There was a very tall & serviceable gentleman, somtime Lieutenant of the ordinance, called M. Jaques Wingfield; who coming one day, either of businesse, or of kindnesse, to visit a great Ladie in the Court; the Ladie bad[e] her Gentlewoman aske, which of the Wingfields it was; he told her Jaques Wingfield: the modest gentlewoman, that was not so well seene in the French, to know that Jaques,(*) was but James in English, was so bashfoole, that to mend the matter (as she thought) she brought her Ladie word, not without blushing, that it was M. Privie Wingfield; at which, I suppose the Lady then, I am sure the Gentleman after, as long as he lived, was wont to make great sport.
[Sir John Harington], A New Discourse of a Stale Subject called the Metamorphosis of Ajax: Written by Misacmos, to his friend and cosin Philostilpnos, 1596
(*) Since the fifteenth century, the French proper name Jaques had lent itself as an arbitrary euphemism for privy, latrine, toilet, house of office. By the sixteenth century, the common noun jakes, derived from the proper name, had lost its deflective force, with the word also coming to be used figuratively to denote anything regarded as filthy, disgusting, morally corrupt, wicked. The naïve gentlewoman of Harington's anecdote therefore confuses the proper noun for what by that period had become an offensive word, substituting the euphemism privy as the gentleman's forename. In a further humorous reversal, here it is Jaques who pays a visit, rather than a visit being paid to the jakes.
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