donne and the ancient catholic nobility

D E N N I S FLY”

Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility

9 ohn Donne introduced himself to the reading public with the dangerous reflection that, “as I am a Christian, I have beene ever kept awake in a meditation of Martyrdome, by being derived from such a stocke and race, as, I beleeve, no family, (which is not of farre larger extent, and greater branches,) hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes, for obeying the Teachers of Romane Doc- trine.”’ This is one of a few isolated references by Donne to the sufferings of English Catholics, all understandably guarded or indirect. Nevertheless, Donne’s main point (still a delicate one at the time) is that the persecution of his family for their religion has been the central theme of his life. He alludes to family and lineage in terms that still had for his contemporaries a meaning much deeper than we would normally give them today. Often quoting this passage, Donne’s biographers have slighted it as hyperbole, not fully recognizing its implications.

Among the least recognized of these has been Donne’s secondary point, his allusion to families “of farre larger extent, and greater branches”-that is, to families of the ancient nobility. By the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, such noble houses as Howard, Percy, and Stanley had suffered enormous losses, both of lives and possessions, as a consequence of the change of religions in England.2 Donne’s

I . Pseudo-Martyr (1610) “An Advertisement to the Reader.” This book was Donne’s first publication in the full sense ofthe word. Though musical settings for a few ofhis lyrics had been published earlier, as well as his prefatory poem for Ben Jonson’s Volpone, these were not primarily or explicitly publications by Donne himself.

2. From the house of Howard since 1067 had come the earls of Arundel; from Percy and Stanley since I 139 had come the earls of Northumberland and of Derby. These were the three most ancient earldoms of the realm. The political destruction of such Catholic families by the Elizabethan regime is one panel in the broad picture drawn by Lawrence Stone, The Crisis ofthe Arirtocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1979); see especially chapter 5 , “Power,” pp. 199-270.

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awareness of this fact and its personal importance to him have gone virtually unnoticed; yet the desolation of the Catholic peerage became part of Donne’s formative experience and deeply influenced him throughout his life.

A fundamental problem for students of Donne has been to under- stand the politics of Donne’s Catholic humanist heritage as a descen- dant of Sir Thomas More in the midst of the Elizabethan persecution of Catholics. A merely superficial approach to this problem has grown from uncritical acceptance of essentially apologetic historiographical traditions stretching back to the Reformation period. In this connection Donne scholars stand to benefit greatly from recent re- valuation of “the old religion.”3 A second, related problem centers in Donne’s association with members of ancient noble families, tradi- tionally Catholic, who were suffering progressive degradation at the hands of Tudor politicians. Although Donne’s biographers have made almost no reference to this important context, it is a key to much that has remained mysterious in Donne’s life.

Study of Donne’s Catholic heritage has mainly concentrated on an effort to supply the fullest possible detail about what he himself pointed out, the personal and material sufferings endured by the branches of his family. This has sometimes seemed an end in itself, and no doubt much here remains to be discovered. But too often Donne scholars have ignored his family’s acts of resistance to Tudor reform, conceiving the eventful years between Thomas More and Donne (as Donne himself tersely sketched them) in generalized terms as a record of suffering. Donne and his family lived through important and historic developments in which they were active participants more often than passive sufferers. It is necessary therefore to show (what Donne did not mention, let alone detail) that their sacrifice and repression took place in significant social and political contexts. In particular, despite Donne’s silence and the silence of others, we need

3 . E.g.. by John Bossy, “The Character of Elizabethan Catholicism,” Past and Present, 21

(April 1962). 39-58; and The English Catholic Community, 1570-1850 (London, 197s). See also Christopher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge, Eng., 197s); and Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise (Cambridge, Eng., 1982). Also valuable, if sometimes overlooked in this connection, is the useful calculus of religion and politics in sixteenth-century England offered by Francis Edwards, The Marvellous Chance (London, 1968). pp. 15-18,

evincing an impartiality uncommon among historians less aware than Edwards of their own historiographical presumptions.

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to know more about the long history ofassociations between Donne’s family, the ancient nobility, and the Tudor Court.

One might ask, for example, what history lies behind Donne’s being able in February 1602 to enlist an earl-Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland-as a mesrenger to deliver the letter informing Sir George More that Donne had clandestinely married More’s daughter. The Earl’s participation in the aftermath of Donne’s wedding, although it is so reported by Izaak W a l t ~ n , ~ was not merely an isolated incident. For years a personal and political alliance had persisted between the two men and their families, beginning at least as early as the return from exile of Donne’s Jesuit uncle Jasper Heywood in the summer of I 581 , when Donne was only nine years old. An even earlier relationship between the Heywood and Percy families is suggested by the fact that Heywood, after twenty years on the Conti- nent, was enabled to infiltrate England as an underground missionary at Tynemouth Castle: the only port of entry on the northeast coast available for safe use by Catholic exiles, because it was controlled not by the Privy Council but by Henry Percy, eighth Earl of Northum- berland, the father of Donne’s lifelong friend.

