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Donne’s Catholicism: I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2016

Dennis Flynn
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Extract

Over fifty years ago, Louise Imogen Guiney wrote: ‘Someone, firstin the field, should write a little book, which should be a scientific andauthentic study of Dr John Donne as a Catholic’. As Guiney pointed out, Donne’s Catholicism, even when he had ceased to practice it actively, and even after he became an Anglican minister, was a continuous influence on his life and writings. However, Donne’s biographers, those before and those since Guiney, have paid scant attention to Donne’s Catholicism, tending rather to see his life as a paradoxical development fromlibertine scepticism to Protestant fideism. Between these extremes, Donne’s religious development has usually been described in terms of riddles and contradictions, with no more than passing reference to its relativelyclear involvement in the spiritual conflict through which Catholicism was repressed in Tudor and Stuart English society. The most influential proponent of this paradoxical interpretation has undoubtedly been Izaak Walton, Donne’s friend, who inexplicably likened Donne’s rather protracted Anglican conversion to the comparatively spontaneous conversion of St Augustine. Augustus Jessopp later repeated Walton’s fundamental idea, that Donne had clean rejected Catholicism at about twenty, even though Jessopp observed that Donne was suspected by his father-in-law of Catholic sympathies as late as 1602. Edmund Gosse was the first of Donne’s biographers to acknowledge the weight of evidence illustrating Donne’s persistent Catholic sympathies; Gosse nevertheless concluded that Donne’s Catholicism had been easily corrupted in the worldly atmosphere of London in the 1590’s, that he had grown sceptical of religion altogether,and that he lapsed thereafter only occasionally into fits of Catholic religion. Very little evidence of this supposed libertine scepticism can be found. Donne was far from sharing the extraordinary sceptical atheism rumoured of Raleigh or Marlowe, and the theory that he even leaned in this directionhas little support other than weak inference from the cynical tone of some of his writings. On the contrary, Donne seems to have shared the common assumption of his time, and the main lesson of his Catholic education, that there is one true religion. But his biographers have persistently seen him (mechanically mentioning his Catholic background) as a profane writer of ‘conceited verses’ converted by saving grace into an Anglican preacher.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , April 1975 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1975

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References

1 ‘Donne as a Lost Catholic Poet’, The Month, 136 (1920), 12 Google Scholar.

2 The Lives of John Donne, SirWotton, Henry, Hooker, Richard, Herbert, George, and Sanderson, Robert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 23 Google Scholar.

3 John Donne (London, 1897), p. 14. This suspicion called forth Donne’s earliest known denial that he was a Catholic or had Catholic sympathies, in a letter written when he was about thirty.

4 As soon as Donne found himself free from his mother’s tutelage, his attachment to the Catholic faith began to decline; presently his indifference to its practice, combined with an intellectual scepticism as to its tenets, led him away from any Christian communion’ ( The Life and Letters of John Donne, 2 vols. [Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959], 1,27Google Scholar). Gosse bases his theory on Walton’s account of Donne’s youth, an account we know to be partial and largely uninformed. Gosse later goes on to observe that, even as a minister, Donne ‘harkened after some tenets of the Roman faith, or at least he still doubted as to his attitude with regard to them’ (2, 110).

5 Ibid., 2, 124.

6 Jonson, Ben, ed. C.H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1925), 1, 138Google Scholar.

7 Donne, John: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 1 Google Scholar. Bald goes on to say of Walton that ‘unquestionably he has traced the main outlines of Donne’s life; even if the pattern has since had to be modified here and there, the essential impression remains’, p. 13.

8 Gardner, Helen, ‘All the Facts’, New Statesman, 79 (1970), 370 Google Scholar. Gardner goes on to say: ‘It is impossible to praise too highly the industry which has searched all conceivable record sources, the skill with which the evidence is marshalled, the density of reference, the judgementwith which at crucial points conflicting evidence is weighed, and the modesty of conjecture where conjecture is required’ (Ibid).

