1561-1627
MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD somewhere devotes a grateful sentence to the women
who have left a fragrance in literary history, and whose loss of long
ago can yet inspire men of to-day with indescribable regret. Lady
Danvers is surely one of these. As John Donne’s dear friend, and George
Herbert’s mother, she has a double poetic claim, like her unforgotten
contemporary, Mary Sidney, for whom was made an everlasting epitaph.
If Dr. Donne’s fraternal fame have not quite the old lustre of the
incomparable Sir Philip’s, it is, at least, a greater honor to own
Herbert for son than to have perpetuated the race of Pembroke. Nor is
it an inharmonious thing to remember, in thus calling up, in order to
rival it, the sweet memory of “Sidney’s sister,” that Herbert and
Pembroke have long been, and are yet, married names.
Magdalen, the youngest child of Sir Richard Newport, and of Margaret
Bromley, his wife, herself daughter of that Bromley who was
Privy-Councillor, Lord Chief-Justice, and executor to Henry VIII., was
born in High Ercall, Salop; the loss or destruction of parish registers
leaves us but 1561-62 as the probable date. Of princely stock, with
three sisters and an only brother, and heir to virtue and affluence,
she could look with the right pride of unfallen blood upon “the many
fair coats the Newports bear” over their graves at Wroxeter. It was
the day of learned and thoughtful girls; and this girl seems to have
been at home with book and pen, with lute and viol. She married, in
the flower of her youth, Richard Herbert, Esquire, of Blache Hall,
Montgomery, black-haired and black-bearded, as were all his line; a man
of some intellectual training, and of noted courage, descended from
a distinguished brother of the yet more distinguished Sir Richard
Herbert of Edward IV.’s time, and from the most ancient rank of Wales
and England. At Eyton in Salop, in 1581, was born their eldest child,
Edward, afterwards Lord Herbert of Cherbury, a writer who is still the
puzzle and delight of Continental critics. He is said to have been a
beautiful boy, and not very robust; his first speculation with his
infant tongue was the piercing query: “How came I into this world?” But
his next brother, Richard, was of another stamp; and went his frank,
flashing, fighting way through Europe, “with scars of four-and-twenty
wounds upon him, to his grave” at Bergen-op-Zoom, with William, the
third son, following in his soldierly footsteps. Charles grew up
reserved and studious, and died, like his paternal uncle, a dutiful
Fellow of New College, Oxford. The fifth of these Herberts, “a soul
composed of harmonies,” as Cotton said of him, and destined to make the
name beloved among all readers of English, was George, the poet, the
saintly “parson of Fuggleston and Bemerton.” Henry, his junior, with
whom George had a sympathy peculiarly warm and long, became in his
manhood Master of the Revels, and held the office for over fifty years.
“You and I are alone left to brother it,” Lord Herbert of Cherbury once
wrote him, in a mood more tender than his wont, when all else of that
radiant family had gone into dust. The youngest of Magdalen Newport’s
sons was Thomas, “a posthumous,” traveller, sailor, and master of a
ship in the war against Algiers. Elizabeth, Margaret, and Frances
were the daughters, of whom Izaak Walton says, with satisfaction,
that they lived to be examples of virtue, and to do good to their
generation. None of them made an illustrious match. Margaret married
a Vaughan. Frances secured unto herself the patronymic Brown, and was
happily seconded by Elizabeth, George Herbert’s “dear sick sister,”
who became Mistress Jones. In the south chancel transept of Montgomery
Church, where Richard Herbert the elder had been buried three years
before, there was erected in 1600, at his wife’s cost, a large canopied
alabaster altar-tomb, with two portrait-figures recumbent. All around
it, in the quaint and affectionate boast of the age, are the small
images of these seven sons and three daughters; “Job’s number and Job’s
distribution,” as she once remarked, and as her biographers failed
not to repeat after her. But their kindred ashes are widely sundered,
and “as content with six foot as with the moles of Adrianus.” This at
Montgomery is the only known representation of the Lady Magdalen. Her
effigy lies at her husband’s left, the palms folded, the eyes open, the
full hair rolled back from a low brow, beneath a charming and simple
head-dress. Nothing can be nobler than the whole look of the face, like
her in her prime, and reminding one of her son’s loving epithet, “my
Juno.” The short-sighted inscription upon the slab yet includes her
name.
Never had an army of brilliant and requiring children a more excellent
mother. “_Severa parens_,” her gentle George called her in his
scholarly verses; and such she was, with the mingled sagacity and
joyousness which made up her character. If we are to believe their
own testimony, the leading members of her young family were of
excessively peppery Cymric temperaments, and worthy to call out that
“manlier part” of her which Dr. Donne, who had every opportunity of
observing it in play, was so quick to praise. There is a passage in
a letter of Sir Thomas Lacy, addressed to Edward Herbert, touching
upon “the knowledge I had how ill you can digest the least indignity.”