Jasper Heywood’s return to England reunited him with childhood friends among the ancient nobility, as is seen in his subsequent approach to work as a missionary. Heywood’s characteristic style placed him almost immediately at odds with his Superior on the Jesuit mission, Robert Persons. Twelve years older than Persons, Heywood had grown up at Court during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. His personal acquaintance not only with Queen Elizabeth but with other aristocrats in England and abroad led him to think of the mission largely in terms of influencing the great noble houses. In contrast, Persons, a yeoman’s son and a scholarship student at Ox- ford, seriously considered the English nobility a lost cause from the Catholic point of view. The difference is symbolized in the contrast- ing ways these two men infiltrated the country. Persons, furtively disguised as a petty military officer, crossed the Channel with the help of Catholic sympathizers among English merchants and boatmen; Heywood disembarked at Tynemouth Castle with the help of North- umberland and brazenly defied detection, descending on London

4. Izaak Walton. T h e Lives ofjohn Donne, S i r Henry Worton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Robert Sanderson (London, 1936). p. 28.

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from the north, out of Percy country, “in coach accompanied with many and in costly a ~ p a r e l . ” ~

Heywood’s first order of business when Persons left him in charge a few weeks later was to contact sympathetic friends among the nobility and collect from them sizable donations of funds for the work of the mission. By early 1 5 8 2 Heywood had raised pledges to total more than 1 3 0 0 pounds a year, “by even porsions to be payde,” from a long list of wealthy nobles and gentry headed by Henry Stanley, fourth Earl of Derby, who pledged 3 0 0 pounds a year. Other sympathetic nobility on the list of Heywood’s contributors were Anthony Browne, Viscount Montague and Lords William Vaux, Thomas Paget, John Lumley, Henry Morley, and Philip Wharton.6 All these men or their deceased fathers had grown up with Heywood at Court (as had a group of noble women contributors on the same list) and all Heywood’s contributors were key figures, able in more ways than financially to facilitate missionary operations throughout the country.

The appearance of Derby’s name on this list is especially significant, because it relates to later efforts by Donne’s mother, Elizabeth Heywood Donne Syminges, working with her brother Jasper, to give her son the kind of Catholic humanist education she had received and to insure through Court connections that Donne’s education did not run afoul of repressive Elizabethan laws and regulations attempting to curb the Catholic education of children. The Oxford matriculation statute had required from the outset of Queen Elizabeth’s reign that students subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles and swear the Oath of Supremacy at the age of sixteen. But during the early I 5 8 0 s the Privy Council, reacting to the success of the mission at the universities, especially Heywood’s work at Oxford, had ordered heads of Oxford

5 . On Persons and his coming to England see Letters and Memorials oJFather Robert Persons, S.]., ed. Leo Hicks (London, 1942). pp. ix-xvi. O n Heywood see my “The English Mission of Jasper Heywood, S.J.,” Archiuum Historicum Sociefafis lesu, 54 (1985), 45-76. On the background of Heywood’s infiltration at Tynemouth see Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, to Sir Francis Walsingham, March 13. 1581 (Scot. Cal. Elix. , V. 653); and the Examination of William Holt, March 2, 1583 (Bodleian Library, Tanner 79/187).

6. P. H. to Walsingham, n.d. (Public Record Ofice, SP12/168/31). The letter is conjec- turally calendared in 1584 (Dom. Cal. Eliz., 11. 160), but its references to the imprisonment of the priests Christopher Small and Ralph Collyer show that it must have been written after mid- spring 1582 and before mid-winter 1582-1583. “P. H.” was a Privy Council spy who reported on Heywood’s activities from time to time; cf. P. H. to Walsingham. n.d. (PRO SPiz/ I 55/96), giving news of Heywood’s reconciling hundreds to Catholicism in Staffordshire in the fall of 1 5 8 1 .

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colleges to require the Oath of Supremacy from selected students as young as twelve years of age.’ This was why Donne lied about his age when matriculating from Hart Hall in October 1584. He could not spend more than one term at Hart Hall before he would likely be required, as a member of a noted Catholic family and nephew of a by now imprisoned Jesuit missionary, to swear the Oath of Supremacy.

Donne simply could not risk returning to Oxford after Michaelmas term 1584. Our only reason for supposing that he did so has been a statement by Izaak Walton. But Walton is at his most unreliable in recounting this period ofDonne’s life; his story is so self-contradictory that biographers have had to question it even without knowing of Heywood’s urgent concern over early imposition of the Oath of Supremacy. For example, R. C . Bald modified Walton’s story and speculated about the possibility of Donne’s having spent at least some of the 1580s traveling on the Continent.H Considering the historical crisis of English Catholicism in I 584-1585, of which one manifesta- tion was the situation faced by young Oxford Catholics, Donne’s flight from the heightening persecution at this time seems logical and plausible.

By the fall of I 584, as Donne was beginning at Oxford, Heywood had been held in the Tower of London for most of the year. Catholics expected that he would eventually be executed. But behind the scenes, it now developed, Heywood had instead been scheduled by the Privy Council for deportation. The policy of Lord Burghley with regard to Catholicism in England had begun to prevail over the policy of the Earl of Leicester and Sir Francis Walsingham, who had strongly urged show trials and public executions of priests during the preced- ing three years. As Burghley now argued, these brutal executions had largely backfired: “Death doth no Ways lessen them, since we find by Experience that it worketh no such Effect, but, like Hydra’s Heads, upon Cutting off one, seven grow up.”9 Therefore, it would be better to clear out all the priests: summarily deport those in custody and then put new legislation through Parliament banishing the rest and making it simply illegal for them ever to set foot in England again. Heywood,

7. Heywood to Claudio Aquaviva, n.d. (Roman Archives ofthe Jesuits, Anglia 3 0 / 1 / I 18v). 8. R. C. Bald,John Donne: A L I ~ (Oxford, 1970), pp. 50-52. 9. William Cecil, Baron of Burghley, “Lord Treasurer Burleigh’s advice to Queen Elizabeth,

in Matters o f Religion and State,” in A Fourth Collection ofScarce and Valuable Tracts, 4 vols. (1752). 1, 104.

