The History of Court Fools

by Dr. Doran

Sometimes, like Will Sommers before Henry VIII., Killigrew would appear in the presence of Charles, in disguise. Once he came before the King in pilgrim’s attire, “cockled hat and shoon.” “Whither away?” asked Charles. “I am going to hell,” boldly replied the jester, “to ask the devil to send back Oliver Cromwell to take charge of the affairs of England; for as to his successor, he is always employed in other business.” It will be seen from this, that if Killigrew did not wear the cap and bells, he was in all essentials the bold, witty, and privileged jester of the court of Charles II.

Tom could bring the latter to attend to his affairs when no one else had hope of succeeding. We have an instance of this when a Council had assembled on some highly important matter, but could do nothing for want of the King’s much-desired presence. When Lauderdale had failed to induce the King to leave his pleasures for the public business, Killigrew wagered a hundred pounds with the Duke, that he would bring Charles to the Council in half-an-hour. Tom succeeded too. He simply suggested to the King, that as his Majesty hated Lauderdale, he might now get rid of him for ever. “If I win my wager, the Duke will rather hang himself than pay the money.” “Well then,” said Charles, “if that be the case, I positively will go.” And so merry villain and merry monarch proceeded straight to the Council Chamber.

Pepys calls Killigrew “a merry droll, but a gentleman of great esteem with the King.” When the immortal diarist was in the Admiralty yacht, off the coast of Holland, in 1660, among the “persons of honour” also there, Killigrew is named. “He told us many merry stories,” says Pepys; “one, how he wrote a letter three or four days ago to the Princess Royal, about a Queen Dowager of Judea and Palestine, that was at the Hague incognita, that made love to the King, which was Mr. Cary (a courtier’s) wife, that had been a nun, who are all married to Jesus.” Two years later, when the clerk met the courtier at the Tower, the former designates the wit of the jester as consisting of “poor and frothy discourse.”

In February, 1666–7, Killigrew narrated to Pepys what he had done, since he was a manager, for the improvement of the stage; rendering it “a thousand times better and more glorious than ever heretofore. Now, wax-candles, and many of them; then, not above 3lbs. of tallow. Now, all things civil, no rudeness anywhere; then, as a bear-garden. Then, two or three fiddlers; now, nine or ten of the best: then, nothing but rushes on the ground, and everything else mean; now, all otherwise.” It was in the following year that Killigrew is said to have received his fee for the purchase of his cap and bells. What is more certain is, that in the last year named, he and gentlemen of similar mirthful quality relieved the depression of their spirits at Sir Thomas Teddiman’s funeral, by reading aloud, or listening to, a variety of comic ballads! The respect which Killigrew received at the hands of Rochester, appears to have been exactly that which an over-bold fool might win from a courtier equally proud and dissolute. It was for some fool’s offence given at a banquet at the Dutch Ambassador’s, at which the King himself was present, that Rochester dealt the saucy wit a stinging smack on the face. Tom took it as Tom Derry might have taken a cuff from a Lord; and Rochester lost no favour with the King for having thus assaulted one of his Majesty’s “merry villains.” Killigrew died in March 1682. Evelyn records in his Diary, the execution of Vrats, the murderer, who believed that “God would deal with him like a gentleman;” but he leaves Tom’s departure from the festive scene unhonoured by a word of remark.

Shadwell writes, in his ‘Woman Captain,’ anno 1680:—“It is out of fashion now, for great men to keep fools;” but though princes and nobles began to prefer the society of witty and intellectual gentlemen to the paid-for nonsense of hirelings who were said, by periphrasis, to have been born at Little Witham, the old taste did not entirely expire either at court or in private households. Anthony à Wood mentions Dr. John Donne, son of the celebrated Donne, as “an atheistical buffoon, a banterer, and a person of over-free thought; yet valued by Charles the Second.” The court of this monarch assuredly little resembled that of his contemporary sovereign, the King of Siam, touching which, Captain Erwin told Pepys (17th August, 1666), “how the King of Syam seldom goes out without thirty or forty thousand people with him, and not a word spoke, nor a hum or a cough in the whole company to be heard.” In other respects, the difference does not seem to have been remarkable, for the Captain was assured by a native interpreter, that “our (the Siamese) King do not live by meat or drink, but by having great lies told him.” The reign of James II. is barren, as far as it is in connection with the subject I pursue; and it is tolerably certain that throughout the reign of William III., the only official court fool in England was the one who came over in the suite of the Czar Peter. His presence marked the distinction then existing between a civilized and intellectual, and an uncivilized and ignorant court.

