The History of Court Fools. Dr. Doran

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СКАЧАТЬ fashion did not cease till after the accession of Alexander Severus, who drove from his Court the whole tribe of dwarfs, male and female, and indeed other equally unseemly appendages to the household of a grave and dignified prince. They became matters of attraction to the mob, and being vulgar, are no more heard of in the palaces of kings and the mansions of nobles, till a later period and in highly civilized Christian courts. Let us do with them as Alexander Severus did, and consider now the condition of the more modern Court Fool, though in doing so we may have to look occasionally to a more remote antiquity than that at which I close this Chapter. It will perhaps be found that kings and their fools must, for a time, have had a rather pleasant time of it. “He,” so ran an old proverb quoted by Seneca, “he who thinks to achieve every object that enters his head, must either be a born king or a born fool.” Herein, it is supposed, is intimated the proximity in degrees of happiness of the respective individuals, who could neither be called to account for things done nor for words uttered.

THE FOOL BY RIGHT OF OFFICE.

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      When Erasmus praised Folly, it was only by making Folly advocate her own cause. After all, her pleading neither recommends her cause, nor says much for the wit of the pleader. Folly, in the abstract, has been denounced alike by Scripture and ancient heathen sages. “All men are fools,” was once a received text. Over the text, some have laughed, some have cried, and upon it, or its equivalent, divines have preached sermons now mirthful now melancholy. “If I wish to look at a fool,” says Seneca modestly, “I have not far to go. I have only to look in a mirror.” A sharper saying still was once uttered by Rhodius, a physician of Marburg, who had adorned the front of his house with full-length portraits of all the lawyers and doctors in the city, himself in the centre, and all in the dress of the professional buffoon. “You have a large number of thorough fools painted on your walls,” once remarked a passer-by. “Ay, ay,” rejoined Rhodius, “but there are still more who pass this way and look at them.” He was something of the opinion of Schuppius of Hamburg, who used to remark that in this world, the fools outnumbered the men; and the Emperor Maximilian II. delicately expressed a similar sentiment when he observed that every young fellow must be pulled by fools’ strings, for seven years, and that if, during that time, he forgot himself for an instant, he had to re-commence his seven years’ service. This potentate distinguished the dullest of his counsellors by the title of the King of Fools. On once addressing a prosy adviser by this title, the gentleman neatly enough replied, “I wish, with all my heart, I were King of Fools; I should have a glorious kingdom of it, and your Imperial Majesty would be among my subjects.”

      The “Fool” was not the exclusive possession of a Sovereign King. In course of time, wealthy individuals prided themselves in their own jesters, as ladies of the last century did in their black foot-boys and monkeys. Counts, Cardinals, Barons, and even Bishops had their professional makers of mirth. In France the Fou du Roi was an official title, and Champagne is thought by some to have enjoyed the monopoly of furnishing his Gallic Majesty with a new Fou du Roi en titre d’office, when the old one died. The profession, in most Courts, survived the name; and the office has been exercised by many gentlemen who, perhaps, little thought of the duty they were performing. The office has not seldom been filled, as I have before remarked, by the Court poet; and the well-known epigram on Cibber, the above fact being considered, has a happy application.

      The term itself however has often been mis-applied. Thus Charles the Simple was no fool, but a man of extraordinary simplicity of mind and feeling. So Homer, when he called Telemachus, Νἡπιος, a fool, or “silly,” did not employ it as a term of reproach, but one of endearment.

      The term “fool,” “fol,” “fou,” is said to be of Northern origin. Every language, however, or nearly so, has an original word expressive of the office.

      Some French writers deduce the term Fool—that is their own word Fol or Fou—from the Game of Chess. In the French game, the pieces which we call Bishops, are called “Fous;” and in anciently carved sets are represented in the fool’s dress;—hence the saying of Regnier in his 14th Satire:—

      “Les Fous sont aux échecs les plus proches des Rois.”

      Thomas Hyde, in his ‘De Ludis Orientalibus,’ lib. i. 4, does away with this derivation by remarking that the chess term Fou or Fol is derived from the eastern word Phil, an “Elephant;”—he adds that two figures of this animal were always to be seen on the old boards; and that they had the oblique move of our “bishops.” This is no doubt true. The line of Regnier, however, indicates the place of the “Fou,” not only at chess, but at Court—namely, always near the King. The dignity of the latter, however, was preserved by a simple arrangement, namely, the ranking as “fool” or of deranged wit, every one who ventured to utter to his superior a disagreeable truth. As for a closer connection between kings and fools, it is marked by Rabelais, who observes that wearers of crown and sceptre are born under the same constellation as the wearers of cap and bells.

      And this office, it is to be observed, was partly in fashion as being a good sanitary system; “Laugh and grow fat” is a popular saying, with much philosophy therein. “Laughter,” says the Prussian Professor, Hufeland, “is one of the most important helps to digestion with which we are acquainted; and the custom in vogue among our ancestors, of exciting it by jesters and buffoons, was founded on true medical principles. Cheerful and joyous companions are invaluable at meals; obtain such, if possible, for the nourishment received amid mirth and jollity, is productive of light and healthy blood.”

      Walter Scott, when discussing, in a note to ‘Ivanhoe,’ the question whether Negroes were known in England at the period of that romantic story, cites an instance, whereby he not only establishes an affirmative, but proves that the professional jesters were of value to their patrons in other ways besides exciting their laughter and improving their digestion. “John of Rampayne,” he tells us, “an excellent juggler and minstrel” (words implying the professional jester), “undertook to effect the escape of one Andulf de Bracy by presenting himself in disguise at the Court of the King where he was confined.” For this purpose “he stained his hair and his whole body entirely as black as jet, so that nothing was white but his teeth. And succeeded in imposing himself on the King, as some Ethiopian minstrel. He effected by stratagem the escape of the prisoner. Negroes therefore must have been known in England in the dark ages.” When the joyous brotherhood could perform services of this nature we need not be surprised that prelates as well as princes entertained them, and that the Council of Paris, in 1212, in vain denounced churchmen who were worldly enough to maintain fools in their households.

      The idea that fools were instituted in order to supply the wants of a free society is, perhaps, not so strictly true as that they were gradually allowed to go out of fashion because their licensed freedom of expression was calculated to lead to social liberty. At first, a sarcasm from an equal may have only been considered as an insult; “yet conversation,” says Southey, “wanted its pepper and vinegar and mustard,” and so Fools were allowed to make the seasoning. When freedom of speech became vulgar (that is, popular or general), the Fool, as such, began to disappear. The term is sometimes applied in a singular sense. Thus “Fools’ Pence” was the name given to a tax once levied on the astrologers of Alexandria, because of the gain of their own ingenious folly derived from fools.

      It is to be observed too that people themselves have been as sovereigns who possessed their witty fools to teach them lessons of wisdom. Such servants of the public are to be recognised in Menenius Agrippa, when he taught the rebellious commons the respective duties of governors and governed, by repeating to them the apt allegory of “The Belly and the Members;” and in Themistocles, when, to the over-taxed citizens who wished to introduce a new element into the government, he wittily told, how once a fox entangled in a bog, was soon covered by flies who sucked nearly СКАЧАТЬ