Noble Blood - The Hidden Life of Henry VIII's Fool (With Peter K. Andersson)

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

William Somer (or Will Summers), Henry VIII's fool, became known to history as a famous wit, the man who spoke truth to power and advocated for the common people. But in reality, the man's life was more nuanced, and far sadder. Dana speaks with historian Peter K. Andersson about his new book, FOOL: In Search of Henry VIII's Closest Man about the man who was arguably Henry VIII's longest-term relationship. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Merch! — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? Oh, they hit a bogo. Well, then you got it. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. Hi, welcome to a new episode of Noble Blood. I am talking today with Peter Kay Anderson, who is a senior lecturer in history at Oroboro University in Sweden, and author of the new book, Fool, in search of Henry the Eighth's closest man, which is a book about the personal history, but also I would say the social and political history of Henry the Eighth's fool, William Summer, and also just of royal fools in general. Hi, how are you? I'm good. It's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you so much for joining us all the way from Sweden. Let's just start with the basics. Who was William Summer? or as he was sometimes known, Will Summer. Yeah, William or Will, most people who were named William were nicknamed Will in this period. Will Summer was Henry VIII's Fool. So he is known mostly as the King's Fool, but he was not just Henry the Ace Fool. He was the court fool at the British Royal Court from about 1530 up until his death in 1560. And that's when Queen Elizabeth I had just been crowned.

So he was a royal fool with Mary and King Edward and up until Elizabeth I. And also considering Henry's famously rocky marriage situations, this is one of the longest term relationships he had in his life. Yes, that's true. I've never thought about it that way. But yeah, they must have had some sort of special relationship, so to speak. What the nature of that relationship was, we will discuss, but it's not very clear cut. As the title indicates, he was a person who was very close to Henry VIII in one way or another. Before we get into Summer's biography or what we know of his biography, I think people, when they hear medieval fool, they sort of think of a jester hat with bells and shoes with pointed feet.

How close is that popular perception to the reality? Not particularly in this case. I think there were fools in Motley, wearing the cap with bells and so on. But mostly this seems to have been some sort of stereotype about the fool. When we come to this period, the Renaissance, most fools, at least the fools we find in portraits, the fools that are depicted and that we can identify, they don't look anything like that.

If you see a typical portrait of a Renaissance fool, you wouldn't know that it was a fool if you didn't look closely. There is very little to sort of identify them as fools in their portraits. And this goes especially for Will Sommer, who was depicted many times in portraits, but always looking very mysterious, very brooding, never smiling or anything like that. A very sort of mysterious and almost dark figure. So what do we know about the life of Will Summer, who was this man who was so prominent at one of the most famous Renaissance courts in history? We know very little about him and the sort of contemporary references to him, you could fit them on one piece of paper really. The thing about Will Summer is that quite a legend grew around him after his death. So when you look at the late 16th century and the period of Shakespeare and so on,

there's quite a lot of references to him there. There's some sort of mythology around him, and he is invoked as a sort of mythological gesture of the past, a sort of almost godlike figure in comedy, so to speak. And a lot of playwrights include him in place about the reign of Henry VIII, where he's depicted as a very sort of jesting and, shrewd comic. And a lot of books were written about him in that period, but very little of what you can find in that period is truthful. And when you start to move closer in on his own period

and the sources that are closest to his life, you see that he was quite a different character. He was probably what was called in those times a natural fool. You had this distinction between natural and artificial fools. And artificial fools constituted what we would call a comedian, basically, someone who was skillful at being funny. But natural fools were employed based on, mainly on what we would today call an intellectual disability. It could be other things as well.

It could be persons with a very sort of rural or common background who would be a contrast to the other people at court in a way that would be considered. it amusing. But natural fools were not the sort of shrewd wits that they are sometimes depicted as in Shakespeare plays or in later fiction. One thing that I found so fascinating about your book is how you sort of trace how some are the character in fiction and plays is depicted as this famous wit as a man of the people who's sort of this outside observer who's able to comment on the insanity of court or the indulgences of the church, even though as you lay out in Summer's lifetime, he almost certainly wasn't, at least, you know, a famous wit by anything

that he was doing purposefully. How did that shift happen? That's a good question, really. It's difficult to say. I mean, it's very, the image that you describe is, of course, very attractive to us. We like to think of the fool as someone who sort of looks through all the performances and all the role playing going on at court and who is a bit more like us perhaps and who sort of represents our perspective on this period. But it wasn't like that. And it's difficult to say how this shift in the image of Will Summer happens. But when we go a bit closer to his own lifetime, You see anecdotes about him, stories told about him, where you can find perhaps a grain of truth.