Most of this is high encomium largely undeserved. Bald’s industrymay be praiseworthy, but it is hyperbole to speak of any historian’shaving ‘searched all conceivable record sources’, or to doubt, as Gardner does, whether ‘it is possible that some scraps of new information may turn up’ (ibid.). As for Bald’s skill and judgement in handling evidence, if the picture rendered leaves essentials out of place or inexplicable, then judgement or skill has been wanting. Finally, what is meant by ‘modesty of conjecture where conjecture is required’, and can this be a virtue in a historian? (Every interpretation of historical events must be but conjecture put forward for trial to be rejected if not true. Thus in the writing of history conjecture is required throughout, not merely to list facts but to assert something about their significance. A ‘modesty of conjecture’ would presumably beone that asserted little about the significance of a body of information; or asserted only what was not risky to assert, yet seemed to have adequate explanatory power. A conjecture of this sort can be made to seem plausible by virtue of the sheer bulk of facts with which it is shown to be compatible[‘density of reference’]. However, this illusion is dispelledby the recognition that facts to confirm a conjecture can usually be found.The crucial question about a conjecture’s value is not whether many facts confirm it, but whether any fact refutes it. A ‘modesty of conjecture’ is one hedged about to guard against refutation.) Whether or not we agree that Bald’s interpretation of Donne’s life fits this description, it is clear that illustrious historical conjectures do not.

9 Walton, pp. 23-25. Walton’s view, that Donne discarded Catholicism at twenty, was surely based in part on what he read in Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr, where Donne speaks of having ‘used no inordinate hast, nor precipitation in binding my conscience to any localiReligion’, but of first having had to ‘blot out, certaine impressions of the Romane religion’ (Pseudo-Martyr [London, 1610], ‘A Preface to the Priestes, and Iesuits, and to their Disciples in this Kingdome’). As Gosse pointed out, Donne’s words here, while evidencing an early religious dilemma, are ‘scarcely in accordwith Walton’s view’ that the conversion took place immediately in Donne’s twentieth year (Gosse, 1, 26).

10 Walton, p. 61.

11 Concerning Elizabeth Donne’s stubborn Catholicism, Walton writes with a pity verging on disdain that she, ‘having sucked in the Religion of the Roman Church with her Mothers Milk, spent her Estate in forraign Countreys, to enjoy a liberty in it’ (ibid., p. 71).

12 John Donne: A Life, pp. 63-64. Bald states that Donne, having been associated with the Jesuit mission through his uncle Jasper Heywood, continued in touch with the Jesuits and in 1591 was present at a meeting in the Tower of London at which the wording of a petition to be presented to the Queen was supposedly discussed by Jesuits. Bald concedes that the meeting in question may have been held at the end of 1584 when Jasper Heywood is known to have been visited in the Tower by Elizabeth Donne and William Weston (see Weston’s An Autobiography from the Jesuit Underground, trans. Caraman, Philip [New York: Doubleday, 1955], pp. 10–11 Google Scholar). All things considered, this seems more likely than 1591, when no visitors would have been allowed in the Tower. Bald’s arguments are more fully set forth in Appendix 3 of his edition of Southwell’s, Robert An Humble Supplication to her Molestie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), pp. 70–80 Google Scholar.

13 John Donne: A Life, pp. 38-50.

14 Ibid., p. 68-70.

15 Ibid., p. 68.

16 Walton, p. 26.

17 John Donne: A Life, p. 52.

18 Ibid., p. 39.

19 The best account of these events is still that contained in ‘The Martyrdom of William Harrington’ by Morris, John in The Month, 20 (1874), 411-23Google Scholar. Bald’s version varies unaccountably from this, his only reference.

20 John Donne: A Life, pp. 58 and 67.

21 Ibid., p. 66.

22 Ibid., p. 63. The sort of mistake Bald makes here is discussed by Raspa, Anthony in ‘Donne as Meditator — a Note on some Recent Oxford Publications’. Recusant History, 10 (1969), 242 Google Scholar: ‘Thedifference between the Catholic and the anti-Catholic Donne is subtle, in the sense that it allows us to leap to simplifications. It is based on the tempting assumption that an ex-Catholic in the earlier seventeenth century must perforce have been an anti-Catholic’.

