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  Praise for King’s Fool

  “…The author presents an absorbing picture of King Henry VIII and his court… Through [Somers’] shrewd and observing eyes the reader gains not only an intimate view of each of the monarch’s six wives but also a remarkably honest and human portrait of Henry.”

  —Booklist

  “All should be warned that, despite the title, they will not encounter the traditional fool.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Using the bright threads of historical fact, Margaret Campbell Barnes, one of the abler practitioners of the costume novel, has woven a regal tapestry of pomp and circumstance.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “For anyone who thinks of Henry VIII as a violent and tempestuous king, this novel opens another side. The violence is there, but it is tempered by an almost pitiful tenderness which only those closest to him ever found.”

  —Free Press (Winnipeg, Canada)

  “Margaret Campbell Barnes has written a novel in which warmth of feeling and imaginative perception have been skillfully blended with historical research.”

  —Gazette Montreal

  king’s fool

  king’s fool

  A Notorious King, His Six Wives, and the

  One Man Who Knew All Their Secrets

  MARGARET CAMPBELL BARNES

  Copyright © 1959, 2009 by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  Cover and internal design © 2009 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover photo © Portrait of Catherine Parr (1512-48), 1545 (coloured engraving) by Master John (fl.1544) (after)

  Private Collection/ The Stapleton Collection/ The Bridgeman Art Library Nationality / copyright status: English / out of copyright

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567–4410

  (630) 961–3900

  Fax: (630) 961–2168

  www.sourcebooks.com

  Originally published in 1959 by Macdonald & Co.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Barnes, Margaret Campbell.

  King’s fool : a notorious king, his six wives, and the one man who knew all their secrets / Margaret Campbell Barnes.

  p. cm.

  1. Henry VIII, King of England, 1491-1547—Fiction. 2. Courts and courtiers—

  Fiction. 3. Great Britain—History—Henry VIII, 1509-154 —Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PR6003.A72K56 2008

  823’.912—dc22

  2008038834

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Reading Group Guide

  Brief Gaudy Hour

  My Lady of Cleves

  The Tudor Rose

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  Brief Gaudy Hour

  My Lady of Cleves

  The Tudor Rose

  In grateful memory

  of my parents,

  CHARLES and EMILY WOOD

  WILL SOMERS

  “Few men were more beloved than was this fool

  Whose merry prate kept with the King much rule.

  When he was sad the King with him would rhyme;

  Thus Will exil’d sadness many a time.

  “The King would ever grant what he did crave,

  For well he knew Will no exacting knave,

  But wish’d the King to do good deeds great store,

  Which caused the Court to love him more and more.”

  Contemporary verse by Robert Armin in

  Nest of Ninnies, 1608.

  Author’s Note

  That Will Somers was friend as well as fool to the Tudor family seems to be proved not only by the many stories told of him at the time, but also by the fact that he was painted with Henry the Eighth for one of the few illustrations in the King’s own psalter, which is now in the British Museum, and that he appears in the background of other Tudor family groups. He knew all six of Henry’s wives and lived just long enough to see each of his three children come to the throne. Queen Mary the First and Queen Elizabeth the First each gave Will an annuity.

  The outline of his life and many of the incidents and conversations used in my story are founded on contemporary records, and the way in which several writers mentioned him, both then and later, shows him to have been a popular and well-loved character. The main facts about his first master, Richard Fermor, are authentic; but as nothing is known of Will’s love story, this is purely fictional. There is an excellently preserved brass of Richard Fermor at Easton Neston in Northamptonshire, and a mural tablet to William Somers in St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, London, where he was buried in 1560. Richard Tarleton, Queen Elizabeth’s jester, and James Burbage, the actor, were also buried there, and the registers and several memorials were preserved when the church was rebuilt by Dance in 1740.

  My sincere thanks are due to the Staff of the Manuscripts Department and the Prints and Drawings Department of the British Museum. Also to the County Librarian and Staff of the County Seely Library in Newport and Freshwater, Isle of Wight, for their help in getting me reference books.

  Yarmouth, I.o.W.

  M. C. B.

  I WAS SHROPSHIRE BORN, essentially a country lad, brought up to take my place among the new middle class which Tudor rule begat. Under the Plantagenets there had been titled folk and peasants. But when Henry the Seventh defeated the last of them on Bosworth field and filched dead Richard’s crown he changed all that. With his encouragement of merchants and explorers, and this new printing, and learning for the sons of solid citizens, he opened up life for those who knew how to profit by it. Perhaps a prince who has known exile and hardship is apt to have new and wider ideas. And I was particularly fortunate in this matter of learning because my father taught the choristers of Wenlock Priory, and every day I went with him to be schooled in Latin and calculus and other clerkly knowledge as well as music. From boyhood I knew the grandeur of architecture as well as the beauty of the countryside.

