“First Battas came, deep read in worldly art,Whose tongue ne’er knew the secrets of his heart.In mischief mighty, though but mean of size,And, like the Tempter, ever in disguise.See him with aspect grave and gentle tread,By slow degrees approach the sickly bed;Then, at his club, behold him alter’d soon,The solemn doctor turns a low buffoon.”
“First Battas came, deep read in worldly art,Whose tongue ne’er knew the secrets of his heart.In mischief mighty, though but mean of size,And, like the Tempter, ever in disguise.See him with aspect grave and gentle tread,By slow degrees approach the sickly bed;Then, at his club, behold him alter’d soon,The solemn doctor turns a low buffoon.”
“First Battas came, deep read in worldly art,Whose tongue ne’er knew the secrets of his heart.In mischief mighty, though but mean of size,And, like the Tempter, ever in disguise.See him with aspect grave and gentle tread,By slow degrees approach the sickly bed;Then, at his club, behold him alter’d soon,The solemn doctor turns a low buffoon.”
But Battie could play the fool, even to better purpose by the sick bed, than the buffoon at his club. It is told of him that he had a young male patient whom obstinate quinsy threatened with almost instant suffocation. Battie had tried every remedy but his foolery, and at last he had recourse tothat. Setting his wig wrong side before, twisting his face into a compound comic expression, and darting his head suddenly within the curtains, he cut such antics, poured forth such delicious folly, and was altogether so irresistible, that his patient, after gazing at him for a moment in stupefaction, burst into a fit of laughter which broke the imposthume, and rescued the sufferer from impending death.
The above, however, is only a sample of how a professional man could apply folly to a wise end. We have something more resembling the professional fool or dwarf, in the case of a retainer of the Duke of Ancaster who died in 1779. Walpole mentions him in a letter to Lady Ossory. “I hear the Duke of Ancaster has left a legacy to a very small man that was always his companion, and whom, when he was drunk, he used to fling at the heads of the company, as others fling a bottle.”
Although, professionally, the vocation had gone, it is still worth observing, that other patent places which had originated in feudal times, had not gone with that of the jester. “If my memory does not deceive me,” says Burke in hisspeech on the royal household, in 1780, “a person of no slight consideration held the office of patent hereditary cook to an Earl of Warwick.” The orator rightly conjectured that the Earl’s soups “were not the better for the dignity of his kitchen;” and he adds his belief that “an Earl of Gloucester officiated as steward of the household to the Archbishops of Canterbury.” The orator found a curious relic of those old times when these practices were common, in the household of George III. He did not meet with any witty fellow there patented as fool, but he discovered something akin to it; namely, that the turnspit in the King’s kitchen was a Member of Parliament!
The annals of succeeding reigns bear the names of several courtiers whose office it was to amuse and gratify their Royal patron. How George III. himself could play the court jester with effect, I will tell in a chapter devoted to sovereigns who occasionally were their own fools. How Colonel Haager and others of more recent periods have played first cousins to the more ancient jokers, it is unnecessary here to enumerate. I will rather conclude my long, and I fear imperfect, chapter, by showing also the conclusion of the actual line of hired fools in noble English households. It is not so very long since the last of this class died and left no successor. Mr. Douce, in his pleasant Essay on clowns and fools, gives the names of the last of them who practised professionally in this country. The household fool survived the court fool; and after Muckle John closed the line of the latter, there was still bread to be earned by the profession of the former. According to Mr. Douce, the favourite Lord Chancellor of George I., the eminent Lord Talbot, kept a fool, probably at his country-house, if at all. Mr. Douce tells us that his name was Rees Pengelding, and that he was a shrewd fellow who rented a farm under his patron. It happened that Rees was a little backward with his rent, and he was harshly menaced by the steward, who wound up hisobjurgations by exclaiming, “I’ll fit you! I’ll fit you!” Now it happened that the steward, in his earlier days, had been a tailor, the remembrance of which caused Rees to call out in return, “Fit me! will you? Well, it will be the first time in your life you ever did such a thing!”
I feel bound to add, that Lord Campbell, in his life of Chancellor Talbot, makes no mention of this fool, Pengelding. May not the latter have been simply favoured, because of the sharpness of his wit? It is difficult to conceive that the profound scholar in Roman civil law; the friend and equal of Philip Yorke, the enlightened statesman; the only Chancellor who had ever sat on the Woolsack without making an accuser, a detractor, or an enemy; a man, in short, in whom was “joined the utmost freedom of dispute with the highest good breeding, and the vivacity of mirth with primitive simplicity of manners,”—it would be difficult to conceive that such a man, the friend of Butler the divine, and patron of Thompson, could take delight in a mere household fool, were we not reminded that even more intellectual Chancellors than he, in earlier, but not in less refined days, could find relaxation in listening to the professional joker. In connection with my subject, I shall be excused if I notice that when Talbot was appointed Chancellor, a grand “Revel” was given in his honour by the Inner Temple (1734), and that this was the last festivity of the sort at which royalty attended at an Inn of Court. There has been a royal entertainment in our own days, at Lincoln’s Inn, but Talbot’s “Revel” was the last of its class.
