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?