Part 2

There was prescience in that couplet. As early, at least, as 1607-8, the widow’s long privacy ended, probably while she was at her “howse at Charing Cross,” watching over the progress of her son George at Westminster School; and he that was “loved of her” was the grandson of the last Lord Latimer of the Nevilles, junior brother of a nobleman who perished with Essex in 1602, and brother and heir of that Sir Henry Danvers who was created Earl of Danby in 1625 for his services in Ireland, and who literally left a green memory as the founder of the pleasant Physic Gardens at Oxford. The name of Danvers, the kindly step-father, is one of the noteworthy omissions of Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s _Autobiography_. But George Herbert was devoted to him, as his many letters show, and turned to him, never in vain, during his restless years at Cambridge; and into his circle of relatives, with romantic suddenness, he afterwards married. Sir John Danvers, of Dauntsey, Wilts, was twenty years younger than his wife. It is worth while to quote the very deft and courtly statement of the case made at the last by Dr. Donne: “The natural endowments of her person were such as had their part in drawing and fixing the affections of such a person as by his birth and youth and interest in great favors at court, and legal proximity to great possessions in the world, might justly have promised him acceptance in what family soever, or upon what person soever, he had directed. . . . He placed them here, neither diverted thence, nor repented since. For as the well-tuning of an instrument makes higher and lower strings of one sound, so the inequality of their years was thus reduced to an evenness, that she had a cheerfulness agreeable to his youth, and he had a sober staidness conformable to her more advanced years. So that I would not consider her at so much more than forty, nor him at so much less than thirty, at that time; but as their persons were made one and their fortunes made one by marriage, so I would put their years into one number, and finding a sixty between them, think them thirty apiece; for as twins of one hour they lived.”[5]

In the August of 1607, a masque by John Marston was given in the now ruined castle of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, eighteen miles from Leicester, as an entertainment devised by Lord Huntingdon and his young wife, the Lady Elizabeth Stanley, to welcome her mother, Alice, Countess-Dowager of Derby,[6] “the first night of her honor’s arrival at the house of Ashby.” Fourteen noble ladies took part in the masque, and among them was “Mris Da’vers.” The name may, perhaps, be recognized as that of the subject of this sketch, for Sir John Danvers was not knighted until the following year; and it has been so recognized by interested scholars who have searched Nichols’s _Progresses of James I_. And yet we cannot be too sure that we have her before us, in the wreaths and picturesque draperies of the amateur stage; for there was another Mistress Da’vers at court, whose purported letter, dated February 3, 1613, signed with her confusing Christian names of “Mary Magdaline,” gave great trouble, thirty years ago, to the experts of the Camden Society. Besides, a letter of the good gossipy Chamberlain, dated March 3, 1608-9, mentions as if it were then a piece of fresh news: “Young Davers is likewise wedded to the widow Herbert, Sir Edward’s mother, of more than twice his age.” This would seem to preclude the possibility of the fair masquer being the same person.

The mother of many Herberts, the “more than forty” bride, was by nature a home-keeping character. Among the correspondence relating to Lord Herbert of Cherbury, privately printed in 1886 by the Earl of Powis, are a few pages which give us invaluable glimpses of the London household. Lady Danvers’s eldest son, who set off upon his travels soon after her second marriage, and who applied himself vigorously to the various diversions of body and mind catalogued in the _Autobiography_, found himself often pinched for money. In such a strait, not unfamiliar to other fine gentlemen of his day, he invariably appealed to the services of the step-father who was his junior, in England. The latter, writing how “wee are all some what after the olde manner, and doe hartely wish you well,” seems to have busied himself to some avail, in concert with his brother-in-law, Sir Francis Newport (the first Lord Newport), in securing letters of credit to Milan, Turin, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, and in explaining at length, in his long involved sentences, how matters could be bettered. Whether or not the absent Knight of the Bath had reason to suspect Sir John’s disinterested action when it came to the handling of pounds and pence, he does not seem, then or after, to have burdened him with any great harvest of thanks. But Sir John’s faithful wife knew how to defend him, in a script of May 12, 1615, which may be quoted precisely as it stands in the Herbert papers.

