The court fool, like the tailor, is one whose avocation is passed by without notice in Scripture. From no passage in Holy Writ could the old church dignitaries who maintained fools in their households, find warrant for their practice; they simply found a worldly fashion, and adopted it. Like princes, they were not always free from “vapours;” and as princes sought to cure their melancholy by the agency of hired mirth-makers, these reverend gentlemen followed the example. With respect to the profession of fools, in its connection with the Clergy, there are two circumstances which present themselves to our attention, and excite our surprise. In old pictures and woodcuts representing inner clerical life, the presence of the jester proves that he was an actual member of the godly and merry household. This is further certain by several edicts, which forbid, not only various church dignitaries therein named from maintaining fools, but also forbidding abbesses from making dull days in convents tolerable by employing jesters to help them through such heavy seasons. But if it be matter of some surprise, to find grave religious dignitaries and solemn lady abbesses taking pleasure in such jokes as the professional mirth-maker could manufacture for them, a still greater measure of surprise is excited by the fact, that these holy personages occasionally acted the fool themselves, at the tables of patrons whose particular favour they most earnestly desired. That this irregular practice must have prevailed to a very wide extent, is ascertained by a passage in a decree of the369 Council of Cahors, to this effect: “It is also our command, that the clergy shall not practise as jesters, fools, or buffoons (Joculatores, Goliardi, seu Bufones), declaring that if they exercise such disgraceful profession for one year, they are thereby deprived of every ecclesiastical privilege; and further ordering, that if they do not desist, after being duly admonished, they shall be subjected, in addition, to secular punishment.” I am afraid that the Council of Cahors would not even have granted exemption to Sydney Smith.
Among the punishments alluded to, was whipping—after degradation. The last alone was no joke to a clerical jester. He was condemned to serve his brethren, and to go to communion as a simple laic. If such an offender travelled without testimonials, he was further subject to great annoyance and suspicion, as (to take an early example) when Chrysostom, at Constantinople, hospitably entertained some agreeable Egyptian monks, he was delighted with his visitors, but he would not admit them to the Eucharist. The joyous strangers might, for aught he knew, be under censure, and he treated them accordingly.
But, although Scripture does not mention, and the Councils of the Church do not sanction, “fools,” the latter particularly when they are members also of the clerical profession; yet the jester does not lack a protector among the Saints. The Church, indeed, has been, if one may say so without being impertinent, a little inconsistent towards the professional merrymen, when it is recollected, that in the roll of Saints there are two who especially favour fools. One is St. Mathurin, who was always invoked by them in sickness. He was a very good man, who lived at Montargis, in the fourth century, and who condescended to be the physician of all professional jesters, till the vocation became extinct. The other, and more especially patron-saint, was St. Julian; but which of the half-dozen of solemn and shadowy men who bear that name on the calendar, I am unable370 to say. Probably it was the Julian who, in the seventh century, was Archbishop of Toledo. This prelate not only lived at the court of King Wemba, but he talked him into abdicating the crown, and assuming the cowl. There was no other but a fool who could have had such liberty of speech, or was likely to have used it so effectually,—and from this circumstance is, perhaps, derived the alleged fact of St. Julian’s patronage of the professors of folly.
Whatever the Saint may have thought of the community, it is very clear that the Church did not regard its members with so much complacency as certain individual priests, who loved to have a “fun-maker” in their household. I suppose the liking and the practices to which it led were abused, or solemn councils would hardly have issued stern prohibitions, by which prelates were forbidden to retain the professional fool. The prohibition was referred to during many centuries, and we are told that Antony Sanderus, as late as 1624, reproached the clergy of his time with their love for buffoons, and for young ladies whose wit might be heavier, but whose principles were lighter than any ever professed beneath the party-coloured gabardine.
There was a time when some church corporations peculiarly honoured the votary of St. Julian. At Tournay, for instance, at the annual procession of the Holy Sacrament, the pompous line of march was opened by the official fou de la ville, who was paid by the municipality. When we read that his dress, acts, and words were all of the most extravagant description, we are surprised to learn that the office was sometimes filled by a wealthy banker of the city. At that time perhaps bankers were more fools than knaves.
A reminiscence of this custom was exhibited in Belgium as late as 1834, at the musical contest in Brussels, when several troops of musicians from various provinces entered the city, with their especial “fou” at the head of every company.
