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 on 1 Jan. 1606–7, and was buried in the parish church of Good Estre, Essex, in which county he had purchased several estates. He married four times: (1) Mary, who died in February 1585–6; (2) Catherine, daughter of Henry Leake, citizen and clothworker of London, and widow of Barnabas Hilles of London, who died in January 1589–90; (3) between 1591 and 1602, Margaret, daughter of John Maynard, M.P. for St. Albans in 1553—the grandfather of the first lord Maynard—and widow of Sir Edward Osborne, lord mayor of London in 1582 and ancestor of the first duke of Leeds; she died in 1602; (4) in 1602, Joice or Jocosa, widow of James Austin, who survived him, dying in 1626, and was buried at St. Saviour's Church, Southwark, where her monument still exists. By his first wife Clarke had issue Robert, who succeeded to his manor of Newarks, and died on 18 May 1629, and five daughters; a son and daughter by his second wife; and two daughters by his third wife. By his will he directed that his funeral expenses should not exceed 20l., and that twice that sum should be distributed in alms.

[Dugdale's Chron. Ser. 96, 97; Dugdale's Orig. 253; Coke's Reports, iii. 16 b; Lane's Exch. Reports, p. 21; Cobbett's State Trials, i. 1271–1315; Strype's Annals (fol.), iv. 21, 24, 25–7; Strype's Whitgift, p. 375; Nichols's Progresses (James I), i. 207; Morant's Essex, i. 345, ii. 453, 459; Cal. State Papers (Dom. 1601–3), p. 285, (Dom. 1603–10) p. 348; Coll. Top. et Gen. v. 51; Collins's Peerage (Brydges), i. 254, vi. 282; Willis's Not. Parl. iii. 27; Foss's Judges of England.] 

CLARKE, ROBERT (d. 1675), Latin poet, was a native of London, his real name being. He was educated in the English college at Douay, where he became professor of poetry and rhetoric, and he was ordained priest in the chapel of the palace of the Bishop of Arras, 20 March 1627–8. On 16 July 1629 a Latin tragi-comedy, ‘The Emperor Otho,’ composed by him, was performed in the college refectory; and on 13 Sept. the same year another drama of his composition, ‘The Return of St. Ignatius, bishop and martyr, from Exile,’ was acted there before Anthony Mary, viscount Montacute. On 19 Sept. 1629 he was sent to the English mission with the ordinary faculties. The college entry, recording the circumstance, describes him as ‘non solum in humanioribus literis (quas per aliquot annos laudabiliter docuit) verum etiam in philosophia ac theologia doctus et eruditus.’ Being unequal, through ill-health and other causes, to encounter the difficulties and dangers then inseparable from the career of a missionary priest, he returned to the continent, and went from Douay in 1632 to join the English Carthusians at Nieuport, and he was a strict observer of the severe rule of that order until his death on 31 Dec. 1675.

He was author of an elaborate sacred epic in Latin, completed in 1650, and published under the title of: 1. ‘Christiados, sive De Passione Domini, libri 17.’ Bruges, 1670, 8vo; Augsburg and Dillingen, 1708, 8vo; Ingolstadt, 1855, 8vo. This last edition was prepared by Aloys Kassian Walthierer, parish priest of Böhmfeld, who had previously published a German translation of the poem, Ingolstadt, 1853, 8vo. The manuscript of a metrical English translation of ‘Christias,’ by Baron Edmund de Harold, was in 1855 in the library of his nephew at Trostberg. Clarke's other works, none of which have been printed, are: 2. Four books on the Imitation of Christ, in Latin iambics. 3. ‘Miscellanea.’ 4. ‘Dissertatio de dignitate confessarii.’ 5. ‘The Crown of Thorns,’ an English poem. The original manuscript was in 1855 in the possession of Baron de Harold.

[Preface to reprint of Christias; Dodd's Church History, iii. 311; Cat. of Printed Books in Brit. Mus.] 

CLARKE, SAMUEL (1625–1669), ‘right famous for oriental learning’, was a son of Thomas Clarke of Brackley in Northamptonshire, and at the age of fifteen entered at Merton College, Oxford, Lent term 1640. About four years later, when the city was being garrisoned in the royal cause, he left Oxford, but returned after the surrender, submitted to the parliamentary visitors, and took his M.A. degree (1648). In 1649 he was appointed the first architypographus of the university, adding the office of upper bedell of the civil law; but in 1650 we find him master of a school at Islington, and at the same time materially assisting Walton in the preparation of his polyglott Bible, notably in the Hebrew text, the Chaldean paraphrase, and the Latin translation of the Persian version of the Gospels. In 1658 he returned once more to Oxford, and was re-elected to both his former posts, which he retained till his death in Holywell, 27 Dec. 1669, and during this period showed himself ‘a most necessary and useful person in the concerns thereof belonging to the university’. Besides his share in Walton's ‘Biblia Sacra Polyglotta’ (1657), he published ‘Scientia Metrica et Rhythmica, seu tractatus de Prosodia Arabica,’ Oxford, 1661, which appeared as an appendix (separately paged) to Pococke's ‘Lamiato 'l Ajam,’ and ‘Massereth Beracoth Titulus Talmudi-