“To my best beloved sonn, S’r Edward Herbert, Knight, “My deare Sonn,

it is straunge to me to here you to complayne of want of care of you in your absence when my thoughts are seldom removed from you which must assuredly set me aworkinge of any thinge may doe you good, & for writinge the one of us yf not both never let messenges pass without letter, your stay abroad is so short in any one place & we so unhappy in givinge you contentment as our letters com not to your hands which we are sorry for. And to tel you further of S’r John Da’vers Love which I dare sweare is to no man more, he is & hath beene so careful to keep you from lake of money now you are abroad as your Baylife faylinge payment as they continually doe & pay no man, he goeth to your Merchaunt, offers him self & all the powers he can make to supply you as your occasions may require, mistake him not, but beleeve me there was never a tenderer hart or a lovinger minde in any man then is in him towards you who have power to com’aund him & all that is his. Now for your Baylifs I must tell you they have not yet payed your brothers all their Anuities due at Midsom’er past & but half due at Christmas last and no news of the rest, this yf advauntage were taken might be preiuditiall to you and it is ill for your Brothers & very ill you have such officers.

“I hope it will bringe you home & that is all the good can com of this. your sister Johnes hath long beene sicke & within this 8 dayes hath brought a boy she is so weake as she is much feared by those aboute her. my Lady Vachell lyes now adyeinge the bell hath twice gone for her. your wife & sweet children are well & herein I send you little Florence letter to see what comfort you may have of your deare children, let them, my Dear sonn, draw you home & affoorde them your care and me your comfort that desire more to see you then I desire any thinge ells in the world, and now I end with my dayly prayer for your health and safe retorne to Your ever lovinge mother,

Magd: Da’vers.

“I have received the Pattent of your Br: William, & S’r John hath beene with the ambassatore who stayes for S’r James Sandaline[7] his cominge.”

A sympathizing reader, aware of sequences, may wonder whence Sir John drew “all the powers he can make”! The dignified letter, with its undulating syntax and thrifty punctuation, harmonizes with all we know of this delightful woman, who could so reproach what she deemed a shortcoming, without a touch of temper. How affectionate is the reference to the “little Florence” who died young, and to the other children, sufficiently precious to all that household, except to the wool-gathering chevalier their father, far away! Their innocent faces peer again through a sweet postscript of their grand-uncle: (“Dick is here, Ned and Bettye at Haughmond,”) written in the winter, from Eyton, to the truant at the Hague.[8] This same genial Sir Francis Newport, “imoderately desyring to see you,” confides to his nephew, during what he complains of as “a verye drye and hott time”[9] for Shropshire farmers, that “mye syster your mother is confident to take a iourney into these pts this somer, the rather, I think, because yo’r brother Vaugh’n is dead & if yo’ have a willing harte you maye come tyme enough to acco’pany her heare, & would not then the companye bee much the better?” But we fear the little excursion never came off. Edward Herbert’s next visit to his home, presumably after a four-years’ absence, was in 1619; and in May of that year he accepted the office of Ambassador to France, and spread his ready wing again to the Continent. And the _Athenæ Oxoniensis_ will not let us forget that the too spirited envoy had to be temporarily recalled in 1621, because he had “irreverently treated” De Luynes, the powerful but good-for-nothing Constable of France. It is not insignificant that this was the year in which George Herbert wrote to his mother in one of his consoling moods, bidding her be of good cheer, albeit her health and wealth were gone, and the conduct of her children was not very satisfying!