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in custody since December I 583 , was thus to be deported with twenty others in January 1 5 8 5 .

These plans, along with preparations for the Parliament of I 584- 1585, became a main concern of Catholics. To counter the new legislation, a group of Catholic nobility and gentry headed by Hey- wood’s friend Lord William Vaux had worked with Heywood to prepare a petition boldly appealing to the Queen herself for toleration of Catholicism. Heywood’s replacement as Jesuit Superior in En- gland, William Weston, learned of the petition for toleration through correspondence with Heywood, relayed to and from the Tower by Donne’s mother. Probably on instructions from Persons, Weston now sought more searching conversation with Heywood than could be had by letters. The petition contemplated had the potential to compromise the whole political design of the mission. Thus at Christmas 1584 , evidently under the guise of a family visit, Mrs. Syminges daringly brought Weston to Heywood’s cell in the Tower. To make the family visit more plausible, they brought with them into the Tower the twelve-year-old John Donne.

Weston’s memoirs, tersely describing the meeting, were written twenty-seven years afterwards. But even at such great distance of time, his traitorous penetration into the Tower of London had left a deep impression on him: “I accompanied her to the Tower, but with a feeling of great trepidation as I saw the vast battlements, and was led by the warder past the gates with their iron fastenings, which were closed behind me. So I came to the cell where the Father was con- fined. We greeted one another and then, as was natural, exchanged the information we had about the affairs that concerned US."^^ The specific details of these affairs Weston does not mention, but Donne has left us his own account of the visit, the earliest experience of his life of which we have any personal testimony: “at a consultation of Zeruits in the Tower in the late Queenes time, I saw it resolved, that in a Petition to bee exhibited to her, shee might not be stiled Sacred.”” Although even more laconic than Weston’s account, Donne’s remark charac- teristically tells more than Weston does about the heart of the matter, the meeting’s political focus on the petition for toleration. We may be sure, however, that this quibble over wording the petition was not the

10. William Weston, A n Autobiography &om theJesuit Underground, trans. Philip Caraman

I I . Donne, Pseudo-Martyr, p. 46. (New York, I ~ S S ) , p. 10.

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only thing about his visit to the Tower that had made an impression on the boy. Weston concludes, “At last, when I had finished talking to Father Heywood-we spent almost the whole day together-I em- braced him and said goodbye. Then I returned the same way that I had come; and the moment I reached safety outside the walls I felt as if I had been restored to the light of day.”’*

The tension Donne and his mother must have felt on this occasion was not only over the petition for toleration and other problems raised by the Privy Council’s policy to deport and ban priests. In addition, Burghley had advised various other crushing but not killing measures against the Catholics, to the end that “the furthest Point to be sought, for their contentment, is but to avoid their Despair.” Among these measures was the taking of what Burghley called “School Hostages.” The practice had been implemented selectively and was considered by Catholics to be one of the most devilish policies directed at them. Catholic parents were forced to surrender their sons to live and be educated under “good Schoolmasters,” an arrangement at once preventing the boys’ Catholic education and insuring their parents’ good behavior. 13 Any Oxford student refusing to swear the Oath of Supremacy, especially one with.Donne’s connections, was a likely prospect to receive this treatment. Donne’s presence in the Tower of London at Christmas 1584 thus had a secondary purpose: his mother and uncle were making final arrangements for his flight from the persecution in England.

From about this time, Catholics obviously felt the need to take more elaborate care about the education of their children. For example, among the group of imprisoned priests deported with Heywood was his fellow Jesuit James Bosgrave, who spent the first weeks of his exile trying to satisfy his family’s earlier request that his adoles- cent niece and nephew be somehow secretly transferred to Catholic schools at Louvain or Rheims. Bosgrave sought to contact Catholics or Catholic sympathizers among the English merchants trading at Calais.14 This procedure had the advantage that, amidst heavy cross- channel traffic, the children could be fairly inconspicuously stowed

12. Weston, A n Aufobiogrophy, p. 1 1 . Unlike Donne, Weston carefully omits all mention of the visit’s political context; but see Roger B. Manning, “Richard Shelley of Warminghurst and the English Catholic Petition for Toleration of 1585,” Recusont Hisfory, 6 (1962). 270.

13. Burghley, “Lord Treasurer Burleigh’s advice to Queen Elizabeth,” 104.

14. James Bosgrave to Odon Pigenat, May I , 1585 (Roman Archives ofthe Jesuits, Gallia 9217).

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away in a small boat or merchant ship. O n the other hand, mercantile activity across the Channel was a risky business, given the ongoing hostilities in the Netherlands. Moreover, the ports were all closely watched on both sides by agents of the Privy Council under orders to thwart just such attempts to secure the illegal education of Catholic children as Bosgrave was trying to arrange. Heywood and his sister had chosen a better way, making use of their contacts at Court to get John Donne across the Channel. Young Donne did not have to crouch furtively behind barrels and parcels on a channel packet.