“Holy George Herbert” himself, in 1618, commended to his dear brother
Henry the gospel of self-honoring: “It is the part of a poor spirit to
undervalue himself and blush.” And physical courage went hand in hand
with this blameless haughtiness of the Herberts, a pretty collateral
proof of which may be adduced from a message of Sir Henry Jones to his
brother-in-law, the other Henry just mentioned, concerning a gift for
his little nephew. “If my cozen, William Herbert your sonne . . . be
ready for the rideing of a horse, I will provide him with a Welch nagg
that shall be as mettlesome as himself.” There is no doubt that all
this racial fire was fostered by one woman. “Thou my root, and my most
firm rock, O my mother!” George cried, long after in the _Parentalia_,
aware that he owed to her his high ideals, and the strength of
character which is born of self-discipline.
“God gave her,” says one of her two devoted annalists, who we wish
were not so brief and meagre of detail—“God gave her such a comeliness
as though she was not proud of it, yet she was so content with it as
not to go about to mend it by any art.” Her fortune was large, her
benevolence wide-spreading. All the countryside knew her for the living
representative of the ever-hospitable houses of Newport and Bromley.
“She gave not on some great days,” continues Dr. Donne, “or at solemn
goings abroad; but as God’s true almoners, the sun and moon, that pass
on in a continual doing of good; as she received her daily bread from
God, so daily she distributed it, and imparted it to others.” In these
years of her wifehood and widowhood at Montgomery Castle (the “romancy
place” dating from the eleventh century, and ruined, like the fine
old house at High Ercall, during the Civil Wars), and afterwards at
Oxford and London, she reared her happy crew of boys and girls in an
air of generosity and honor; training them to habits of hardiness and
simplicity, and to the equal relish of work and play. “Herself with
her whole family (as a church in that elect lady’s house, to whom John
wrote his second Epistle) did every Sabbath shut up the day at night
with a general, with a cheerful singing of psalms.” One may guess at
young Richard’s turmoil in-doors, and at the little Elizabeth’s soft,
patient ways, and think of George (on Sundays at any rate) as the child
of content, “the contesseration of elegances” worthy Archdeacon Oley
called him.
The fair and stately matron moving over them and among them was not
without her prejudices. “I was once,” Edward testifies, “in danger of
drowning, learning to swim. My mother, upon her blessing, charged me
never to learn swimming; telling me, further, that she had learned of
more drowned than saved by it.” Though the given reason failed to
impress him, he adds, the commandment did; so that the accomplished
Crichton of Cherbury, who understood alchemy, broke his way through
metaphysics, and rode the Great Horse; the ambassador, author, and
beau, to whom Ben Jonson sent his greeting:
“What man art thou that art so many men,
All-virtuous Herbert?”
even he lacked, on principle, the science of keeping himself alive
in an alien element, because it had been pronounced less risky to
die outright! It was a pretty paradox, and one which sets down our
high-minded Magdalen as quite feminine, quite human.
Her Edward was matriculated in 1595 at University College, Oxford,[1]
for which he seemed to retain no great partiality; he bequeathed his
books, like a loyal Welshman, to Jesus College, instead, and his
manuscripts to the Bodleian Library. In 1598, when he was little
more than seventeen, he was wedded to his cousin Mary Herbert, of
St. Gillian in Monmouthshire. Her age was one-and-twenty; she was an
heiress, enjoined by her father’s will to marry a Herbert or forfeit
her estates; she was also almost a philosopher. There was no wild
affection on either side, but the marriage promised rather well, both
persons having resources; and no real catastrophe befell either in
after-life. Much as she desired the match for worldly motives, the
chief promoter of it was too solicitous for her tall dreamer of a
son, who underwent the pleasing peril of having Queen Bess clap him
on the cheek, not to take the whole weight of conjugal direction on
her own shoulders. Without undue officiousness, but with the masterly
foresight of a shrewd saint, she moved to Oxford from Montgomery with
her younger children and their tutors, in order to handle Mistress
Herbert’s husband during his minority. “She continued there with him,”
says Walton, in his _Life of George Herbert_, “and still kept him in
a moderate awe of herself, and so much under her own eye as to see and
converse with him daily; but she managed this power over him without
any such rigid sourness as might make her company a torment to her
child, but with such a sweetness and compliance with the recreations
and pleasures of youth as did incline him willingly to spend much of
his time in the company of his dear and careful mother.”
It was during this stay that she contracted the chivalrous friendship
which has embalmed her tranquil memory. Dr. John Donne (not ordained
until 1614, and indeed not Dr. Donne then at all, but “Jack Donne,”
his profaner self) had been at Cadiz with Essex, and had wandered over
the face of Europe; and he came back, accidentally, to Oxford during
the most troubled year of his early prime. It was no strange place to
him,[2] who had been, at eleven, the Pico della Mirandola of Hart
Hall, and whose relatives seem to have resided always in the town.
There and then, however, he cast his bright eye upon Excellence, and in
his own phrase,
“—dared love that, and say so, too,
And forget the He and She.”
We can do no better than cite a celebrated and beautiful passage, once
more from Walton: “This amity, begun at this time and place, was not
an amity that polluted their souls, but an amity made up of a chain of
suitable inclinations and virtues; an amity like that of St. Chrysostom
to his dear and virtuous Olympias, whom, in his letters, he calls his
saint; or an amity, indeed, more like that of St. Hierom to his Paula,
whose affection to her was such that he turned poet in his old age, and
then made her epitaph, wishing all his body were turned into tongues
that he might declare her just praises to posterity.” How these words
remind one of the sweet historic mention which Condivi gives to the
relations between Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo! The little English
idyl of friendship and the great Italian one run parallel in much.