We know that Lady Danvers had the “honor, love, obedience, troops of friends” which became her, and that she lost none of her influence, none of her serene charm. Her poet was much with her in his advancing age. In July, 1625, while the plague was raging in London, Donne reminded Sir Henry Wotton of the leisure he enjoyed, golden as Cicero’s, by dating his letter “from S’r John Davor’s house at Chelsey, of w’ich house & my Lord Carlil’s at Hanworth I make up my Tusculum.” Many a peaceful evening must they have passed upon the terraces, within sound of the solemn songs always dear to both. Visitors yet more illustrious came there from the city; for the noble hostess had once the privilege of reviving the great Lord Bacon,[10] who had fainted in her garden. We learn, with sympathy, that “sickness, in the declination of her years, had opened her to an overflowing of melancholy; not that she ever lay under that water, but yet had, sometimes, some high tides of it.” Death chose Dr. Donne’s ministering angel before him, after thirty years of mutual fealty. Her restless son Edward, now at home, was already eminent, and wearing his little Irish title of Baron Castleisland; her thoughtful Charles was long dead; her brother, also, was no more; her daughters were matrons, and dwelling in prosperity. With but one unfulfilled wish, that of seeing her favorite George married and in holy orders,[11] and after a life which left a wake of sunshine behind it in the world, very patiently and hopefully Magdalen Newport, Lady Danvers, entered upon eternity, in the early June of 1627. On the eighth day of the month, in St. Luke’s, the parish church of Chelsea, she was buried:

“Old age with snow-bright hair, and folded palm,”

the final earthly glimpse of her still traditionally beautiful. On the first of July her faithful liegeman, now Dean of St. Paul’s and Vicar of St. Dunstan-in-the-West, preached her funeral sermon there, before a crowd of the great ones of London, the clergy, and the poor. Izaak Walton’s kind face looked up from a near pew, whence he saw Dr. Donne’s tears, and felt his breaking voice, the voice of one who did not belie his friend, nigh the end of his own pilgrimage. In present grief and among graver memories, he had the true perception not to forget how joyous she had been. “She died,” he said, “without any change of countenance or posture, without any struggling, any disorder, . . . and expected that which she hath received: God’s physic and God’s music, a Christianly death. . . . She was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame, . . . naturally cheerful and merry, and loving facetiousness and sharpness of wit.” His own fund of mirth and strength was fast going; and a haunting line of his youth,

“And all my pleasures are like yesterday,”

must have reverted to him many and many a time. Morbid and persistent thoughts beset him from this hour, probably, more than ever, until he had the effigy of himself, painted as he was, laid in his failing sight;[12] morbid and persistent thoughts of the ruin which befalls the bright bodies of humanity, sometimes surging up in his loneliness, and crowding out the better vision which yet may “grace us in the disgrace of death.” His inward eye was drawn strongly to his friend’s sepulchre, sealed and sombre before him, and to what had been her, “going into dust now almost a month of days, almost a lunar year . . . which, while I speak, is mouldering and crumbling into less and less dust.” But he ended in a wholesomer strain, subdued and calm: “This good soul being thus laid down to sleep in His peace, ‘I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye wake her not!’”

The rare little duodecimo which contains Lady Danvers’s funeral sermon was printed soon after, “together with other Commemorations of Her, by her Sonne G. Herbert,” and offered to the public at the Golden Lion in Paul’s Churchyard. The commemorations are in Greek and Latin. Strangely enough, nowhere is the sweet and sage poet of _The Temple_ so set upon his prosody, so given to awkward pagan conceits, so out of tune with the ideals of classic diction. But he, who tenderly loved his mother, has given to us, in the _Memoriæ Matris Sacrum_, several precious personal fragments, and one more precious whole picture of daily habits in the lines beginning _Corneliæ sanctæ_: her morning prayer, her bath, and the plaiting of her glossy hair; her housewifely cares, her fit replies, her writing to her friends, her passion for music, her gentle helpfulness; the long felicity of a glad and stainless life,

“Quicquid habet tellus, quicquid et astra, fruens.”