You can find little facts and little nuggets of information that you can single out because they don't really have any purpose in the anecdote. So it's just something that is mentioned in passing. Things like the fact that he came from Shropshire, apparently, that he had a strange ability to fall asleep in odd places, which is mentioned in a posthumous biography, but also in his own lifetime and so on. So there are little things when we get closer to his own lifetime that might have a sort of basis in truth. I love that detail of him frequently falling asleep because listeners might be familiar with the fictional novels of Hillary Mantel,

which, as you point out, she briefly alludes to Will Summer but paints him almost as a narcoleptic, which I love when fiction just takes it. A detail. She does a big thing about that. He has to have an attendant when he's in town so that he doesn't fall asleep in the street and so on. There is no source about that, but we have these indications that he might have had that sort of condition. So she does a funny thing about that. I love that.

You alluded to earlier the fact that Summer is featured in numerous portraits, I think four that we know for sure, sometimes with Henry the 8th at his side. Was that common for fools at the time? Or does it say something about Summer's relationship with Henry the 8th? It wasn't that common in England, actually. The only other example is there's a portrait of Thomas Moore with his family, which includes his own fool. And you can find examples from other countries, the Spanish court, for instance, and so on.

But in England, this doesn't seem to have been a, convention. So that's quite interesting to find him in several portraits. There are no portraits of William Summer alone. We haven't been able to find anything like that, but he is included in a lot of family portraits, dynastic portraits, where he is standing in the background. And when you compare all these different portraits to each other, you can easily recognize this man. And you can also see a bit how he gradually becomes older and older as time passes. There are a lot of are of course posthumous portraits. He was invoked and used as a sort of mascot of the court, even up until the time of Elizabeth I. So he was probably viewed and used as a sort of symbol

of the continuity of the Tudor court. That's fascinating that these portraits of him are less to feature him as an individual and more just what he represented as a symbol. One other sort of, I think maybe modern stereotype we have about the medieval and Renaissance fool is the idea of jester's privilege, that the jester gets to say anything that he wants and he won't get in trouble to speak truth to power. In the book, you referred to it as the legendary fool's license. Can you talk a little bit about that idea? Yes. And that, as I said, it connects a bit with this myth that has grown around

fools as literary characters really. You find that a lot of course in Shakespeare plays which often include a fool character that is very sort of shrewd and very amusing and clever and so on. The thing about

the fool's license and so on, that is a bit of a myth really. When you look at the real fools in the period before this they were not treated very, very respectfully. They were definitely not sort of taken seriously in any way, I would say. Perhaps they had a sort of carte blanche in a way that they weren't taken seriously, and they were considered fools, so they could, in a way, say what they wanted,

but what they said was so little regarded, so it wasn't really a thing or something that would sort of have any political importance. So the natural fools, which were sort of the majority of fools in this time, they were not licensed in any way like that. They had a relevance, of course. They were entertainers in one respect. They were also sort of symbols of the deviance, of something different, something curious in a way. They were in a way sort of part of the Royal Curiosity collections. The role was something quite different from the sort of myth that emerged in literature later. I mean, it comes partly from Shakespeare, partly from writers like Erasmus of Rotterdam, who wrote about praise of folly, pamphlets, and so on.

But then it starts actually to influence the role of actual court fools when you come into the 17th and early 18th century. Then you find fools that are more artificial fools. They begin to be called court jesters more than earlier. And that's a different type of fool, really. They are more sort of clever and shrewd. And they do have the odd moment of sarcasm and criticism. Archie Armstrong was the main fool in the English court in the 17th century. And he got into trouble a few times for, say, witty or shrewd things that weren't very popular with the king.

And sometimes fools like Will Summer were disciplined quite harshly. It wasn't necessarily an easy or fun life. There are some violence that you remark on in this book. Yes, they were disciplined. And especially Will Summa, we see, was subjected to physical punishment and chastisement. As a contemporary play by a court poet called John Haywood, he sort of, references the conditions of court fools at this time. And he has a long list of how they are treated.