Donne’s trenchant _Satires_, some of the earliest and very best in
the language, were already written, and he was not without the hint
of fame. Born in 1573, he was but eight years the senior of Edward
Herbert, and not more than a dozen years the junior of Edward Herbert’s
mother. To her two sons, also, who were to figure as men of letters,
he was sincerely attached from the first, and had a marked and lasting
influence on their minds. Donne had the superabundance of mental power
which Mr. Minto has pointed out as the paradoxical cause of his failure
to become a great poet. He was a three-storied soul, as the French say:
a spirit of many sides and moods, a life-long dreamer of good and bad
dreams. To his restless, incisive intelligence his contemporaries, with
Jonson and Carew at their head, bowed in hyperboles of acclaim. He had
a changeful conscience, often antagonized and often appeased. There
was a strain in him of strong joy, for he was descended through his
mother from pleasant John Heywood the dramatist, and from the father
of that great and merry-hearted gentleman, Sir Thomas More. If ever
man needed vitality to buoy him over sorrows heavy and vast, it was
Donne in his “yeasting youth.” Thrown, through no fault but his own,
from his old footholds of religion and occupation, and unable, despite
his versatile and alert genius, to grind a steady living from the hard
mills of the world, he was in the midst of a bitter plight when the
friends worthy of him found a heavenly opportunity which they did not
let go by, and made his acceptance of their favor a rich gift unto
themselves. Foremost among these, besides Lady Herbert, were Sir Robert
Drury of Drury Lane, and a kinsman, Sir Francis Woolly, of Pirford,
Surrey, fated to die in his youth, both of whom gave the Donnes, for
some nine consecutive years, the use of their princely houses. John
Donne had been in the service of the Chancellor, Lord Ellesmere,
and lost place and purse by the opposition to his marriage with his
“_lectissima dilectissimaque_,” Anne More, who was Lady Ellesmere’s
niece, the daughter of Sir George More of Loxly, Lieutenant of the
Tower, and probably a distant cousin of his own. No reverses, however,
could beat the pathetic cheer out of him. “Anne Donne,[3] undone,” was
one of his inveterate teary jests over the state of things at home. He
wrote once, with sickness, poverty, and despair at his elbow: “If God
should ease us with burials, I know not how to perform even that. But I
flatter myself that I am dying, too, for I cannot waste faster than by
such griefs.” Five of his twelve children passed before their father to
the grave, the good domestic daughter Constance upholding him always,
and keeping the house together. But just as hope dawned with his
appointment to the Lectureship of Lincoln’s Inn, heavenward suddenly,
with her youngest-born, in 1617, went his dear and faithful wife, whom
he laid to rest in St. Clement Danes.
About the time when the remorseful old queen died disdainfully on her
chamber-floor at Richmond, the necessities of this family called for
daily succors, and with a simple and noble delicacy they were supplied.
Nor did they cease. Magdalen Herbert was a “bountiful benefactor,”
Donne “as grateful an acknowledger.” His first letter to her from
Mitcham in Surrey, dated July 10, 1607, is made up of terse, tender
thanks, in his heart’s own odd language. He sends her an enclosure of
sonnets and hymns, “lost to us,” says Walton, movingly, “but doubtless
they were such as they two now sing in heaven.” Dr. Grosart, with a
great show of justice, claims that the sequence called _La Corona_, and
familiar to latter-day readers, are the identical sonnets passed from
one to the other. During this same month of July we know that, paying a
call in his “London, plaguey London,” and finding his friend abroad,[4]
Dr. Donne consoled himself by leaving a courtliest message: “Your
memory is a state-cloth and presence which I reverence, though you be
away;” and went back after to his “sallads and onions” at Mitcham, or
to his solitary lodgings near Whitehall.
The attachment, close and deferent on both sides, was continued without
a breach, and with the intention, at least, of “almost daily letters.”
Thoreau, quoting Chaucer, so saluted Mrs. Emerson: “You have helped
to keep my life on loft.” No meaner service than this was his dear
lady’s to John Donne, often heretofore astray in the slough of doubt
and dissipation; she fed more than his little children, clothed more
than his body, and fostered anew in him that faith in humanity which
is the well-spring of good works. He was not a poet of Leigh Hunt’s
innocent temperament, who could accept benefits gladly and gracefully
from any appreciator; his soul dwelt too remote and proud in her
accustomed citadels. But this loving help, thrust upon him, he took
with dignity, and after 1621, when he was able, in his own person, to
befriend others, he gave back gallantly to mankind the blessings he
once received from two or three. It was something for Magdalen Herbert
to have saved a master-name to English letters, and kept in his unique
place the poet, interesting beyond many, whose fantastic but real force
swayed generations of thinking and singing men; it was something, also,
to have won in return the words which were his gold coin of payment.