371 Among the Popes, there was none who so liberally patronized jesters as Leo X. It has been said of this prelate that a witty fool had always a much better chance of obtaining an audience of him than a grave philosopher. Jovius and Guicciardini agree in the fact of the papal predilection for fellows who could afford him mirth, not merely by their light learning, but by their gross and heavy appetites. The same writers especially allude to the favour which Leo extended to buffoons, and to those so-called arch-poets who played the fool and miserably degraded themselves for the sake of a half-gnawed bone and a handful of ducats. The most famous, yet not the grossest of these mirthmakers, was Querno, a Neapolitan by birth, with a diminutive figure, a huge appetite, and an unquenchable thirst. The mock ovation of this arch-poet, his march to the Capitol, crowned with a wreath of vine, carrot, and cabbage-leaves, and mounted on an elephant, is a well-known incident, as is also his bandying of indifferent Latin verses, improvised for the nonce, with Leo himself. This buffoon, although by no means devoid of mental endowments, was content to stand by at papal banquets, and amuse the godly company by the greedy avidity with which he swallowed the fragments and half-consumed dishes despatched to him from the pontiff’s table. If Querno was a buffoon, he was at least that sort of fool to perform whose part efficiently requires a certain sort of wit. But Leo had other jesters who had no merit but the sorry one of being disagreeable fools. Of these we may judge by what is said of two of them, a greedy, insatiable fellow named Martinus, and a mendicant brother called Marianus. They certainly were wonderful buffoons in their way, for one could take a pigeon, roasted or stewed, compress it into a species of gigantic bolus, and swallow it whole, at one gulp. The other made no difficulty of devouring forty eggs at a meal, and indeed on high festive days, wondering and applauding guests saw him deliberately devour a score of capons!
372 Of the extravagance of Leo’s table, his successor, Adrian VI., was heartily ashamed, having a sort of disgust for a pontiff who, in the company of buffoons like Querno, Gazoldo, Britonio, and Baraballo, could eat himself into an indigestion, or see others do so, on costly dishes of peacock-sausages. But in this case we have an instance of that easy compounding for one’s own sins by denouncing those of our neighbours. Adrian did not care for costly dishes or jesters; but his appetite was under less control than that of Leo, if it be true, as Jovius says of him, that the Flemish pontiff drank himself into chronic disease on strong beer. “Contrahisse morbum assiduum cerevisi? potu.”
According to some writers, it was the fool Baraballo, and not Querno, who was processionally conducted in mock pomp through the streets of Rome, to be crowned in the Capitol. The absurd verses of this jester procured for him this doubtful honour; but when he uttered dull jokes in bad measure, Leo would order him to be bastinadoed,—and to such depth could one of the most intellectual of pontiffs stoop to find relaxation from heavy duties and oblivion of as heavy responsibilities. But he might cite as example and excuse the Pontiff Paul II., who from 1458 to 1464 found exquisite delight in the poor jests of his official fools. But Paul was at least more orthodox than Leo, and in that distinction there is a world of difference.
Both these pontiffs differed from Benedict XIV., who was Pope from 1740 to 1758. Benedict loved a joke, but he loved to make it himself, and he might therefore be set down among those potentates who have been their own fools. When he was yet but Consistorial Advocate—a sufficiently grave and responsible dignitary—the spirit of fun so strongly influenced him, that at carnival-time he would issue into the thronged streets in the burlesqued costume of a doctor of divinity, and, mounting on a stool, would hold forth to the other gay masquers, denouncing their sins so pleasantly that373 their only regret was, that they were not fathoms deeper in iniquity, that they might laugh the more at the comic recapitulation of their offences. When Benedict became Pope, he endeavoured to suppress the carnival orgies; but the popular voice expressed itself so menacingly that he was content to leave others to enjoy what he could no longer participate in himself. He then confined himself to playing tricks on the Cardinals. His chief butt was Cardinal Passionei, a patient, orthodox man, who equally hated heresy and the Jesuits. The papal jokes were practical; as when the Pope, hearing that his Eminence had ordered a chest of books to be sent to him, contrived that a chest should reach him full of the most famous heretical and condemned volumes. The papal enjoyment here consisted in beholding the horror of the Cardinal on opening the case, and in seeing the delicate disgust with which he seized each work with a pair of tongs, and tossed it into the fire.
The spiritual prince-electors followed the fashion, and retained fools who seem to have been pretty plainly spoken. Thus, when the Elector Brendal of Mayence asked his jester what he thought of the newly-gilded chancel of the cathedral, Sir Motley replied, “I think it is very like the golden goblet in which the Hessians drink sour beer. Your newly-gilded chancel will be filled by dirty thieves of monks.”
Far bolder, however, was the reply of the electoral buffoon, Witzel, to Wolfgang, another Elector of Mayence, who asked him of what gender the word Mater was. “Well,” answered the fool, “mine is generis feminini; but your Electoral Highness’s mater is generis communis.” The fools of the Mayence Electo............