CHAPTER XVI

POSTHUMOUS ACTIVITY

THE death of Donne was evidently foreseen, and his pulpit was soon filled. Already, a week after the event, one of his intimate friends was appointed his successor.

On the 8th of April, the King wrote to Laud, now Bishop of London, and to the Chapter of St. Paul's, that "That Church being destitute of a principal minister by the decease of Dr. Donne, late Dean of St. Paul's, the King hath appointed for supply thereof Thomas Winniff, D.D., and Dean of Gloucester.'

The Dean's mother, after the death of her third husband, Mr. Rainsforth, had come to live with her son in the

Deanery of St. Paul's. She was still an unbending Romanist. It is probable that when Donne was obliged by his health to go down to Abrey Hatch in the autumn of 1630, he took with him his mother and left her there on his final return to London. At all events, after his death, she appears to be in the charge of her grandchildren, Samuel and Constance Harvey. Donne stated, just before his death, that "it hath pleased God, after a plentiful fortune in her former times, to bring my dearly beloved mother in decay in her very old age," and he was therefore careful to leave her comfortably provided for, the money to be used for her maintenance and divided among Donne's children after her death. That event was now not long delayed, for Elizabeth Rainsforth was buried at All Hallows, Barking, in Tower Street, on the 28th of January 1632. She must have been over ninety years of age.

Of Donne's principal patrons, his excellent friend the Earl of Carlisle was, during the Dean's last illness, appointed

1 Domestic State Papers.

Groom of the Stole and First Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the King, but this was the latest of his many promotions. He was beginning to fail in health, and on the 25th of April 1636 he died. The Earl of Kent lived until the 21st of November 1639. The Earl of Dorset, who was of a younger generation, long survived his friend. He was Lord Chamberlain through the dark years of the Civil War, and he lived until the 17th of July 1652. Sir Robert Ker underwent several violent vicissitudes. On the 31st of October his eldest son, William Ker, was created Earl of Lothian, and in 1633, to raise the father to a like honour with the son, Donne's old friend and correspondent was made Earl of Ancrum. The rebellion reduced him from ostentatious wealth to extreme poverty. He remained a faithful royalist and fled to Holland, where, in Amsterdam, he died in wretched conditions about Christmas 1654. His dead body was seized for debt, some months after its burial. Later than all these, Elizabeth, the luckless Queen of Bohemia, lived on until the 13th of February 1662.

George Herbert was buried at Bemerton on the 3rd of March 1633, having imitated, after a gentle fashion of his own, his master's dramatic manner of dying, singing to his lute on his death-bed "such hymns and anthems as the angels and he now sing in heaven." Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter, having been transferred to Norwich, was ejected in 1644, and retired to his house at Heigham, where he died on the 8th of September 1656. Bryan Duppa, who asserted his right to clanship in the Tribe of Ben, by contributing a poem to Jonsonus Virbius in 1637, was one of the nine bishops who survived to see the Restoration. In 1660 he was promoted from Salisbury to Winchester, and died in his palace at Richmond on the 16th of March 1662. Duppa's funeral sermon was preached by Henry King, Bishop of Chichester, by whom the tradition of Donne's friendship was carried on till the 30th of September 1669. On the death of her troublesome husband, Mrs. Cokain retired to her property at Ashbourne, and remained there until her death on the 29th of August 1664. Dr. Simeon Foxe resided in the House of the College of Physicians in

Amen Corner, until he died on the 20th of April 1642. He cultivated a romantic tenderness for St. Paul's Cathedral, spent money on the preservation and creation of its memorials, and left instructions for his body to be buried there, close to the monument of the famous Dr. Linacre. Izaak Walton long outlived all other acquaintances of Donne, dying at Winchester on the 15th of December 1683 in his ninety-first year. Among his bequests was a copy of "Dr. Donne's Sermons, which I have heard preached and read with much content."

Of Donne's children, for all of whom he made careful and equal provision, John alone attained any measure of notoriety. His adventures will presently be recounted. George, who was a prisoner of war when his father died, returned and married, for the baptism of a daughter of his is recorded in the parish register of Camberwell, on the 22nd of March 1638. The date of his death is unknown.1 Nicholas, the poet's third son, probably died in infancy. Of Constance, no more is known than has been already recorded. Bridget, who had been born on the 12th of December 1609, married, at Peckham, about 1633, Thomas Gardiner of Burstowe, the son of Sir Thomas Gardiner of Camberwell. She had a child born on the 7th of March 1634. In 1633 Margaret Donne married Sir William Bowles, and died on the 3rd of October 1679, at Chislehurst, where she was buried in the church porch. Finally, Elizabeth, who was not fifteen when her father died, on the 18th of May 1637 married Cornelius Laurence, Doctor of Physic at All Hallows, Barking. No son of the poet's sons is known to have reached maturity.

