most big men, Henry hated to see a woman cry. She ought to have thought of that, because it would be something which through the years ahead he would find it uncomfortably difficult to forget. And she ought not to have cornered him in public with that embarrassing question—she, his Kate, who had always been so considerate of his comfort. But perhaps it didn’t matter very much, because in the years ahead he was going to have ease and wit and gaiety and a sloe-eyed woman’s clear, high laughter.…

  He began to fidget, impatient for the painful proceedings to end. Watching my royal master, I had so far entered into his thoughts, and he himself had half risen with Warham’s welcome paper in his hand, when one of those unexpected things happened which will stay in my memory as long as Queen Katherine’s courage and for all time be associated with it. The Archbishop was assuring Henry that he and his whole bench of bishops would give their consent to a divorce, when a tall, thin old man arose from their midst. He was
so parchment-skinned that there seemed to be nothing of him save his burning conviction and the carrying quality of his cultured voice. “No, Sir, not I,” he told his King. “Ye have not my consent thereto.”

  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.