23 John Donne: A Life, p. 63. Bald’s theory of Donne’s not unreceived sceptical learning is shared with earlier biographers, notably by Gosse (1,27), and is supported by Bredvold’s, Louis source study, ‘The Naturalism of Donne in Relation to some Renaissance Traditions’, JEGP, 22(1923), 471–502 Google Scholar, where Donne’s familiarity withMontaigne and other sceptical writers is documented. For a different line of thought see Jackson’s, Robert S. ‘ “Doubt Wisely” : — John Donne’s Christian Skepticism’, Cithara, 8 (1968), 39–46 Google Scholar.

24 John Donne: A Life, p. 67.

25 Ibid., p. 68. Donne’s marked edition was, according to Walton, bequeathed to a friend, but is not extant.

26 Ibid., p. 70. Christopher Devlin wrote that during these years Robert Southwell was also discussing Bellarmine with young men from the universities and Inns of Court ( The Life of Robert Southwell, Poet and Martyr [New York: Greenwood, 1969], pp. 156-7Google Scholar); and Bald notes that The English JesuitsGarnet, Southwell, and Oldcorne had all been Bellarmine’s pupils, and it is more than likely that it was from one or the other of these men that Donne first heard of Bellarmine’s skill in controversy’ (John Donne: A Life, p. 69).

27 See An Humble Supplication, p. 79. For evidence of Harrington’s intimacy with the Jesuits, see Morris, pp. 418-23. In John Donne: A Life Bald is less tendentious and concedes that Harrington ‘had known Edmund Campion, and had for a time wished to follow him into the Jesuit order, but as a priest he had speedily found himself in opposition to the Jesuits’ (p. 67). Of Harrington’s priestly opposition to the Jesuits Bald again presents no evidence whatsoever. The Appellant pamphlet he cites says merely that Harrington was ‘oppressed’ by Jesuit ‘calumnies’; in view of the Government’s role in sponsoring Appellant publications in order to divide the Catholics, this source is not unimpeachable.

28 ‘The Patriotism of Robert Southwell’, The Month, 196 (1953), 345-54Google Scholar.

29 Ibid., pp. 346-7. See also the more recent comments in Hugh Aveling’s Northern Catholics (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1966), pp. 163-9Google Scholar.

30 A contemporary Catholic writer tells the story in these words : ‘His father in his lifetime had given to the Chamber of Londona certain sum of money, for which they were to pay to this his son, at twenty-one years of his age, five hundred pounds if he lived so long. Being nownear twenty-one, he was this last summer — the plague being then in Newgate — removed thither from the Clink, and within a few days after, he there sickened, and thereof died; in all likelihood his remove contrived of purpose, by that means so to make him away to defeat him of his money’ (italics added) (quoted in Morris, p. 417). Bald makes reference to this story in passing, laconically remarking that this slur against the Government’s motives ‘is answered by F. P. Wilson’. However, what Wilson’s answer shows is simply that the magistrate did not keep the money for himself after Henry’s death, but apportioned it to the surviving children. Nothing at all is stated or cited to disprove the testimony of this contemporary writer, whose understanding of the incident was likely to have been shared by other members of the Catholic community, used to this sort of treatment. (See John Donne : A Life, p. 59 ; Wilson, F.P., ‘Notes on the Early Life of John Donne’, RES, 3 (1927), 275 Google Scholar).

31 John Donne: A Life, p. 115.

32 Ibid., p. 81.

33 Ibid., p. 116.

34 Gosse, 1, 291.

35 Walton, p. 25. Bald comments, ‘Donne must have realized that he was taking a serious risk’, but then he quotes Walton’s homily, ‘love is a flattering mischief’, etc. (John Donne : A Life, p. 131).

36 Ibid., p. 134.

37 Ibid. Bald observes (p. 135): ‘All in all, the letter was scarcely calculated to assuage the anger that Donne had everyreason to anticipate’.

