by Lorie Lewis Ham & Jeri Westerson
This week we have a review of the latest A King’s Fool Mystery by Jeri Westerson, along with an interesting guest post from Jeri about her main character. Details at the end of this post on how to win an ebook copy of the book and a link to purchase it from Amazon.
The Twilight Queen by Jeri Westerson
Review by Lorie Lewis Ham
I have been a big fan of Jeri Westerson’s writing ever since I picked up my first Crispin Guest book many years ago, and she has never disappointed me. She always tells a great story with complex and interesting characters and goes all out with her research for her historical mysteries.
The Twilight Queen is the second book in her A King’s Fool mystery series. The main character in this series is Will Somers, Henry VIII’s jester—who was a real person, but Jeri adds to the character to flesh him out. Another KRL reviewer reviewed the first book in this series, Courting Dragons (you can click here to go read that review), but I will say I didn’t feel the least bit lost reading book two without having read the first one.
This book is set in London in 1536. The current Queen of England, Anne Boleyn, is in peril and calls on Will late at night for his help. There is the body of a man in her quarters, and she has no idea how it got there or who it is. Is someone trying to frame her? Her position in court is not good as Henry now has eyes for another, and some are not happy with how Anne became Queen. Will recently helped solve a murder, so that and the fact that she trusts him is why the Queen called on him for help. Though Will is now married and loves his wife dearly, he also has his own secrets to hide (though I loved how not from his wife)—he enjoys the company of men as well, and there is one new handsome courtier named Nicholas Pachett on the scene who has definitely caught his attention and vise versa. Were he to be caught…
Can Will once again save the day without losing his own life?
Jeri is masterful at bringing other time periods to life with such amazing accuracy and details—and yet not in a way that bogs things down or slows the pace of the mystery. She artfully blends real history with fiction. Last year my son was in a play called A Man For All Seasons about the way that Anne became Queen, so it was also fascinating for me to meet all these characters I had seen in the play.
As usual, Jeri doesn’t disappoint. She gives the reader a fascinating story, great characters, and a mystery filled with plenty of twists and turns. I loved the book, and adore Will. I especially loved his relationship with his wife and Nicholas and hope we get to see much more of that in the next book! I can’t wait to go back and read the first book!
What’s It Like To Be A Jester
By Jeri Westerson
In the second of my King’s Fool Mystery series, The Twilight Queen, Will Somers, Henry VIII’s real court jester, finds himself called upon to use his skills to solve murders.
But this was my conceit, 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 with 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. They were 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, 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 there 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.” 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 near the monarch’s. 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. Coins he’d be given if he entertained the king well, and by others of the court, but his room, board, and keeping were 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 Will 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, 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 jibe 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 of him.
If you 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, 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, speaking truth to power, navigating the fraught politics of the day, and solving the occasional puzzling murder.
Here are a couple of fun videos to check out as well:
And an amusing short video:
youtu.be/emIuXZYCK6A?si=AvbcvBZ4qy_3Amag
And the series video:
youtu.be/hN7hjEy193o?si=-mW0qI8ZnrSldMBp
To enter to win an ebook copy of The Twilight Queen, simply email KRL at krlcontests@gmail[dot]com by replacing the [dot] with a period, and with the subject line “twilight” or comment on this article. A winner will be chosen February 10, 2024. U.S. residents only, and you must be 18 or older to enter. You can read our privacy statement here if you like.
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Thanks for that review, Lorie!
You are welcome!
This is an excellent series! Count me in!
We have a winner!