Dr. Donne died in 1631, whatever was yet of earth in his spirit healed and chastened by long pain. His last remembrance to some he loved was his own seal of Christ on the Anchor, “engraven very small on heliotropium stones, and set in gold, for rings.” Many of those to whom his heart would have turned, the “autumnal beauty” scarce second among them, had preceded him out of England. But in travelling towards his Maker, he had that other sacred hope to “ebb on with them,” and gloriously overtake them, as he traced the epitaph which covered him in old St. Paul’s: “_Hic licet in occiduo cinere, aspicit eum cujus nomen est Oriens_.” The tie between himself and her was not unremembered in the next generation; for we find John Donne the younger dedicating his father’s posthumous work to Francis, Lord Newport, and when making his will, in 1662, bequeathing also to the same Lord Newport “the picture of St. Anthony in a round frame.” And thus, in a revived fragrance, the annals of true friendship close.

These rapid, ragged strokes of a pen make the only possible biography of Lady Danvers. When Walton wrote of her, he had the entire correspondence with Dr. Donne before him.[13] “There were sacred endearments betwixt these two excellent persons,” he assures us, but disappointingly hurries on into the highway of his subject. It is curious that it seems impossible now to trace these breathing relics, or others from the same source; for George Herbert, in the second elegy of the _Parentalia_, has much to say, and very sweetly, of the industry of his mother’s “white right hand,” and of the “many and most notable letters, flying over all the world.” Much detail is utterly lost which men who agree with Prosper Mérimée that all Thucydides would not be worth an authentic memoir of Aspasia, or even of one of the slaves of Pericles, might be glad to remember. A copy of a song, a reminiscence of the glow and stir of the days through which she moved, a guess through a mist at the blond head,[14] the half-imperious carriage, the open hand, as she went her ways, like Dante’s lovely lady, _sentendosi laudare_,—these are all we have of the daughter of England’s golden age. It would be easy, were it also just, to throw a dash of color into her shadowy history. One would like to verify the scene at Eyton, while the news of the coming Armada roused the lion in Drake, and struck terror into the Devon towns; and to hear the young wife, with three lisping Herberts at her knee, beguile them with mellow contralto snatches of a Robin Hood ballad, or with the sweet yesterday’s tale of Zutphen, where their country’s dearest gave his cup of water to a dying comrade. A decade later, before their handsome bluff father, her other healthful boys stood up to wrestle, and twang their arrows at forty paces; or a rosy daughter stole to his side, and asked him of mishaps in Ireland, or of the giant laughter bubbling from the “oracle of Apollo” in a London street. It is to be believed that one who watched events through the insurrection of Essex, through Raleigh’s dramatic trial, reprieve, and execution, through the national mourning for the Prince of Wales, through the fever for colonization, the savage sea-fights, the great intrigues in behalf of the Queen of Scots, the religious divisions, the muttering parliamentary thunders, the stress and heat of the exciting dawn of the seventeenth century, was not unmindful of all it meant to be alive, there and then. Magdalen Newport’s girlhood fell on Lyly’s _Euphues_, fresh from the printers; the _Arcadia_ made the talk of Oxford, in her prime; the dusky splendor of Marlowe’s _Faustus_ was abroad before her second marriage. She was, surely, aware of Shakespeare, and of the wonder-folio of 1623; of the newest delighting madrigals and antiphons set forth by one Robert Jones, when every soul in England had the gift of music; of rascal Robert Greene’s lovable lyrics, of Wyatt’s, Campion’s, and Drayton’s. She wrote no verses, indeed, but her familiars wrote them; her every step jostled a Muse. We may assume that no growth nor loss in literary circles escaped that tender “perplexing eye.” Perhaps it glistened from a bench, in the pioneer British theatre, on the actors of _Volpone_, and followed silently, behind the royal group, the first mincings of the first dear Fool in _King Lear_, one day-after-Christmas at Whitehall. Last of all, for whim’s sake, how any sociologist would enjoy having the honest opinion of young Lady Herbert, or that of little Mistress Donne, concerning the person they could but thank and praise! _Utinam vivisset Pepys!_ It is a cheat of history that it preserves no clearer tint or trace of this chosen passer-by. Such, in truth, she was, and the quiet vanishing name clings to her: the woman of durable gladness, happily born and taught, like the soul whereof Sir Henry Wotton, who must have known her well, made his immortal song.

