Chapter VI: Part 6

“Will Sommers, born in Shropshire, as some say,
Was brought to Greenwich, on a holiday,--
Presented to the King;--which fool disdain’d
To shake him by the hand, or was ashamed.
Howe’er it was; as ancient people say,
With much ado was won to it that day.
Lean he was, hollow-eyed, as all report,
And stoop he did too; yet in all the court,
Few men were more beloved than was this fool,
Whose merry prate kept with the King much rule.
When he was sad the King with him would rhyme;
Thus Will exilëd sadness many a time.
I could describe him, as I did the rest,
But in my mind, I do not think it best;
My reason this, howe’er I do descry him,
So many knew him, that I may belie him;
Therefore, to please all people, one by one,
I hold it best to let that pains alone;
Only this much:--He was a poor man’s friend,
And help’d the widow often in her end.
The King would ever grant what he did crave,
For well he knew Will no exacting knave;
But wish’d the King to do good deeds great store,
Which caused the court to love him more and more.”

Will seems to have been contemporary with Saxton, or Sexton, a fool of some notoriety at the Tudor’s Court, from the circumstance of his being the first jester who wore a wig. There is an entry from the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chambers, quoted in the Archæologia, to the following effect:--“Paid for Saxton, the King’s fool, for a wig, 20_s._” Is it not possible that this jester may have assumed this mode in order to ridicule the new fashion of the ladies, who had now, for the first time in England, adopted the wig--which English lords had begun to wear as early as the reign of Stephen? However this may be, the above is all we know of Saxton in his capacity of fool to Henry. How Sommers looked at Court, the following entry will sufficiently show:--“For making a doublet of worsted, lined with canvass and cotton, for William Som’ers, our fool. Item, for making of a coat and a cap of green cloth, fringed with red crape and lined with frieze, for our said fool. Item, for making of a doublet of fustian, lined with cotton and canvass, for our said fool. For making of a coat of green cloth, with hood to the same, fringed with white and lined with frieze and buckram, for our fool aforesaid.”

In this suit and office, Will’s reputation so stirred Shropshire, that his old uncle trudged up to town to visit him at court. The uncle was no ill man to look at, for when the “kinde old man,” as Armin calls him, entered Greenwich, and on asking the way to the palace, was laughed at by saucy pages, who directed him across the water to Blackwall, others pitied his simplicity, and had respect for a man “with a buttoned cap, a lockram falling band (coarse but clean), a russet coat, a white belt of a horse-hide (right horse-collar, white leather), a close round breech of russet sheep’s-wool, with a long stock of white kersey, a high shoe with yellow buckles, all white with dust,--for that day, the good old man had come three-and-twenty miles on foot.” Lusty old yeoman! How much more respectable than the flaunting “gard and gentlewomen in their windows,” who “had much sport” to see him pass on his way. But the old man thought his nephew as good as any of them, and, with dignified self-possession, inquires,--“if there be not a gentleman in the court dwelling, called by the name of Master Will Sommers.” This was giving Will a high position, but it was recognized; and the old uncle was led to Will, who was taking an afternoon sleep in the park, with his head on a cushion supplied by a woman whose son, addicted to the gentle pursuit of piracy, Will saved from the hangman and the gallows at Blackwall. After a little fooling and much hearty greeting, Will took his uncle by the hand: “Come,” says he, “thou shalt see Harry, Cockle,--the only Harry in England;” so he led him to the chamber of presence, and ever and anon cries out, “Awere! room for me and my uncle! and, knaves, bid him welcome!” This was done, perhaps, with a little mock gravity, but Armin tells us that “the old man thought himself no earthly man, they honoured him so much.”

Will, however, paused awhile, for he saw his uncle’s country suit, pronounced it unfit for the King’s presence, and, telling the old man that he must first don a full court-dress, Will takes him to his chamber, and attires him in his best fool’s suit, cap and all. The simple old man simply wore the costume, and when the two stood before the King, Harry laughed at the ridiculous spectacle. The old man, and Will too, seem to have had some purpose in the whole affair, for when the King encouraged them to talk, the uncle bade Will tell him all about Tirrell’s Frith,--a common, of the use of which the Shropshire poor had been deprived by Master Tirrell, who had enclosed it. The King was so interested that he gave orders that the common should be thrown open again; and thereby the sturdy old uncle had not his long walk for nothing, seeing also that, when he returned to his native county, “he, while he lived, for that deed was allowed bayly of the common, which place was worth twenty pound a year.”

Of Will’s power to please the King in his moody moments, we have specimens in certain questions put, and indeed answered, by the fool. He put them, as the fool of the play does, “with an anticke look, to please the beholders;” for example, “What is it, that the lesser it is, the more it is to be feared?”--which proves to be, “a little bridge over a deep river,” at which the King “_smiled_.” At more foolish riddles, the King “_laught_;” and at others, which cannot possibly be set down here, we are told that “the King laught _heartily, and was exceeding merry_.” For being made so merry, Harry promised Will any favour he might ask; Will undertook to apply when he had grace to petition. “One day I _shall_,” said he, “for every man sees his latter end, but knows not his beginning.” And with this jester’s quip, Will took his leave and went away, “and laid him down among the spaniels to sleep.”

