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Hi, welcome to a new episode of Noble Blood. I am talking today with Peter k Anderson, who is a senior lecturer in history at Oraboro University in Sweden and author of the new book Fool in Search of Henry the Eighth's Closest Man, which is a book about the personal history, but also I would say, the social and political history of Henry the Eighth's fool, William Summer, and also just of royal fools in general. Hi, how are you.
I'm good. It's a pleasure to be here.
Thank you so much for joining us all the way from Sweden. Let's just start with the basics. Who was William Summer, or, as he was sometimes known, Will Summer.
Yeah, William or will Most people who were named William were nicknamed will In this period. Will Summer was Henry the Eighth's fool, so he is known mostly as the King's fool, but he was not just Henry the A's fool. He was the court fool at the British Royal Court from about fifteen thirty up until his death in fifteen sixty, and that's when Queen Elizabeth First had just been crowned. So he was a royal fool with Mary and King Edward and up until Elizabeth First.
And also considering Henry's famously rocky marriage situations, this is one of the longest term relationships he had in his life.
Yes, that's true. I've never thought about it that way, but yeah, they must have had some sort of special relationship, so to speak. What the nature of that relationship was we will discuss, but it's not very clear cut. As the title indicates, he was a person who was very close to Henry the eighth in one way or another.
Before we get into Summer's biography or what we know of his biography. I think people when they hear, you know, medieval fool, they sort of think of a juster hat with bells and shoes with pointed feet. How close is that popular perception to the reality.
Not particularly in this case. I think there were fools in Motley wearing the cap with bells and so on, but mostly this seems to have been some sort of stereotype about the fool. When we come to this period, the Renaissance, most fools, at least the fools we find in portraits. The fools that are depicted and that we can identify, they don't look anything like that. If you see a typical portrait of a Renaissance fool, you wouldn't know that it was a fool if you didn't look closely.
There is very little too identify them as fools in their portraits. And this goes especially for Will Summer, who was depicted many times in portraits, but always looking very mysterious, very brooding, never smiling or anything like that, a very sort of mysterious and almost dark figure.
So what do we know about the life of Will Summer? Who was this man who was so prominent at one of the most famous Renaissance courts in history.
We know very little about him, and the sort of contemporary references to him you could fit them on one piece of paper. Really. The thing about Will Summer is that quite a legend grew around him after his death. So when you look at the late sixteenth century and the period of Shakespeare and so on, there's quite a lot of references to him.
There.
There's some sort of mythology around him, and he is invoked as a sort of mythological gesture of the past, a sort of almost godlike figure in comedy, so to speak, and a lot of playwrights include him in place about the reign of Henry the Eighth, where he's depicted as a very sort of jesting and shrewd comic, and a lot of books were written about him in that period, but very little of what you can find in that
period is truthful. And when you start to move closer in on his own period and the sources that are closest to his life, you see that he was quite a different character. He was probably what was called in those times a natural fool. You had this distinction between natural and artificial fools, and artificial fools constituted what we would call a comedian, basically someone who was skillful at being funny. But natural fools were employed based mainly on
what we would today called an intellectual disability. It could be other things as well. It could be persons with a very sort of rural or common background who would be a contrast to the other peoples at court in a way that would be considered amusing. But natural fools were not the sort of shrewd wits that they are sometimes depicted as in Shakespeare place or later fiction.
One thing that I found so fascinating about your book is how you sort of trace how some are the character in fiction. In plays is depicted as this famous wit, as a man of the people, who sort of this outside observer who's able to comment on the insanity of court or the indulgences of the church, even though as you lay out in Summer's lifetime, he almost certainly wasn't, at least, you know, a famous wit by anything that he was doing purposefully. How did that shift happen?