Nowhere is Donne’s sentiment more genuine, his workmanship more happy
and less complex, than in the verses dedicated to her blameless
name. They have a lucidity unsurpassed among the yet straightforward
lyrics of their day. Drayton’s self, who died in the same year with
Donne, might have addressed to the lady of Eyton so much of his noble
extravagance;
“Queens hereafter shall be glad to live
Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise.”
Yet in these eulogies, as in most of the graver contemporaneous poems
of the sort, there is little personality to be detected; the homage
has rather a floating outline, an unapproaching music, exquisite and
awed. Donne gives, sometimes, the large Elizabethan measure:
“Is there any good which is not she?”
In the so-called _Elegy, The Autumnal_, written on leaving Oxford, he
starts off with a well-known cherishable strophe:
“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.”
The entire poem is a monody on the encroachments of years, and neatly
chronological:
“If we love things long-sought, age is a thing
Which we are fifty years in compassing;
If transitory things, which soon decay,
Age must be loveliest at the latest day.”
It strikes the modern ear as maladroit enough that a woman in her yet
sunshiny forties, and a most comely woman to boot, should have required
prosody’s ingenious excuses for wrinkles and kindred damages. Was life
so hard as that in “the spacious days”? Shakespeare, in agreement with
Horace, had already reminded his handsome “Will” of the pitiless and
too expeditious hour,
“When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field!”
which also seems, to a nice historical sense, somewhat staggering. The
close of Donne’s little homily is perfect, and full of the winning
melancholy which was part of his birthright in art, whenever he allowed
himself direct and homely expression:
“May still
My love descend! and journey down the hill,
Not panting after growing beauties; so
I shall ebb on with them who homeward go.”
Such was John Donne’s first known tribute to his friend. She must have
been early and thoroughly familiar with his manuscripts, which were
passed about freely, Dr. Grosart thinks, prior to 1613, and which
burned what Massinger would call “no adulterate incense” to herself.
Her bays are to be gleaned off many a tree, and she must have cast a
frequent influence on Donne’s work, which is not traceable now. He
seems to have had a Crashaw-like devotion to the Christian saint whose
inheritance
“Bethina was, and jointure Magdalo,”
not unconnected with the fact that some one else was Magdalen also;
never does he tire of dwelling on the coincidence and the difference.
In one of his quaintly moralizing songs, he goes seeking a “true-love”
primrose, where but on Montgomery Hill! for he is hers, by all
chivalrous tokens, as much as he may be. Again he cites, and almost
with humor:
“that perplexing eye
Which equally claims love and reverence.”
And his platonics make their honorable challenge at the end of some
fine lines:
“So much do I love her choice, that I
Would fain love him that shall be loved of her!”
There was prescience in that couplet. As early, at least, as 1607-8,
the widow’s long privacy ended, probably while she was at her “howse
at Charing Cross,” watching over the progress of her son George at
Westminster School; and he that was “loved of her” was the grandson of
the last Lord Latimer of the Nevilles, junior brother of a nobleman
who perished with Essex in 1602, and brother and heir of that Sir
Henry Danvers who was created Earl of Danby in 1625 for his services
in Ireland, and who literally left a green memory as the founder of
the pleasant Physic Gardens at Oxford. The name of Danvers, the kindly
step-father, is one of the noteworthy omissions of Lord Herbert of
Cherbury’s _Autobiography_. But George Herbert was devoted to him,
as his many letters show, and turned to him, never in vain, during
his restless years at Cambridge; and into his circle of relatives,
with romantic suddenness, he afterwards married. Sir John Danvers, of
Dauntsey, Wilts, was twenty years younger than his wife. It is worth
while to quote the very deft and courtly statement of the case made at
the last by Dr. Donne: “The natural endowments of her person were such
as had their part in drawing and fixing the affections of such a person
as by his birth and youth and interest in great favors at court, and
legal proximity to great possessions in the world, might justly have
promised him acceptance in what family soever, or upon what person
soever, he had directed. . . . He placed them here, neither diverted
thence, nor repented since. For as the well-tuning of an instrument
makes higher and lower strings of one sound, so the inequality of their
years was thus reduced to an evenness, that she had a cheerfulness
agreeable to his youth, and he had a sober staidness conformable to her
more advanced years. So that I would not consider her at so much more
than forty, nor him at so much less than thirty, at that time; but as
their persons were made one and their fortunes made one by marriage,
so I would put their years into one number, and finding a sixty
between them, think them thirty apiece; for as twins of one hour they
lived.”[5]
In the August of 1607, a masque by John Marston was given in the now
ruined castle of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, eighteen miles from Leicester, as
an entertainment devised by Lord Huntingdon and his young wife, the
Lady Elizabeth Stanley, to welcome her mother, Alice, Countess-Dowager
of Derby,[6] “the first night of her honor’s arrival at the house of
Ashby.” Fourteen noble ladies took part in the masque, and among them
was “Mris Da’vers.” The name may, perhaps, be recognized as that of the
subject of this sketch, for Sir John Danvers was not knighted until the
following year; and it has been so recognized by interested scholars
who have searched Nichols’s _Progresses of James I_. And yet we cannot
be too sure that we have her before us, in the wreaths and picturesque
draperies of the amateur stage; for there was another Mistress Da’vers
at court, whose purported letter, dated February 3, 1613, signed with
her confusing Christian names of “Mary Magdaline,” gave great trouble,
thirty years ago, to the experts of the Camden Society. Besides, a
letter of the good gossipy Chamberlain, dated March 3, 1608-9, mentions
as if it were then a piece of fresh news: “Young Davers is likewise
wedded to the widow Herbert, Sir Edward’s mother, of more than twice
his age.” This would seem to preclude the possibility of the fair
masquer being the same person.