Will was but scantily in favour with Cardinal Wolsey, whom he once mulcted of ten pounds. He had entered the King’s private apartment when the Sovereign and the Cardinal were together; and Will apologized for the intrusion by saying, that some of his Eminence’s creditors were at the door, and wanted to be paid their due. Wolsey declared he would forfeit his head if he owed a man a penny; but he gave Will ten pounds, on his promise to pay it where it was due. When Will returned, he exclaimed, “To whom dost thou owe thy soul, Cardinal?” “To God,” was the reply. “And thy wealth?” “To the poor.” At which, Will declared the Cardinal’s head forfeit to the King. “For,” said he, “to the poor at the gate I paid the debt, which he yields is due.” The King laughed, and the Cardinal feigned to be merry, “but it grieved him to give away ten pounds so; yet worse tricks than this Will Sommers served him after, for indeed he (the Cardinal) could never abide him.”

Will was not above human infirmities; he was jealous, like greater men at court, and especially when a rival fool vied with him to gain smiles and moidores from the King. We have an instance in the case when “a jester, a big man, of a great voice, long black locks, and a very big round beard,” was juggling and jesting before the King. Armin tells us, that “lightly one fool cannot endure the sight of another;” and Will, angry at his huge rival, sought to recover his supremacy by dashing a bowl of bread and milk over the head, eyes, and beard of his titanic rival. “This lusty jester, forgetting himself in fury, draws his dagger, and begins to protest. ‘Nay,’ says the King, ‘are ye so hot?’ claps him fast; and though he draws his dagger here, makes him put it up in another place. The poor abused jester was jested out of countenance, and lay in durance a great while, till Will Sommers was fain (after he broke his head, to give him a plaister,) to get him out again. But never after came my juggler in the Court more so near the King, being such a man to draw in the presence of the King;” who (after all) could not have been mortally stricken, seeing that jesters carried only daggers of lath; but probably the act itself was considered a bad example and a serious offence.

Of the generous feeling of Will, there is a well-known instance recited in Grainger; according to which it would appear, that in early life Will had been a servant in the family of a Northamptonshire gentleman named Richard Farmor or Fermor. This gentleman was of a compassionate spirit, and hearing of a destitute priest incarcerated in the gaol at Buckingham for denying the King’s supremacy, the kind gentleman sent him a couple of shirts and eightpence. This small but acceptable and praiseworthy charity entirely ruined the donor. It laid him open to a charge of _præmunire_; and for giving a change of linen and the price of a meal to a captive Papist, the King confiscated this Fermor’s estates, and reduced him to beggary and starvation. Will found opportunity to serve his old master, but not till death was pressing hard upon the King, and making his heart also something less tough and obdurate than it was wont to be. The fool improved his opportunity, and leaving to others to bid the sick monarch repent of his sins, hinted that it would be a better joke if he were to make reparation for them. The fool’s divinity was not so contemptible, for it worked on the dying King, “who,” says Mr. Thoms, in a note to Mr. Collier’s reprint of the ‘Nest of Ninnies,’ “caused the remains of Fermor’s estate, which had been dismembered, to be restored to him.”

The tracts and plays of succeeding years found purchasers or spectators because they reproduced Sommers in his jests, gait, dress, and manners. Rowland has him in his ‘Good and Bad News;’ Rowley, in his chronicle play, ‘When you see me you know me;’ and Nash, in his ‘Summers’ Last Will and Testament.’ From these sources, no indifferent idea may be gained of the once famous Will. The incidents of Rowland’s poem are to be found in Rowley’s play. The latter, printed in 1605, is a chronicle play, including the years 1537–1546, the last year being the one before Henry’s death. It abounds with anachronisms, but also with illustrations of the manner in which Sommers lived at court, how he joked with the King, capped rhymes with their Majesties, and was sometimes anything but decent in his jokes. At his first appearance, Will enters the presence “at Whitehall,” booted and spurred, upon which the following dialogue takes place:--

“_K._ Why, where hast thou been?

_W._ Marry, I rise early, and ride post to London, to know what news was here at Court.

_K._ Was that your nearest way, William?

_W._ Oh, ay, the very foot-path, but yet I rid the horse-way to hear it. I warrant there is ne’er a Cundid-head keeper in London, but knows what is done in all the courts in Christendom.

_Wols._ And what is the best news there, William?

_W._ Good news for you, my Lord Cardinal, for one of the old women water-bearers told me for certain, that last Friday, all the bells in Rome rang backward; there was a thousand dirges sung; six hundred Ave-Marias said; every man washed his face in holy water; the people crossing and blessing themselves to send them a new Pope, for the old is gone to purgatory.... The news,” adds Will, “after leaving Rome last Friday, was at Billingsgate by Saturday morning; ’twas a full moon, and came up in a spring-tide.”

Queen Jane is represented as looking “bigger” upon the jester; “But I care not,” says Will to the King, “an she bring thee a young prince, Will Sommers mayhaps be his fool when you two are both dead and rotten.” “Do you hear, wenches?” he subsequently says to the maids of honour, likely to be anxious to announce the issue of the event alluded to. “She that brings the first tidings, however it fall out, let her be sure to say that the child’s like the father, or else she shall have no reward.”

