#practical joke booby trap water garden feature

[acrossthewavesoftime]

I would love to know about William III’s water booby trap garden feature. I can’t not want to know after reading that

So apparently, William III of Orange was, for all his extremely unpersonable public persona, a practical jokster in private.

In the late 1690s, he installed a garden water feature at Het Loo that would spray unsuspecting guests with mist. Apparently, water features intended to catch guests unawares were all the rage and not quite so 'friendly' varieties included dousing people in water. How many people he watched getting sprayed with water has, alas, been lost to history. Sadly, I don't know if they still have it or have put a replica up at Het Loo, though I sadly don't think so. He restricted his sense of humour not just to water-fuelled booby traps, though.

His secretary Constantijn Huygens the Younger would sometimes fall victim to William at random introducing him as "the oldest general in the army" or "the finest astronomer the world" to complete strangers.

The earliest example of, while not a prank, a situation he enjoyed witnessing and playing a part (making decidedly worse) in was when the young Liselotte von der Pfalz visited The Hague when, was taken by her grandmother to visit William and his mother, and immediately got lost. At last finding William in a room with a strange lady, she asked him who "this lady with the ugly nose" was, to which the approximately nine-year-old owner of an even more sizeable olfactory organ burst out laughing, correcting Liselotte by saying: "but this is the Princess Royal, my mother!" Liselotte was not punished for her rude indiscretion (mainly because her aunt thought that the Princess Royal deserved being taken down a peg on occasion), and the children taken away by a Miss Hyde to go play somewhere else under her supervision- the same Miss Hyde would become William's mother-in-law many years later.

He was also capable to on occasion crack a wry joke at his own expense; one time, when he was sick with a cold that was growing into what sounds like a fully-fledged case of pneumonia that left him coughing for sometimes a quarter of an hour without stopping, he remarked, after one of these coughing fits: "At this rate, Mr Dijkvelt, I’ll soon blow to land."

There you have it! I hope I could answer your question (and maybe we can bring the late 17th century love of joke garden features back?)!