Some beat him, some bob him, some joll him, some job him, some tug him by the ass, some lug him by the ears, some spit at him, some spurn him. And the list goes on and on and on. So it was quite an obvious thing at this time that the fool was someone who was physically punished a lot. And this long monologue ends saying that not even Will Summer, the king's own fool, can avoid this kind of treatment. So he was definitely treated in the same way as other fools. And by the way, as children and servants in this period.

And there's an allusion you make in the book to a fool, possibly Summer, who said something that insulted the queen and princess that insulted court. Can you speak a little bit to that? Yes, yes. We don't know if it is Will Summer, but possibly it is. And in that case, there's an ambassador who mentions this in a letter home to Spain. And he says that the king's own fool slandered the king's mistress. And the king flew into a rage and nearly murdered him or threatened to murder him or something like that. And the fool had to go in hiding.

So this isn't really the only sort of proof we have that King Henry would have become physically violent himself towards his fool. But it is very interesting. And it shows that, yeah, the carte blanche fool's license and so on. But you could overstep the mark, of course. And even though you were just a fool who just said foolish things, perhaps now and then there were moments when, when the fool said things that could enrage the king, of course. Possibly this is not Will Summer at all. Possibly this is some sort of clever fool who had a very brief stint at the royal court.

Made briefer by his lack of tact. Exactly, yeah. And maybe Will Summer was better in that respect because he didn't. There are no other sources really of him being critical or anything like that. One thing that I find very interesting about your book is how you talk about the influence that the Renaissance Fool has on the modern stand-up comedian. And you sort of suggest that that link isn't as clear as some historians like to believe and that it's almost as if the idea of the Renaissance Fool is what influenced the idea of modern comedians more than the actual fact. Yeah. I mean, we like to think of medieval fools sometimes perhaps as some sort of precursor to the modern stand-up comedian.

They stood up in front of dinner guests and had like a monologue or something like that. There's a Woody Allen film where he plays a medieval fool in just the same way as he is normally. And that's, of course, a very appealing thought. But I don't think it was quite like that, especially not when we speak about the natural fools. of the Renaissance. The link that I try to sort of put forth in my book is that the taste for natural foolery in the Renaissance was based on a sort of comic taste for the natural, for the spontaneous comedy and some sort of authenticity.

And that this should in some way have been taken further with the image of the court fool in Shakespeare and related to literature. And in that way, because Shakespeare expresses this sort of penchant for more sort of natural and spontaneous and comedians who don't laugh at their own jokes and so on. That's sort of things that Hamlet says he likes in that place. So possibly there is a line to identify there, which goes forward to today when we perhaps often think of spontaneous comedy or a sort of natural streak in comedy as something to be strived after. But it's not a sort of straight line from the medieval fool to the stand-up comedian.

Shakespeare is famous for his fools that he's written, except in his history, Henry VIII, he specifically does not include Will Sumner. Why do you think that is? I don't know. I think there have been different explanations for that. One is that his regular clown actor, Robert Darwin, wasn't available at that time. I don't think Shakespeare wanted to do what all the other playwrights did. So he left Will Summer out of his play. But he still has a prologue that says to the audience,

you know, you won't find this fool in this play that you might expect in a play about. Henry the 8th. So apparently the fool's absence had to be explained away. And this shows that it was sort of a convention to include Will Summer in these very popular history plays about the reign of Henry the 8th. As you say in your book, the information we have about Summer's life is incredibly sparse and you almost have to read between the lines in various legends and secondhand anecdotes that we get about him. Why, as a historian, were you drawn to this figure? I've had a longstanding obsession with court fools as a sort of historical problem, really.

I mean, naturally, there have been earlier historians writing books about this, and the history of the fool, from antiquity really to up until today. And I've written a book myself in Swedish, unfortunately, called the History of the Comedian, where I try to see this sort of long history. But there is something special about the court fool and the fool in the Renaissance or the early modern period. They aren't, as I said, the sort of typical precursor of the modern comedian. They are not just entertainers.