That's a good question, really, it's difficult to say. I mean, it's very The image that you describe is, of course very attractive to us. We like to think of the fool as someone who sort of looks through all the performances and all the role playing going on at court, and who is a bit more like us, perhaps, and who sort of represents our perspective on this period. But it wasn't like that, and it's difficult to say how
this shift in the image of will Summer happens. But when we go a bit closer to his own lifetime, you see anecdotes about him, stories told about him where you can find perhaps a grain of truth. You can find little facts and little nuggets of information that you can single out because they don't really have any purpose in the anecdote. So it's just something that is mentioned
in passing. Things like the fact that he came from Shropshire, apparently that he had a strange ability to fall asleep in odd places, which is mentioned in a posthumous biography, but also in his own lifetime and so on. So there are little things when we get closer to his own lifetime that might have a basis in the truth.
I love that detail of him frequently falling asleep because listeners might be familiar with the fictional novels of Hilary Mantel, which, as you point out, she briefly alludes to Will Summer, but paint him almost as a narcaliptic, which I love when fiction just takes it a detail.
She does a big thing about that that he has you know, he has to have an attendant when he's in town so that he doesn't fall asleep in the street and so on. There is no source about that, but we have these indications that he might have had that sort of condition. So she does a funny thing about that.
Yeah, I love that you alluded to earlier, the fact that Summer is featured in numerous portraits I think four that we know for sure, sometimes with Henry the Eighth at his side. Was that common for fools at the time or does it say something about Summer's relationship with Henry the Eighth?
It wasn't that common in England. Actually. The only other example is there's a portrait of Thomas Moore with his family, which includes his own fool. And you can find examples from other countries, the Spanish court for instance, as on, but in England this doesn't seem to have been a convention. So that's quite interesting to find him in several portraits.
There are no portraits of William Summer alone, we haven't been able to find anything like that, but he is included in a lot of family portraits, dynastic portraits where he is standing in the background, and when you compare all these different portraits to each other, you can easily recognize this man, and you can also see a bit how he gradually becomes older and older as time passes.
There are, of course posthumous portraits he was invoked and used as a sort of mascot of the court even up until the time of Elizabeth First, So he was probably viewed and used as a source of symbol of the continuity of the Tudor court.
That's fascinating that these portraits of him are less to feature him as an individual and more just what he represented as a symbol. One other sort of I think maybe modern stereotype we have about the medieval and Renaissance fool is the idea of jester's privilege, that the gester gets to say anything that he wants and he won't get in trouble to speak truth to power. In the book, you refer to it as the legendary fool's license. Can you talk a little bit about that idea?
Yes, and that, as I said, it connects a bit with this myth that has grown around fools as literary characters. Really, you find that a lot of course in shakespeare place, which often include a fool character that is very sort of shrewd and very amusing and clever and so on. The thing about the fool's license and so on, that that is a bit of a myth, really, because when you look at the real fools in the period before this,
they were not treated very very respectfully. They were they were definitely not sort of taken seriously in any way. I would say that perhaps they had a sort of cart blanche in a way that they weren't taken seriously, and they were considered fools, so they could in a way say what they wanted, but what they said was so little regarded, so it wasn't really a thing or or something that would sort of have any political importance.
So the natural fools, which were sort of the majority of fools in this time, they were not licensed in any way like that. They had a relevance. Of course, they were entertainers in one respect, they were also sort of symbols of the deviance of something different, something curious. In a way. They were in a way sort of part of the royal curiosity collections. The role was something quite different from the sort of myth that emerged in
literature later. I mean, it comes partly from Shakespeare, partly from writers like Erasmus of Rotterdam, who wrote about the Praise of Folly pamphlet and so on. But then it starts actually to influence the role of actual court fools. When you come into the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Then you find fools that are more artificial fools. They begin to be called court justice more than earlier, and that's a different type of fool.
Really.
They are more sort of clever and shrewd, and they do have the odd moment of sarcassm and criticism. Archie art Armstrong was the main fool in the English court in the in the seventeenth century, and he got into trouble a few times for saying witty or shrewd things that weren't very popular with the king.
And sometimes fools like will Summer were disciplined quite harshly. It wasn't necessarily an easy or fun life. There are some violence that you remark on in this book.