Will is described as extravagantly free, not only to the maids of honour, but to the King’s sister. Patch, in this piece, is not the King’s fool, but Wolsey’s. “All the fools follow you, my lord,” he says to the Cardinal, when the latter observes the two fools near him: “I come to bid my cousin Patch welcome to court; and when I come to York House, he’ll do as much for me.” To which Patch, who seems here a natural rather then an artificial fool, replies, “Yes, cousin; hey, da, darry, diddel, day, day.” Will’s attempts to make the King merry are sometimes roughly recompensed. “He gave me such a box on the ear,” says the fool, “that strake me clean through three chambers, down four pair of stairs. I fell over five barrels in the bottom of the cellar, and if I had not well liquored myself there, I had never lived after it.” Patch, too, declares that the King had almost killed him “_with his countenance_.” This sort of fool’s flattery has been very acceptable, it may be observed, to all despotic princes, from Augustus down to the Czar Nicholas. The most amusing of Roman historians tells us that Augustus was always well pleased with those persons who, in addressing him, looked upon the ground, as though there were a divine splendour in his eyes, too dazzling for them to gaze upon. “Gaudiebatque,” says Suetonius, “si quis sibi acrius contuenti, quasi ad fulgorem solis, vultum submitteret.” His eyes nevertheless grew dim as he grew old, when the lustre of the left one, in particular, went out in a most ungodlike fashion.

The Czar Nicholas had a similar weakness, and he used his eyes to frighten or fascinate people. Playing them mildly, he subdued Lieutenant Royer into ecstatic admiration; and, according to Mr. Turnerelli, Nicholas once, with one of his terrible glances, terrified a Swedish Admiral into the Russian service. On another occasion, happening to encounter a poor fellow who had strolled into a private part of the Imperial park, the Czar gazed at him with such lightning in his glance, that the intruder was stricken with brain fever;--an amount of flattery which even Patch never piled up as tribute to the withering power of the terrible looks of Henry VIII. Patch indeed had cause to be afraid of Henry, for his rude essay to make the melancholy Monarch merry, is rewarded by a kicking; for which, however, the King makes compensation. Patch gets an angel, to buy him points; but Will, who contrived that his cousin fool should incur the punishment, obtains a new cap and suit for his pains; for, sayeth he, “so long as the King lives, the Cardinal’s fool must give way to the King’s fool.” But in the latter there is some sound sense, as, for instance, when he exclaims: “Dost hear, old Harry, I am sure the true faith is able to defend itself, without thee!” For some such remark, Wolsey styles him “a shrewd fool.” Will is ready to do anything but flatter, which is against his vocation; and get drunk, which is against his health; but he no sooner declines to follow Patch to the cellar, when he foregoes his resolution, and foolishly drinks away his wit, but sleeps it back again.

Its awakening is first tried on the new Queen Catherine; and it is in the accomplished jester’s vein. “Look to thy husband, Kate, lest he cozen thee; provide civil oranges enough, or he’ll have a lemon, shortly.” This play upon the word _leman_, or “mistress,” was subsequently employed by Heywood, the “King’s Jester,” to point a jest made in the hearing of Queen Mary. Will, however, is much more addicted to uttering bitter sentences against Wolsey, than jokes on the King, Queen, or little Prince Edward. He is especially severe on the “Smoake pence,” a most unpopular tax levied by the priest, and turned, as Will implies, to the Cardinal’s especial profit. The jester proposes to the King, that Wolsey shall be permitted to take the chimneys, since there were bricks enough in the land, or materials for them, to build others. But he protests against the coin of the realm being carried away, seeing, as he says, that there is no mint whence new money can be issued. Indeed nothing can exceed the boldness of Will’s jokes against the Cardinal, except the nastiness of those levelled at the ladies. Both are doubtless traditional, and we may believe that they were uttered with impunity, from the stereotyped speech of the King, “Well, William, your tongue is privileged.”

Sommers was also brought upon the stage by Nash, in his ‘Summers’ Last Will and Testament.’ This piece was written in 1593, and printed some years later. There were then persons living who may have remembered Will, as having seen him in their youth; and what is said of him personally in this piece, may be accepted, I think, as having some foundation in fact. The incidents spoken of connected with his life at court, may also rest upon a basis of truth, and are therefore worth noticing. Nash’s play is more like a masque than a comedy, and Rowley’s chronicle-drama abounds in anachronisms. The probable facts, however, are only mistimed, and both dramatists agree, in the main, in the character of Will, “who,” says Mr. Thoms, in the reprint of the ‘Nest of Ninnies,’ “in all probability owes his reputation rather to the uniform kindness with which he used his influence over bluff Harry, than to his wit or folly.”

In the dramatic portrait, then, of this once famous court fool, as limned by Nash, we find Will describing himself as “used to go without money, without garters, without girdle, without a hatband, without points to my hose, and without a knife to my dinner.” As in Rowley, so here, Will quotes Latin; he is also apt at old proverbs, and verbose with old classical stories and tales, in which there are more words, however, than wit. His Latin, indeed, is not always to the point, for he translates _memento mori_, “Remember to rise betimes in the morning;” nor are his classical stories true to historical tradition, nor his tales remarkable for delicacy of illustration. He has a simpleton’s philosophy, and talks little matters of science very much after the fashion of ‘Conversations at Home.’ He has, too, a fool’s contempt for learning, as may be seen in the following passage, which contains some allusions to his early life:--