The mother of many Herberts, the “more than forty” bride, was by
nature a home-keeping character. Among the correspondence relating
to Lord Herbert of Cherbury, privately printed in 1886 by the Earl
of Powis, are a few pages which give us invaluable glimpses of the
London household. Lady Danvers’s eldest son, who set off upon his
travels soon after her second marriage, and who applied himself
vigorously to the various diversions of body and mind catalogued
in the _Autobiography_, found himself often pinched for money. In
such a strait, not unfamiliar to other fine gentlemen of his day, he
invariably appealed to the services of the step-father who was his
junior, in England. The latter, writing how “wee are all some what
after the olde manner, and doe hartely wish you well,” seems to have
busied himself to some avail, in concert with his brother-in-law, Sir
Francis Newport (the first Lord Newport), in securing letters of credit
to Milan, Turin, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, and in explaining at
length, in his long involved sentences, how matters could be bettered.
Whether or not the absent Knight of the Bath had reason to suspect Sir
John’s disinterested action when it came to the handling of pounds
and pence, he does not seem, then or after, to have burdened him with
any great harvest of thanks. But Sir John’s faithful wife knew how to
defend him, in a script of May 12, 1615, which may be quoted precisely
as it stands in the Herbert papers.
“To my best beloved sonn, S’r Edward Herbert, Knight,
“My deare Sonn,
it is straunge to me to here you
to complayne of want of care of you in your absence
when my thoughts are seldom removed from you which
must assuredly set me aworkinge of any thinge may doe
you good, & for writinge the one of us yf not both
never let messenges pass without letter, your stay
abroad is so short in any one place & we so unhappy in
givinge you contentment as our letters com not to your
hands which we are sorry for. And to tel you further
of S’r John Da’vers Love which I dare sweare is to no
man more, he is & hath beene so careful to keep you
from lake of money now you are abroad as your Baylife
faylinge payment as they continually doe & pay no man,
he goeth to your Merchaunt, offers him self & all the
powers he can make to supply you as your occasions may
require, mistake him not, but beleeve me there was
never a tenderer hart or a lovinger minde in any man
then is in him towards you who have power to com’aund
him & all that is his. Now for your Baylifs I must
tell you they have not yet payed your brothers all
their Anuities due at Midsom’er past & but half due
at Christmas last and no news of the rest, this yf
advauntage were taken might be preiuditiall to you and
it is ill for your Brothers & very ill you have such
officers.
“I hope it will bringe you home & that is all the good
can com of this. your sister Johnes hath long beene
sicke & within this 8 dayes hath brought a boy she is
so weake as she is much feared by those aboute her. my
Lady Vachell lyes now adyeinge the bell hath twice gone
for her. your wife & sweet children are well & herein
I send you little Florence letter to see what comfort
you may have of your deare children, let them, my Dear
sonn, draw you home & affoorde them your care and me
your comfort that desire more to see you then I desire
any thinge ells in the world, and now I end with my
dayly prayer for your health and safe retorne to Your
ever lovinge mother,
Magd: Da’vers.
“I have received the Pattent of your Br: William, & S’r
John hath beene with the ambassatore who stayes for S’r
James Sandaline[7] his cominge.”
A sympathizing reader, aware of sequences, may wonder whence Sir John
drew “all the powers he can make”! The dignified letter, with its
undulating syntax and thrifty punctuation, harmonizes with all we
know of this delightful woman, who could so reproach what she deemed
a shortcoming, without a touch of temper. How affectionate is the
reference to the “little Florence” who died young, and to the other
children, sufficiently precious to all that household, except to the
wool-gathering chevalier their father, far away! Their innocent faces
peer again through a sweet postscript of their grand-uncle: (“Dick
is here, Ned and Bettye at Haughmond,”) written in the winter, from
Eyton, to the truant at the Hague.[8] This same genial Sir Francis
Newport, “imoderately desyring to see you,” confides to his nephew,
during what he complains of as “a verye drye and hott time”[9] for
Shropshire farmers, that “mye syster your mother is confident to take
a iourney into these pts this somer, the rather, I think, because yo’r
brother Vaugh’n is dead & if yo’ have a willing harte you maye come
tyme enough to acco’pany her heare, & would not then the companye bee
much the better?” But we fear the little excursion never came off.
Edward Herbert’s next visit to his home, presumably after a four-years’
absence, was in 1619; and in May of that year he accepted the office
of Ambassador to France, and spread his ready wing again to the
Continent. And the _Athenæ Oxoniensis_ will not let us forget that the
too spirited envoy had to be temporarily recalled in 1621, because he
had “irreverently treated” De Luynes, the powerful but good-for-nothing
Constable of France. It is not insignificant that this was the year in
which George Herbert wrote to his mother in one of his consoling moods,
bidding her be of good cheer, albeit her health and wealth were gone,
and the conduct of her children was not very satisfying!