  But though I was fortunate in one way I was misfortunate in another, for I was an
only child and my mother died of the plague when I was four. She was a Welsh woman from over the border and it must have been from her, folks said, that I inherited my dark leanness and love of music. Although I respected my father, I had no particular love for him, so mine was a lonely childhood. While often poking fun at my schoolmates, I envied them secretly and fiercely because they had real homes. Not just a house swept by a hired woman, and empty to come back to. But warm, candlelit homes full of family bickering and laughter, with some mothering person at the heart of it. It would have been easier for me, I sometimes think, had my mother died a year earlier so that I could not remember her at all. For then my mind would not always have been searching for, or my heart hungering for, a shadowy, half-remembered presence, never completely visualised yet all-pervading. A childish hungering of the heart which went on throughout my youthful life.

  Because I am hardier than I look some of my happiest hours were spent helping with the work at my Uncle Tobias’s farm. Gathering the golden harvest through long summer days leaves a lasting sweetness to ripen in a man’s soul. The smell of newly carted hay can be a lasting memory even in strange cities. The indiscriminating hospitality of my uncle’s wife, feeding willing helpers as if they were her own strapping sons, taught me the core of kindness.The glowing companionship of harvest suppers established a belief in humanity against the mean buffets of the years. I shall always remember the glow of these sunsets over Wenlock Edge, and the gloaming covering the softly thatched houses like a gradual benediction. The rough voices of the farm lads and the giggling of the lasses handing round the ale pots making a homely kind of music as precious as the chanting of the monks; the older folk sitting around the cleared trestles afterwards, and the lads drawing the lasses away into the warm darkness. The shrieks and stifled laughter coming from the deeper shadow of the great tithe barn, and then the stillness and the rustling in the straw stack. That was the time I half dreaded. I’d always been the life and soul of the party with my mimicry and quips, and the topical jingling rhymes that even then came to me so easily. But the girls with whom I was popular enough in the day-time had no use for me under a hedge or in the hay.My awkward attempts had always been rebuffed, and I was never one to press myself where I was not wanted. Perhaps they felt me to be different, being the schoolmaster’s son, or maybe it was just because I was plain, with quick mind and tongue, and unreddened skin drawn tight across my cheekbones.

  So when the lasses and lads paired off with that excited catch in their voices and the glitter of expectation in their eyes I would invent some face-saving errand to the elder folk, and slip away through the beauty of the summer night to listen to the spilled-out ecstasy of nightingales and watch the great gold-white moon sail up behind the branches of the trees. Lonely, I was, and aching for I know not what. But because such beauty could lift the soul clear out of my scrawny body in ecstasy—because I had found celestial beauty in the stone lacework of soaring arches or in the echo of some lingering chord—I seldom hankered for long after the coarse, comely, sweat-soaked bodies and the toil-hardened limbs of the kind of girls I knew. I thought, Heaven help me, that I was immune and never could be driven crazy by a woman.

  And so it happened that when I left Shropshire I was still inexperienced and fancy-free.

  Until I was fourteen the highlights of my life had been during High Mass or Vespers, when I sent the pure treble of my carefully trained voice soaring up in praise to the very roof of the Priory, or muted it to plead for God’s compassion so that it filled the dimness of arcaded aisles with sweet sound. How my world seemed to shatter about me when my voice broke! How restlessly I waited through those awkward months of adolescence when any remark I made croaked between childish treble and manhood gruffness, when I felt like an outcast waiting to creep back into the choir among the alto line. My secret hope was that one day I should be able to sing the tenor solos on Saints’ days, or even in the new anthem which my father told us the King himself had composed. But to my bitter disappointment my voice never came again. Oh, of course it was trained and true, good enough to warble a love song as I went about my work, but never again to draw the hearts out of worshippers in a Cluniac priory famous for its music.

  Although this was no fault of my own my father was unforgiv-ingly disappointed, lacking the imagination to conceive how much worse it was for me. Half the tragedy of youth is that it has no measuring stick for grief. With a mother I might have talked some of mine out of my heart, bringing it into lighter proportion—indeed, I think that mothers sense such things without being told. But our musical work as master and pupil was the sole thing my father and I had in common. So I tried to assuage my frustration by sitting moodily strumming my shabby lute when I ought to have been chopping logs for winter fuel, or wandering over the hills making up ribald couplets about my betters when I was supposed to be construing Latin, or—with a sudden change of mood—driving the neighbours to distraction with practical jokes and leading the other lads in wild bursts of revelry. By then my poor father—God rest his soul!—was not only disappointed in me, but exasperated and bewildered beyond measure, not knowing what devil possessed me so to dishonour his standing in our little Shropshire town. Twice he beat me, grown lad as I was. Once for hanging a pewter chamber pot on a gable of our Guildhall, and once for releasing a pretty drab from the stocks to annoy our pompous beadle. And Heaven knows the parental chastisements were well deserved! “What is modern youth coming to?”my father would mutter, running a scholarly hand through his rapidly greying hair. So that I imagine he must have been much relieved to send me away into another county to learn better manners.