“Who would be a scholar? not I, I promise you! My mind always gave me this learning was such a filthy thing, which made me hate it so as I did. When I should have been at school construing _Batte mi fili, mi fili mi Batte_, I was close under a hedge, or under a barn wall, playing at span-counter or Jack-in-a-box. My master beat me, my father beat me, my mother gave me bread and butter, yet all this would not make me a squitter-book. It was my destiny. I thank her as a most courteous goddess, that she hath not cast me away upon gibberish;” and so on, with a diatribe against the divisions of grammar, and parts of speech generally, as forming a portion of “the devil’s Pater-noster.” And yet, out of the accidence, he coins almost his only fragment of wit throughout a play in which he enacts the character of “Chorus.” “Verba dandi et reddendi,” says Will, “go together in the grammar rule; there is no giving but with condition of restoring.” Altogether we obtain fewer ideas of what Will may have been, from Nash, than from Rowley. The former makes him less attractive, and when the jester closes the piece with a “_Valete spectatores_, pay for this sport with a _Plaudite_, and the next time the wind blows from this corner, we will make you ten times as merry,”--we are glad to rejoin, _vale et tu_, and to get away without paying the price asked for sport which, had it been ten times as merry as is vouched for the next play, would not have sinned with excess of mirthfulness.

It only remains for me to add, that Will survived to hold office under Edward VI. How he sustained his reputation during a portion of the six years’ reign of that young monarch, I am unable to inform my readers. The only trace I have found of him is in a paper by Bray, in the eighteenth volume of the ‘Archæologia,’ from which we learn, according to a citation from the household expenses, that the sum of twelvepence was paid “for painting Will Somers’ garments.”

Before proceeding to the next reign, I will take this opportunity to narrate an anecdote of the learned and skilful diplomatist, Pace,--not because he was the namesake of Pace, the “bitter fool” of Queen Elizabeth’s days, but because the anecdote itself has reference to subjects from which Henry could draw amusement, and that there is an illustration in it, in connection with the court jesters.

Pace, we are told, in the collection of letters to and from Erasmus (Basle, 1558), was once in the church at Woodstock, with the King and court, when the Franciscan monk who preached, confined himself in his sermon to denouncing the Greek language, and devoting to destruction all who studied it. The choice of such a subject, and the manner in which it was treated, were the more remarkable, as, a short time previously, a Franciscan monk had been silenced for preaching in the same sense. The Oxford students had hooted him in his cell, and the authorities had to interfere. The King had written to the heads of colleges in favour of the study of Greek; and his amazement was all the more unbounded at the audacity of the new monk, who went even further in his wrath against Greek than the Jewish Rabbis, who were wont to solemnly pronounce accursed the man who allowed his children to learn that language. If the King was enraged, the grave and learned Pace, who sat near him, was delighted. He did not dare exhibit his ecstasy; but he was so overcome with a propensity to burst out laughing, that he was compelled to bury his face in both hands, to conceal his strong and risible emotion. He was rather bolder when Henry subsequently ordered the monk to attend him in his closet, where the king pelted him with questions and menaces, and nearly frightened him out of his senses. The poor preacher had been abusing Erasmus without having read his works. He had, however, as he tremblingly remarked, “cast his eye over some pages of the ‘Eulogy of Folly.’” “Ah,” said Pace, “I really believe that the work was especially written with a view to your reverence.” The monk meekly smiled. He had not heart enough to confront the scholar, but he had sense enough to creep out of the difficulty into which he had fallen. He confessed himself to be reconciled with Greek from the sudden conviction which had descended upon him, that it was derived from the Hebrew. King and courtiers present burst into loud laughter at this sapient observation, under shelter of which the speaker was allowed to withdraw in safety. Pace declared that the monk had wit enough to make the fortune of a court jester; for if it did not save him from getting into a scrape, it certainly was strong enough to draw him out of one.

Having mentioned the faithful fool of Cardinal Wolsey,--Patch,--I cannot pass over the simpleton, or Morio, Patteson, retained in the household of Wolsey’s successor in the Chancellorship, Sir Thomas More. All persons who are familiar with the biography of the latter eminent individual, will remember how heartily Sir Thomas, from his youth upwards, was addicted to jesting. When he was a page, being then fifteen years of age, in the family of Cardinal Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, he kept the octogenarian prelate and all his guests in roars of laughter, as he waited on them at table. Morton was delighted with the frolicsome boy, who, especially at Christmas and other joyous seasons, was worth any number of ordinary household fools, seeing that his improvised jests were superior to anything done or uttered by the professional joker. More’s manner on these occasions was, however, quite after the fashion of “cousin Motley.” Thus, when the players were representing some comic drama, for the entertainment of their reverend patron, “young More,” as Roper relates in his Life, “would suddenly step up among the players, and, never studying before upon the matter, make often a part of his own invention which was so witty, and so full of jests, that he alone made more sport than all the players besides; for which, his towardliness, the Cardinal much delighted in him, and would often say of him to divers of the nobility who at sundry times dined with him, ‘This child here, waiting at the table, whosoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous rare man.’” As More, in his youth, gratified Cardinal Morton by his wit, so, in his manhood, by his wit as well as his wisdom, he afforded amusement to his capricious Sovereign. When Henry had had enough of the outpouring of knowledge from More (who was yet but Under-Sheriff of London _and_ Master of the Requests) on astronomy, geometry, and divinity; then, “because,” says his biographer, “he was of a very pleasant disposition, it pleased His Majesty and the Queen, after the Council had supped, commonly to call for him to hear his pleasant jests.” These latter must have been of a very different quality from those which the King had been wont to make merry with from the lips of Will Sommers, and we cannot be surprised at their exciting such admiration in the Sovereign that he detained the illustrious jester whole weeks at Court, away from his home and domestic enjoyments. Sir Thomas beheld himself in great peril of descending to the vocation of joker in ordinary, and he devised a witty remedy in order to escape the uncoveted distinction. “When Sir Thomas perceived his pleasant conceits so much to delight them that he could scarce once in a month get leave to go home to his wife and children, and that he could not be two days absent from the Court, but he must be sent for again; he, much misliking this restraint of his liberty, began therefore to dissemble his mirth, and so, little by little, to disuse himself, that he from henceforth, in such seasons, was no more so ordinarily sent for.” In short, he feigned heaviness of humour, that he might escape the honours paid to, and the services expected from, a court jester. Had any friend expressed astonishment at the change in his bearing, More might have excused himself nearly in the words of the essayist, who said:--“If my readers should at any time remark that I am particularly dull, they may be assured there is a design under it.”