On January 20, 1585, the day before Heywood’s deportation, Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby, was sent toward Paris as Extraordinary Am- bassador to King Henri 111, to invest him with the Order of the Garter. Taking leave of the Queen, the Earl and with him his retinue at Greenwich were admitted to kiss Elizabeth’s hand. Forty-five names were certified on that day over Derby’s signature as “noble men Knightes and Esquires and Gentlemene geving their Attendance one the Righte Honorable the Earle of Derby Elizabethe the Queenes Matys Embassador to the French King.” Toward the end of the list are the names of boys serving as waiting gentlemen to the Earl, including one hitherto unidentified “Mr John Donnes.”I5

A later document-“A Checkerowle of my L. the Earle of Derbies Householde Servants the xiiith daie of Maye Anno I 587”-lists under the heading Gentlemen Waiters “Mr Jhon Downes” with seven other young men and boys, six of whom also appear as gentlemen waiters with “Mr John Donnes” on the earlier list of Derby’s suite for the I 585 embassy. Evidently “Mr John Donnes” and “Mr Jhon Downes” were the same person. F. R. Raines, who edited and annotated the 1587 list, could not identify “Mr Jhon Downes,” except as possibly John Dawney, son or grandson of Sir John Dawney.I6 But E. B. Goodacre

I S . Bodleian Library, Rawlinson 146B/67. The name is clearly inscribed “MrJohn Donnes” although scholars who have published the list have silently and unwarrantably altered the spelling of this name to “John Downes”; see E. B. Goodacre, “Henry, Earl of Derby’s Suite on His Embassy to Paris in 1584/5.” Transactions ofthe Historical Society of lancashire and Cheshire, 92 (1940), 54; and Barry Coward, T h e Sranleys: Lords Stanley and Earls o f D e r b y , 1385-1672 (Man- Chester, Eng., 1985), p. 150.

16. F. R. Raines, ed., T h e D e r b y HouseholdBooks (Manchester, Eng., 1853). pp. 23 and 1 1 3 -

14.

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pointed out that “Mr John Donnes” and “Mr Dawnie” were separately listed as members of Derby’s suite in 1 5 8 5 and must therefore have been different persons. As for “Mr John Donnes”/“Downes, ” Goodacre (like Raines an informed historian of Lancashire and Chesh- ire) was nevertheless unable to make any positive identification but speculated that he might have been “a member of one of the many Cheshire families” with such a name.17

Goodacre could cite no specific connection between a Cheshire boy and Derby, and neither have I been able to find one. However, neither Raines nor Goodacre seems to have considered Jasper Heywood’s relations with Derby in the course of missionary work and even earlier, while they both grew up at the Courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI. In view of this connection, and the critical circumstances faced by Catholics in January 1 5 8 5 , the most likely identification of Derby’s waiting gentleman would seem to be Heywood’s nephew. Mindful of the danger to Donne if he returned to Oxford, and seizing the unique opportunity presented by his own deportation, Heywood had again called on his old Court friend Henry Stanley, placing his nephew in Derby’s suite, thus conveying the boy safely to France, out of range of the Oath of Supremacy and the persecution.

Arriving at Calais on February 14, the Earl ambassador and his train passed by stages toward Paris, greeted first at St. Denis by the resident English ambassador to France, Sir Edward Stafford. O n Feb- ruary 2 3 they made their entrance into Paris, welcomed by the flower of French nobility and opulently lodged at the Hotel de Longueville. O n the following day, the Earl with his retinue was elaborately ushered into the Louvre, where his liveried officers and gentlemen were appointed to stay in an antechamber, while the ambassadors and other English lords and knights were admitted to the French king’s Chambre Royal. On February 28, Henri I11 took the oath of the Garter in a house next door to the church of the Augustinian friars, where afterwards at vespers a magnificat was sung because the En- glish ambassadors could not countenance a mass. 1*

Donne probably remained in the Earl of Derby’s retinue throughout the ceremonies marking the award of the Garter to Henri 111. But

17. Goodacre, “Derby’s Suite,” 5 3 . 1 8 . Venetian Ambassador to the Doge and Senate, February 28. 1585 (Ven. C a l . , VIII. 107-

09). Cf. John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions ofQueen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (1823). 11, 428-31; and Thomas Morgan to Mary Stuart, February 25, 1585 (HMC Salisbury 3: 94-95), where Morgan tells of his effort to persuade French prelates to avoid the ceremony.


just at this time Heywood and the other deported priests arrived, joining the Parisian community of English Catholics, stirred by the wave of deportations and the coincidental excitement of the embassy to a sense that a great crisis in their exile had arrived. Derby’s embassy fueled this speculation partly because of the size and composition of the Earl’s retinue. At a time when ordinary passage out of England was being carefully scrutinized and unlicensed travel was forbidden, the Earl ambassador had easily allowed his consent to a host of avid fellow travelers. All told about 220 people, most of them unofficial hangers-on, had taken advantage of Derby’s liberality,lY which caused pointed comment by the Privy Council.

Implicitly reprimanding a peer of the realm, the Council later noted (in advance of another Derby embassy) that “divers evil1 disposed personnes had intruded and thrust themselves into the company ofhis Lordship’s traine and followers, purposing under collour thereof to convey themselves beyond the seas.”2o Evidently Heywood was not the only Catholic exile expecting a friend or family member to join him in Paris. Among others there was the Earl’s own sister, Elizabeth Stanley Parker, Lady Morley, who had followed her husband into exile more than fifteen years earlier. On the occasion of Derby’s embassy she came from Bruges to Paris to be with her brother and her nephew William Stanley, the Earl’s second son, who had accompanied his father.21 Thomas Morgan, lately proclaimed a traitor for his involvement in plotting to invade England, wrote from Paris to Mary Stuart that he had found many among the Earl’s train eager to meet secretly with him.22 No doubt other such meetings took place at Paris. And when the Earl of Derby finally departed on March 10 his train had been considerably and suspiciously depopulated. Donne was among the Catholic fellow travelers who left the Earl’s retinue to remain on the Continent.

