ABSTRACT
Some writers leave behind them a biographical legend entwined inseparably with what they have written. John Donne (1572-1631) was one such. He came of a Roman Catholic family, and his mother, as the daughter of John Heywood, was great grand-daughter of Sir Thomas More. His father died before John was four, but the boy studied at Oxford and the Inns of Court and, after travel and foreign service, he became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper. But in December 1601 his prospects were ruined by his secret marriage to Lady Egerton’s niece, Ann More, whose father had him dismissed and, for a time, imprisoned. ‘John Donne-Ann Donne-Un-done’, the young husband wrote in a letter to his wife, and though he managed to make his peace with his father-in-law, he was not reinstated, and he and Ann brought up a rapidly increasing family in very straitened circumstances. Donne, who had early become critical of the Roman Church, joined in the polemical writing of the time and was pressed to take Anglican orders, but declined until pressure from James I, together with developments in his own thinking, brought him to the view that it was God’s will that he should do so, and he was ordained in 1615. The death of his wife in 1617 was the end of a most loving partnership. Izaak Walton, in his Life of John Donne, tells how Donne was now ‘the careful father of seven children then living, to whom he gave a voluntary assurance never to bring them under the subjection of a step-mother; which promise he kept most faithfully, burying with his tears, all his earthly joys in his most dear and deserving wife’s grave…’ And indeed Donne’s sonnet on his wife’s death (‘Since she whom I lov’d’) is one of his loveliest:
Here the admyring her my mind did whett To seeke thee God; so streames do shew their head…
It was in 1621 that Donne was made Dean of St Paul’s, where he achieved a great reputation for his sermons and his piety.