So More contrived for awhile to be more at home, where he had a wife who missed all the points of his puns, and a household fool who had about as much wit as his mistress. The latter was one Patteson, an ex-mummer, half crazed by a fall from a church-steeple, who had lost his old itinerant vocation, and whom More took into his family, poor, shabby, droll fellow as he was, and amused himself, after application to high subjects, by listening to his small wit, even as a man may take now and then to small-beer after too hot and long an acquaintance with ruddy Vin de Beaune.

Patteson founded his desire to be a household fool, on the very sufficient ground that, as he was already laughed at for one, he thought he might as well be hired in a great family, where he should be paid, fed, and lodged for being thus the object of risibility. Sir Thomas answered, that he had had little thought of employing such a retainer, being rather inclined to do all the fooling in his family, himself. The great negotiation, however, was brought to a conclusion by a compromise; the business was to be divided, Sir Thomas continuing unlicensed joker, and Patteson being paid full salary for inoffensive small wit, cleanliness of life, and restraint of his tongue before ladies.

Patteson was not an educated jester, like Scogan and other great wearers of the cap and bells under the roofs of kings. He could not read. “But what of that?” he is said to have asked; “there never was but one that I ever heard of, that never having learned, knew his letters, and well _he_ might, for he made them that made them.” The witty remark deserved to procure for Patteson his desired engagement; and this he had no sooner procured, than he affected to take precedence of his master, in his own house; “for,” said he, “you, brother, are but jester to King Harry, whereas _I_ am jester to Sir Thomas More; and I leave you to determine which is the greater man of the two.”

Patteson occasionally went abroad with his master, probably attending him as his servant, which was often one of the offices of fools. The license of the latter also went abroad with the service of the former, and we are told that once, after he had been many years in More’s service, he attended his master, or at all events was present, at a dinner given in Guildhall, when the conversation fell upon More’s refusal to take the oath of supremacy. The conversation of the guests was interrupted by a query of the fool:--“Why, what aileth him,” cried Patteson, “that he will not swear? Wherefore should he stick to swear? I have sworn the oath myself.”

Lord Campbell quotes another illustration of the license of this jester, from ‘Il Moro’, an Italian account of Sir Thomas More, printed at Florence, and dedicated to Cardinal Pole. The incident is supposed to be narrated by the Chancellor himself, and Lord Campbell is of opinion that it does not give us “a very exalted notion of the merriment caused by these simpletons.” Perhaps we might more correctly say, that the incident fails to convey a very elevated idea of the wit that raised the merriment. However this may be, here is the _trait_ in question:--

“Yesterday, while we were dining, Pattison” (so is the name here spelt) “seeing a guest with a very large nose, said, there was one at table who had been trading to the _Promontory of Noses_. All eyes were turned to the great nose, though we discreetly preserved silence, that the good man might not be abashed. Pattison, perceiving the mistake he had made, tried to set himself right, and said, ‘He lies who says the gentleman’s nose is large, for, on the faith of a true knight, it is rather a small one.’ At this, all being inclined to laugh, I made signs for the fool to be turned out of the room; but Pattison, who boasted that he brought every affair that he commenced to a happy conclusion, resisted, and, placing himself in my seat at the head of the table, said aloud, with my tone and gesture, ‘There is one thing I would have you to know,--that gentleman there has not the least bit of nose on his face.’”

This sort of sparring between patron and jester was commonly indulged in with considerable satisfaction by both parties. It was safer for More to do so, by way of relaxation, with Patteson, than with the King; whose humour might take a deadly turn against an unwelcome joke, and particularly against an unlicensed joker. The authoress of ‘The Household of Sir Thomas More,’ following the tradition, describes the banter of Sir Thomas and Sir Witless, as never exceeding the bounds of good-humoured pleasantry; “but Patteson,” it is added, “is never without an answer, and although, it may be, each amuses himself now and then with thinking, I’ll put him up with such a question; yet, once begun, the skein runs off the reel without a knot, and shows the excellent nature of both, so free are they alike from malice and over-license.” It is true that the sayings put in the mouth of More’s “_Morio_” by the authoress whose words I have just quoted, are for the most part as apocryphal as Borde’s compiled jests to which he has prefixed the name of “Scoggin,” to make them sell. The character of the fool is, however, described according to tradition, in the pleasant addition to the Romance of History, in the work last named. There we see Patteson, with a peacock’s feather in his hand, sitting astride on a balustrade, and exchanging sharp question and answer, and lively comment and reflection, on peacocks themselves and their vanity; and on the advantages of not having as many eyes in their heads as they have in their tails, as they are in consequence less vain-glorious, and see not what passes behind their backs. Patteson, according to this authoress, chopped logic with the young daughters of More; touched a little on sentimental matters; could speak feelingly of religion, death, and the equality of the grave; spoke prophetically on political subjects; and jested with them, or rather at them, on their several lovers.