If you look at Will Sommer, for instance, he is never listed in payments or accounts together with other entertainers. You have a list of the minstrels and the musicians and all those people. He is never among those. He is always listed separately, perhaps together with stable boys or something like that. Very strange. So apparently he belonged to a different category. And that's also what you see when you look closely at the Renaissance Fool,

that they had a sort of ceremonial or almost ritualistic purpose, which you can sort of trace back to earlier times when the fool. had a sort of almost scapegoat symbolic importance. And of course, there's also a lot of theology involved in this and the image of the fool in the Bible and so on. You speak to the contradiction of the fool as a figure, someone who is sometimes physically disciplined in a cruel way, treated cruelly, laughed at,

but that there is this almost religious side where they're considered almost godly, closer to God in that sense. Can you speak to that contrast a little bit? Yes, that's very interesting because not even modern scholars have really been able to resolve that contradiction. If you look at theological writings on fools or references to fools, you can find both a sort of tradition about the so-called holy fools, the image, as you said, that fools were closer to God or had some sort of innocent connection with God and so on. And this tradition is very clear if you look at Orthodox Christianity.

I think if you look at Russia, for instance, you can find a lot of ideas about holy fools. But then there are other ideas which also say that fools are almost like devils. They are godless. And there's a psalm line, the fool has said in his heart there is no. God and so on. So there is like a tradition connecting atheism to foolishness because it's foolish to deny the existence of God. And this also sort of implicates and comes into play when people speak about fools in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. So it was very much ambivalent. And I think this is visible also when you look at the treatment of ordinary fools like

will some. It almost is an interesting throughline to how people in the Renaissance and early modern period viewed mental disability, intellectual disability. Absolutely. And that's a big issue, of course, which a lot of historians have treated and are beginning to study more and more. What you can say about that is, of course, that it's difficult to apply our terminology on that period because the terminology back then was completely different. And the definitions and what you sort of, what was and wasn't a disability then was different. But even there, you can see this ambivalence. You can see a lot of empathy and a lot of care, especially in communities, taking care of people with a disability and so on.

But also the cruelty and the beating and the sort of very, very, cruel humor that fools are subjected to. The fool is a sort of bully victim, really, in a lot of situations. And that's often the most obvious modern parallel when you study fools this time. Bulley in the sense that they were the ones being bullied? Yes, yes, bully victims. Very much so. So there aren't any more obvious bullies in history than Henry VIII, really. So it's very suitable this particular fool, but also in other cases, of course. You mentioned earlier the sort of nebulous position that Will Somer had in court, not part of the chamber, but also not quite part of the household. What might his daily life have looked like?

Obviously, we don't know, but just if you had to imagine. Yeah, that's very interesting. Some people earlier suggested that he had his own sort of quarters in the royal palaces and so on. I don't think that was the case. Well, in that case, something very simple and perhaps together with servants or stable boys or something like that. There's even a reference in one of the anecdotes about him. It says that after he had been entertaining the king, he went into a corner of the room to sleep with the spaniels. So suggesting that he He slept in the dog basket, basically. And there are theories about fools and dwarfs at this time being sort of human pets.

And you can see that image sometime when you see him falling asleep and being sort of in the background, lounging around, being quite comfortable really, but also treated with this combination of sympathy and cruelty that you might. compare with a pet. So there is that dimension in it, really. So possibly his daily life would be something like that. He would be around, especially when called for. But he would also probably live outside of the court. And his life outside of court, we know very little about. But there is a there is a document in the Royal Archives with payments for him being washed and shaped. and his feet being washed. And this is in connection with the coronation of Mary Tudor. So it's quite possible that he was not at court before that,

but he was taken in. Maybe some servant was sent out to find him in a tavern in London or something. And he was taken in because you had to have, of course, Henry the 8th's fool around for the coronation. So he was taken in, he was shaved, he was fitted with new clothes, washed and so on. And I believe he was also president at the coronation of Elizabeth as well.

Yes, yes. That's one of the last sort of records we have of him in his life. I'm Iris Palmer and my new podcast is called Against All Od and that's exactly what the show is about doing whatever it takes to be thoughts. Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers

as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers and breaking generational patterns. I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Eva Langoria. I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, what are you going to do? And I was like, I'll figure it out. We got a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford. Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month?

