The unfortunate Save Saveitch, whose feelings may be imagined, after having afforded the royal couple much diversion, was dismissed, half-dead with terror and confusion; but before he departed, he received a salutary hint that the Czar did not always punish the foolery of his subjects so leniently.—In short, Nicholas, after using poor Save as a court fool, was mean enough to dismiss him without a court fool’s wages.
Thus much to illustrate my subject with regard to Russia. There is not much to be added in reference to the other Northern courts. In the autobiography of Christina, Queen of Sweden, which forms part of the ponderous memoirs of that sovereign by Archenholz, she tells the world that when in her youth the Regency of Sweden had determined to provide her with apartments separate from those of the Queen-Mother, the latter opposed it with vehement anger and sorrow, while Christina herself, with all her tender respect for the widow of Gustavus Adolphus, approved of the measure with as vehement delight. “I was afraid,” says the lively Queen, “that she would be a grand obstacle in the way of my studies and exercises, which annoyed me much, for I had an extreme desire to learn.” Besides, adds Christina, “the Queen-Mother took delight in maintaining a number of buffoons and dwarfs in her apartments, which were always full of them, after the German fashion. Such a fashion was insupportable to me, for I have a natural aversion against that wretched class of beings.”
Flögel traces the Scandinavian jesters back to the period of the Scalds (the Skial, or wise men), who were also called Spekinge (from speke, wisdom), from which, he says, is derived our word speak, which, however, is not always in connection with wisdom. The Sapphic verses of the Scalds often conveyed a double meaning, and perhaps this species of wit caused the idea of the bards being a species of jesters. That they were magnificently rewarded there is no doubt, seeing that Hiarne, the Scald, wrote an epitaph on Frotho I. of Denmark, which so delighted the people that they elected the poet to the vacant throne. The people must have been poor judges of poetry, for the epitaph is but an indifferent production. And then the story is doubtful, belonging to the period anterior to that of Harald in the ninth century, all the details of which are mythic and contradictory. One fact, nevertheless, connects the Scald with the jester; both were licensed to sing or speak with impunity. The former might make his harp ring to the intoning of the royal faults, just as the fool might raise the laughter of a court by sarcastic allusion to kingly foibles. And, moreover, there were several Scandinavian Kings who were their own Scalds, as we have seen several princes who were their own fools. The parallel may, perhaps, be allowed to pass; the more, that the wit of the Scald was generally as incomprehensible and cumbersome as that of some of the early court jesters. Fancy the verse which literally runs:—“I hang the round hammered yawning serpent at the tongue of the falcon-bridge, by the gallows of the shield of Odin,” to mean nothing more than, “I put the ring on the finger of the hand, near the arm!” Here was euphonistic folly! And the words, too, were mixed up unconnectedly, having no meaning at all as they originally stood; and through what a circumlocution-office of construing and interpreting had the student to go before he reached the thing signified! The falcon-bridge was the hand on which the falconer carried his bird. The tongue of the bridge was the little finger; and the gallows of the shield of Odin, was the arm on which the warrior’s shield was wont to be suspended!
They were mighty fellows, those Scalds, in the days of heathenism, but as Christianity dawned and rose, their power decreased. They became court poets, which, according to Ménage, was the same as court fool, and they sank into ordinary minstrels, who sang, as their historians say, with more truth than refinement, simply to “fill their bellies.”
Like the Italian fools, the Scandinavian jesters seem to have been mere practical jokers. Of one, who was not clever enough to transmit his name to posterity, we are told that a King of Denmark once accepted his invitation to repair to an old castle, and there drink ale-soup with him; and that the fool, conducting his Majesty to the sea-+side, remarked, “There is the soup; when you have finished that you shall have the ale.” At a much later period the fool is to be found in another capacity; thus, at the triumphal entry of Admiral Bagge, there figured in the procession “the court fool Hercules,” whose duty it was to play on the fiddle. Nothing however is said of his proficiency.
In Scandinavia, as elsewhere, the fool is sometimes seen in the light of excellent counsellor and acute statesman. This was the case with the jester of Frederick II. of Denmark, about 1580, when that monarch happened to be in much perplexity touching a bargain he had made, or half made, with some English merchants at Copenhagen. He had been induced to accept their offer to purchase the island of Huen, in the Sound, at the cost of as much English scarlet cloth as would reach all round the island, and a piece of gold for every fold of the cloth. The perplexity of Frederick arose from the fact that he had bethought himself, if the English possessed Huen they might fortify it, and with their fleets blockade the Sound itself. He was sorely puzzled, for he wished to break the bargain without seeming to break his word. He looked in utter helplessness at his fool; and the fool, smiling at the supposed difficulty, came to the King’s relief. “You have only to tell the English merchants,” said the descendant of Yorick, “that in standing to your contract, it is understood that as soon as they pay the price of the purchase, they must remove the article purchased; for it is not to be imagined that you sell such an unwieldy article, to let it stick at your door, or to let them stick on it in your very jaws.” The King was delighted; he wriggled out of his bargain, by the fool’s good aid, and the popular voice added the name of the Scarlet Isle to that of Huen, or Venusia.
These brief notices will perhaps suffice to show the quality of the joculator in the Northern Courts. The next chapter will as briefly illustrate the Motley of Spain.
THE SPANISH JESTERS.
In one of the letters addressed by the anxious Chesterfield to his son, the discerning Peer remarks: “There is at all courts a chain which connects the Prince or the Minister with the page of the backstairs or the chambermaid. The King’s wife or mistress has an influence over him; a lover has an influence over her; the chambermaid or valet de chambre has an influence over both; and so ad infinitum. You must therefore,” adds the estimable trainer of his child, “not break a link of that chain, by which you hope to climb up to the prince.”