Mr. Douce also names a certain Robin Rush as being fool, in the last century, to Lord Bussy Mansel; and Mr. Douce adds, that in 1807 there were people living who remembered him. Sir Edward Stradling, of St. Dorret’s Castle, Glamorganshire, was another of the lords of land who kept a fool in his house at the same period;—a fool of sharp and ready wit. We have still more satisfactory proof of theexistence of a household fool in the last century, in the person of Dicky Pearce, “fool to Lord Suffolk,” for which fool, being dead, Dean Swift did what Ronsard failed to do for a more witty jester at the court of France,—namely, write his epitaph. Dicky Pearce lies in Berkeley churchyard, Gloucestershire, and these are the lines the Dean has placed above hisgrave:—
“Here lies the Earl of Suffolk’s fool,Men called him Dicky Pearce;His folly served to make folks laugh.When wit and mirth were scarce.“Poor Dick, alas! is dead and gone;What signifies to cry?Dickeys enough are still behindTo laugh at by and by.”
“Here lies the Earl of Suffolk’s fool,Men called him Dicky Pearce;His folly served to make folks laugh.When wit and mirth were scarce.“Poor Dick, alas! is dead and gone;What signifies to cry?Dickeys enough are still behindTo laugh at by and by.”
“Here lies the Earl of Suffolk’s fool,Men called him Dicky Pearce;His folly served to make folks laugh.When wit and mirth were scarce.
“Poor Dick, alas! is dead and gone;What signifies to cry?Dickeys enough are still behindTo laugh at by and by.”
The last recorded instance of a domestic fool being kept in an English family, is that of the jester retained at Hilton Castle, Durham, by John Hilton, the descendant of the old barons of that name, who died 1746. Surtees, in his ‘History of Durham,’ notices this fact, and adds one touch of the wit of this anonymous fool, who seems to have borrowed a traditionary joke of his great predecessor, Archie Armstrong. His master, we are told, on one occasion of his returning to his northern seat from London, left his carriage at the ferry near the castle, and proceeded towards that building over a foot-bridge, at the end of which the fool was awaiting his patron. The latter was attired in a gaily gold-embroidered dress, according to the fashion of the times, and made in the south, by a fashionable tailor. The fool gazed on his master with mingled astonishment and vexation, and, in place of greeting his return with a welcome, boldly looked him in the face, and inquired, “Who’s the fool now?” This is the last recorded joke of the last recorded jester; and the long line could not have gone out with a milder, though it might have done so with a less impertinent, jest. Hilton’s foolmay, I think, fairly rank as theultimus stultorum(he was remembered by aged Cumberland people, as late as 1812), though in point of fact the honour may be disputed by the nameless individual who figured, though it was only for the nonce, at the Eglinton tournament, in 1839, where knights tilted in spectacles, and the spectators looked on at the solemn fun, under rain and from beneath umbrellas.
Thus the fool went out in a rather gorgeous fashion. There was a grand tableau as the curtain descended which had been up in England for so many centuries. I am bound to add that the Eglinton fool may find a rival as to the honour of closing the merry line, in Shemus Anderson, the fool of Murthley Castle, Perthshire, who died in the year 1833. He had grown tolerably rich in his vocation; had suffered losses, like Dogberry; but left behind him some comfortable hundreds of pounds to his heirs. Shemus, however, never wore the cap and bells, or nursed the bauble, or whirled the bladder and peas, or shook the clappers, or carried motley. He was a fool in undress; but in respect of fulness of character and costume, of circus jokes, and all the accessories of the part, excepting its indecencies, the Eglinton fool was the last of the race. He flickered up for a moment, as did the padded knights and the Queen of Beauty, to afford some idea to the times present of the aspect of the times past, as far as the latter could be exhibited in one of its gorgeous follies. The blaze of splendour was great, and the fool’s fire of conundrums burnt bravely, but the rain extinguished it all; the umbrellas gave an air of ridicule to the scene; the thing was felt to be, after all, only a splendid sham; and accordingly the fool and the pseudo-feudal lords and ladies disappeared for ever. All that remains of the old reality are rags and shreds and fragments in the mansions of our nobles and gentles. At Glamis Castle a motley jacket still hangs, or did recently hang, on a peg in the wall, and at Stourhead is still preserveda jester’s baldric, which may be devoutly kissed as a relic by the worshippers of Folly.