Tending to confirm that Donne accompanied the Derby embassy in 1585 is evidence that he was present at the siege of Antwerp a month later. While Heywood and the other deported priests had set

19. Coward, The Sfanleys: Earls ojDerby, p. 33 . On the general excitement at Paris, including an effort to bribe Stafford, see Morgan to Mary Stuart, February 10, I 5 8 5 (HMC Salisbury 3 : 90- 91).

20. Privy Council to Derby, February 17. 1588 (APC IS: 378). 21 . Bodleian Library, Rawlinson 146B167. Cf. Morgan to Mary Stuart, February 10, 1585

22. Morgan to Mary Stuart, April 19, 1585 (HMC Salisbury 3: 96). (HMC Salisbury 3: 91).

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out from Paris to confer with leaders of the mission at the Rheims seminary, Donne remained with some of his fellow travelers in Paris, where the great news of the day was the completion by Alessandro Farnese, Prince of Parma, of his siege works around Antwerp. Gradu- ally since the summer of 1584, Parma had been tightening a noose around the city, establishing control of surrounding dikes and water- ways, building forts, and generally sealing Antwerp off from any outside aid. He had dug a twelve-mile canal connecting his encampment to his source of supplies at Steeken, and to cut off Dutch shipping into Antwerp had erected a bridge across the unbridgeable Scheldt. In all he had conducted one of the most brilliant diplomatic, military, and engineering enterprises of his age and was himself “as- tonished” at what had been achieved.23 The climax of Parma’s years- long siege was at hand as Heywood and Donne came to the Continent in early 1585. Young English Catholic fugitives would naturally take keen interest in these developments, and Donne’s interest was in fact expressed in his earliest literary efforts, his Latin Epigrams.

Donne scholars have paid little or no attention to Jasper Mayne’s translation of the lost Latin Epigrams. Neither R. C. Bald nor Wesley Milgate, who finished Bald’s work for publication, so much as mention these poems or their translator. Milgate had earlier edited the English Epigrams, also without mentioning Mayne or the Latin Epi- grams. Milgate and Bald thus continued a tradition in Donne scholarship going back to Sir Herbert Grierson, and beyond Grierson to Sir Edmund Chambers, Alexander Grosart, and Augustus Jessopp, all of whom concluded that Mayne’s translations were merely spurious. Only Baird W. Whitlock diverged from this consensus about the translated Epigrams, holding that “students of Donne have been robbed of much potentially important material by editorial suppres- sion of the 1652 epigrams.”24 This was a serious charge; it seems more

23. Alessandro Farnese, Prince of Parma, to King Philip 11, January 1 5 . 1585; John Lothrop Motley, The History ofthe United Netherlands, 4 vols. (New York, 1867). I , 172.

24. Baird W. Whitlock. “Donne’s University Years,” E n ~ l i s h Studies, 43 (1962). 19. The epigrams appeared as “A sheafofMiscellany Epigrams. Written in Latin byJ. D. Translated byJ. Main D. D . ,” pp. 88-103 in Donne’s Paradoxes, Problemes, Essayes, Characters, Written by D r Donne Dean ofPauls: To which is added a Book ofEpigrams: Written in Latin by the same Author; translated into English byJ: Maine, D . D . (1652). For my argument that these translations must be authentic see ‘Ijasper Mayne’s Translation of Donne’s Latin Epigrams,” John Donne journal, 3 (1984). 121-30. Although the poems have never been reprinted since the seventeenth century, they are scheduled for inclusion by the University o f Missouri Press in a forthcoming volume o f The Variorum Edition ofthe Poetry ofJohn Donne.


serious still in view of something Whitlock himself did not realize: thirty-two of these poems are based on observations of the Spanish siege of Antwerp during the spring of I 5 8 5 .

Donne’s Epigrams about Antwerp show that he had joined the company of English fugitives being trained at the Spanish encampment outside Antwerp for eventual participation as gentlemen volun- teers in an invasion of England. Comparable to the English Epigrams Donne wrote a dozen years later about his observations during the Essex expedition to Cadiz, the poems seem based on direct experience of the siege works around Antwerp as they appeared after such spec- tacular engineering feats as the use of standing timber to build a new town on the spot; the excavation, through the same terrain, of a canal for shipping supplies; and other unmistakable and unique features of Parma’s enterprise. Moreover, by the evidence of the translated Latin Epigrams, we can identify with some precision the time when Donne was a t Antwerp.

The phenomena Donne’s poems describe coincide exactly with the scene as it appeared during the weeks just after the tenacious Dutch rebels had slaughtered about a thousand of Parma’s elite troops and nearly killed the Prince himself by sending downriver against the Farnese bridge a floating bomb: a ship filled with powder and slabs of granite, layered over with cannonballs, chain shot, plowshares, and miscellaneous deadly projectiles. O n the night of April 5 this ship had lodged against the piers of the bridge near Parma’s encampment when suddenly there was a horrible explosion and a large part of the bridge, with all the troops stationed on it, vanished into air.

