Will was not above human infirmities; he was jealous, like greater men at court, and especially when a rival fool vied with him to gain smiles and moidores from the King. We have an instance in the case when “a jester, a big man, of a great voice, long black locks, and a very big round beard,” was juggling and jesting before the King. Armin tells us, that “lightly one fool cannot endure the sight of another;” and Will, angry at his huge rival, sought to recover his supremacy by dashing a bowl of bread and milk over the head, eyes, and beard of his titanic rival. “This lusty jester, forgetting himself in fury, draws his dagger, and begins to protest. ‘Nay,’ says the King, ‘are ye so hot?’ claps him fast; and though he draws his dagger here, makes him put it up in another place. The poor abused jester was jested out of countenance, and lay in durance a great while, till Will Sommers was fain (after he broke his head, to give him a plaister,) to get him out again. But never after came my juggler in the Court more so near the King, being such a man to draw in the presence of the King;” who (after all) could not have been mortally stricken, seeing that jesters carried only daggers of lath; but probably the act itself was considered a bad example and a serious offence. Of the generous feeling of Will, there is a well-known instance recited in Grainger; according to which it would appear, that in early life Will had been a servant in the family of a Northamptonshire gentleman named Richard Farmor or Fermor. This gentleman was of a compassionate spirit, and hearing of a destitute priest incarcerated in the gaol at Buckingham for denying the King’s supremacy, the kind gentleman sent him a couple of shirts and eightpence. This small but acceptable and praiseworthy charity entirely ruined the donor. It laid him open to a charge of _præmunire_; and for giving a change of linen and the price of a meal to a captive Papist, the King confiscated this Fermor’s estates, and reduced him to beggary and starvation. Will found opportunity to serve his old master, but not till death was pressing hard upon the King, and making his heart also something less tough and obdurate than it was wont to be. The fool improved his opportunity, and leaving to others to bid the sick monarch repent of his sins, hinted that it would be a better joke if he were to make reparation for them. The fool’s divinity was not so contemptible, for it worked on the dying King, “who,” says Mr. Thoms, in a note to Mr. Collier’s reprint of the ‘Nest of Ninnies,’ “caused the remains of Fermor’s estate, which had been dismembered, to be restored to him.”