THE PRODIGIOUS CHILD
In one way, and one way only, it was an auspicious beginning: John Donne was born on Bread Street in central London, from one end of which you have a clear and easy view of St Paul’s Cathedral. He was born in sight of both his future job and his final resting place, which must be rare. In every other way, it was a hard time to come into the world. It was 1572 – month unknown – and a Catholic plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I had just been foiled. The Duke of Norfolk was executed for treasonous Popish machinating, and it was a bad year in which to be an English Catholic.
Donne’s mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was the great-niece of the Catholic martyr Thomas More. She sounds to have been formidable, unafraid to assert herself: a woman of whom it was whispered (erroneously) that she carried the head of Thomas More in her luggage when she travelled. Donne’s father, also John Donne, was an ironmonger, though not of the horny-handed, rugged variety; he was warden of the Ironmongers’ Company. The family had once owned magnificent estates, before they had been confiscated by the Crown in the various Tudor shake-downs of Catholic landowners. He married, in Elizabeth, the daughter of a musician and epigrammatist who had played for Henry VIII; so Donne was born into a family who had known the smell and touch of a king.
What was his childhood? When London burned in 1666, a colossal chunk of history burned with it; the house in which Donne was born was reduced to cinders, along with 13,200 other homes; the cathedral he would later preach in, and eighty-seven parish churches; and, too, catastrophic amounts of paper across the city, carrying records of the details of thousands of ordinary lives. Whole libraries’ worth of paper: accounts, disputes, wills, play texts and poems, postmasters’ trunks, bills, love letters folded so intricately into paper locks that you couldn’t open them without leaving a telltale tear; all gone. Time and fire together have laid waste to so much of the paper that might have told us about Donne. The names and lives of his siblings, for instance, are blurry; there were at least two before him, Elizabeth and Anne, then John, and after him Henry and then we aren’t so sure. But to fill the gaps, we have the account written by Izaak Walton, Donne’s friend and first biographer, and a man with a claim to have written the first literary biography in English.
Walton was a gentle, retiring kind of man. He was younger than Donne by two decades, and had been Donne’s adoring parishioner in London. Best known in his lifetime as the author of The Compleat Angler, an ecstatic poetic celebration of fishing, he was at his most perceptive when talking about trout – but in taking time off fish to set out the facts of his friend’s life, Walton created one of the most valuable resources we have. All Donne scholars must be profoundly grateful to him: but, equally, rarely has a man been so keen to make his subject appear a shining example to all humanity. Walton didn’t subscribe to the sceptical school of biographer, who carry a pen in one hand and a knife in the other. He was eager from the very outset to reassure his readers about Donne’s worth. ‘Though [Donne’s] own learning and other multiplied merits may justly appear sufficient to dignify both himself and his posterity; yet the reader may be pleased to know, that his father was masculinely and lineally descended from a very ancient family in Wales, where many of his name now live, that deserve, and have great reputation in that country.’ Born high enough to merit some small awe, Walton wants us to know. (Donne’s connection to the Welsh Dwns has never, in fact, been proven.)
Donne came of stock that valued literary flourishes. Donne’s maternal grandfather John Heywood had his own line in ironical verse. In his Play Called the Four PP, the four Ps (a pardoner, a palmer, a ’pothecary and a pedlar) hold a competition to see who can speak the biggest lie. The palmer wins:
I have seen women five hundred thousand
Wives and widows, maids and married
And oft with them have long time tarried
Yet in all places where I have been
Of all the women that I have seen
I never saw nor knew, in my conscience
Any one woman out of patience.
Years later, Donne would write with exactly the same sceptical eyebrow:
If thou beest born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee:
Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
‘Nowhere
Lives a woman true, and fair.’
Donne’s family prized good jokes in extremis (and, evidently, casual sexism as a comic trope). His grandfather became famous for his deathbed comedy: his confessor, repeating over and over that ‘the flesh is frail’, to which Heywood: ‘Marry, Father … it will go hard but you shall prove that God should a made me a fish.’