We know that Lady Danvers had the “honor, love, obedience, troops of
friends” which became her, and that she lost none of her influence,
none of her serene charm. Her poet was much with her in his advancing
age. In July, 1625, while the plague was raging in London, Donne
reminded Sir Henry Wotton of the leisure he enjoyed, golden as
Cicero’s, by dating his letter “from S’r John Davor’s house at Chelsey,
of w’ich house & my Lord Carlil’s at Hanworth I make up my Tusculum.”
Many a peaceful evening must they have passed upon the terraces,
within sound of the solemn songs always dear to both. Visitors yet
more illustrious came there from the city; for the noble hostess
had once the privilege of reviving the great Lord Bacon,[10] who
had fainted in her garden. We learn, with sympathy, that “sickness,
in the declination of her years, had opened her to an overflowing
of melancholy; not that she ever lay under that water, but yet had,
sometimes, some high tides of it.” Death chose Dr. Donne’s ministering
angel before him, after thirty years of mutual fealty. Her restless son
Edward, now at home, was already eminent, and wearing his little Irish
title of Baron Castleisland; her thoughtful Charles was long dead; her
brother, also, was no more; her daughters were matrons, and dwelling in
prosperity. With but one unfulfilled wish, that of seeing her favorite
George married and in holy orders,[11] and after a life which left a
wake of sunshine behind it in the world, very patiently and hopefully
Magdalen Newport, Lady Danvers, entered upon eternity, in the early
June of 1627. On the eighth day of the month, in St. Luke’s, the parish
church of Chelsea, she was buried:
“Old age with snow-bright hair, and folded palm,”
the final earthly glimpse of her still traditionally beautiful. On the
first of July her faithful liegeman, now Dean of St. Paul’s and Vicar
of St. Dunstan-in-the-West, preached her funeral sermon there, before
a crowd of the great ones of London, the clergy, and the poor. Izaak
Walton’s kind face looked up from a near pew, whence he saw Dr. Donne’s
tears, and felt his breaking voice, the voice of one who did not belie
his friend, nigh the end of his own pilgrimage. In present grief and
among graver memories, he had the true perception not to forget how
joyous she had been. “She died,” he said, “without any change of
countenance or posture, without any struggling, any disorder, . . . and
expected that which she hath received: God’s physic and God’s music,
a Christianly death. . . . She was eyes to the blind, and feet to the
lame, . . . naturally cheerful and merry, and loving facetiousness and
sharpness of wit.” His own fund of mirth and strength was fast going;
and a haunting line of his youth,
“And all my pleasures are like yesterday,”
must have reverted to him many and many a time. Morbid and persistent
thoughts beset him from this hour, probably, more than ever, until
he had the effigy of himself, painted as he was, laid in his failing
sight;[12] morbid and persistent thoughts of the ruin which befalls the
bright bodies of humanity, sometimes surging up in his loneliness, and
crowding out the better vision which yet may “grace us in the disgrace
of death.” His inward eye was drawn strongly to his friend’s sepulchre,
sealed and sombre before him, and to what had been her, “going into
dust now almost a month of days, almost a lunar year . . . which, while
I speak, is mouldering and crumbling into less and less dust.” But he
ended in a wholesomer strain, subdued and calm: “This good soul being
thus laid down to sleep in His peace, ‘I charge you, O daughters of
Jerusalem, that ye wake her not!’”
The rare little duodecimo which contains Lady Danvers’s funeral sermon
was printed soon after, “together with other Commemorations of Her, by
her Sonne G. Herbert,” and offered to the public at the Golden Lion in
Paul’s Churchyard. The commemorations are in Greek and Latin. Strangely
enough, nowhere is the sweet and sage poet of _The Temple_ so set upon
his prosody, so given to awkward pagan conceits, so out of tune with
the ideals of classic diction. But he, who tenderly loved his mother,
has given to us, in the _Memoriæ Matris Sacrum_, several precious
personal fragments, and one more precious whole picture of daily habits
in the lines beginning _Corneliæ sanctæ_: her morning prayer, her bath,
and the plaiting of her glossy hair; her housewifely cares, her fit
replies, her writing to her friends, her passion for music, her gentle
helpfulness; the long felicity of a glad and stainless life,
“Quicquid habet tellus, quicquid et astra, fruens.”
Dr. Donne died in 1631, whatever was yet of earth in his spirit healed
and chastened by long pain. His last remembrance to some he loved
was his own seal of Christ on the Anchor, “engraven very small on
heliotropium stones, and set in gold, for rings.” Many of those to
whom his heart would have turned, the “autumnal beauty” scarce second
among them, had preceded him out of England. But in travelling towards
his Maker, he had that other sacred hope to “ebb on with them,” and
gloriously overtake them, as he traced the epitaph which covered
him in old St. Paul’s: “_Hic licet in occiduo cinere, aspicit eum
cujus nomen est Oriens_.” The tie between himself and her was not
unremembered in the next generation; for we find John Donne the younger
dedicating his father’s posthumous work to Francis, Lord Newport,
and when making his will, in 1662, bequeathing also to the same Lord
Newport “the picture of St. Anthony in a round frame.” And thus, in a
revived fragrance, the annals of true friendship close.