Lord Campbell naturally suggests, that More’s fool ought to have been a great proficient at jesting, since he practised under so great a master. However this may be, when the Lord Chancellor had commenced to decline from power and dignity, he provided for the future well-being of his fool as carefully as he did for that of any greater officer of his household. Wolsey, at _his_ fall, sent Patch as an acceptable gift to the King. More made over Patteson to a less exalted sovereign,--the Lord Mayor of the City of London, “with a stipulation,” says Lord Campbell, “that he should continue to serve the office of fool to the Lord Mayor for the time being.” This rather loosely-worded phrase probably points at the origin of the office of “Lord Mayor’s Fool,” a title which was, however, given to the clubmen in provincial mayoral processions from the year 1444. Whether Patteson was, or was not, the original Lord Mayor’s Fool, by right of nomination to the office, he had as little respect for the dignity of chief magistrate of the city, as any modern merchant prince who, being too lazy or too unpatriotic to perform the onerous duty of the office, affects to despise the dignity which accompanies, and the titles which often follow, a distinguished fulfilment of that duty. So this first official corporation jester flouted his sublime chief. His humour in this respect is well hinted at by the authoress of ‘The Household of Sir Thomas More,’ who depicts Patteson as saying, on one first of April, “I told my Lord Mayor overnight, that if he looked for a fool this morning, he must look in the glass.... I should by rights wear the gold chain, and he the motley; and a proper fool he is, and I shall be glad when his year’s service to me is out. The worst of these Lord Mayors is, that we can’t part with them till their time’s up. Why, now, this present one hath not so much understanding as would foot an old stocking; ’twas but yesterday when, in quality of my Taster, he civilly enough makes over to me a half-eaten plate of gurnet, which I wave aside thus, saying,--I eat no fish of which I cannot affirm, ‘_rari sunt boni_,’ few are the bones, ... and I protest to you, he knew it not for fool’s Latin.” Patteson himself had a veneration for his old master which he could not entertain for the new, from whose chattering propensity at table, the jester picked out views of politics that foreboded evil to his former and now disgraced patron. “For the love of safety, then, Mistress Meg,” says Patteson, in a passage founded on this stray scrap of history, “bid thy good father e’en take a fool’s advice, and eat humble-pie betimes; for doubt not this proud madame (Anne Boleyn) to be as vindictive as Herodias, and one that, unless he appease her full early, will have his head set before her in a charger. I’ve said my say.”

We may take Patteson at his last word, and, leaving him, proceed to greater names than his on the register of Motley in the service of kings.

* * * * *

We now come to a personage of some celebrity, who seems to have been a court jester, without being exactly a court fool. I allude to John Heywood, of North Mimms, in Hertfordshire, whom Sir Thomas More introduced to the King as Sir William Neville did Scogan, and whose introduction was followed by similar circumstances,--his appointment as “jester” to the sovereign.

More had known Heywood early. The latter was a student at what was then called Broadgate, Oxford, now Pembroke. Heywood’s spirit of fun, his humour, and his readiness at repartee made him a favourite with More, who was fond of spending leisure hours with him,--a man of whom it was said that “he had wit at will, and art was all he missed.” Heywood, moreover, was a good vocalist, and no mean instrumental player. Previous to his introduction to the King, More presented him to the lady (afterwards Queen) Mary, who found his merriment so irresistible “that it moved even her rigid muscles,” says Warton; “and her sullen solemnity was not proof against his songs, his rhymes, and his jests.” Mary, however, was more easily moved to mirth than Warton and those whose opinions were followed by him, suspected. Even in her womanhood, when we are accustomed to think of her as one solemnly severe, she could (albeit moody and melancholy at times) laugh heartily at a mountebank. In 1556, Strype speaks of her as holding a grand military review in Greenwich Park, at which “came a tumbler, and played many pretty feats, the Queen and Cardinal (Pole) looking on; whereat she was observed to laugh heartily.” Long ere she had ascended the throne, she had learned to laugh at, with, or through John Heywood. Of the latter, Warton says that “he was beloved and rewarded by Henry VIII. for his buffooneries;” and, indeed, that monarch was so satisfied with the quips of his daughter’s favourite, that, as previously stated, he named John “King’s Jester.” He seems to have been a favourite also in the mansions and at the tables of the nobility; and a specimen of his wit there is offered us by Puttenham.

“The following happened,” he says, “on a time, at the Duke of Northumberland’s board, where merry John Heywood was allowed to sit at the board’s end. The Duke had a very noble and honourable mind to pay his debts well, and when he lacked money, would not stick to sell the greatest part of his plate. So had he done some few days before.

