In the reigns of George II. and his successor, among the men who seem to have united with other offices, something like the vocation of court fool, was the son of a Carlisle apothecary, named Bubb, who succeeded to the estates and adopted the name of his uncle, Doddington; and who is better known by their conjoined names, than by his subsequent title of Lord Melcombe. A disappointment in obtaining a peerage, took him from the ranks of Sir Robert Walpole and George II., to those of Frederick, Prince of Wales. In the household of the Prince, Bubb, who lacked neither good qualities nor ability, descended to play the fool. Horace Walpole tells us that “he submitted to the Prince’s childish horse-play, being once rolled up in a blanket and trundled down stairs.” He changed sides more than once; lent and lost money to the Prince; was laughed at, to his very face, by the King; slept in a bed canopied with peacocks’ feathers; and kept fools, “a tame booby or two,” of his own. These were Wyndham, his heir; Sir William Bruton, keeper of George II.’s privy purse; and Dr. Thompson—“a misanthrope, a courtier, and a quack,” as Cumberland names them. Thompson appears to have been the most ignoble of the “monks” who sojourned at “La Trappe,”—so Doddington called his company and mansion at Hammersmith. Thompson was ostensibly his medical adviser; but he practised his profession like a fool, and was treated by his patron as patrons were wont to treat fools of more audacity than wit. On one occasion, the Doctor observed Doddington, at breakfast, about to help himself to muffins. He denounced them as indigestible, and loudly bade the servant, “Take away those muffins!” “No, no!” said Doddington, pointing to the Doctor, “take away that ragamuffin!” In this way were “tame boobies” treated by their patrons, who, themselves, were princes’ fools.
At an earlier period, that, namely, of Louis XIV., we find instances of noble persons assembling in their houses people of a very inferior rank, for the purpose of drawing from them something more than amusement. The Duchess de la Ferté was one of these. This exalted personage was in the habit of inviting all her tradespeople to her house. She entertained herself with their peculiarities at table, and then set them down to play with her at lansquenet, or some similar game. Madame de Staël, who tells the story in her Memoirs, adds, “The Duchess would sometimes whisper to me, ‘I am cheating the fellows, but Lord! serve them right! Don’t I know how they rob me daily?’” So that the Duchess made her fools pay their expenses, and her own.
In the reign of George III., although the fool did not exist as a professional man, we have an instance of a professional man enacting the fool, with good intent and profitable purpose. The person alluded to is the learned and laughter-loving Dr. William Battie, who was a well-reputed London physician in portions of the reigns of George II. and his successor. He was celebrated for his treatment of the insane; and is thus described in the ‘Battiad,’ a poem of which he was the hero.
“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 to that. 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 his speech 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 his objurgations 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 the existence 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 his grave:—