The Scheldt yawned to its lowest depth, and then cast its waters across the dikes, deep into the forts, and far over the land. The earth shook as with the throb of a volcano. A wild glare lighted up the scene for one moment, and was then succeeded by pitchy darkness. Houses were toppled down miles away, and not a living thing, even in remote places, could keep its feet. The air was filled with a rain of plowshares, gravestones, and marble balls, intermixed with the heads, limbs, and bodies of what had been human beings. Slabs of granite, vomited by the flaming ship, were found afterward at a league’s distance, and buried deep in the earth. A thousand soldiers were destroyed in a second of time, many of them being torn to shreds beyond even the semblance of humanity.25

25. Motley, History ofthe United Netherlandr, I , 196.

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Unfortunately for the Dutch, Parma himself miraculously survived this blast. Rallying his shaken forces, before morning he had already restored the ruined portion of the bridge temporarily. Inexplicably, the Dutch failed to take advantage of the Spaniards’ brief disarray, and within a few days the siege works were again as effective as ever.

It must have been at this point, sometime late in April, that Donne came to Parma’s encampment. The Spanish troops, among them an embryonic company of English deserters and fugitive gentry, had been severely traumatized. Parma wrote to King Philip, “We are always upon the alert, with arms in our hands. Every one must mount guard, myself as well as the rest, almost every night and the better part of every day.”2h Afraid of a repetition of the episode of the “demon fire-ship, ” the besieging troops were soon overcome with fatigue. All night, every night, a continual exchange of rockets and beacon fires threatened yet another ingenious attack, somehow con- certed by the Antwerpers upriver and the massed Dutch fleet downriver. “Every day we are expecting some new invention,” Parma told King Philip.27 But the general’s instincts told him that the real attack would come not from fire-ships against the bridge but in a pitched battle on the Kowenstyn dike.

To prevent the raising of the siege by the piercing of this massive dike, Parma’s troops waited for the attack in strategically placed forts, the rest of the dike fringed with breastworks. They knew that forces of sappers and pioneers from the Dutch fleet would combine with troops from Antwerp, sallying forth simultaneously at a prearranged signal. Sentinels were ordered all day to listen for the bells of the cathedral’s steeple, and all night to watch the city’s towers unblink- ingly for flares or beacons signaling the attack. (Years later Donne wrote, “I have lien neere a steeple, in which there are said to be more than thirty Bels,” and his marginal note next to this passage reads ‘‘Antwerp.”)28 Concerning his vigilant troops Parma wrote, “The fatigue and anxiety are incredible. Not a man can sleep at night.”*’ This is precisely the situation described in one of Donne’s epigrams,

26. Parma to King Philip I I , May 6, 1585 (in Motley, I , 203). 27. Parma to King Philip 11, May 2 5 , 1585 (Motley). 28. John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal, 1975).

p. 82 . Raspa’s note idcntifies the steeple with the bells as that of the Cathedral of Notre Dame at Antwerp; Raspa cites Bald’s conjecture that Donne may have visited Antwerp in 1612.

29. Parma to King Philip. May 6, 1585 (Motley, History ofrhe United Nefherlands, I , 207).


an expostulation “To Sleep, stealing upon him as he stood upon the Guard in the corner of a running Trench”:

Here guards are kept, & from yond watchful totures, The crafty Foe vyes broken sleeps with ours; Seeking by slye plots, what pitchd fields deny; Hence, hence, then Morpheus, from our quarters fly. Our very standing still here business finde; Duty imploys our bodies, cares our minde. . . . Wil not this serve, Sleep? wil not a1 this fright thee? See, then, a night turn’d into day to light thee. See a bright shine from coal-black powder spring, And light from darkness once more issuing. See flames like those belcht forth from Aetna’s Maw, Such flames as no Fleece-stealinglason saw.30

These lines evoke the desperate sleeplessness of Parma’s troops, in- tently studying the skyline of Antwerp and fearful about a possible repetition of the disastrous midnight explosion.

In another epigram addressed “To his Fellow Sentinels,” Donne expresses the concern that had brought them all to take part in this enterprise, the reason why they were not at home in Elizabethan England:

A coy whore is with patience watcht for, yet No honor’s gain’d; glory with dangers met Here doth attend us; toyls are paid with praise. Let’s weave us Crowns, then, of immortal Bayes. To Heaven our souls, to Earth let’s flesh assign, But in our mindes let loyal honor shine.31

English Catholic fugitives who enlisted in the service of Spain were above all conscious of the point of honor on which their service had turned. The Catholic gentry and nobility had watched patiently for the first two decades of Elizabeth’s reign. Although most were no match for such a politician as Burghley, they valued a concept of honor as “steadfastness,” standing by a position once taken. For adherents of the code of honor, this had always been more important than manipulating events toward a successful outcome. But since the

30. Donne, “A sheaf of Miscellany Epigrams,” p. 100.

3 I . Donne. “A sheaf of Miscellany Epigrams,” p. 101.

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code of honor was a social code, it required that positions consistently taken be defined ultimately in public gestures, if necessary in a “language of the sword.”32 Such was the rationale of invasion plots that began to preoccupy larger numbers of English Catholics in the early 1580s.