“Heywood being loath to call for his drink as often as he was dry, turned his eyes towards the cupboard, and said, ‘I find a great miss of your Grace’s standing-cups.’ The Duke, thinking that he had spoken it of some knowledge that his plate was lately sold, said somewhat sharply, ‘Why, Sir, will not _these_ cups serve so good a man as yourself?’ Heywood readily replied, ‘Yes, if it please your Grace, but I would have one of them stand still at my elbow, full of drink, that I might not be driven to trouble your man so often to call for it.’

“This pleasant and speedy reverse of the former words, helped all the matter again, whereby the Duke became very pleasant, and drank a bottle of wine to Heywood, and bade a cup should always be standing by him.”

His boldness with the Queen was quite that of the privileged jester, and he was recompensed for his puns and conceits when men more meritorious were neglected. The following contains good proof of his license. When the Queen once remarked to him that the priests must forego their wives, John exclaimed (and he was a very strict Catholic too), “Then your Grace must allow them _lemmans_ [sweethearts], for the clergy cannot live without _sauce_.” This epigrammatic turn was very strong upon him; and indeed many of his epigrams, of which he was the author of hundreds, are said to have been versifications of his own jokes. I have already noticed the audacity of his jests with the sovereign, a further instance of which we have in an incident connected with one of his visits to the palace.

“Now, Master Heywood,” said Mary on the occasion in question, “what wind blew you to court?” “There were two,” answered audacious John; “one, that I might see your Majesty, and the other, that your Majesty might see me.” When he was told that a certain Master of Arts had assumed the ordinary attire of the court fool, “There is no great harm in that,” remarked Heywood, “he is merely a wise man in a fool’s coat; the evil is, when the fool puts over his motley the wise man’s gown.”--“How do you like my beer?” asked a host of him, “is it not well hopped?” “So well,” said Heywood, “that had it hopped a little further, it would have hopped into water.” This reminds me of a far wittier saying by a brighter English wit than Heywood--the late Douglas Jerrold; and which is better worth recording. At an hotel at Hastings, Jerrold was dining with two friends, one of whom, after dinner, ordered among other pleasant things, “a bottle of _old_ port.” “Waiter,” said Douglas, with that twinkle of the eye which was always a promise of wit, “Mind, now; a bottle of your _old_ port, not your _elder_ port.” Heywood never equalled _that_, though he gave utterance to as many witty thoughts as the wittiest man of his time. Among them was his remark, to a person complaining that the great number of lawyers would spoil the profession. “Not so,” exclaimed John; “for the more spaniels, the more game!”

His familiarity with Mary, was doubtless founded on his long service. When she was a mere little girl at Greenwich, Heywood officiated as manager of the troop of child actors who performed in her presence. On one occasion he appears to have received six and eightpence for his pains. Later, he wrote ballads for her, sometimes making herself the subject of them. When her coronation procession passed St. Paul’s, _there_ was mirthful John, seated beneath a vine; and, as the Queen approached, he arose and delivered an oration. When Mary was ill, he went to her chamber and recited verses or read plays to her; and when she was dying, says Flögel, he stood by her death-bed, and solaced her with music; “Er war auch ein berühmter Musikus, und musste der Königin Maria von England, auf ihrem Todbette, mit seiner Musik aufwarten.” This could not have been, however, when her death was very near. Lingard simply says, that “on the morning of her death, Mass was celebrated in her chamber; she was perfectly sensible, and expired a few minutes before the conclusion.”

With the reputation of having been “King’s Jester,” Heywood is also known to us as a poet, a dramatist, and a writer of epigrams. In the first capacity, his most laboured piece is the least successful. I have tried in vain to read through his ninety-eight chapters, in octave stanzas, devoted to the subject of “The Spider and the Fly,” in the gaily-bound copy in the British Museum. I quite agree with Harrison’s description of it (quoted by Warton), that “neither he himself that made it, neither any one that readeth it, can read unto the meaning thereof.” It is far less amusing than the comic song, with the same title, by the old free-and-easy poet, Tom Hudson.

As a dramatist, Heywood was among the earliest of English writers of comedy. He was not among the best for delicacy, humour, or decency. All these are of the roughest and dirtiest, such as might have been expected from Will Sommers. I must however differ in some degree from Warton, unassailable as his judgments generally are, when he describes Heywood’s plays as “altogether void of plot, humour, and character.” Yet, I confess, detestable as I hold idleness to be, a man were better occupied in doing nothing than in reading these productions. They hardly repay the curiosity of the student of literature, and even _he_ must rise from the perusal sorely in need of civet wherewith to sweeten his imagination.

It is as an epigrammatist that this honorary jester was most celebrated, and continues to be best known to the few who care to cultivate acquaintance with him. Of the epigrams I will select a few specimens. Bearing in mind that they are often the versification of his jests, and that the latter must frequently have had allusion to passing subjects, the following probably points at a then living prince. It is entitled:--

OF AN ILL GOVERNOR CALLED JUDE.

A ruler there was in a country afar,
And of the people a great executioner,
Who by name, I understand, was called Jude.
One gave him an ass, which gift when he had view’d,
He asked the giver, for what intent
He brought him that ass. “For a present
I bring, Master Jude,” quoth he, “this ass hither;
To join Master Jude and this ass together,
Which two joined in one, this is brought to pass,
I may bid you good even, Master Jude--ass.”
“Maccabee or Iscariot, thou knave?” quoth he;--
“Whom it pleaseth your mastership, him let it be!”

The following, too, is very much after the fashion of the French “_fous à titre d’office_” when they repelled the unwelcome familiarity of certain courtiers.