It has been seen, by those who have followed this narrative, that during his life Donne published scarcely anything in verse, and comparatively little in prose. The Pseudo-Martyr of 1610 and the Devotions of 1624, with five or six separate sermons, were the most important of his publications in life. But he left behind him voluminous and highly notable works in MS., and we have now to

1 Can he have been the George Donne who addressed poor copies of verses to Ford, Jonson, and Massinger? See Appendix F.

endeavour to trace the fate of these. Some, which impressed the mind of the seventeenth century, would add little to our entertainment to-day, if they were preserved. We cannot pretend that we are eager to read "the resultance of 1400 authors, most of them abridged and analysed with his own hand"; it is even probable that we have not lost much in the "divers Cases of Conscience that had concerned his friends, with his observations and solutions of them.” But all his poems, his letters to his numerous and distinguished acquaintances, his disquisitions and his sermons, carefully scheduled and docketed, "all particularly and methodically digested by himself," these we tremble to think may, through the years 1631 and 1632, have hung on the verge of extinction.

For, singularly enough, no one seems to have been left in charge of these, the most precious of all Donne's possessions. His elaborate Will, in none of its dispositions, makes the smallest reference to the MSS. They came, doubtless, under the general charge of the executors, Dr. Henry King and Dr. John Montford. On the other hand, we are told in a statement made a very long while afterwards by King, that Donne, on his death-bed, three days before his decease, presented all his religious MSS. -sermons, notes, and "resultances "-to King to do what he liked with, professing before Dr. Winniff, Dr. Montford, and Izaak Walton, that it was at King's "restless importunity" that Donne had prepared them for the press. There follows, in the Bishop of Chichester's letter to Walton, a cryptic utterance: "How these were got out of my hands, you, who were the messenger for them, and how lost both to me and yourself, is not now seasonable to complain." It has been suspected that these MSS. were kept by Dr. King in a cabinet, and that John Donne the younger stole them. In the Will which that individual drew up in 1662 he wrote:

"To the Reverend the Bishop of Chichester I return the cabinet that was my father's, now in my dining-room, and all the papers which are of authors analysed by my father; many of which he hath already received with his

Common Place book, which I desire may pass to Mr. Walton's son, as being most likely to have use for such a help when his age shall require it."

Of all this we may make what we can; but although John Donne the younger died at the end of January 1662, and although his Will was published on the 23rd of February of that year, neither Henry King, who lived until 1669, nor Walton, who survived until 1683, makes any mention of the recovery or possession of Donne's MSS. There was some unaccountable delay in the production of the Dean's posthumous writings. Nothing was printed in 1631, and for 1632 we have only the little quarto of Death's Duel, his last sermon, with the ghastly engraving of the author as he posed for the painter in his windingsheet.' This sermon is one of the most curious fragments of theological literature which it would be easy to refer to, even in the works of Donne. It takes as its text the words from the 68th Psalm: "And unto God the Lord belong the issues of death." In long, stern sentences of sonorous magnificence, adorned with fantastic similes and gorgeous words, as the funeral trappings of a king might be with gold lace, the dying poet shrinks from no physical horror and no ghastly terror of the great crisis which he himself was to be the earliest of those present to pass through. "That which we call life," he says, and our blood seems to turn chilly in our veins as we listen, "is but Hebdomada mortium, a week of death, seven days, seven periods of our life spent in dying, a dying seven times over, and there is an end. Our birth dies in infancy, and our infancy dies in youth, and youth and the rest die in age, and age also dies and determines all. Nor do all these, youth out of infancy, or age out of youth, arise so as a Phoenix out of the ashes of another Phoenix formerly dead, but as a wasp or a serpent out of a carrion, or as a snake out of dung."

There is not much that we should call doctrine, no pensive or consolatory teaching, no appeal to souls in the modern sense, in this extraordinary address. The effect aimed at is that of horror, of solemn preparation for the

1 See Gosse: Gossip in a Library, pp. 59, 60.