When Donne was four, his father died and his mother married again to a John Syminges, a physician who had been several times the President of the Royal College of Physicians. It might sound a gentle, upper-middle kind of upbringing: but to be born a Catholic was to live with a constant, low-level, background thrum of terror.
England had been so shot through with religious violence in the sixteenth century that there was ample evidence to cast either side as villain. Mary I, a Catholic, had burned at least three hundred Protestants, and now with Protestant Elizabeth on the throne a concerted effort was made to channel national ire at the Catholic minority. John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs had been published in 1563, nine years before Donne’s birth, and its frontispiece illustration served well to remind those in doubt of where the country stood: on one side Catholics with bulbous noses are seized by gleeful demons, while on the other Protestants with aquiline profiles burn in the fires of persecution and rise to glory.
It was in the spring of 1574, when Donne was a toddler, that disaster first came for the family. His mother’s uncle Thomas Heywood was suddenly and without warning arrested. A house on Cow Lane, close to Donne’s own home, was raided; officials discovered Thomas, a priest and former monk, along with ‘divers Latin books, beads, images, palms, chalices, crosses, vestments, pyxes, paxes and such like’. (A pyx was the box used for wafers: a pax was a piece of engraved wood which was kissed by Catholics during the Peace. Before the invention of the pax the congregation used to kiss each other, until it was felt this was unreasonably intimate – and plaguey – for church.)
At the time, the penalty for being a Catholic priest was to be hanged, drawn and quartered – which meant being stretched, hung until almost dead, and then having the arms and legs severed from the body while crowds looked on. One Richard Simpson was caught by a priest hunter – not unlike a bounty hunter – in 1588, and was hanged, drawn and quartered in the company of two other men. A bystander remarked that he ‘suffered with great constancy, but did not evince such signs of joy and alacrity in meeting death as his two companions’. (This evokes Samuel Pepys’s laconic note of 1660: ‘I went out to Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered – which was done there – he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.’) It’s unclear from the Privy Council records exactly what happened to Thomas – but tradition holds that he was executed as his family looked on.
The punishments of Catholics were designed to be as performative as they were cruel. In response, the loyalty of families like Donne’s, necessarily driven underground, took on correspondingly strange and lurid shapes. The Thomas More tooth, and the head it came from, is a vivid example. After More’s death, his head was put on a pike for several weeks at London Bridge; his formidable daughter, Margaret Roper, bribed the executioner, whose job it was to take down the heads and throw them into the Thames, to give it to her instead. She pickled it in spices; and when one of the teeth worked loose she gave it as a sacred relic to Jasper and Ellis Heywood, Donne’s uncles, both of whom were Jesuits, a then-newish Catholic missionary order founded in 1540 by Ignatius of Loyola. There was a story that once, when the two uncles were going on separate journeys, unable to decide who got to take the tooth, it ‘fell asunder and divided of it self’. Not just Catholic, then, but super-Catholic: the kind of Catholic which relishes the theatre and paraphernalia of martyrdom.
Sir Thomas More, after Hans Holbein the Younger
Donne would have been familiar with all the legends of More, the one-time Lord Chancellor of England: with his many works of hyper-learned prose, his asceticism (More liked to wear a grey goat’s hair shirt next to his skin, now enshrined at Buckfast Abbey) and his insistence on educating his daughters to almost unheard-of levels of female erudition. His mother’s proud Catholicism meant he would have heard from his cradle about More’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge Henry VIII as supreme head of the Church of England, and about his subsequent death by beheading. More’s wit was inexhaustible, uncompromising, and with him to the very last breath: ‘I pray you,’ he was supposed to have said to the executioner as he mounted the scaffold, ‘master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.’ And, once settled: ‘Pluck up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine office; my neck is very short; take heed therefore thou strike not awry.’ The Undersheriff of London wrote: ‘I cannot tell whether I should call him a foolish wiseman, or a wise foolishman.’ Donne grew up knowing you were supposed to meet death with a flourish: he never forgot it, right to the very end.
