Book review: “Fool: In Search of Henry VIII’s Closest Man” by Peter K. Andersson

William Somer was Henry VIII’s fool.  He also served in some capacity in or on the edge of the court during the reigns of Henry’s children: Edward VI, the sickly Protestant teen; the fervid Catholic Mary I; and Elizabeth I, another Protestant.

The fact that he was able to stay linked to the Tudor courts over nearly a quarter of a century through drastic changes in religion and politics must say something.  But what?

What, if anything worthwhile, can be said of Somer who, after his death in 1559, seven months into Elizabeth’s rule, quickly moved into the stuff of myth and legend? Indeed, he was mentioned so often in later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature that he was “one of the most famous men of his age,” writes Peter K. Andersson, a historian at Orebro University in Sweden.

Those mentions, however, were of Will Somer the legend, not Will Somer the human being. There are very few written records mentioning him.

Yet, we know what he looked like.

He appears in four portraits with Henry or with Henry and his family — “gaunt and morose.” That’s more representations of his face and body “than for many of the period’s most illustrious noblemen and noblewomen,” Andersson notes.

 

“One of the most mysterious individuals”

The man who stares back at us from the group portraits with Henry and his children, looming behind the royal figures, is perhaps one of the most mysterious individuals of Tudor history.

Was he a natural fool, i.e., a developmentally disabled person? Or an artificial fool, i.e., someone pretending to be intellectually slow?

Was he, as some of the later portrayals suggest, a clever, politically savvy comedian, the only person in the court who could say blunt, honest things to the monarch? Or was he a simple person of limited abilities who was amusing in one way or another to those at court?

 

A tour de force of research and informed speculation

How do you tell the story of someone little recorded when he was alive but, after his death, frequently described by people who never met him?

That was the challenge Andersson posed to himself, and the result is Fool: In Search of Henry VIII’s Closest Man, a tour de force of historical research and informed speculation.

As Andersson explains in his Introduction, his book is, as the subtitle indicates, a search for Will Somer’s biography.

In doing so, Andersson works backward in time, starting with the legends and myths about the fool a hundred years and more after his life and stepping closer and closer to him in his lifetime through the examination of the scraps of household records about him and a mediation on the four images of him as well as a fifth created later.

Finally, he comes as close as anyone is ever going to be able to when he studies the ways the men of Henry’s court wrote of Will Somer in their letters and documents.

 

“Considered as an individual”

But the primary reason for focusing on an individual fool is to finally release many men and women who were labelled fools during the early modern period from the oppression of terminology…

I would like to give just one of all these fools to be considered as an individual and thus to see whether after that he remains just a fool or is something more complex and, perhaps in turn, makes the word “fool” more complex.

All of the evidence that Andersson assembles about Will Somer is circumstantial, and all of his findings are tentative and makeshift.

For instance, he recounts a story of Will Somer saying that a particular bishop had a great bass voice and gave a base sermon. The fool is using the same sounding (and, at the time, same spelled) word with two meanings.

Is that the phrase of a clever artificial fool using a play on words to criticize one of his betters?  Andersson doesn’t think so:

It is reminiscent of the way a child might use a word in the wrong way, being oblivious to how it could be found humorous by an adult, and it is implied here that Somer did not himself understand that he had made a gaffe.

 

“Private joke”

Andersson writes that, based on his researches, Will Somer “was an unassuming and uneducated man, with a willingness to rant that frequently revealed his lack of learning in relation to others at court.” He was a fixture at royal palaces, in part, because he represented the world of commoners.

His discourse clearly amused and allowed his addressees the luxury of feeling both superior to this simpleminded man and an affinity (real or feigned) with the coarse and earthy nature of people outside the corridors of power.

Most likely, you had to be there.  The writers who report his sayings seem to ride on a wave of appreciation of a private joke that cannot really be told out of context.

The fool, it seems, was often sleepy and was likely to fall asleep in odd places, such as on a stile over a wall or in a basket of spaniels. Will Somer, Andersson writes, “comes across…as a sort of charm for the court, a harmless presence who infuses a perhaps much-needed slice of tranquility to court life through his incessant idleness and ability to sleep anywhere.”

 

A kind of mirror

Andersson never says directly that Will Somer was a natural fool, but that seems to be the weight of his evidence.

Will Somer, he writes, was a kind of mascot, a kind of pet, an utterer of “involuntary bon mots,” a human conversation piece, “a passive agent made into a source of laughter or a symbol of something only by others.”

If he had an impact on the court and the king, it was one of showing them occasional glimpses of a person who did not behave as they did or according to courtly customs, who spoke like a man from the world outside, and who gave them momentary tastes of vernacular speech and unlettered lines of reasoning. Most times this would have made them laugh or sneer, but his endurance and behavior also aroused their sympathy and affection.

To the king and the court, Will Somer could have functioned, Andersson suggests, as a kind of mirror, a human being like them and not like them. But only if they wanted to look.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

7.16.26