Kings of England in the olden time seldom made jokes, and more seldom allowed them to be made by others, excepting professional jesters. When we come to the Norman time we find the Conquistor so little able to digest a joke that he declared war against the King of France for making one at the expense of William’s obesity. The latter, indeed, did try to answer the jest, but the answer missed its aim, and William lost his life because he could not understand humour. Rufus, on the contrary, indulged in such jesting as one might expect in an ill-bred bachelor king of loose principles and looser companions. The first Henry is handed down to us by successive historians as a man of very facetious humour, but they afford no samples of the humorous expression. Stephen had little leisure for anything but to keep his seat in the saddle into which he had leaped after a severe struggle. The humour of Henry the Second was of a sad-coloured hue; as it well might be. It was sardonically indulged when he caused to be painted on the wall of a chamber at Windsor and on the ceiling of a room at Winchester a singular picture. The artist is nameless, but he must have been the Landseer or the Ansdell of his day. The subject was an old eagle attacked by his four eaglets. The youngest and fiercest of the four was savagely picking at the parent eagle’s eyes. The king used to smile a melancholy smile as courtiers gazed at this picture, and did not penetrate, or seemed not to penetrate, the allegory which it presented. Probably when they were beyond royal sight and hearing they made good guesses at it, or the king interpreted it, and then it was no treason to give circulation to Henry’s interpretation. The old eagle was the monarch himself. The four eaglets were his obstinately rebellious sons. The ruffianly youngest bird savagely trying to peck the parent’s eyes out was the youngest and most ruffianly of his sons, John. In that form the half-mad and most melancholy Henry manifested his humour with regard to family affairs—an example which has not been generally followed. In one of his sons, Richard the First, there was much readiness of wit; and he especially loved to turn it against the priests. To make a joke at the cost of an ecclesiastic was as good to him as slaying an infidel. John’s jokes took a cruel form, drawing Jews’ teeth to accelerate their disposition to lend money, and behaving noisily at divine worship with an idea of humiliating some priest or bishop who had offended him. His son Henry loved the arts and good company. Of the three Edwards not one has come to our knowledge as a joker, but the son of the last, the Black Prince, did once so far stoop from his dignity as to, half jocularly, half angrily, call an archbishop an ass. The second Richard never had an opportunity for joking; and of the next three kings, Henry the Fifth alone, when Prince of Wales, is said to have aired his wit a-nights about Eastcheap. But what Shakespeare has made witty in relation never took place in point of fact. All the Eastcheap doings are apocryphal, and the Boar’s Head never had beneath its roof-tree those joyous princely spirits in whom we shall nevertheless continue to believe. Again, of the third Richard’s jesting humour we have no other example than what Shakespeare and Colley Cibber have invented for him. The seventh Henry was a dull deep man; the eighth, one to laugh with if you felt especially sure it would not shake your head off your shoulders. His son and his daughters are not recorded in the annals of wit, and such stories as have descended to us of James the First are of an unclean tendency, and the best of them in point of mirth are by far the uncleanest. His son Charles was too gentlemanlike and too grave to be such a joker as his unkingly sire. His refinement of manner did not admit of coarseness, with whatever wit it might be gilded, and the royal martyr is but known, in respect of humour, for ‘King Charles’s Golden Rules,’ of which, of course, he was not the author.
If ever there was a man in whom we should not expect to find the jesting spirit, that man is Oliver Cromwell. At the wedding festival, however, of his daughter Frances with Mr. Rich, Oliver entered joyously into all the jesting; so joyously that, in a moment of excitement, the Protector whipt off his son Richard’s wig and pretended to throw it into the fire. This he appeared to have done, but he had dexterously conveyed it under him, and was sitting upon it, when the company were looking for the wig upon the top of the coals. No clown, not even thou, oh Joseph Grimaldi!—not even thou who wast an artist, true actor, in whose every look there was a purpose, in every movement a meaning—not even thou, oh best and greatest of the old pantomime clowns! couldst have executed this trick with more rapidity, cleverness, and impudent imperturbability than Oliver Cromwell exhibited on that occasion. It was an occasion, by the way, when spilling of blood had like to have happened through immoderate excess of the spirit of fun. Old Sir Thomas Hillingsby was solemnly dancing, according to the fashion of his younger days. He looked so like an insensible statue in motion, that some daring young Puritan lads thought they might molest him with impunity. They tried, as he slowly moved to and fro in measured pace, to blacken his lips with burnt cork. They roused the old lion to fury. The ex-gentleman usher to the Queen of Bohemia pulled out his dagger, which he would have plunged between the ribs of the fellow most actively concerned but for general interference. Some time elapsed before harmony was restored.
It may be here objected that Cromwell was neither a royal nor an imperial joker. He was nevertheless sovereign master of England, and as despotic as any of them. We place him among them for much the same reason which Richardson, the painter, gave to Queen Caroline, when she went to see Richardson’s series of portraits of English kings, and seeing Cromwell’s portrait among them, angrily asked how he, who was no king, was placed in such company. ‘He was no king, indeed, madam,’ said Richardson, ‘but it is good for kings to have him among them.’
