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.