King's Fool

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  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?

  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.”