Note 460 — NEW ENGLISH CANAAN OR NEW CANAAN. (continued 2)

Will Sommers was the famous jester and court fool of Henry VIII. His witticisms are frequently met with in the plays and annals of the period; and the portrait, said to be by Holbein and of him, looking through a window and tapping on the glass, was formerly a prominent feature in the gallery at Hampton Court. It is very questionable, however, whether the story alluded to in the text belongs to Sommers. He had been dead eighty years or more when Morton wrote, and the stories connected with him had been gotten together by Armin, and printed in his Nest of Ninnies, in 1608. This book Morton had probably seen. In it there is a story of another famous fool, Jack Oates, of an earlier period, which is probably the one Morton had in mind. Oates is represented as giving an earl, the guest of his patron, Sir William Hollis, “a sound box on the ear,” for saluting Lady Hollis, and then excused himself on the ground of “knowing not your eare from your hand, being so like one another.” (Doran’s Court Fools, p. 182.) Remembering this story in the Nest of Ninnies, Morton, with his well-developed faculty for getting everything wrong, seems to have fathered it on the most famous and popular of the occupants of the Nest.