A language of crusade had been the conceptual undergirding of all the Catholic rebellions against Tudor reform, going back through the Northern Rising of 1569 to the Pilgrimage of Grace in the year after Sir Thomas More’s execution. More himself, with Bishop John Fisher, Reginald Pole, and the circle surrounding Catherine of Ara- gon, had fostered such a language by comparing heretic reformers to Turkish infidels.33 Never far from this imagery was the implication that Queen Catherine’s successor Anne Boleyn, the mother of Eliz- abeth, was a whore. These were the political blood lines extending through Donne’s Catholic heritage, leading him to Antwerp in the spring of 1585. Thus, in “To his Fellow Sentinels,” Donne sees his treasonous flight from the persecution and his military service under Parma as more honorable than devotion to a whore. Like the gentleman volunteer later evoked in his 1591 portrait with its Spanish motto, “Antes muerto que mudado” (Rather dead than changed), the twelve- or thirteen-year-old Donne in this Epigram presents his noble and gentle comrades with a steadfast remembrance of the concept of honor.

But for this honorable company of Spanish Elizabethans at Ant- werp no invasion plot ever came to fruition, and Donne did not remain there long. Two years later he had returned to England and the service of the Earl of Derby. Just when or how this decision was arrived at and implemented remains a problem. After April 1585, when we know Donne was at Antwerp, his activities for the next two years are unclear. Since Donne did not return to England with the Earl in March I 585, the most plausible explanation for his turning up later in Derby’s household is that at some point he joined the Earl’s son William Stanley on the Continent and returned to England in Stan- ley’s company.

William Stanley, like Donne and others in the Earl ambassador’s

32. Mervyn James, En.@sh Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485-1642 (London, 1978).

pp. 7-8. 33 . James, p. 37.


train, had not returned to England with his father. Instead he remained abroad for another two years. Stanley’s travels became the stuff of folklore in Lancashire, accruing to picaresque and fantastic propor- tions in ballads and tales recounting an impossible twenty-one years of traveling. Some of these local traditions, including a core of truth, are preserved in “Sir William Stanley’s Garland,” a ballad first published around 1800 but probably composed much earlier. A version or versions of this poem must have been known to the eighteenth- century Lancashire antiquarian John Seacome, whose Memoirs o f the House of Stanley make only passing reference to Stanley’s “Travels, martial Exploits, and Bravery abroad, [of] which this County (especially) gives us many large Accounts, as well in Story, as Song.”34 But a later edition of Seacome’s book appends A BriefAccount ofthe Travels of the Celebrated Sir William Stanley, based like the rest of Seacome’s work on unspecified sources (“all the Histories, Records, and Manu- scripts, of Value or Esteem, I could possibly obtain either the Sight or private Use of”) including but clearly not limited to the ballad. Both the ballad and the Brief Account agree that sometime in I 5 8 5 Stanley traveled from France to Spain. According to the ballad, “He tarried there not past half a year.” From Spain, say both the ballad and the BriefAccount, Stanley traveled to Italy. And we know from the ledger of his father’s steward that he returned to England sometime during 1 5 8 7 . ~ ~ This chronology describes better than any other the period of Donne’s own reported travels on the Continent.

According to Izaak Walton, Donne traveled to the very countries Stanley is said to have visited in 1 5 8 5 - 1 5 8 7 : “he returned not back into England, till he had staid some years first in Italy, then in Spain.”36 Walton mistakenly dates these travels in the I ~ ~ O S , after Donne’s participation in the Azores expedition under the command of the Earl of Essex. This is impossible because the ships led by Essex returned directly to England from the Azores without putting in at any Spanish or other foreign harbor. Moreover, Donne’s employment as secretary

34. John Seacome, Memoirs, Containing a Genealogical and Historical Account ofthe Ancient and Honourable House ofStanley (Manchester, Eng., 1767), p. 65. An earlier edition was published at Liverpool in 1741.

35 . Si r Wil l iam Stanley’s Garland (Leeds, 1814), p. 7; Seacome. Memoirs, p. 2, and A Britf Account ofthe Travels ofrhe Celebrated S i r Wil l iam Stanley (Liverpool, n.d.), pp. 5-20, separately printed but bound into J. Nuttall’s 1801 edition of Seacome’s Memoirs; and Raines, Derby Household Books, p. 45. where the steward’s log records that Stanley came to Knowsley from Chester on December 17, 1587.

36. Walton, Lives, p. 26.

Dennis Flynn 3 2 1

to Sir Thomas Egerton began within a few months of his return from the islands voyage and continued four years until early 1602. Walton seems not to have known of Donne’s flight from the persecution in I 585 and certainly confused the date of Donne’s travels; he may also have confused the order of Donne’s visits to Spain and Italy. But his phrasing, “returned not back into England,” suggests he knew this much at least: that Donne had decided on traveling to these countries at a time when he was already out of England. Since we now know Donne went to the Continent with the Derby embassy and returned to Derby’s service two years later, it seems most likely that his travels to Spain and Italy took place between the spring of 1 5 8 5 and the spring of 1587, and moreover that he traveled for at least part of this time in the company of William Stanley.

I11

To follow Donne’s story much further would exceed the scope of this essay. The limited point illustrated here is that up to now we have not appreciated Donne’s early associations with the ancient Catholic nobility, nor have we understood the social and political context in which his personality was formed and in which his literary work began. But hitherto unknown information about Donne’s formative years, along with careful reading of texts, can bring us much new insight into Donne and his writings of the I 590s and later. Following his travels on the Continent, Donne returned to England and to the service of Derby. Listed again among the Earl’s gentleman waiters in I 587, he apparently accompanied Derby on another embassy to treat peace with Parma just as the Spanish Armada was getting under way early in 1588.37 Thus Donne, as a member of Derby’s household, must have known from their early childhood the three granddaugh- ters of the Earl, who played important roles in his later life: Anne Stanley Brydges, Lady Chandos; Frances Stanley Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater; and Elizabeth Stanley Hastings, Countess of Hunt- ingdon. This, no doubt, is the proper explanation for references in Donne’s letters to his having lived in the same house with the Count- ess ofHuntingdon (e.g., that “I had a little preparation to her knowl- edge in the house where I served at j r ~ t . ” ) ~ ~ Between terms and in

37. Raines, Derby Household Books, pp. 23 and 37 (where Donne’s name is not among those remaining at Knowsley when the Earl departed toward his embassy to Flanders).