TWO, ARM-IN-ARM.

One said to another, on taking his arm,
“By license, friend, and take this for no harm.”
“No, Sir,” (quoth the other,) “I give you full leave
To hang on my arm, Sir, but not on my sleeve.”

Here is a jester’s definition of

WIT, WILL, AND WISDOM.

Where will is good, and wit is ill,
There wisdom can no manner skill.
Where wit is good, and will is ill,
There wisdom sitteth silent still.
Where wit and will are both too ill,
There wisdom no way meddle will.
Where wit and will well-ordered be,
There wisdom maketh a trinity.

And the following is not a bad specimen of the ordinary fool’s mock sermon put into rhyme, with the title of

CERTAIN FOLLIES.

To cast fair white salt into wise man’s meat,
To make them count salt, sugar, when they eat,--
A folly.
To bear a man in hand he itcheth in each part,
When the man feeleth an universal smart,--
A folly.
To speak always well and do always ill,
And tell men those deeds are done of good will,--
A folly.
Thy lusty-limbed horse to lead in thy hand,
When on thy lame limbs thou canst scanty stand,--
A folly.
Of sticks for cage-work to build thy house high,
And cover it with lead, to keep thy house dry,--
A folly!

From a sermon, to those who needed the instruction that ought to be afforded by one, is not going wide apart. Such a person Heywood seems to have met, and to have reproved by a Latin pun which was unintelligible to this

MERRY WOMAN.

There came by chance to a good company,
A lady, a wanton, and eke a merry.
And though ev’ry word of her own show’d her light,
Yet no man’s words _that_ to her might recite.
She had all the words, which she babbled so fast,
That they being weary, one said, at last,
“Madam, you make my heart light as a ‘kix,’
To see you thus full of your _meretrix_.”
This trick thus well trick’d out in good Latin phrase,
Brought to this tricker neither muse nor mase.
She nought perceiving was no whit offended,
Nor her light behaviour no whit amended;
But still her tongue was clapping like a patten.
“Well,” said the said man, in language of Latin,
“I never told woman any fault before,
Nor never, in Latin, will tell them fault more.”

It would be hard to say whether Queen Mary laughed or not, when “John, the King’s Jester,” either read to her the following epigram, or recounted the story, by way of joke; but it is worth quoting here, though not so much as a specimen of the royal favourite’s wit, as another proof that in the old pronunciation of the word _ache_, the latter had the _ch_ soft.

OF THE LETTER H.

H is worst among letters in all the cross row,
For if thou find him either in thine elbow,
In thine arm or leg, in any degree,
In thy head or teeth, in thy toe or knee;--
Into what place soever H may pyke him,
Wherever thou find _ache_ thou shalt not like him.

Heywood has a few epigrams touching fools. The following will show that what Selden said of evil-speaking, in reference to James’s court fool, Stone, in courtly prose, had been uttered before him by Mary’s court wit in shambling verse.

A FOOL’S TONGUE.

Upon a fool’s provocation,
A wise will not talk,
But ev’ry light instigation,
Will make a fool’s tongue walk.

And again, on a fool whose foolish wit was called wisdom, Heywood said and sang:--

Wisdom and folly in thee (as men scan)
Is, as it were, a thing by itself; fool,
Among fools, thou art taken a wise man;
And among wise men thou art known a fool.

In the same strain is this quatrain:--

OF EARS AND WITS.

Thin ears and thin wits be dainty;
Thick ears and thick wits be plenty.
Thick ears and thick wits be scant;
Thin ears and thin wits none want.

The following belongs to the satirist:--

OF THE WIFE’S AND HER HUSBAND’S WAIST.

“Where am I least, husband?” Quoth he, “In the waist;
Which cometh of this, thou art vengeable strait-laced.”--
“Where am _I_ biggest, wife?” “In the waist too,” quoth she,
“For all is waste in you, as far as I can see.”

Finally, here is a fling at farthingales, for which any modern epigrammatist might do what Pope effected for Donne, smooth the versification, and, in addition, turn the point against crinoline.

“Alas! poor verdingales must lie in the street;
To house them no door in the City’s made meet.
Since at our doors they in cannot win,
Send them to Oxford, at Broadgate to get in.”

Soon after the death of Queen Mary, in 1558, her orthodox jester, who hated and ridiculed Protestantism as vigorously as any French court fool launched his little quips against the faith of the Huguenots, withdrew from England, and took refuge in the fair Flemish city of Mechlin. It was a likely place of refuge for a lively and “orthodox” voluntary exile. Mechlin, like Troyes in Champagne, was worthy of supplying any Court with fools, for it was the wise men of that city who once tried to put out the moon! It was a jovial place also. Near the gate of St. Catherine, on the Antwerp side, stood the church and monastery of St. Alexis. This monastery contained fifteen hundred nuns, and full as many lady boarders. The good sisters enjoyed the very merriest of privileges. They were not only permitted to receive all sorts of visitors within the monastery, but to return the visit when and wheresoever they pleased. They might, if they chose, live unrestrained in the city; and might either marry or leave it alone, just as their humour prompted. The old and anonymous author of ‘Les Païs Bas’ (Bruxelles, 1692, p. 123), assures his readers that the old-established custom had never been followed by ill effect; and that the pious and pretty sisters had even employed themselves in respectable and praiseworthy matters, to the edification of the population which had before them so excellent an example.