‘No thanks. Too much sex.’ Thus an elderly friend dismissed my offer to lend him John Stubbs’s compendious biography of John Donne. His fears are groundless. Stubbs tells us virtually nothing about the paramours who inspired Donne’s youthful poems, partly because no new information is available and partly because the poet’s exquisite testimony on the subject renders further details superfluous. Instead he focuses on Donne’s struggle with his religious conscience, a conflict which typifies the difficulties faced by England’s religious communities in the early 17th century.
Donne was born a Catholic during the reign of Elizabeth I (he was the great-great-grandson of Sir Thomas More) and he was sent to Oxford in his early teens so that he could gain an education before being compelled, as 16-year-old scholars were, to take the Protestant oath.
After studying at the Inns of Court he entered government service as a secretary to the Lord Keeper. By this stage he had turned his back on the family faith. His devout mother had gone into exile in Antwerp and his brother Henry, a religious hooligan, had been arrested for sheltering a Catholic priest. After being tortured in prison Henry fell ill and died, while the priest he had assisted was offered his life but refused. Stubbs describes in elaborate and sensuous detail how the militant cleric was hanged, disembowelled and forced to watch his sausagey intestines being barbecued before his dying eyes. The fate of these two men seems to have left Donne with a lasting contempt for the extremes of Christian fervour. He loved life not death and he was eager to get ahead at court. His Catholic past was an impediment to promotion as was his love poetry, which he declined to publish at this time. But it was love in a more immediate form that caused the greatest calamity of his life. He started an affair with Ann More, the daughter of Sir George More, an ambitious MP. They married secretly in 1601. After three months of celibacy, the groom wrote to his unwitting father-in-law informing him about the wedding and pleading that ‘to have given any intimacion of yt had been to impossibilitate the whole matter’.
Sir George reacted as if Donne had picked his pocket in public — which in a sense he had. An MP on the make could expect to marry his daughter off to a moneyed nobleman not to a landless government clerk whose only distinction was as the author of naughty poems. Sir George procured Donne’s dismissal and arrest. He was thrown into the Fleet, London’s oldest and most pestilential jail, where his life was in immediate danger from disease. He put his eloquence to good use and began writing letters begging for mercy. He was successful and after settling his astronomical bill (£40 for a fortnight in a putrid death-trap) he was released. But the disgrace dogged him for years He moved with his wife to a damp, draughty house in Mitcham and set about nurturing his connections. Toadying to the high and mighty was the only way to obtain preferment in a society run on ‘patronage’ (elaborate fawning rituals combined with tacit promises of kickbacks). Stubbs calls Donne a ‘masterful groveller’. No doubt about that. It’s almost embarrassing. Here he is, one of the language’s most subtle and forceful prose stylists, drooling over James I’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham.
All that I meane in usinge thys boldness, of puttinge myself into your Lordship’s presence by this ragge of paper, ys to tell your Lordship that I ly in a corner, as a clod of clay, attendinge what kinde of vessel yt shall please you to make of Your Lordship’s humblest and thankfullest and devotedst servant.
Repeated attempts to gain work came to nothing, and extreme poverty eventually compelled him to take holy orders. From then on his fortunes changed and he made a name for himself as a popular preacher who picked a shrewd path between the religious extremes by stressing that a Christian’s prime duty was obedience to the king. His loyalty was rewarded and Donne was made Dean of St Pauls, a post which gave him responsibility for the capital’s foremost place of worship. Thus he ended his life as a pillar of the faith which his family had died defying. Stubbs is a newcomer to the academic world and this is an outstanding debut, a book which will surely become a standard work for anyone examining the religious psyche of England during the 60 years preceding the civil war. But there’s no sex.
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