3 8 . Donne to Sir G. P., October 18 , 1622 (emphasis added); Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, ed. M. Thomas Hester (Delmar, 1977). pp. I 84-85. See also Donne’s earlier reference to


summers, Donne lived with the Earl and his family at their Lancashire estates, Knowsley, New Park, and Lathom. At other times Donne was with the Earl in London or attending the Court, acquiring that familiarity and easy condescension toward the Court and courtiers so evident in his writings and in the pose and motto of his 1591 portrait.

The portrait, known to us in a book frontispiece engraving by William Marshall, was originally a miniature by Nicholas Hilliard or Isaac Oliver, artists patronized by the Court. Tudor portrait minia- tures were contrived artfully to express mute but poetic and intimate messages about their courtly subjects: messages that, although not immediately obvious, speak volumes when at length discerned. I have argued elsewhere that Donne’s portrait should be interpreted as an emblem of honor.3’ Yet even as we try to construe Donne’s pose and his purpose in the portrait, a startling fact emerges from the mere recognition of its idiom and genre: Hilliard and Oliver did not paint undistinguished university dropouts or beginning law school students. Their subjects were courtiers who, through their portraits, were addressing other courtiers. It is as if Donne is already at eighteen someone with access to the highest levels of English society, as if he is silently presenting himself to an audience with whom he shares ap- propriate connection to the Court. While neither Walton nor subsequent biographers have noticed that Donne had attended the Court as early as I 591, this is one implication of his portrait.

We realize here a new truth about Donne’s early life, a truth gone unrecognized for more than three centuries. Probably we should long ago have appreciated the testimony of Donne’s friend Constantine Huygens, who wrote in 1630 that Donne had been “educated early at Court in the service of the great.’” Although Donne’s associations

“that Tribe, and that house where I have lived”; Donne to Sir Henry Goodyere, n.d. (Hester,

39. “Donne’s First Portrait: Some Biographical Clues,” Bullefin ofResearch in the Humanities, 82 (1979). 7-17,

40. Constantine Huygens to P. C. Hooft, August 17. 1630; quoted in Sir Herbert J. C . Grierson, The Poems ofJohn Donne, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1912). 11, Ixxvii-lxxviii. The importance of this letter is suggested by an unpublished paper of Paul R. Sellin. “Some Textual Implications of Constantine Huygens’ Translations from the Poetry of John Donne” (read at the 1985 con- ference of the John Donne Society of America), in which Sellin renders the passages somewhat differently: “At one time nurtured at court in the service of the great . . .” (“Eerfijds fen dienste vande groofe te hove gevoedt”). In his article “John Donne and the Huygens Family, 1619-1621: Some Implications for Dutch Literature.” Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters, 12

(1982-83). 193-204, Sellin argues that Huygens first met Donne “not in London in 1622 but in

P. 104).

Dennis Flynn 323

and even familiarity with English aristocrats have been known, his biographers have misinterpreted Huygens as referring to service begun only after Donne stopped practicing Catholicism, during his middle and late twenties. Thus it has been assumed that Donne obtained his secretarial position with the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, as “the son of a London ironmonger, . . . without any advantages of birth, family influence, or wealth”; and that Donne’s four years in Egerton’s employ not only “familiarized him with the ways of the court,” but gave him grounds to “hope that by courting the favour of the great he could win a way to a life of public service.”41 In this way Donne’s relations with the ancient nobility of the realm have been more or less castigated as a form of toadying, narrowly centered in his quest for advancement in English government.

Donne’s poems likewise have been misinterpreted as utterances of a would-be insider, appeals for patronage or expressions of the “desperate ambition” common among coteries of place-seekers at the royal Court. The poems’ witty disdain for success at Court is explained away as if it were mere posturing. But the fact remains that, despite his early Catholicism, Donne seems already to have experienced a certain familiarity with the Court by the early 1590s. The value his poetry places on being “out” was in this case not just envious at- titudinizing. O n the contrary, it had a subversive appeal specifically intended for readers delighted to share Donne’s “inside” commentary on the society of the Elizabethan Court, seen from the critical per- spective of the family of Sir Thomas More. As Donne’s first portrait suggests (and as Huygens seems to have known), Donne’s involvement with the ancient nobility probably was of longer duration and deeper significance than has been thought. It may well have remained for him a matter of honor from early adolescence until his death, a presence in his life from the start, part of his family’s Catholic heritage.

B E N T L E Y COLLEGE

The Hague at the end of 1619, that he first heard Donne preach not in English at St. Paul’s but in French at the Hoflcapel in 1619. and that such acquaintance was renewed in London in early 1621’’ (p. 194); and further that the basis oftheir friendship lay “not in belles-lettres, as virtually all Donne-Huygens scholarship proposes, but in a tight network of specific religious and political relationships” (p. 204).

41. Bald,John Donne: A Life , pp. 94 and 12s.

donne and the ancient catholic nobility

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