These rapid, ragged strokes of a pen make the only possible biography
of Lady Danvers. When Walton wrote of her, he had the entire
correspondence with Dr. Donne before him.[13] “There were sacred
endearments betwixt these two excellent persons,” he assures us, but
disappointingly hurries on into the highway of his subject. It is
curious that it seems impossible now to trace these breathing relics,
or others from the same source; for George Herbert, in the second
elegy of the _Parentalia_, has much to say, and very sweetly, of the
industry of his mother’s “white right hand,” and of the “many and most
notable letters, flying over all the world.” Much detail is utterly
lost which men who agree with Prosper Mérimée that all Thucydides
would not be worth an authentic memoir of Aspasia, or even of one of
the slaves of Pericles, might be glad to remember. A copy of a song,
a reminiscence of the glow and stir of the days through which she
moved, a guess through a mist at the blond head,[14] the half-imperious
carriage, the open hand, as she went her ways, like Dante’s lovely
lady, _sentendosi laudare_,—these are all we have of the daughter of
England’s golden age. It would be easy, were it also just, to throw
a dash of color into her shadowy history. One would like to verify
the scene at Eyton, while the news of the coming Armada roused the
lion in Drake, and struck terror into the Devon towns; and to hear the
young wife, with three lisping Herberts at her knee, beguile them with
mellow contralto snatches of a Robin Hood ballad, or with the sweet
yesterday’s tale of Zutphen, where their country’s dearest gave his
cup of water to a dying comrade. A decade later, before their handsome
bluff father, her other healthful boys stood up to wrestle, and twang
their arrows at forty paces; or a rosy daughter stole to his side, and
asked him of mishaps in Ireland, or of the giant laughter bubbling
from the “oracle of Apollo” in a London street. It is to be believed
that one who watched events through the insurrection of Essex, through
Raleigh’s dramatic trial, reprieve, and execution, through the national
mourning for the Prince of Wales, through the fever for colonization,
the savage sea-fights, the great intrigues in behalf of the Queen of
Scots, the religious divisions, the muttering parliamentary thunders,
the stress and heat of the exciting dawn of the seventeenth century,
was not unmindful of all it meant to be alive, there and then. Magdalen
Newport’s girlhood fell on Lyly’s _Euphues_, fresh from the printers;
the _Arcadia_ made the talk of Oxford, in her prime; the dusky splendor
of Marlowe’s _Faustus_ was abroad before her second marriage. She was,
surely, aware of Shakespeare, and of the wonder-folio of 1623; of the
newest delighting madrigals and antiphons set forth by one Robert
Jones, when every soul in England had the gift of music; of rascal
Robert Greene’s lovable lyrics, of Wyatt’s, Campion’s, and Drayton’s.
She wrote no verses, indeed, but her familiars wrote them; her every
step jostled a Muse. We may assume that no growth nor loss in literary
circles escaped that tender “perplexing eye.” Perhaps it glistened from
a bench, in the pioneer British theatre, on the actors of _Volpone_,
and followed silently, behind the royal group, the first mincings
of the first dear Fool in _King Lear_, one day-after-Christmas at
Whitehall. Last of all, for whim’s sake, how any sociologist would
enjoy having the honest opinion of young Lady Herbert, or that of
little Mistress Donne, concerning the person they could but thank and
praise! _Utinam vivisset Pepys!_ It is a cheat of history that it
preserves no clearer tint or trace of this chosen passer-by. Such, in
truth, she was, and the quiet vanishing name clings to her: the woman
of durable gladness, happily born and taught, like the soul whereof Sir
Henry Wotton, who must have known her well, made his immortal song.
Of the gracious figure of Sir John Danvers we may be said to lose
sight; for he seems less gracious, as by a Hindoo trick, as soon as
it is written that his wife departed unto her reward. Comment on
his character is equal comment upon hers, and adds new force to the
classic episode of a lady philanthropist espousing a ne’er-do-weel and
a featherbrain. Aubrey, always happy over a little ultra-contemporary
gossip, calls it “a disagreeable match,” disappointing to the
bridegroom’s kindred; but adds that “he married her for love of her
wit.” Now, wit is an admirable magnet, but it is to be suspected that
there was also, and in the immediate vicinity, “metal more attractive,”
as Hamlet says. In the Chelsea parish-books is an entry, the first of
its kind, certifying that Sir John Danvers had settled his account with
“the poore,” a matter of thirty pounds’ loan (in which the vicar must
have connived), for the year ending in January of 1628. If the payment
were, by any hap, in advance, it may have fallen in Lady Danvers’s own
lifetime; and if so, it is quite as likely that she paid it, with an
admonition! Her “high tides of melancholy,” of whose true cause she
certainly would not have complained to Dr. Donne, had something to
do with this young spendthrift, who must have had his wheedling way,
sooner or later, with such of her ample revenues as were yet extant.
