Which caus'd the court to love him more and more.”
Many quaint sayings are recorded of him, which exhibit a copious vein of mirth, and an acute and ready wit. Upon a festival day, being in the court-yard walking with divers gentlemen, he espied a very little personage with a broad-brimmed hat; when he remarked, that if my Lord Minimus had but such another hat at his feet, he might be served up to the king's table, as between two dishes.
Going over with the king to Boulogne, and the weather being rough and tempestuous, he, never having been on ship-board before, began to be fearful of the sea; and, calling for a piece of the saltest beef, devoured it before the king very greedily. His majesty asked him why he ate such gross meat with such an appetite, when there was store of fresh victuals on board? To which he made answer, “Oh! blame me not, Harry, to fill my stomach with so much salt meat beforehand, knowing, if we be cast away, what a deal of water I have to drink after it!”
He was no favourite with Wolsey, who had a fool of his own, one Patch, that loved sweet wine exceedingly, and to whom it was as natural as milk to a calf. The churchman was known to have a mistress; Holinshed terms him “vitious of his bodie,” and Shakspere says, “of his own body he was ill,” which clearly implies clerical concupiscence. Summers improvised an unsavoury jest upon the lady, which made the king laugh, and the cardinal bite his lip. He was equally severe upon rogues in grain, for, said he, “a miller is before his mill a thief, and in his mill a thief, and behind his mill a thief!” and his opinion of church patronage was anything but orthodox. Being asked why the best and richest benefices were for the most part conferred on unworthy and unlearned men, he replied, “Do you not observe daily, that upon the weakest and poorest jades are laid the greatest burdens; and upon the best and swiftest horses are placed the youngest and lightest gallants?”
On his death-bed a joke still lingered on his lips. A ghostly friar would have persuaded him to leave his estate (some five hundred pounds—a large sum in those days!) to the order of Mendicants; but Summers turned the tables upon him, quoted the covetous father's own doctrine, and left it to the “Prince of this world,” by whose favour he had gotten it.
Tarlton * is entitled to especial notice, as being the original representative of the court-fool, or clown, upon the stage. Sir Richard Baker says, “Tarlton, for the part called the clowne's part, never had his match, and never will have.”
* Bastard, in his Chrestoleros, 1598, has an epigram to
“Richard Tarlton, the Comedian and Jester” and, in Nash's
Almond for a Parrot, he is lauded for having made folly
excellent, “and spoken of as being extolled for that which
all despise.”
The music to “Tarleton's Jigge” is preserved in a MS. in the
Public Library, Cambridge (D d. 14, 24). This manuscript is
one of six, containing a number of old English tunes,
collected and arranged for the lute, by John Dowland, and
among them are the music to many of Kemp's Jigs. “Most
commonly when the play is done,” says Lupton, in his London
and the Countrey Carbonadoed and Quatred into seuerall
Characters, 8vo. 1632,) “you shall haue a jig or a dance of
all treads: they mean to put their legs to it as well as
their tongues.” According to the author of Tarltoris News
out of Purgatory, the jig lasted for an hour. The pamphlet,
says he, is “only such a jest as his (Tarlton's) jig, fit
for gentlemen to laugh at an hour.”