George the Second was not a humourist, but he would have made a first-rate actor of ‘genteel comedy’ had not fate cast him for another line of characters in the drama of life. Shortly after his accession he commanded a play at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The house was full, but as the king kept it waiting, the murmurs of their displeasure fell upon his ear as he entered his box, three-quarters of an hour behind time. As he caught the unwelcome sounds he turned to Mr. Rich, the manager, who waited on him, as if he might gather from that official some explanation of the phenomenon. The greatest of the intellectual harlequins of England honestly told the king that his majesty was late, and that the audience did not seem to like it. Whereupon the sovereign assumed the air of an unrighteously suspected prince. He advanced to the front of his box, took out his watch with the apparent conviction that it was an arbitrator which would render him justice, and looking upon it, saw that it showed the time which he knew it to be. Then he appeared in a change of character. He gazed at the audience with an expression bespeaking a guilty but a repentant prince. He put himself as much outside of his box as the laws of balancing would allow, and shaking his wigged head and very much powder out of it, he laid his jewelled hand on the heart side of his sky-blue velvet coat, and made a bow to the house, so superb in its apologetic pantomime that the audience burst forth into hilarious hurrahing and applauding, and all other possible symptoms, to demonstrate their gladness and to express their consent to a full reconciliation of prince and people.
The Thespian element was very strong too in the eldest son of George the Third. If the first gentleman in Europe had not been born a prince he might have made a very good livelihood as an actor. High or low comedy, it would have been all the same to a player of such versatility. He could have played Rover like Elliston, and his imitations were as good as Mr. Toole’s. The best-wigged prince in Christendom has, fortunately, had an historian who makes record of his royal hero in the histrionic part of his profession. Raikes is the chronicler, but the Duke of Wellington was the fountain of intelligence.
‘When the king sent for me,’ said F.M. the Duke of Wellington to Raikes, ‘to form a new Administration in 1828, he was then seriously ill, though he would never allow it. I found him in bed, dressed in a dirty silk jacket and a turban night-cap, one as greasy as the other; for, notwithstanding his coquetry about dress in public, he was extremely slovenly and dirty in private. The first words he said to me were, “Arthur, the Cabinet is defunct;” and then he began to describe the manner in which the late Ministers had taken leave of him on giving in their resignations. This was accompanied by the most ludicrous mimicry of the voice and manner of each individual, so strikingly like that it was quite impossible to refrain from fits of laughter.’
This exhibition has been considered a proof of the king’s bad taste; which it may be allowed to be. But there was equal bad taste on the part of the Duke. If he had looked grave, the old bedridden prince-actor would have been rebuked. Moreover, the king was quite as capable and quite as willing to give an imitation of Arthur. Inimitable as the latter was in certain respects, there were certain peculiarities about him which the king would have hit off with as intense delight as he felt when mimicking his majesty’s servants, Viscounts Goderich and Palmerston.
With George the Fourth’s successor there was no indisposition to joke, but the royal humour was of an ordinary quality. And yet it was eccentric too. King William would not, like his brother of Cambridge, have said to a chaplain at a public dinner, ‘Come, d—— it, do say grace, and let us begin!’ but he could not resist heightening a jest by a strong expletive; as, for instance, in the case of Captain and Mrs. Marryat, who were at a royal reception at the Pavilion, in King William’s time, and from which they were anxious to get away at a certain hour, in order to fulfil another engagement. Mrs. Marryat looked anxiously at the clock, and King William, catching her more than once in the fact, good-humouredly asked her the cause of her uneasiness. The lady frankly replied. ‘Well,’ said his majesty, ‘then why do you not leave at once?’ Mrs. Marryat had to inform him that it would be a breach of etiquette to leave the room while their majesties were still there. ‘Oh, d—— it!’ said the bluff monarch; ‘if that’s the case, come along o’ me; I’ll smuggle you out.’ On state occasions, however, a breach of etiquette would fairly take the king’s breath away. This is exemplified by what occurred at one of his first levées. Seeing an admiral, with whom he had been shipmate, bowing before him, the king cordially expressed his gladness at seeing his old comrade; adding, ‘and I hope you are quite well?’ The proper course would have been to simply answer the remark made. But the over-polite admiral replied, ‘Quite well, your majesty. I hope your majesty is well?’ The breach of etiquette was in making a remark to the king which implied the necessity of an answer. King William quite blushed with confusion, and did not recover himself till dinner-time. One of his own jokes he enjoyed amazingly; and notably one which he played off soon after his accession. After his arrival at St. James’s Palace the populace summoned him again and again to the window to offer him the congratulations of their sweet voices. King William presented himself again and again, till twilight came on and he was tired of it. As the ‘gloaming’ thickened, and identity was a matter of difficulty, the king sent an old naval officer to bow for him at the window. At every summons the officer stepped forward and acted king, bowing and retiring, till it became too dark to make out whether any one was at the window or not. Then the loyal mobile dispersed, and the affair was a joke for the remainder of the night at the jovial monarch’s table.
And now we are called upon to pause, just as we had finished only the prologue to our drama. But if people will make prologues as long as plays, editors will call out, Lusisti satis! and the play is deferred to a more convenient opportunity.