would be safe, say, for a prince of the blood to enter into colloquy
with the apple women at the Marble Arch or the fruit-sellers at St.
James’s Gate, when the guard is being relieved? Frederick William the
Third had a quiet humour of his own. There is one sample of it which
reminds one of what Henry the Fourth said to the mayor of a town whose
speech the king could hardly hear for the accompanying braying of a
donkey: ‘One at a time, gentlemen, if you please!’ When Frederick
William visited one of his provincial towns for the first time, the
chief clerical official of the district read to him a bombastically
inflated address. The king grew uneasy as the flattery was piled,
and at length he cut it all short, with an angry observation to his
adjutant, Colonel von Witzleben, ‘Can’t stand any more of it! The man
is pelting me with untruths.’ The king and the crown prince were good
mimics, and both brought their powers into play at a moment when a
farce was being acted in Berlin, which attracted all play-goers who
loved a laugh, king and court included. There was a favourite scene
in this farce, wherein a workman and his master quarrelled and were
reconciled. Great fun was caused by the way in which the workman
propitiated his wrathful master, by awkwardly holding out his hand,
and saying, in _dialect_, ‘Now, measter, nevertheless, no animosity
on no account!’ To this, said again and again, the master invariably
replied, ‘You know me better; am I not always that one which’----
In the expression given to these phrases by the two low comedians
there was a world of stage humour which delighted their audience, the
sovereign and his family, as much as any there. It happened at this
time that the king was kept waiting for his dinner by the tardiness
of the crown prince to appear. Now if we common mortals can bear only
with impatience being kept so waiting, you may judge if a king with
an appetite considers such an offence to be much below high treason.
Frederick William at last sat down in dudgeon; all his family sat down
too, in silence, looking at the crown prince’s vacant chair, with
a feeling that there was a storm coming. When his majesty had just
concluded his soup, his tardy royal highness entered the room. Seeing
how matters stood, he put on the sheepish look of the actor who played
the workman in the farce, approached the king in a loutish fashion,
extended his hand awkwardly, and exclaimed with country accent, ‘Now,
measter, nevertheless, no animosity on no account!’ Frederick William
took up the joke immediately. He put on the look of the other actor,
assumed his air and accent, and answered in his very voice, squeezing
his son’s hand the while, ‘Fritz, thou knowest me better; am I not
always that one which’---- You may suppose what a satisfied audience
listened to that bit of dialogue; and may lose yourself in conjecture
as to how a similar scene might be gone through with H.R.H. the Prince
of Wales and H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh giving imitations of Mr.
Compton and Mr. Buckstone in ‘Box and Cox.’
Kings of England in the olden time seldom made jokes, and more seldom
allowed them to be made by others, excepting professional jesters.
When we come to the Norman time we find the Conquistor so little able
to digest a joke that he declared war against the King of France for
making one at the expense of William’s obesity. The latter, indeed,
did try to answer the jest, but the answer missed its aim, and
William lost his life because he could not understand humour. Rufus,
on the contrary, indulged in such jesting as one might expect in an
ill-bred bachelor king of loose principles and looser companions. The
first Henry is handed down to us by successive historians as a man
of very facetious humour, but they afford no samples of the humorous
expression. Stephen had little leisure for anything but to keep his
seat in the saddle into which he had leaped after a severe struggle.