Yes, they were disciplined, and especially Will Summer, we see was subjected to physical punishment and chastisement. As a contemporary play by a court poet called John Heywood, he sort of references the conditions of court fools at this time, and he has a long list of how they are treated. Some beat him, some bob him, some job him, some job him, some tug him by the ass, some lug him by the ears, some spitted him, some on him,
and the list goes on and on and on. So it was quite an obvious thing at this time that the fool was someone who was physically punished a lot. And this long monologue ends saying that not even will some o, the king's own fool, can avoid this kind of treatment. So he was definitely treated in the same way as other fools, and by the way, as children and servants in this period.
And there's an allusion you make in the book to a fool, possibly Summer, who said something that insulted the queen and princess that insulted court. Can you speak.
We don't know if it is will Summer. Possibly it is, And in that case, there's an ambassador who mentions this in a letter home to Spain, and he he says that the king's own fool slandered the king's mistress and the king flew into rage and nearly nearly murdered him or threatened to murder him or something like that, and the fool had to go in hiding. So this isn't really the only the only sort of proof we have that the King Henry would have become physically violent himself
towards his fool. But it is very interesting and it shows that, Yeah, the carte blanche fool's license and so on, but you could over overstep the mark, of course, and uh, and even though you were just a fool who just said foolish things, perhaps now and then there were moments when when when the fool said things that could enrage the king. Of course, possibly this this is not Will Summer at all. Possibly this is some sort of clever fool who had a very brief stint at the royal court.
So we made brief for by his lack of tact exactly.
Yeah, And maybe Will Summer was better in that respect because he didn't. There are no other other sources really of him being critical or anything like that.
One thing that I find very interesting about your book is how you talk about the influence that the Renaissance fool has on the modern stand up comedian, and you sort of suggest that that link isn't as clear as some historians like to believe, and that it's almost as if the idea of the Renaissance fool is what influenced the idea of modern comedians more than the actual fact.
Yeah, I mean, we like to think of medieval fools sometimes perhaps some sort of precursor to the modern stand up comedian. They stood up in front of the dinner guests and had like a monologue or something like that. There is some there's a Woody Allen film where he plays a medieval fool in just the same way as he is normally. That's, of course a very appealing thought, but I don't think it was quite like that, especially not when we spoke speak about the natural pools of
the Renaissance. The link that I try to sort of put forth in my book is that the taste for natural foolery in the Renaissance was based on a sort of comic taste for the natural, for the spontaneous comedy and some sort of authenticity, and that this should in some way have been taken further with the with the image of the court fool in Shakespeare and related to literature, and in that way, the sort of because Shakespeare expresses this sort of pension for more sort of natural and
spontaneous and comedians who don't laugh at their own jokes and so on, that's that's the sort of things that Hamlet says he likes in that place. So possibly there is a line to identify there, which goes forward to today when we perhaps often think of spontaneous comedy or a sort of natural streak in comedy as something to be strived after. Hmm and yeah, so so. But but it's not very it's not a sort of straight line from from the medieval fool to the stand up comedian.
Shakespeare is famous for his fools that he's written, except in his History Henry the Eighth, he specifically does not include Will Summer. Why do you think that is?
I don't know. I think I think there are There have been different explanations for that. One is that his regular clown actor, Robert Armand wasn't available at that time. I don't think Shakespeare wanted to do what all the other playwrights did, so he left Will Summer out of his play. But he but he still he has a prologue that says to the audience, you know, you won't find this fool in this play that you might expect in a play about Henry the Eighth. So apparently the
fool's absence had to be explained away. And this shows that it was on sort of a convention to include Will Summer and in these very popular history plays about the reign of Henry.
Yet, as you say in your book, the information we have about Summer's life is incredibly sparse, and you almost have to read between the lines in various legends and secondhand anecdotes that we get about him. Why as a historian were you drawn to this figure.
I've had a long standing obsession with court fools as a sort of historical problem. Really, I mean, naturally, there have been earlier historians writing books about this, the history of the fool from the antiquity really too up until today. And I've written a book myself in Swedish unfortunately, called the History of the Comedian, where I tried to see this sort of long history. There is something special about the court fool and the fool in the Renaissance or
the early modern period. They aren't, as I said, the sort of typical precursor of the modern comedian. They are not just entertainers. If we look at Will Summer, for instance, he is never listed in payments or accounts together with other entertainers. You have a list of the sort of the minstrels and the musicians and all those people. He is never among those. He is always listed separately, perhaps together with stable boys or something like that. Very strange,
So apparently he belonged to a different category. And that's also what you see when you look closely at the Renaissance fool, that they had a sort of ceremonial or almost ritualistic purpose, which you can sort of trace back to earlier times when the fool had a sort of almost scapegoat symbolic importance. And of course there's also a lot of theology involved in this, and the image of the fool in the Bible and so on.