Elizabeth I had hoped to let Catholicism fade quietly away, starved to death without a public institution; but in 1570, two years before Donne’s birth, a papal bull excommunicated her, calling her ‘the pretended Queen of England’, ‘the servant of crime’. In response the English government’s attitudes to the Catholic population became more anxious, more repressive, more bloody. But Catholics with living memory of Mary I were unlikely to forget that if the fate of a religion could wane, it could also wax. Donne was taken by the adults around him to witness the blood and suffering of his religion. Much later, he wrote that in the past he had seen executions of Catholic priests, and around their bodies ‘some bystanders, leaving all old Saints, pray to him whose body lay there dead; as if he had more respect, and better access in heaven.’ It’s likely that his Catholic tutors would have shepherded him to the deaths, to show him the brutality of the world and the possibility of rising through it to the heavens; a front-row view of a dark and scarring kind of theatre.
Donne was once taken right into the heart of the fear, inside the Tower of London to visit his uncle Jasper. Jasper, another man whom Donne was brought up to honour, was an unexpected candidate for the wild adventure that his life became. His early education had taken place in the royal court, alongside Princess Elizabeth – the most useful connection of his life, and one that would save it. He should, really, have been a scholar with a quiet, paper-bound life, chewing on swan-feather quills (Elizabeth’s preferred writing pen: popular at court) and disputing the finer points of religious heresy. He had been made a Fellow of All Souls College, home of the incurably bookish, where he produced three translations of plays by Seneca. But he had to leave Oxford, unable to negotiate the ever more stringent reforms against Catholics, and became a Jesuit priest. He felt the strain of it: he suffered night terrors and underwent an unsuccessful exorcism. For all that, he did not lack bravery: he attempted to convert some of the country’s most powerful earls (the ‘big fish’, he said) to Catholicism, and in doing so caused a scandal so loud he had to make a break for France. He was almost in sight of Dieppe when a storm blew his boat, drenched and battered, all the way back to England. He was arrested, tried, indicted for treason and locked in the Tower of London.
It was there that his sister Elizabeth, Donne’s mother, came to minister to him, and to secretly carry messages between Jasper and another Jesuit, William Weston. If caught, Elizabeth would not have been safe from punishment by virtue of her sex: in 1592 a Mrs Ward was hanged, drawn and quartered for helping a Catholic priest to escape his pursuers in a box; a Mrs Lynne was put to death for harbouring a priest in her home. Once, Weston disguised himself in other clothes and came with Elizabeth into the Tower, an act of astonishing bravery or stupidity or both, to go into arms’ reach of the jailers. Weston was terrified: ‘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.’ Donne, aged twelve or thereabouts, accompanied them, perhaps as a way of making the party seem innocent and familial; he wrote, later, that he was once at ‘a Consultation of Jesuits in the Tower, in the late Queen’s time’. Heywood petitioned his one-time playmate the Queen for leniency. She granted it: he was deported to France, and from there to Rome, never returning to the country of his birth, where they were so liable to cut him into four.
Self-bifurcating molars and state-endorsed torture: these were the things of Donne’s early years. It was a darkly particular way to grow up; not only the terror and injustice, but the strangeness of it: how unhinged the world must feel, that you are persecuted for professing that which you believe to be the most powerful possible truth. Not ‘strange’ as in ‘unfamiliar’, for being killed for your religion was hardly new; strange as in unmoored from all sense, reason, sanity.
John Donne’s mother almost certainly did not, in truth, carry Thomas More’s head in her accoutrements: Margaret Roper had it until she died in 1544, when she left it to her husband, who was buried with it: it’s unlikely that he would have loaned it out like a library book. But Donne’s internal baggage was piled high with skulls: with persecuted family members, with the wounds of his mother and uncles. He felt his family had been tried beyond almost any other: ‘I have been ever kept awake in a meditation of martyrdom, by being derived from such a stock and race, as, I believe, no family (which is not of far larger extent, and greater branches) hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes, for obeying the teachers of the Roman doctrine, than it hath done.’
