Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 15.djvu/231

Rh and about London had of late been showing great activity, and their zeal and devotion had resulted in a very remarkable success in the way of gaining converts to the Roman creed and ritual. The government was much provoked, and a relentless persecution was organised against the proselytisers. One of these men, William Harrington, a seminary priest, a man of birth, culture, and piety, was betrayed by some associate and tracked, hunted down, and arrested in the chambers of young Henry Donne in May 1593. To harbour a seminary priest was then a capital offence. Harrington was hurried off to his trial, and ended his career at Tyburn. Young Donne, too, was taken to the Clink, and there, catching gaol fever, died after a few weeks' incarceration (Stonyhurst College MSS., Angl. A. I. No. 77; this document, together with confirmatory evidence, has been printed in one of the catholic publications). Well might Donne, six years after this event, say, as he does in the 'Pseudo-Martyr,' 'No family (which is not of far larger extent and greater branches) hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes for obeying the teachers of Roman doctrine.'

Walton tells us that Donne about this time was much distressed in mind by the questions that were then being discussed so warmly between the Roman and Anglican divines, and that he gave himself up to study the subject with great care and labour. The fate of his only brother might well account for the direction which his studies took; but when Robert, earl of Essex, set out on the Cadiz voyage in June 1596, and an extraordinary gathering of young volunteers joined the celebrated expedition, Donne was one of those who took part in it. Among his associates, and not improbably on board the same ship, were the son and stepson of Sir Thomas Egerton, who had been appointed keeper of the great seal three weeks before the fleet weighed anchor. On its return in August 1596 the lord keeper appointed Donne his secretary. Donne had already won for himself a great reputation as a young man of brilliant genius and many accomplishments, and was accounted one of the most popular poets of the time. In the contemporary literature of the later years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, and the first half of that of James I, his name is constantly occurring. He seems to have had an extraordinary power of attaching others to himself; there is a vein of peculiar tendernsss which runs through the expressions in which his friends speak of him, as if he had exercised over their affection for him an unusual and indefinable witchery. During the time he was secretary to the lord keeper he necessarily lived much in public, and became familiarly known to all the chief statesmen at the queen's court. It was at this time that he wrote most of his poetry, perhaps all his satires, the larger number of his elegies and epistles, and many of the fugitive pieces which are to be found in his collected poetical works; but he printed nothing. His verses were widely circulated in manuscript, and copies of them are frequently to be met with in improbable places. Frequently, too, poems which were certainly not from his hand were attributed to him, as if his name would secure attention to inferior productions. In the autumn of 1599 Sir Thomas Egerton the younger, eldest son of the lord keeper, died. It had been through his intercession that Donne had been made secretary to the lord keeper, and when his funeral was celebrated with some pomp at Doddleston, Cheshire (27 Sept. 1599), Donne occupied a prominent position in the procession, and was the bearer of the dead man's sword before the corpse (Harl. MS. 2129, f. 44). The lord keeper had married as his second wife Elizabeth, a sister of Sir George More of Losely, Surrey, and widow of Sir John Wolley of Pyrford in the same county. By her first husband this lady had a son, Francis; by the lord keeper she had no issue. Her ladyship appears to have looked to her brother's children for companionship, and to have kept one of her nieces, Anne, in close attendance upon her own person. It was inevitable that the young lady and the handsome secretary should be thrown much together, and when Lady Egerton died, in January 1599-1600, and the supervision of the domestic arrangements in the lord keeper's house was perhaps less vigilant than it had been, the intimacy between the two developed into a passionate attachment which neither had the resolution to resist, and it ended by the pair being secretly married about Christmas 1600, Donne being then twenty-seven, and his bride sixteen years of age. The secret could not long be kept, and when it came out Sir George More was violently indignant. He procured the committal to prison of his son-in-law and the two Brookes, who were present at the marriage. Donne was soon set at liberty, but his career was spoilt. Nothing less would satisfy Sir George More than that the lord keeper should dismiss his secretary from his honourable and lucrative office, and Donne found himself a disgraced and needy man with a scanty fortune and no ostensible means of livelihood. After a while a reconciliation took place between him and his wife's family, but Sir Thomas Egerton declined to reinstate him Rh