Meet Henry VIII’s fool – and gasp at how Tudor England treated him
In several 16th-century portraits of Henry VIII, with or without his family, he is attended by a strange-looking man. Sometimes the man is at the edge of the painting, but in more than one case he is right next to the King. The face is always recognisable: sallow, big-boned, with slightly sunken eyes, a straight, bulbous-tipped nose, and a distinctive receding hairline. The expression is tight-lipped, sometimes frowning, but generally stony.
His dress is usually demure (though one much later engraving does put him in strange, luxurious clothing), and uninformed viewers would struggle to guess the nature of his occupation. A Jeeves-like valet, perhaps? The only visual clue is that in one painting, the least characteristic one, he has a pet monkey perched on his shoulder. “Keeper of the Royal Monkeys” was not in fact a job at the Tudor court, but it would be as good a guess as any.
In fact this was Henry’s court fool, Will Somer or Summer, who became a famous figure in his own right, the subject of stories and publications long after his death in 1559. Robert Armin, the talented clown-actor who pioneered the roles of Shakespeare’s fools – Touchstone, Feste and the fool in King Lear – published an account of him in 1600; and a few years earlier Thomas Nashe, the brilliant writer whose verbal fireworks made him the James Joyce of Elizabethan literature, presented “Will Summer” as the pivotal figure of his only play.
For such a well-known character, located at the heart of the royal court, you might think that we would possess a mass of evidence from administrative records, memoirs, diplomatic reports, and so on – all the materials for a detailed biography, complete with a large repertoire of comic stories, clownish actions and funny repartée. But we don’t. That is, in itself, an intriguing fact, raising various questions about the person described rather ambitiously in the subtitle here as “Henry VIII’s Closest Man”.
As a biography, this book, by a Swedish academic who has previously written a general history of comedians, is a classic exercise in making bricks without straw. Indeed, much of Peter Andersson’s mental energy here has gone into sifting through the tiny heap of apparent straw, inspecting it closely and throwing most of it away. Therein lies – and this is no back-handed compliment – the real interest of the book.
Take the witty jests and exploits recorded by Armin and other writers, for example. With forensic skill, Andersson shows that most of them were adapted from stories about other people, or literary sources, or proverbial wisdom (or rather, proverbial foolery). Will Somer gained a sort of gravitational force, such that any funny stories that floated around would sooner or later be drawn in and affixed to his name – as would later happen to Dr Spooner with comic transpositions, or Oscar Wilde with brilliant paradoxes and put-downs.
But at least Wilde’s wit and Spooner’s verbal fumbles can still make us laugh. Those who wish to explore the world of popular humour in the Tudor period should bear in mind the warning at the entrance to Dante’s Hell: abandon hope all ye who enter here. There are few things more dismal than the 16th-century “jest books”, with their crude physical pranks, all too often involving excrement or vomit. And the jokes are not much better, either. One of the witty sayings attributed (dubiously) to Will Somer is his answer to a question about why a dog lifts its leg to pee. “For manners’ sake, and lest he should bepiss his stockings.” Cue uproarious laughter, apparently.
Physical humour, if that’s what we can call it, characterises two of the stories about Somer which Andersson is inclined to accept: that he once threw a bowl of milk at a rival fool, breaking his head; and that if he was insulted by someone standing at a distance from him, he would just punch the nearest person instead. Such stories were preserved because people found them hilarious; perhaps the second contains a smidgeon of absurdist comedy, because of its elementary illogicality, but still one’s heart sinks.
Was Somer even trying to be funny? Here we face one of the most basic issues, which Andersson discusses sensitively but never fully resolves. Ever since Enid Welsford published her wonderful book The Fool in 1935, we have known about the traditional distinction between “natural” and “artificial” fools. The former were “simpletons”, ie, -people with intellectual disabilities; the latter were clever comedians, whose comedy sometimes consisted of pretending to be simple-minded. Over time, in princely courts, there was a shift from the former to the latter, and Shakespeare’s fools belong to a transitional period where elements of both might coexist. So to which type did Will Somer belong?
On balance, Andersson thinks he was a “natural”. What remains after all the evidence-sifting tends to support that: the sudden temper, the illogicality, an odd habit of falling instantly asleep, an apparent obsession with coloured buttons, and so on. It then becomes even harder to believe some of the old stories about him: that he engaged in brilliant ex tempore rhyming competitions, or uttered ingenious political criticisms (though it’s a pity to discard his reported comment on the auditors and receivers of Henry’s revenues, calling them his “frauditors” and “deceivers”.)
But you are left asking yourself: what was the mentality of serious, pious, well-educated people who kept individuals with intellectual difficulties for the purpose of laughing at them? And it was mostly at them, not with them – a household fool could often be the butt of unpleasantly violent practical jokes. One historian has coined the term “human pet”; Andersson’s preferred alternative is “mascot”. The most we can say is that Henry’s so-called “closest man” – close only in terms of occasional physical proximity – was indulged and cared for, with as many coloured buttons as he wanted. Whether he himself enjoyed all the fun is a much harder question to answer.
Fool: In Search of Henry VIII’s Closest Man is published by Princeton at ￡22. To order your copy for ￡18.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