38 Bald claims strangely that Northumberland ‘was obviously the most influential messenger’ Donne could have sent, and that he and More as neighbours would have been ‘on friendly terms’. Bald speculates that Northumberland ‘probably visited [More at] Losely frequently on his journeys between London and his house at Petworth’ (pp. 133-4). This theory is far from the mark. To support it Bald cites some letters summarized by Kempe, A.J. in The Losely Manuscripts (London, 1835), pp. 496-7Google Scholar; but all these summaries show is that at some date Northumberland wrote toMore about household matters from Petworth. No letters from More in return are summarized, and Bald cites nothing to suggest the two men were friends in 1602. On the contrary, Northumberland’s biographer ( Brenan, Gerald, A History of the House of Percy [London, 1902])Google Scholar makes no mention of any friendship with More, and points out that Petworth was the Earl’s least loved estate, probably becausehis Catholic father had in effect been imprisoned there by Elizabeth. According to Brenan, Northumberland rarely visited Petworth, carried on a feud from a distance at London with his Petworth tenants, and never actuallyresided at Petworth until he too was confined to within thirty miles of theplace by James. But this was in 1621, after his release from the Tower, where he had been held for years on account of purported complicity in the Gunpowder Plot (ibid., pp. 47-48; 200-01). The letters Bald cites must therefore have been written after this time, while Northumberland lived outhis life at Petworth. In any case, Northumberland’s influence with More in 1602, can hardly be accepted as obvious, despite Bald’s assurance.

39 Bald, again following Walton, has simply not realised this important point: ‘Donne’s real problem was, in fact, to break the news to Sir George More in such a way as to prevent him from going to extremes’ (John Donne: A Life, p. 133). On the contrary, Donne seems to have driven More to extremes almost deliberately, as if confident of his own immunity.

40 Gosse, 1, 94.

41 John Donne: A Life, p. 94. For Egerton’s second offence, unnoticed by Bald, see the Catholic Record Society’s Miscellanea XII, ed. Pollen, J.H. (C.R.S. 22), p. 101 Google Scholar.

42 John Donne: A Life, p. 94.

43 Ibid., p. 98.

44 Ibid., pp. 104-06.

45 Kempe, p. 331. Bald does not quote this passage, but paraphrases it misleadingly : ‘busy tongues were urging everything they could to his discredit — his Catholic upbringing, his earlier amours, his debts’ (p. 135). The words of the letter specify not ‘upbringing’ but ‘religion’. The rumours Donne denies arerumours about his present practice or sympathies.

46 Kempe, p. 334.

47 Ibid., p. 339. Bald does not refer to this passage at all.

48 Ibid., pp. 341-42. Bald actually quotes extensivelyfrom this letter, but amazingly he skips over these striking and very important sentences, making no paraphrase of their contents, but quoting insteadparagraphs precisely on either side of them.

49 The Jacobean Age (London: Longmans, 1938), p. 230 Google Scholar.

50 Hill, Thomas, A Quatron of Reasons of Catholike Religion (Antwerp, 1600), p. 91 Google Scholar.

51 Other writers have discussed Donne’s religious dilemma during these years, but Bald all but ignores it. See Bewley’s, Marius ‘Religious Cynicism in Donne’s Poetry’, Kenyon Review, 14 (1952), 635 Google Scholar: ‘For a young man of Donne’s secular ambitions, dissociation from his religious background was an imperative necessity; yet for ayoung man of Donne’s Jesuit-trained and disciplined conscience, dissociation — if it were not to appear as apostasy — would be a long and arduous process, requiring all the subtlety of intelligence his scholastic training could draw upon’; and Clay Hunt’s Donne’s Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 171 Google Scholar: ‘Exactly when Donne finally abandoned his Catholicism is not certain — it was probably in his middle twenties — the break obviously cost him something and left him with lingering feelings of apostasy and guilt’. These writers recognize Donne’s dilemma through their analyses of the poetry, but related conclusions may be drawn from the bare events of Donne’s life, as I have tried to suggest.