  Actually it was my simpler-minded and more practical Uncle Tobias who brought this about. With more free time on my hands I was often helping him at Frith Farm and, although my thoughts wandered far farther than theirs, I enjoyed the company of my sturdy, uncomplicated cousins. With the failure of my voice I had fallen between two stools, as it were, being neither scholarly enough to teach nor robust enough to make a full-time farmer. And so it happened that I was up a ladder searching for one of my aunt’s hens when a strange gentleman came galloping into the yard, and by the wayward chance of a nit-wit bird going broody on a half-cut straw-stack the whole course of my life was altered and enriched.

  “Ho, you up there!” I heard him calling urgently. “Find your master and tell him that one of my men has broken his ankle getting a sheep out of a road-side ditch, and by his good leave we are bringing him into the house.”

  I came down the ladder in haste, with the clucking hen clutched against the front of my borrowed smock.

  The stranger was of middle height and mud-bespattered, soberly dressed for riding, but obviously accustomed to command. So I let the hen flop squawking on to a heap of midden and sprinted across the yard to the house, calling to one of my cousins to bring a hurdle as quickly as he could. And in no time at all we had brought the young shepherd into the warm kitchen and my aunt was fussing over him with strips of torn linen, essence of mandrake and the like. He was not much older than I but twice as robust-looking, even with the colour blanched from his cheeks.

  “He’ll need to rest that ankle for weeks, Sir,” prophesied Uncle Tobias, hurrying in from the stable.

  “I’m afraid you are right, my friend,” agreed the lad’s master, passing an experienced hand over the swollen flesh. “If you and your good wife here will be so kind as to keep him until he is fit to follow us, I will send back a doctor as we pass through Bridgnorth.”

  “Do you have far to go?” asked my uncle.

  “Across two counties to Easton Neston near Towcester in Northamptonshire.”

  My uncle’s round red face lit up with pleased surprise. “Then you’ll be Master Richard Fermor, who knows more about the wool trade than any other land-owner in the Midlands?”

  Master Fermor nodded, and while he shook a generous cascade of silver from his pouch on to the kitchen table, the black-visaged man who appeared to be his bailiff surve
yed the groaning lad gloomily. “Old Hodge and the collies be keeping the flock together out there now, but how we be goin’ to get ’em home without this agile young ’un beats me,” he said.

  It was then, following the two men out into the yard, that we became aware of concerted bleating from the direction of the Bridgnorth road, and Master Fermor explained how he had made the journey into Wales to visit his old home and to buy some strong mountain ewes to improve his own flocks in Northamptonshire. “But they need careful handling on the roads, being less tame than ours,” he added, obviously sharing his bailiff’s anxiety. “I suppose you good Shropshire folk could not spare me one of those strapping sons of yours to help drive them? I’d make it worth your while and send him back with all speed.”

  My uncle scratched his sandy-coloured head, torn between practical necessity and his habitual desire to oblige. His gaze roved over his few newly ploughed fields from which, even with free grazing on Frith Common, he barely managed to scrape a living for his hard-working family. “Well, scarcely, Sir, what with seed time comin’ along an’ all—” he began regretfully. And then his eyes must have fallen upon me, gazing like a goon at the gentleman’s fine bearing. “But there’s my nephew here—” he added, well aware that my willing agricultural efforts would scarcely be missed.

  Richard Fermor turned to look at me, too, and a poor, uninviting sight I must have made with my thin, gangling limbs and straw wisps still in my hair.

  “Be he much good?” demurred the bailiff.

  “Well, only middlin,’” admitted my uncle, being essentially a truthful man.

  Master Fermor smiled, though not unkindly. “Middling farm hands are no good to me with shiploads of the best quality wool to be sent abroad, and all the keen cloth competition in Flanders.”

  “Hundreds of fleeces to be sheared and carted and shipped, as well as a clowder of other goods,” elaborated Jordan, the bailiff.

  I could see my cousins grinning at my discomfiture, but some eagerness in my stance or some understanding of my father’s disappointment in me must have moved my invaluable Uncle Tobias to make another try. “At least he could count ’em,” he urged. “The lad has learning, his father being the schoolmaster up to Wenlock Priory.”