His family would haunt him for life: and nothing in his writing gives the impression he was surprised that it should be so. We are haunted animals: ghosts, Donne’s work and life suggest, should be treated as the norm. He accepted it as such. To read him is to know that we cannot ever expect to shake off our family: only to pick up the skull, the tooth, and walk on.
THE HUNGRY SCHOLAR
Donne worked on words his entire life. It was a time in which prodigal talent among the young was common – his near contemporary, the poet Katherine Philips, claimed to have ‘read the Bible thorough before she was full four years old’, and his biographer Izaak Walton calls Donne ‘another Picus Mirandula’ – the Italian philosopher and child prodigy who was made a protonotary by the Pope at the age of ten (a protonotary was the highest grade of monsignor, entitling him to wear a lot of purple velvet). Even reckoning that Walton is beamish and over-saucing with his praise (and that Pico della Mirandola was murdered at the age of thirty-one by arsenic poisoning, and thereby provides a sad ideal), Donne was born hungry, a lifelong strainer after words and ideas. He sought to create for himself a form of language that would meet the requirements of someone who watched the world with careful and sceptical eyes.
Donne was not sent to school. He was missing very little; the schools of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England were grim, ice cold metaphorically and literally. Eton’s dormitory was full of rats; at many of the public schools at the time, the boys burned the furniture to keep warm, threw each other around in their blankets, broke each other’s ribs and occasionally heads. The Merchant Taylors’ school had in its rules the stipulation, ‘unto their urine the scholars shall go to the places appointed them in the lane or street without the court’, which, assuming the interdiction was necessary for a reason, suggests the school would have smelled strongly of youthful pee. Because smoking was believed to keep the plague at bay, at Eton they were flogged for the crime of not smoking. Discipline could be murderous. It became necessary to enforce startling legal limits: ‘when a schoolmaster, in correcting his scholar, happens to occasion his death, if in such correction he is so barbarous as to exceed all bounds of moderation, he is at least guilty of manslaughter; and if he makes use of an instrument improper for correction, as an iron bar or sword … he is guilty of murder.’
Instead, Donne was educated at home. Walton tells us that he learned fluent Latin – as would have been requisite, for a gentleman’s son – though he makes no mention of Greek; Donne learned that later, under his own tutelage, with a tenacity that is characteristic of him. In 1584 he enrolled with his younger brother Henry at Hart Hall, Oxford University; their ages were given as eleven and ten respectively, although in fact they were both a year older. All students over sixteen were required to take an oath acknowledging royal supremacy over all questions of religion: but it was thought that a child under sixteen couldn’t be expected to understand the nature of the oath, and therefore the young brothers could live under the radar in Hart Hall, a place with a reputation for nurturing and protecting Catholics. There was less burning in the quiet streets of Oxford than in London (at least since Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, condemned under Mary for refusing to acknowledge papal supremacy, had met a fiery death in 1556). There were more books in Oxford, more people his own age, less dying.
Both Oxford and Cambridge were, at the time, just edging into fashionability: until shortly before Donne arrived, both places had been looked at with sceptical eyes by anyone with claim to any class. In 1549, Oxford students were ‘mean men’s children set to school in hope to live upon hired learning’. It was only as the century wore on that more gentry started to pass through the doors – by the time Donne came to live there, it had started to have a little cachet. There were various attempts to give it more of a gleam: when the antiquary William Camden published the Life of King Alfred by the medieval monk Asser, he added notes of his own, putting into the mouth of the monastic the fake claim that the University of Oxford had been founded by Alfred the Great. And the city would have been very beautiful in 1584, yellow-stoned and with the River Isis nearby. Its spires soared less ecstatically skywards than today, as most of the colleges were not yet fully formed, and the great Bodleian Library did not open until 1602, but it was still a place worth loving.
Copyright © 2022 by Katherine Rundell