The primrose path to holiness

‘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.