Perhaps Lord Herbert of Cherbury was both shrewd and charitable, in
suppressing mention of his new relative.[15] The longer one looks into
the matter, the less curious seems his unexplained silence concerning
this late graft of a family hitherto always respectable and always
loyal.
There are gleams of subsequent private history in the tell-tale records
at Chelsea. We are not incurably astonished to learn that as early as
May of 1629 was christened Elizabeth, daughter of Sir John Danvers
and Elizabeth his wife. This Lady Elizabeth, arriving providentially
with her Dauntsey wealth, having borne him four children, died, as
did his mother, in 1636; and left him even as she found him, none too
monogamous. In 1648 Sir John Danvers again appeared at the venerable
altars where his first saint never had a memorial, loving, honoring,
and cherishing a Mrs. Grace Hewes, Hawes, or Hewet, of Kemerton in
Gloucestershire, and, as it is to be surmised, leading her tame
fortune by a ribbon. His debts and difficulties, not of one but of all
time, sprout perennially in the registers. His indefatigable name,
oftener than any rival’s whatsoever, figures as borrowing and paying
interest on a forty-pound note, which, like a Hydra-head, was always
forthcoming so soon as it was demolished. This disgraceful business was
the man’s chief concern: for the older he grew the deeper and deeper
he sank into entanglements, particularly after the death of the King.
It was never doubted, in his day, but that this was a judgment on the
former Gentleman Usher who affixed hand and seal to the warrant of his
sovereign’s execution.[16] His own family, it is said, as well as the
royalist Herberts and Newports, dropped his acquaintance; and who knows
whether Mrs. Grace Hewet was faithful? At his favorite Chelsea, in the
April of 1655, and in about the seventy-fourth year of his age, Sir
John Danvers ended his career by more conventional agencies than the
rope and the knife, which might have befallen him in the Stuart triumph
of the morrow. His manor fell an immediate forfeit to the crown. In
1661, the dead republican was attainted, and all of his estate which
was unprotected was declared regal booty. The year before his own
burial at Dauntsey he laid there, “to the great grief of all good men,”
the body of his elder son Henry, who had just attained his majority.
The Earl of Danby had died, “full of honors, wounds, and days,” in
1643, while this Henry, his nephew, was still a hopeful child; and on
him alone he had taken pains to settle his possessions. But Henry, in
turn, was persuaded to bequeath the major part of them to his father’s
ever-gaping pocket, the remainder reverting to one of his two surviving
sisters. The third Lady Danvers, who lived until 1678, had also a son
Charles,[17] who petitioned the crown for his paternal rights, but
died in old age, with neither income nor issue.
Clarendon quietly indicts Sir John Danvers as a “proud, formal, weak
man,” such as Cromwell “employed and contemned at once.” George Bate
gives him a harder character, saying that he “proved his brother to be
a delinquent in the Rump Parliament, whereby he might overthrow his
will, and so compass the estate himself. He sided with the sectarian
party, was one of the King’s judges, and lived afterwards some years
in his sin, without repentance.” But the same accuser adds the saving
fact that Dr. Thomas Fuller, like Aubrey, was Sir John’s friend, and,
by his desire, preached many times at Chelsea, “where, I am sure, he
was instructed to repent of his misguided and wicked consultations in
having to do with the murther of that just man.” One half surmises
that had the preliminaries of the great struggle occurred in her time
Magdalen Herbert’s rather austere and advanced standards of right would
have stood it out, despite her traditions, for the Commons against
_Carolus Agnus_.[18] But that would have been a very different matter
from sharing the feelings of the crude advocates of revolution and
regicide. What a misconception of her spotless motives must she have
borne, had others found her in agreement with her vagabond lord, who
treated politics as he treated the sacrament of matrimony, purely as a
makeshift and a speculation!
He was no raw-head-and-bloody-bones, this Roderigo-like Briton who won
the approval of Lord Bacon, and whom George Wither thanks for “those
pleasurable refreshments often vouchsafed”; and whom very different
men, such as George Herbert and Walton[19] and peaceable Fuller loved.
He was a comely creature of some parts, a luckless worldling anxious
to feather his own nest, and driven by timidity and the desire of gain
into treacheries against himself. His short, thin, and “fayre bodie,”
common, as George Herbert would have us imply, to all who bore his
name, his elegance, his hospitality, and his devotedness to his elderly
wife, carried him off handsomely in the eyes of her jealous circle. His
house in Chelsea, commemorated now by Danvers Street, adjoined that
which had been Sir Thomas More’s, and was presumably a part of the same
estate. All around it, and due to its master’s genuine enthusiasm, lay
the first Italian garden planted in England; and there, rolling towards
the Thames, were the long glowing flower-beds and green orchard-alleys,
which were also the “_horti deliciæ dominæ_” recalled thrice in the
music of filial sorrow. This home of Magdalen Danvers was pulled down,
and built over, in 1716. Within its unfallen walls, where she spent
her serene married life, and where she died, she had time to think,
nevertheless, that she stood, towards evening, in the ways of folly,
and that hers was one of those little incipient domestic tragedies
which must always look amusing, even to a friend.