Henry VIII’s favourite fool – a new book draws a portrait of the man the Tudor court loved to laugh at
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Monday, September 25, 2023
Fool, Poverty, Ageing, Time Bandits, Ear, Noise, Tongue, VIII, Friends, William Shakespeare, Lace, Entertainment, Book, Film industry, Tudor
And yet, one figure who sailed on apparently effortlessly through Henry’s bloody later years and the equally violent reigns of his successors was Will Somers, the court fool.
Key Points:
- And yet, one figure who sailed on apparently effortlessly through Henry’s bloody later years and the equally violent reigns of his successors was Will Somers, the court fool.
- Somers died peacefully under Queen Elizabeth I after a long and successful career at the Tudor court.
- It is this survivor’s tale that the Swedish historian Peter Andersson set out to tell in Fool: In Search of Henry VIII’s Closest Man.
- Anyone who wants to know about this oddly central figure in Tudor life will find Andersson’s book worthwhile.
The king’s pet
- Neither of those things would be tolerated for a moment in a normal courtier, which is presumably the point.
- He was, the account books tell us, only an intermittent presence at court, since presumably little foolery goes a long way.
- As that suggests, he wasn’t there chiefly for his witty banter, but to be looked at, laughed at and mocked.
- As Ian Holm’s Napoleon says in Terry Gilliam’s film Time Bandits: comedy is about “little things hitting each other”.
Nobody’s fool
- Was he, they repeatedly asked, truly a “natural fool”, or was he an “artificial fool”?
- Although Andersson’s book is heavy going at times, this central puzzle animates it and keeps the reader guessing to the end.
- One day when the king was lamenting his poverty, Somers told him it was because he employed so many “frauditors, conveyors and deceivers”.
- Was that play on the words “auditors, surveyors and receivers” something that someone had taught him, like teaching a parrot to swear?