I'm opening up like I've never before. For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me. Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the MyCultura podcast network. available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Iris Palmer and my new podcast is called Against All Od, and that's exactly what the show is about, doing whatever it takes to be the odds. Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers

as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns. I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Eva Longoria. I think I had like 200. in my savings account and my mom goes, what are you going to do? And I was like, I'll figure it out. We got a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month

and we all could not afford. Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month? I'm opening up like I've never before. For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me. Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the My Cultura podcast network,

available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. That sort of also image of the fool as more of a pet or mascot, I think also fits with this idea of him being featured in portraits. What sort of information have you gleaned about Will Sumner from the visual aspect of him that we get in his portraits? Well, it's quite difficult to, I mean, it's very easy to get ahead of yourself and draw foregone conclusions based on his appearance. we can't really say anything about this appearance based on the portraits apart from the fact that he was simply

but nicely dressed sometimes you can you can even identify the clothes he wears in the portraits with records from the wardrobe accounts where these specific items of dress are ordered for him his hair was cut short which was

common in fools. There's also a portrait of of the queen's fool at one point, Jane Fool, we know very little about, but she is also, she also has her head shaved. So this was, this was something that was done in other fools as well. Apart from this, you can't really say anything about him from, based on the portraits, but it's very frustrating, of course, because you have these portraits and you can recognize him. And in the very good portraits, of course, you can really see this is a real person. So you get very intrigued and very, and you want to know more. But then you have to go to other types of sources to be able to learn something more substantial about who it was. One point that you make in the book that I just found so fascinating is this

idea of what folklore historians call tradition dominant, that when folk heroes are sort of being added to the cultural lexicon, they're almost like slotted in. to cultural archetypes that already exist, that, you know, you'll just apply a local hero to a trope of a type of hero that people already know about. So with that said, we don't really know any specific justs that Will Summer did specifically because he might have just been used as, you know, the, I mean. We know, I mean, there are, of course, contemporary records that I study in the book, which are sort of references to him saying things. And that seems to have been the main sort of appeal of him, that he had a tendency to put his foot in his mouth,

to say things that others found funny that sounded stupid or something like that. Sometimes it's like, it's difficult to say, is he being intentionally funny here, or is it just a gaff that people have sort of recorded here? And that's also interesting, of course, because was he sort of doing something himself deliberately or was he simply a bully-biklim, subject to circumstances and to other people's mockery and so on? But you can actually find that's the most interesting sources

where people in letters or pamphlets say something that will something. has said or that they have heard that he has said. Absolutely, yeah. Get closest to him, but it's also very, very strange because you never hear his own voice. Absolutely. I just meant sort of the larger stories that have surrounded him also as the decades went by. I was wondering if you had a favorite jest that had been attributed to him, either correctly or incorrect. Oh, okay.

Oh, that's a good question. I mean, he doesn't seem to have been, and that also sort of says something about his personality. He doesn't seem to have been like a practical joker or a physical comedian, which other fools at this time could be. There are other stories of fools, you know, eating a lot of laxatives and then sitting on top of the face of someone who's sleeping, something like that. It's always funny. It was funny hundreds of years ago. It's funny today.

Exactly. And I mean, who wouldn't love studying court fools in the Renaissance when you read a story like that? But with Summers, everything is much more subtle and therefore it's very much more interesting, but also very difficult to sort of get at him. But the things he said and the quotes from him are funny in themselves. But the thing that the sort of the motto that he had that most people who quote him refer to is, is you shouldn't abide by anything I say. And that becomes as a sort of figure of speech among courtiers in this time. Oh, as Will Summers says, you shouldn't abide by anything I say.

They sort of remark in passing. And that suggests a fool who, yes, maybe he had a tendency to put his foot in his mouth and so on. But maybe he was also a bit self-conscious about this. wouldn't he have become that after all these years being a court fool? So there you see just a hint of a person behind those words. I mean, it's not quite Groucho Marx. I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me as a member, but it's not that far from it because there is some sort of self-consciousness there

about the silliness and the foolishness of the fool. And also perhaps a bit of, you know, sadness about how he had ended up and what his status was as a man. Don't abide by anything I say. That's the sort of, that's his message in a way, which I think you can, yeah, you can go on and analyze that for quite a long time. Well, I think that's a brilliant place to wrap up. The sort of subtle tragedy of a man whose legend has far outlived him.

Peter Anderson, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure. If you're interested in learning more about Will Summer or the cultural and political history of the fool, pick up fool, thank you so much. And have a lovely evening. I'll enjoy my day in Los Angeles and you enjoy your evening in Europe. Yes, thank you. It's a pleasure, really. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching, by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noamie Griffin and Rima Il Kali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manke,

Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Farrell's big money players and IHeart podcast presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. This is my best friend, Janet. Hey. And we have been joined at the hips since high school. Absolutely. A redacted

amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. This is a podcast we're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? They hit a bogo. Well, then you got it. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human.