I must not omit, however, to relate an incident of this reign in connection with the subject of the license of the fool. If the latter official was not to be found at court, his representatives still lingered in the fairs, and exercised a privilege which the Royal authority, nevertheless, was not slow to oppose. In 1693, the magnificent Smyrna fleet set sail from our shores, under convoy of a squadron of English and Dutch men-of-war, at the head of which were Killigrew, Delaval, and Rooke. The first two abandoned the last admiral; and Rooke, left to encounter the whole maritime force of France in the Bay of Lagos, suffered severe loss, and the rich Smyrna fleet (with some exceptions) was scattered, sunk, burnt, or otherwise destroyed. This catastrophe, the return of the first two admirals to Torbay, and the disaster to “the Turkey fleet,” excited mingled indignation and grief. As the fool of the French King Philip made use of the defeat of the French fleet by the navy of Edward, whereon to exercise his wit and rouse the patriotic anger of his master, so now the fools and merry-andrews congregated at Bartholomew fair, in the vicinity of the edifice where Rahere the jester had founded a Priory in honour of the Apostle, made use of the public dishonour and loss, in order to keep alive the popular execration against those wretched and incapable ministers, to whose incapacity and indifference might be traced the fearful loss of life, property, and good name incurred by England on the fatal day in question. On Saturday, September 2, 1693, Narcissus Luttrell writes, in his Diary:—“A merry-andrew in Bartholomew fair is committed for telling the mobb news that our fleet was come into Torbay, being forced in by some French privateers; and other words reflecting on the conduct of great Ministers of State.” Lord Macaulay founds, on a paragraph in L’Hermitage of the same date, a very graphic description of this attempt of the fool at fairs, to wag his tongue as boldly as his predecessors used to do at court. Of all the shows at this period, says the historian, “none proved so attractive as a dramatic performance which, in conception, though doubtless not in execution, seems to have borne much resemblance to those immortal master-pieces of humour, in which Aristophanes held up Cleon and Lamachus to derision. Two strollers personated Killigrew and Delaval. The admirals were represented as flying with their whole fleet before a few French privateers, and taking shelter under the guns of the Tower. The office of Chorus was performed by a Jack Pudding, who expressed very freely his opinion of the naval administration. Immense crowds flocked to see this strange farce. The applauses were loud; the receipts were great; and the mountebanks, who had at first ventured to attack only the unlucky and unpopular Board of Admiralty, now emboldened by impunity and success, and probably prompted and rewarded by persons of much higher station than their own, began to cast reflections on other departments of the Government. This attempt to revive the license of the Attic stage was soon brought to a close by the appearance of a strong body of constables, who carried off the actors to prison.”

Thus was suppressed an attempt, less to revive than to continue the license of the jester. Government had become less tolerant in this respect than Kings had been to their own fools. A dozen years before, an essay to joke down the administrative foibles of the day, by a pamphleteering jester, “Heraclitus Ridens,” was very summarily and stringently punished. Bartholomew fair, however, struggled hard to maintain its supposed privileges. It is very possible that if persons of high station employed the merry-andrews of 1693, to spout their fun against elevated Ministers of State, that they were also present to hear how their agents acquitted themselves of the office. Nothing was more common than the presence of the nobility at the Saturnalia in Smithfield, except the presence of the “mobile,” with whom the former frequently came in sanguinary contact. In September, 1690, Luttrell writes:—“The first instant was a great disorder at Bartholomew fair, where the mobile got ahead, and quarrelled with some gentlemen, upon which, swords were drawn, where some were wounded, and one or two killed.” Even as late as the reign of George II., the fair was patronized by an august presence. Frederick, Prince of Wales, used to go there by night, attended by a merry suit of courtiers of either sex. The theatres were then closed, and “their Majesties’ servants” played in booths. Princes now went to see the “drolls;” whereas, in former times the clowns waited on the princes.

Before this last period, Queen Anne may be said to have had some of the old leaven in her; for she made a Knight of William Read, a mountebank. Her Majesty, also, offered to knight Beau Nash, a buffoon too, according to the fashion of the times; but the Beau had declined the honour at the hands of the great Nassau, and he would not take it from Anne. His reply was in the bad court-jester style: “I will have none of it, most gracious Madam,” said Nash, as if he were refusing to grant a favour; “but there is Sir William Read, the mountebank, whom your Majesty has knighted,—I shall be very happy to call him Brother.” At which fool’s sally, “the solemn Anna smiled.”

But if the official fool had gone out, foolish officers still exercised a silly vocation at court. Perhaps the most silly of these was the King’s cock-crower, who was still loud and lusty, at the opening of the Georgian era. This personage crowed at each hour of the night. On the first Ash-Wednesday which occurred after the accession of the Hanoverian family, the Prince of Wales (subsequently George II.) supped at court. Just as ten o’clock struck, his Majesty’s cock-crower, who happened to be behind the Prince, set up such a chanticleering, that the Prince started up in indignation at what he deemed a fool’s insult. The courtiers had some difficulty in assuring him that the crowing and crower formed part of the ordinary court etiquette. The Prince would not tolerate such a nuisance, and another fool’s office was annihilated when he came to the throne.

There were still some wits, however, in whom the popular voice hailed an arch-jester. I may notice one, whose very grave is likely soon to be forgotten. In the old cemetery (belonging to St. Clement’s Danes), in Portugal-street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in a grave, the head-stone of which was during many summers, until recently, regularly embowered and concealed by sun-flowers, lie the remains of the witty jester, Joe Miller. There they have been since 1738. The year following, John Mottley, the author of ‘Peter the Great,’ published a collection of jests as honest Joe’s, but they were really a collection of witty things which in his time he had either heard or read, and to which Mottley appended Miller’s name. The latter died at the age of fifty-four, the exact age at which departed so recently from among us, he who held the “consulship of wit,” in England,—Douglas Jerrold. That Miller was “facetious,” we learn from the inscription above his grave; that he was witty also, his jest not merely turning on a pun, but on a chain of ideas, the following will testify. He was once sitting in the parlour of the Sun Tavern, in Clare-street, or the Black Jack, in Portsmouth-street, his favourite houses, when a fishwoman passed by, crying “Buy my soles! buy my maids!”—“Ah, you wicked old creature!” said Joe to her, “are you not contented to sell your own soul, but you must sell your maid’s too?”