Some resemblance may be certainly traced between the conditions of the English court fool and the ancient parasite, and between the English household fool and the old Roman slave. With all, there was laughter excited by liberty of speech, which must have occasionally fallen like refreshing dew upon the ear of despot or noble, unaccustomed to listen to aught from others save his own exceeding glorification. The despot still retained the power of punishing the fool; and in this particular, the household jester, who was often a menial servant, the drudge of the family, very closely resembled the Roman slave, with whom his master would graciously exchange jokes one day, and whom he would scourge the next. The two, capricious master and servile yet audacious wit, agreed very well with despotism, and coarse times and manners; but with liberty and refinement, both expired, or underwent such modifications, or took such new forms, as to be no longer recognizable. The fool was for a season, but eccentricity of character, which was his great merit, naturally survived him.
It has been objected to many of the ancient traits of court jesters, that they were inventions of writers of fiction, and that they only illustrated a rude state of society. Thus, the incident of Scogan chalking the path to be taken by his wife to church, has been pronounced too farcical to be true. But the degree of humour which moved King Edward’s jester to this act, has influenced many persons of later and more refined times than those in which Scogan uttered very questionable jokes for the amusement of his royal and princely patrons. We all know how Lord Hardwicke, when he was an attorney’s clerk, and was ordered by his mistress to purchase a cauliflower, executed this commission, but sent the vegetable home in a sedan-chair at the lady’s cost. An instance more striking and closer to the point, is given us inthe person of the wealthy Margaret Wharton, whom Foote introduced in one of his pieces, as “Peg Pennyworth,” a name which the lady had acquired when a visitor at Scarborough, by sending every night for a pennyworth of strawberries and cream, for her supper. In this dramatic piece, Mrs. Wharton afforded mirth to princes, courtiers, and citizens, with whom the farce was a great favourite. Ord, in his ‘History of Cleveland,’ narrates several anecdotes of her humour, of which I select one that may contrast with that of Scogan. “In one of her visits to Scarborough,” we are told, “she, with her usual economy, had a family pie for dinner, which she directed the footman to convey to the bakehouse. This he declined, as not belonging to his place, or rather derogatory to his consequence. She then moved the question to the coachman, but found a still stronger objection. To save the pride of both, she resolved to take it herself, and ordered one to harness, and bring out the carriage, and the other to mount behind, and they took the pie, with all honour and ceremony, to the bakehouse. When baked, coachee was ordered to put to a second time, and the footman to mount behind; and the pie returned in the same dignified state. ‘Now,’ says she to the coachman, ‘you have kept your place, which is to drive; and yours,’ to the footman, ‘which is to wait; and I mine, which was to have my pie for dinner.’” It was just this sort of eccentricity of character which gave value to the old counterfeit fools, as we shall see further in subsequent pages.
Meanwhile I take leave of the English portion of my subject with the comment of Stillingfleet, whosays:—
“Leave to low buffoons by custom bred,And form’d by nature to be kicked and fed,The vulgar and unenvied task to hitAll persons, right or wrong, with random wit.Our wise forefathers, born in sober days,Resigned to fools the tart and witty phrase;The motley coat gave warning for the jest,Excused the wound and sanctified the pest.But we from high to low all strive to sneer,Will all be wits, and not the livery wear.”
“Leave to low buffoons by custom bred,And form’d by nature to be kicked and fed,The vulgar and unenvied task to hitAll persons, right or wrong, with random wit.Our wise forefathers, born in sober days,Resigned to fools the tart and witty phrase;The motley coat gave warning for the jest,Excused the wound and sanctified the pest.But we from high to low all strive to sneer,Will all be wits, and not the livery wear.”
“Leave to low buffoons by custom bred,And form’d by nature to be kicked and fed,The vulgar and unenvied task to hitAll persons, right or wrong, with random wit.Our wise forefathers, born in sober days,Resigned to fools the tart and witty phrase;The motley coat gave warning for the jest,Excused the wound and sanctified the pest.But we from high to low all strive to sneer,Will all be wits, and not the livery wear.”
If my readers have but patience to go forward, they will soon find themselves in company with theFous du Roi, at the Court of France, where, for a long period, it was not possible for a fool to appearwithouthis livery; but to which now the following lines are not less applicable than they are to otherlocalities:—
“Why, pray, of late do Europe’s kingsNo jester in their courts admit?They’ve grown such stately solemn things;To bear a joke, they think not fit.But though each court a jester lacks,To laugh at monarchs to their face,All mankind do behind their backs,Supply the honest jester’s place.”
“Why, pray, of late do Europe’s kingsNo jester in their courts admit?They’ve grown such stately solemn things;To bear a joke, they think not fit.But though each court a jester lacks,To laugh at monarchs to their face,All mankind do behind their backs,Supply the honest jester’s place.”
“Why, pray, of late do Europe’s kingsNo jester in their courts admit?They’ve grown such stately solemn things;To bear a joke, they think not fit.But though each court a jester lacks,To laugh at monarchs to their face,All mankind do behind their backs,Supply the honest jester’s place.”