You speak to the contradiction of the fool as a figure someone who is sometimes physically disciplined in a cruel way, treated cruelly laughed at, but that there is this almost religious side where they're considered almost godly, closer to God in that sense. Can you speak to that contrast a little bit.
Yes, that's very interesting because not even modern scholars have really been able to resolve that contradiction. If you look at theological writings on fools or references to fools, you can find both a sort of tradition about the so called holy fools, the image as you said, that fools were closer to God or had some sort of innocent connection with God and so on. And this tradition is very clear if you look at authors Christianity. I think if you look at Russia, for instance, you can find
a lot of ideas about holy fools. But then there are other ideas which also say that that fools are almost like devils, they are godless, And there's a Psalm line the fool hath said in his heart there is no God and so on. So there is like a tradition connecting atheism to foolishness, because it's foolish to deny
the existence of God. And this also sort of implicates and comes into play where when people speak about fools in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, so it was very much ambivalent, and I think this is visible also when you look at the treatment of ordinary fools like Will Summer.
It almost is is an interesting through line to how people in the Renaissance and early modern period viewed mental disability intellectual disability.
Absolutely, and that's a big issue of coursed which a lot of historians have treated and are beginning to study more and more. What you can say about that is of course that it's difficult to apply our terminology on that period, because the terminology back then was completely different, and the definitions and what you sort of what was and wasn't a disability then was different. But even there
you can see this ambivalence. You can see a lot of empathy and a lot of care, especially in communities taking care of people with a disability and so on, but also the cruelty and the beating and the sort of very cruel humor that fools are subjected to. The fool is a sort of bully victim really in a lot of situations, and that's often the most obvious modern parallel when when you study fools this time.
Bully in the sense that they were the ones being bullied.
Yes, yes, bully victims very much so. So there aren't any more obvious bullies in history than Henry the Ah. So it's very suitable this particular fool, but also in other cases.
Of course, you mentioned earlier the sort of nebulous position that Will Sommer had in court, not part of the chamber, but also not quite part of the household. What might his daily life have looked like. Obviously we don't know, but just if you had to.
Imagine, yeah, that's very interesting. Some people earlier suggested that he had his own sort of quarters in the royal palaces and so on. I don't think that was the case. I well, in that case, a very something very simple and perhaps together with servants or stable boys or something like that. There's even a reference in one of the anecdotes about him. It says that after he had been entertaining the king, he went into a corner of the room to sleep with the spaniels, so suggesting that that
he slept in the dog basket basically. And there are theories about fools and dwarfs at this time being sort of human pets. And you can see that image sometimes when you when you see him falling asleep and being sort of in the background, lounging around, being quite comfortable really, but also treated with this combination of sympathy and and cruelty that that you might compare with the pets. So so there is that dimension in it, really. So possibly
his his daily life would be something like that. He would it would be around, especially when called for, but he would also probably live outside of the court, and his life outside of court we know very little about. So there is a there is a a documentary in the Royal Archives with payments for him being washed and shaved and his feet being washed. And this is in connection with the coronation of Mary Tudor. So it's quite possible that he was not at court before that, but
he was taken in. Maybe some servant was sent out to find him in a tavern in London or something, and he was taken in because you had to have, of course Henry the Eighth Fool around for the coronation. So he was taken in, he was shaved, he was fitted with new clothes, washed and so on.
And I believe he was also president at the coronation of Elizabeth as well.
Yes, yes, that's one of the last sort of records we have of him in his life.
That sort of also image of the fool as more of a pet or mass got I think also fits with this idea of him being featured in portraits. What sort of information have you gleaned about Willsommer from the visual aspect of him that we get in his portraits.