The humour of Henry the Second was of a sad-coloured hue; as it well
might be. It was sardonically indulged when he caused to be painted
on the wall of a chamber at Windsor and on the ceiling of a room at
Winchester a singular picture. The artist is nameless, but he must
have been the Landseer or the Ansdell of his day. The subject was an
old eagle attacked by his four eaglets. The youngest and fiercest of
the four was savagely picking at the parent eagle’s eyes. The king
used to smile a melancholy smile as courtiers gazed at this picture,
and did not penetrate, or seemed not to penetrate, the allegory which
it presented. Probably when they were beyond royal sight and hearing
they made good guesses at it, or the king interpreted it, and then it
was no treason to give circulation to Henry’s interpretation. The old
eagle was the monarch himself. The four eaglets were his obstinately
rebellious sons. The ruffianly youngest bird savagely trying to peck
the parent’s eyes out was the youngest and most ruffianly of his sons,
John. In that form the half-mad and most melancholy Henry manifested
his humour with regard to family affairs--an example which has not
been generally followed. In one of his sons, Richard the First, there
was much readiness of wit; and he especially loved to turn it against
the priests. To make a joke at the cost of an ecclesiastic was as good
to him as slaying an infidel. John’s jokes took a cruel form, drawing
Jews’ teeth to accelerate their disposition to lend money, and behaving
noisily at divine worship with an idea of humiliating some priest or
bishop who had offended him. His son Henry loved the arts and good
company. Of the three Edwards not one has come to our knowledge as
a joker, but the son of the last, the Black Prince, did once so far
stoop from his dignity as to, half jocularly, half angrily, call an
archbishop an ass. The second Richard never had an opportunity for
joking; and of the next three kings, Henry the Fifth alone, when Prince
of Wales, is said to have aired his wit a-nights about Eastcheap. But
what Shakespeare has made witty in relation never took place in point
of fact. All the Eastcheap doings are apocryphal, and the _Boar’s
Head_ never had beneath its roof-tree those joyous princely spirits in
whom we shall nevertheless continue to believe. Again, of the third
Richard’s jesting humour we have no other example than what Shakespeare
and Colley Cibber have invented for him. The seventh Henry was a dull
deep man; the eighth, one to laugh with if you felt especially sure
it would not shake your head off your shoulders. His son and his
daughters are not recorded in the annals of wit, and such stories as
have descended to us of James the First are of an unclean tendency, and
the best of them in point of mirth are by far the uncleanest. His son
Charles was too gentlemanlike and too grave to be such a joker as his
unkingly sire. His refinement of manner did not admit of coarseness,
with whatever wit it might be gilded, and the royal martyr is but
known, in respect of humour, for ‘King Charles’s Golden Rules,’ of
which, of course, he was _not_ the author.
If ever there was a man in whom we should not expect to find the
jesting spirit, that man is Oliver Cromwell. At the wedding festival,
however, of his daughter Frances with Mr. Rich, Oliver entered joyously
into all the jesting; so joyously that, in a moment of excitement, the
Protector whipt off his son Richard’s wig and pretended to throw it
into the fire. This he appeared to have done, but he had dexterously
conveyed it under him, and was sitting upon it, when the company were
looking for the wig upon the top of the coals. No clown, not even thou,
oh Joseph Grimaldi!--not even thou who wast an artist, true actor, in
whose every look there was a purpose, in every movement a meaning--not
even thou, oh best and greatest of the old pantomime clowns! couldst
have executed this trick with more rapidity, cleverness, and impudent
imperturbability than Oliver Cromwell exhibited on that occasion.
It was an occasion, by the way, when spilling of blood had like to
have happened through immoderate excess of the spirit of fun. Old Sir
Thomas Hillingsby was solemnly dancing, according to the fashion of
his younger days. He looked so like an insensible statue in motion,
that some daring young Puritan lads thought they might molest him
with impunity. They tried, as he slowly moved to and fro in measured
pace, to blacken his lips with burnt cork. They roused the old lion to
fury. The ex-gentleman usher to the Queen of Bohemia pulled out his
dagger, which he would have plunged between the ribs of the fellow most
actively concerned but for general interference. Some time elapsed
before harmony was restored.
It may be here objected that Cromwell was neither a royal nor an
imperial joker. He was nevertheless sovereign master of England, and
as despotic as any of them. We place him among them for much the same
reason which Richardson, the painter, gave to Queen Caroline, when she
went to see Richardson’s series of portraits of English kings, and
seeing Cromwell’s portrait among them, angrily asked how _he_, who was
no king, was placed in such company. ‘He was no king, indeed, madam,’
said Richardson, ‘but it is good for kings to have him among them.’
George the Second was not a humourist, but he would have made a
first-rate actor of ‘genteel comedy’ had not fate cast him for another
line of characters in the drama of life. Shortly after his accession
he commanded a play at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The house
was full, but as the king kept it waiting, the murmurs of their
displeasure fell upon his ear as he entered his box, three-quarters
of an hour behind time. As he caught the unwelcome sounds he turned
to Mr. Rich, the manager, who waited on him, as if he might gather
from that official some explanation of the phenomenon. The greatest
of the intellectual harlequins of England honestly told the king that
his majesty was late, and that the audience did not seem to like it.
Whereupon the sovereign assumed the air of an unrighteously suspected
prince. He advanced to the front of his box, took out his watch with
the apparent conviction that it was an arbitrator which would render
him justice, and looking upon it, saw that it showed the time which he
knew it to be. _Then_ he appeared in a change of character. He gazed
at the audience with an expression bespeaking a guilty but a repentant
prince. He put himself as much outside of his box as the laws of
balancing would allow, and shaking his wigged head and very much powder
out of it, he laid his jewelled hand on the heart side of his sky-blue
velvet coat, and made a bow to the house, so superb in its apologetic
pantomime that the audience burst forth into hilarious hurrahing and
applauding, and all other possible symptoms, to demonstrate their
gladness and to express their consent to a full reconciliation of
prince and people.
