What’s it Like to be a Jester?

In the third of my King’s Fool Mystery series, REBELLIOUS GRACE, Will Somers, Henry VIII’s real court jester, finds himself called upon to use his skills to solve murders during Jane Seymour’s reign.

But this was my conceit, because solving murders is not something that a jester ever would have done. So what do jesters do all day?

Their lives were not glamorous. They were on the level of servants…and yet at the same time, a cut above. Like servants, they were not their own masters and could be called upon to entertain anyone at court, though the monarch paid the jester’s way and the king always came first. They might make friends of other servants who were mostly male, or, if they had a musical talent, might be acquaintances of the many musicians who worked at the court. Perhaps disdained by courtiers, but at the same time, amused by them. But the cleverer ones spoke truth to power, and if there was anyone who needed someone to tell them the truth of the matters surrounding them, it was Henry VIII, and so my Will plays this part most often.

They were usually set apart from all the other courtiers by their clothing, their motley, those party-colored hose, tunic, and fool’s hood with bells on it. This was their armor, because if they insulted a particular lord, that lord knew not to take his dagger to him by virtue of his fool’s raiment. They could insult, cajole, make a fool of anyone at court they wished, especially the king, and get no pushback. Well, that’s the idea, anyway. Sometimes they did go too far, and there was all manner of obeisance to pay to get back into the monarch’s good graces.

Will Somers, however, depicted several times in contemporary paintings with Henry and his children, didn’t seem to wear motley. I have the feeling that he was someone so well trusted and beloved, that the royal family didn’t think he needed to. And one might suppose he was well known enough amongst the courtiers to be instantly recognized as to who and what he was.

It’s hard to know too much about various fools throughout the ages but Will Somers is one of the better-known ones, yet that still isn’t much. He was born in Shropshire and worked for the merchant Robert Fermor the Staple of Calais in Easton Neston and is thought to have been presented to Henry at Greenwich when he was in his early twenties. We don’t know if he worked in the wool trade or was a house fool for Fermor, but Fermor offered him as a jester to King Henry in 1525 and Henry took him.

It was a happy household in the 1520s. Henry was still happily married to his first wife Catherine of Aragon with daughter Princess Mary. It was said of the court that it was a “festival every day”. And Will was surely part of that household, spending time with the royal trio in their private hours as well as their public. He likely had rooms next to Henry or even a pallet or truckle (trundle) bed in the monarch’s bedchamber. Will spent his days close to the king and his family, telling jokes, singing songs, tumbling, and perhaps even learning to juggle, though there were jugglers who came to court. A jester was wise to learn all the entertainment skills he could to be versatile enough to keep the attention of his employer, though he wasn’t likely paid a salary as such. Coins he’d be given if he entertained the king well, and by others of the court, but his room, board, and keeping was paid for.

A jester likely didn’t have a wife because his life belonged to the master, either a wealthy man, lord, or monarch, and that meant you lived by their whims. In my King’s Fool Mysteries, however, I gave him a wife to round out his life and give him more conflict to deal with, along with an adventurous sex life with both men and women. He’d have to keep the former a secret as that was a no-no, and later in 1536 there was the Buggery Act (yes, it was named that), which would put such men to death…though interestingly enough, it wasn’t so much for two human males as it was for men and farm animals. If that leaves you scratching your head, I can only guess…that it was a problem in Tudor England.

Otherwise, besides leaving the king’s side when he had important business to attend to, the same fool might entertain the queen, though the queen might well have her own female fool. And some were of the “natural kind.” In an 18th century book about Will Somers, the author described them thus: “Some were Fools by nature—such as we’ll call mere naturals or idiots—others by cunning and crafty fools, who when they cannot thrive by their wisdom, seek to live by their folly…” I have seen Will described recently as the former type of fool, a guileless but mentally slow sort. But that doesn’t seem to jive with the many depictions both in his time and after. For instance, when Shakespeare (and his collaborator John Fletcher) wrote him into the play “The Famous History of the Life of Henry the Eight”, Will Somers is not a “natural” fool. He was always depicted as the clever, witty sort, much like the Fool in King Lear. He was treated the same way when in 1592, Thomas Nashe’s play Pleesant Comedie called Summers last Will and Testament was performed, as well as Samuel Rowland’s in 1622 Good Newes and Bad Newes and an eighteenth-century book about Will A Pleasant Historie of the Life and Death of William Sommers. My take on Will is that he was the clever type, as so many playwrights seemed to think him.

If you, as a Fool, were constantly entertaining without being an irritant, you could find yourself in lifelong employment. And Will did. He was quite at home with Henry’s ever-changing family, and they liked to have him around along with a few other Fools. He survived all of Henry’s wives, and even continued to work close to the monarchs through Edward VI’s brief reign (Henry’s only legitimate son), into Mary I’s, and finally retiring…and dying…during the reign of Elizabeth I.

He died on June 15, 1560 (the only date we’re sure about) and buried in the Church of St. Leonards in Shoreditch London.

But he lives on in my series, telling bawdy jokes and riddles, speaking truth to power, navigating the fraught politics of the day, and solving the occasional puzzling murder.