ABSTRACT
Date and context. Undetermined. Reference to ‘German schisms’ in WottonKisses 65 (c. Aug. 1598) is sufficiently explanatory of ‘tore’ and ‘Now new, now outwore’ in ll. 3 and 6 here to support the possibility that this sonnet dates from the 1590s, even before Satyre 3, whose ll. 43–60 it repeatedly echoes or anticipates. Calvin had restricted the visibility of the Church to the elect few, and is accordingly reproached for going against the point of the Incarnation by the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion, Rationes decem [Stonor Park, 1581], 3rd reason, tr. as Campian Englished (1632) p. 66. The sonnet’s late and restricted appearance in the MS tradition might be attributable not to late composition but to uneasiness about circulating a politically imprudent poem written before D.’s acceptance of the Church of England, which had taken place, it is presumed, when he became a secretary to the Lord Keeper in about 1597. It would also have been unsuitable to send to Lady Bedford. At a yet later date, in the Essays in Divinity (1952) pp. 48–9 probably completed in 1614, D. pleads in language that implicitly alludes to Calvinists as well as Tridentine papists for the ‘admitting of variety’ in ‘his dearly beloved Spouse … the Church’ so that it should not ‘in her latter age suffer many convulsions, distractions, rents, schisms and wounds’. In favour of a date in the early 1620s, Gardner DP pp. 121–7 argues that D. is seeking not one or other of the two main branches of Western European Christianity but the true Catholic (i.e., Universal) Church, the invisible church of true believers, that embraces all national churches. This enables Gardner to detach the sonnet from D.’s religious dilemma of the 1590s, and suggest that the specific reference to the church in Germany being ‘robbed and tore’ relates to the defeat of the King of Bohemia’s forces at the Battle of the White Mountain outside Prague in 1620 by an Imperial Roman Catholic army, which was lamented and mourned in Britain too as a setback for Protestantism and particularly since the ‘Winter Queen’ was James’s daughter (see Elizabeth). Despite glossing ‘no hill’ as Geneva in her commentary, Gardner p. 127 paraphrases it as ‘elsewhere’, having asserted (p. 124) that D. ‘does not speak of Geneva’. The last line of the sonnet, and D.’s letters (1609) and sermons quoted below, indeed show that, in line with Anglican doctrine, he did not limit the true Church to that of England, but the actual alternatives of ritualistic Roman Catholicism and doctrinaire Protestantism are hostilely presented here (as in sermons of 1617, 1621–3, 1625), Luther’s Germany and the ‘one hill’ of Wittenberg being as clear identifiers as the ‘richly painted’ church on the ‘seven hills’ of Rome.
