Pass we on now from Pace, and the question connected with him, to one of those fools who were rather hangers-on about court, than actually, exclusively and officially, engaged in the Royal service. Such a one seems to have been that Charles Chester, who resembled those official French jesters who found more delight in annoying the courtiers by his sarcasms, than amusing them, or his Sovereign, by his wit. Chester was especially severe in addressing coarse strictures on Raleigh and Lord Knollys, in their own hearing. Sir Walter resolved to be revenged; and to accomplish it, they invited Chester to supper. The buffoon accepted the invitation without any suspicion, and the two noble gentlemen made him exceedingly drunk at a repast at which he had eaten like Gargantua. Taking him in this condition, with the help of several servants, they fastened him up in a corner of a court-yard, and then some masons, engaged for the occasion, built a brick wall close round his person, and right up to his chin. They kept him there many hours, under a threat of building him in altogether. The jester was sobered by his terror, and begged piteously to be liberated. When ready to die with fear, indigestion, and other fatal influences, the frolicsome gentlemen exacted from him a solemn oath, that he would never again cut a joke or make a sarcasm at their expense; and the fool kept his word, if not out of a sense of honour, certainly out of a sense of terror.
Chester survived to be known to Ben Jonson, who has immortalized him as Carlo Buffone, in ‘Every Man Out of His Humour.’ In the character of the persons prefixed to that piece, this buffoon is described as scurrilous and profane; rich in absurd similes and audacious lies; a “good feast-hound or banquet-beagle;” a thorough parasite and glutton, and a stupendous swiller of sack. “His religion is railing, and his discourse ribaldry;” and it is added of this perverse fellow, that he loaded those with the heaviest reproaches whom he had the greatest reason to respect. Such a character accords well with the noisy, evil-tempered fellow depicted by Aubrey (Lives, ii. p. 14), who tells us that the fool so offended a knight at a tavern by his impertinence, that the angry gentleman beat him, and stopped his mouth by sealing his beard and moustachios together with wax!