Of the gracious figure of Sir John Danvers we may be said to lose sight; for he seems less gracious, as by a Hindoo trick, as soon as it is written that his wife departed unto her reward. Comment on his character is equal comment upon hers, and adds new force to the classic episode of a lady philanthropist espousing a ne’er-do-weel and a featherbrain. Aubrey, always happy over a little ultra-contemporary gossip, calls it “a disagreeable match,” disappointing to the bridegroom’s kindred; but adds that “he married her for love of her wit.” Now, wit is an admirable magnet, but it is to be suspected that there was also, and in the immediate vicinity, “metal more attractive,” as Hamlet says. In the Chelsea parish-books is an entry, the first of its kind, certifying that Sir John Danvers had settled his account with “the poore,” a matter of thirty pounds’ loan (in which the vicar must have connived), for the year ending in January of 1628. If the payment were, by any hap, in advance, it may have fallen in Lady Danvers’s own lifetime; and if so, it is quite as likely that she paid it, with an admonition! Her “high tides of melancholy,” of whose true cause she certainly would not have complained to Dr. Donne, had something to do with this young spendthrift, who must have had his wheedling way, sooner or later, with such of her ample revenues as were yet extant. Perhaps Lord Herbert of Cherbury was both shrewd and charitable, in suppressing mention of his new relative.[15] The longer one looks into the matter, the less curious seems his unexplained silence concerning this late graft of a family hitherto always respectable and always loyal.

There are gleams of subsequent private history in the tell-tale records at Chelsea. We are not incurably astonished to learn that as early as May of 1629 was christened Elizabeth, daughter of Sir John Danvers and Elizabeth his wife. This Lady Elizabeth, arriving providentially with her Dauntsey wealth, having borne him four children, died, as did his mother, in 1636; and left him even as she found him, none too monogamous. In 1648 Sir John Danvers again appeared at the venerable altars where his first saint never had a memorial, loving, honoring, and cherishing a Mrs. Grace Hewes, Hawes, or Hewet, of Kemerton in Gloucestershire, and, as it is to be surmised, leading her tame fortune by a ribbon. His debts and difficulties, not of one but of all time, sprout perennially in the registers. His indefatigable name, oftener than any rival’s whatsoever, figures as borrowing and paying interest on a forty-pound note, which, like a Hydra-head, was always forthcoming so soon as it was demolished. This disgraceful business was the man’s chief concern: for the older he grew the deeper and deeper he sank into entanglements, particularly after the death of the King. It was never doubted, in his day, but that this was a judgment on the former Gentleman Usher who affixed hand and seal to the warrant of his sovereign’s execution.[16] His own family, it is said, as well as the royalist Herberts and Newports, dropped his acquaintance; and who knows whether Mrs. Grace Hewet was faithful? At his favorite Chelsea, in the April of 1655, and in about the seventy-fourth year of his age, Sir John Danvers ended his career by more conventional agencies than the rope and the knife, which might have befallen him in the Stuart triumph of the morrow. His manor fell an immediate forfeit to the crown. In 1661, the dead republican was attainted, and all of his estate which was unprotected was declared regal booty. The year before his own burial at Dauntsey he laid there, “to the great grief of all good men,” the body of his elder son Henry, who had just attained his majority. The Earl of Danby had died, “full of honors, wounds, and days,” in 1643, while this Henry, his nephew, was still a hopeful child; and on him alone he had taken pains to settle his possessions. But Henry, in turn, was persuaded to bequeath the major part of them to his father’s ever-gaping pocket, the remainder reverting to one of his two surviving sisters. The third Lady Danvers, who lived until 1678, had also a son Charles,[17] who petitioned the crown for his paternal rights, but died in old age, with neither income nor issue.