Well, it's quite difficult to I mean, it's very easy to get ahead of yourself and draw foregone conclusions based on his appearance. We can't really say anything about his appearance based on the portraits apart from the fact that he was simply but nicely dressed. Sometimes you can even identify the clothes he wears in the portraits with records from the wardrobe accounts where these specific items of dress are ordered for him. His hair was cut short, which
was common in fools. There's also a portrait of the Queen's fool at one point, Jane Fool. We know very little about what she is. Also, she also has her head shaved, so this was this was something that was done in other fools as well. Apart from this, you can'tantly say anything about him from based on the portraits. But it's very frustrating, of course, because you have these portraits and you can recognize him, and in the very good portraits, of course, you can really see this is
a real person. So you get very intrigued and very and you want to know more. But then you have to go to other types of sources to be able to learn something more substantial about who he was.
One point that you make in the book that I just found so fascinating is this idea of what folklore historians called tradition dominant that when folk heroes are sort of being added to the cultural lexicon, they're almost like slotted into cultural archetypes that already exist that you know, you'll just apply a local hero to a trope of
a type of hero that people already know about. So with that said, we don't really know any specific justs that Will Summer did specifically, because he might have just been used as you know that we mean, you know, we know.
I mean, there are of course contemporary records that I study in the book which are sort of references to him saying things, and that seems to have been the main sort of appeal of him, that he had. He had a tendency to put his foot in his mouth, to say things that others found funny, that that sounded stupid, or something like that. Sometimes it's like it's difficult to say is he being intentionally funny here or is it just a gaff that people have sort of recorded here.
And that's also interesting, of course, because was he sort of doing something himself deliberately or was he simply a bolivicly subject to circumstances and too other people's mockery and so on. But you can actually find that's the most interesting sources where people in letters or pamphlets say something that Will Summer has said, or that they have heard that he has said. Absolutely, Yeah, you get closest to him. But it's also very very strange because you never you never hear his own voice.
Absolutely, I just met sort of the larger stories that have surrounded him. Also as the decades went by, I was wondering if you had a favorite just that had been attributed to him, either correctly or incorrect.
Okay, oh, that's a good, good question. I mean, he doesn't seem to have been, and that also sort of says something about his personality. He doesn't seem to have been like a practical joker or a physical comedian, which other fools at this time could be. There are other stories of fools, you know, eating a lot of laxatives and then sitting on top of the face of someone who's sleeping, something like that.
It's always funny. It was funny hundreds of years ago, it's funny today exactly.
And I mean, who wouldn't love studying court fools in the Renaissance when you read a story like that. But Will Summers everything is much more subtle and therefore it's very much more interesting, but also very difficult to sort of get at him. But the things he said and
the quotes from him are funny in themselves. But the thing that the sort of the motto that he had that most people who quote him refer to is you should you shouldn't abide by anything I say, And that becomes us a sort of figure of speech among courtiers in this time. Oh as Will Summers says, you shouldn't abide by anything I say, they sort of remark in passing, and that's just a fool who. Yes, maybe he had a tendency to put his foot in his mouth and so on, but maybe he was also a bit self
conscious about this. Wouldn't he have have become that after all these years being being a court fool? So there you see just a hint of a person back behind
those words. I mean, it's not quite Gratio Marx. I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me as a member, But it's not that far from it, because there is some sort of self consciousness there about the silliness and the foolishness of the fool, and also perhaps a bit of you know, sadness about how he had ended up and what his status was as a man.
Don't abide by anything I say. That's that's the sort of that's his message in a way which I think you can Yeah, you can go on and analyze that for quite a long time.
Well, I think that's a brilliant place to wrap up the sort of subtle tragedy of a man who's lefele has far outlived him. Peter Anderson, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure. If you're interested in learning more about Will Summer or the cultural and political history of the Fool, pick up fool. Thank you so much, and have a lovely evening. I'll enjoy my day in Los Angeles and you enjoy your evening in Europe.
Yes, thank you. It's a pleasure really.
Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me Danashboard, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, hannah's Wick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and re i'ma il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh Thain, and executive
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