All the King’s Fools
The fools of the early Tudor court were likely to have been people with learning disabilities as a new project demonstrates, says Suzannah Lipscomb.
At Hampton Court Palace there is a beautiful painting dating from 1545 that shows Henry VIII with his long-dead, favourite wife, Jane Seymour, his son Edward and his daughters Mary and Elizabeth. There are two other figures, strikingly framed by the two archways in the wings. One is a man in red hose with cropped ginger hair, who has a monkey poised to check his head for lice. He can be identified as William Somer, the king’s fool. The bald woman on the left, whose attention has been gripped by something in the distance, is probably ‘Jane the Fool’, fool to Anne Boleyn, Princess Mary and Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and actual wife at the time. Their inclusion in this royal dynastic portrait suggests that fools had a distinct, privileged and vital role to play at the Tudor court.
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