King's Fool by Margaret Campbell Barnes

Author:Margaret Campbell Barnes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2010-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

JOHN FERMOR’S GUESS ABOUT a Coronation proved right, and although his father absolutely refused to stay for it, he and Joanna remained long enough for me to see them sometimes. I tried to let nothing spoil our mutual pleasure in being together, for although Joanna must soon go back to Neston where some other marriage would inevitably be arranged for her, at least I no longer had the present torment of picturing her in Oakham Skevington’s arms.

During that spring I was often at the Browns’ house in Alder-manbury, and so heard of the City’s preparations for Anne Boleyn’s triumph. While Thurgood and I were busy planning masques and merriment for the palace, Master Peacock, the Lord Mayor, had been ordered by the King to provide a splendid water pageant on the Thames. He and the sheriffs and aldermen were to fetch Anne from Greenwich to the Tower for her crowning at Westminster on Whit Sunday. They were to turn out the artillery, to arrange a barge for a bunch of serenading bachelors, to provide a wherry mounted with cannon lent by the Lieutenant of the Tower, and I know not what. “And I hope those obsolete old demi-falcons explode and they all sink to the bottom of the Thames!” I heard him mutter among his trusty merchant friends. And although both banks and London bridge were black with spectators, and anyone who could afford a place in a boat helped to crowd the shining surface of the river to see the lavish spectacle, most Londoners seemed to be of much the same opinion.

“Stuffed in our scarlet robes and civic chains on a sweltering May day!” grumbled his worshipful the Lord Mayor, reviving himself with a stoup of Master Brown’s best French wine.

“And look at the motto she has chosen—‘Me and Mine,’” exclaimed his host, to whose lot it had fallen, as Master of the Mercers’ Company, to decorate the bachelors’ barge.

“Different indeed from the motto ‘I serve’ which our real Queen used, and lived up to, when she was Princess of Wales!” said Richard Fermor.

“And now her daughter will be called upon to serve, but in a very different capacity,” I prophesied, having recently heard the boastful conversation of the new Queen’s ladies.

The three prosperous merchants turned from watching the final work of one of their journeymen carpenters on a huge model of the Boleyn falcon to survey me dubiously. “You mean her Grace will have to wait on this new brat? Well, you should know, Will, coming from Court,” admitted my former master sadly. “But has not our Princess suffered enough? God forbid that this jumped-up woman should try to humiliate her still further!”

“Jumped-up is the word,” agreed his brother-in-law, John Brown, turning his attention again to his carpenter’s unwelcome task. “Save that her mother was a Howard this new Queen of ours comes from no better stock than my own. Like my own father and uncle, her grandfather, Geoffrey Boleyn, was but a plain merchant before he became Mayor of London.

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