The Thespian element was very strong too in the eldest son of George
the Third. If the first gentleman in Europe had not been born a
prince he might have made a very good livelihood as an actor. High
or low comedy, it would have been all the same to a player of such
versatility. He could have played Rover like Elliston, and his
imitations were as good as Mr. Toole’s. The best-wigged prince in
Christendom has, fortunately, had an historian who makes record of
his royal hero in the histrionic part of his profession. Raikes
is the chronicler, but the Duke of Wellington was the fountain of
intelligence.
‘When the king sent for me,’ said F.M. the Duke of Wellington to
Raikes, ‘to form a new Administration in 1828, he was then seriously
ill, though he would never allow it. I found him in bed, dressed in
a dirty silk jacket and a turban night-cap, one as greasy as the
other; for, notwithstanding his coquetry about dress in public, he was
extremely slovenly and dirty in private. The first words he said to me
were, “Arthur, the Cabinet is defunct;” and then he began to describe
the manner in which the late Ministers had taken leave of him on giving
in their resignations. This was accompanied by the most ludicrous
mimicry of the voice and manner of each individual, so strikingly like
that it was quite impossible to refrain from fits of laughter.’
This exhibition has been considered a proof of the king’s bad taste;
which it may be allowed to be. But there was equal bad taste on
the part of the Duke. If he had looked grave, the old bedridden
prince-actor would have been rebuked. Moreover, the king was quite as
capable and quite as willing to give an imitation of Arthur. Inimitable
as the latter was in certain respects, there were certain peculiarities
about him which the king would have hit off with as intense delight as
he felt when mimicking his majesty’s servants, Viscounts Goderich and
Palmerston.
With George the Fourth’s successor there was no indisposition to
joke, but the royal humour was of an ordinary quality. And yet it was
eccentric too. King William would not, like his brother of Cambridge,
have said to a chaplain at a public dinner, ‘Come, d---- it, do say
_grace_, and let us begin!’ but he could not resist heightening a
jest by a strong expletive; as, for instance, in the case of Captain
and Mrs. Marryat, who were at a royal reception at the Pavilion, in
King William’s time, and from which they were anxious to get away at
a certain hour, in order to fulfil another engagement. Mrs. Marryat
looked anxiously at the clock, and King William, catching her more
than once in the fact, good-humouredly asked her the cause of her
uneasiness. The lady frankly replied. ‘Well,’ said his majesty, ‘then
why do you not leave at once?’ Mrs. Marryat had to inform him that it
would be a breach of etiquette to leave the room while their majesties
were still there. ‘Oh, d---- it!’ said the bluff monarch; ‘if that’s
the case, come along o’ me; I’ll smuggle you out.’ On state occasions,
however, a breach of etiquette would fairly take the king’s breath
away. This is exemplified by what occurred at one of his first levées.
Seeing an admiral, with whom he had been shipmate, bowing before him,
the king cordially expressed his gladness at seeing his old comrade;
adding, ‘and I hope you are quite well?’ The proper course would have
been to simply answer the remark made. But the over-polite admiral
replied, ‘Quite well, your majesty. I hope your majesty is well?’
The breach of etiquette was in making a remark to the king which
implied the necessity of an answer. King William quite blushed with
confusion, and did not recover himself till dinner-time. One of his
own jokes he enjoyed amazingly; and notably one which he played off
soon after his accession. After his arrival at St. James’s Palace the
populace summoned him again and again to the window to offer him the
congratulations of their sweet voices. King William presented himself
again and again, till twilight came on and he was tired of it. As
the ‘gloaming’ thickened, and identity was a matter of difficulty,
the king sent an old naval officer to bow for him at the window. At
every summons the officer stepped forward and acted king, bowing and
retiring, till it became too dark to make out whether any one was at
the window or not. Then the loyal _mobile_ dispersed, and the affair
was a joke for the remainder of the night at the jovial monarch’s table.
And now we are called upon to pause, just as we had finished only the
prologue to our drama. But if people _will_ make prologues as long as
plays, editors will call out, _Lusisti satis!_ and the play is deferred
to a more convenient opportunity.
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