Part 1

THE POEMS OF RICHARD CORBET, LATE BISHOP OF OXFORD AND OF NORWICH.

THE FOURTH EDITION, With considerable Additions.

TO WHICH ARE NOW ADDED, “ORATIO IN FUNUS HENRICI PRINCIPIS,” FROM ASHMOLE’S MUSEUM, _Biographical Notes, and a Life of the Author_, BY OCTAVIUS GILCHRIST, F.S.A.

London: PRINTED FOR LONGMAN, HURST, REES, AND ORME, PATERNOSTER-ROW. 1807.

Invidebam devio ac solo loco Opes camœnarum tegi: At nunc frequentes, atque claros, nee procul, Quum floreas inter viros.

AUSONIUS.

R. TAYLOR, and Co. Shoe Lane.

TO MY FRIEND THOMAS BLORE, ESQ. THIS VOLUME, UNDERTAKEN AT HIS SUGGESTION, AND PROMOTED BY HIS ASSISTANCE, IS INSCRIBED BY THE EDITOR.

THE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR.

The public interest has been of late years so strongly manifested in favour of the poets of the seventeenth century, that little apology appears necessary for the republication of the following Poems. It would, however, be equally vain and foolish in the editor to claim for the author a place among the higher class of poets, or to exalt his due praise by depreciating the merits of his contemporaries.—Claiming only for Cæsar what to Cæsar is due, it may without arrogance be presumed that these pages will not be found inferior to the poems of others which have been fortunately republished, or familiarised to the generality of readers through the popular medium of selections.

The author of the following poems (an account of whose life may be considered as a necessary appendage to these pages) is said to have descended from the antient family of the Corbets in Shropshire. It were too laborious and pedantic in a work of this nature to trace his pedigree, but I should be pleased to find any proofs of their attachment to him: yet as the bishop did not usually “conceal his love,” I suspect he received no mark of their regard, at least till his elevation conferred rather than received obligation by acknowledgment.

Richard Corbet, successively bishop of Oxford and Norwich, was born at the village of Ewell in Surrey, in the year 1582: he was the only son of Bennet, or Benedicta, and Vincent Corbet, who, from causes which I have not discovered, assumed the name of Poynter. His father, a man of some eminence for his skill in gardening, and who is celebrated by Ben Jonson in an elegy[1] alike honourable to the subject, the poet, and the friend, for his many amiable virtues, resided at Whitton, a hamlet in the parish of Twickenham, where the poet passed his declining days. Under the will of his father[2] he inherited sundry freehold lands and tenements lying in St. Augustine’s parish, Watling-street, London, and five hundred pounds in money, which was directed to be paid him by Bennet, the father’s wife and sole executrix, upon his attaining the age of twenty-five years. After receiving the rudiments of education at Westminster School, he entered in Lent term 1597-8 at Broadgate Hall, and the year following was admitted a student of Christ-Church College, Oxford. In 1605 he proceeded Master of Arts, and became celebrated as a wit and a poet.

The following early specimen of his humour is preserved in a collection of “Mery Passages and Jeastes,” Harl. MS. No. 6395: “Ben Jonson was at a tavern, and in comes bishop Corbet (but not so then) into the next room. Ben Jonson calls for a quart of _raw_ wine, and gives it to the tapster. ‘Sirrah!’ says he, ‘carry this to the gentleman in the next chamber, and tell him I sacrifice my service to him.’ The fellow did, and in those terms. ‘Friend!’ says bishop Corbet, ‘I thank him for his love; but pr’ythee tell him from me that he is mistaken, for sacrifices are always burnt.’”

In 1612, upon the death of the amiable and accomplished Henry Prince of Wales,

“The expectancy and rose of the fair state,”

and the theme of many a verse; the University, overwhelmed with grief, more especially as he had been a student of Magdalen College under the tutorage of Mr. John Wilkinson, (“afterwards the unworthy president of that house,”) and desirous of testifying their respect for his memory, deputed Corbet, then one of the proctors, to pronounce a funeral oration; “who,” to use the words of Antony Wood, “very oratorically speeched it in St. Maries church, before a numerous auditory[3].” On the 13th of March in the following year he performed a similar ceremony in the Divinity School on the interment of sir Thomas Bodley, the munificent founder of the library known by his name.

Amid the religious dissensions at this period, encouraged and increased by James’s suspected inclination to popery, it was scarcely possible to avoid giving offence to the supporters of the various doctrinal opinions which in this confusion of faiths divided the people. At the head of the Church was Dr. George Abbott, a bigoted and captious Puritan: opposed to this disciple of Calvin was Laud, then growing into fame, who boldly supported the opinions of Arminius. With the latter Corbet coincided: but the undisguised publication of his faith had nearly proved fatal to his future prospects; for, “preaching the Passion sermon at Christ-Church, (1613,) he insisted on the article of Christ’s descending into hell, and therein grated upon Calvin’s manifest perverting of the true sense and meaning of it: for which, says Heylyn, he was so rattled up by the Repetitioner, (Dr. Robert Abbott, brother of the archbishop,) that if he had not been a man of a very great courage, it might have made him afraid of staying in the University. This, it was generally conceived, was not done without the archbishop’s setting on; but the best was, adds Heylyn, that none sunk under the burthen of these oppressions, if (like the camomile) they did not rise the higher by it[4].”

When James, in 1605[5], visited Oxford in his summer progress, the wits of the sister University vented their raillery at the entertainment given to the royal visitor[6]. Cambridge, which had long solicited the same honour, was in the year 1614-5 indulged with his presence. Many students from Oxford witnessed the ceremonial of his reception; and the local histories of the two Universities at that period, are replete with pasquinades and ballads sufficiently descriptive of their mutual animosities. An eye-witness declares, “Though I endured a great deal of penance by the way for this little pleasure, yet I would not have missed it, for that I see thereby the partiality of both sides—the Cambridge men pleasing and applauding themselves in all, and the Oxford men as fast condemning and detracting all that was done; wherein yet I commended Corbet’s modesty, whilst he was there; who being seriously dealt withal by some friends to say what he thought, answered, that he had left his malice and judgment at home, and came there only to commend[7].” Notwithstanding this conciliatory declaration, the opportunity of retorting upon the first assailants was too tempting to Corbet’s wit to be slighted; and immediately upon his return he composed the ballad, page 13, “To the tune of Bonny Nell.”—This humorous narrative excited several replies; the most curious of which was the one, in Latin and English, (at page 24,) written, perhaps, by sir Thomas Lake, afterwards secretary of state, who performed the part of Trico in the Cambridge play of Ignoramus, and who had a ring bequeathed him by the author, Ruggles[8].

Corbet appears, says Headley[9], to have been of that poetical party who, by inviting Ben Jonson to come to Oxford, rescued him from the arms of a sister University, who has long treated the Muses with indignity, and turned a hostile and disheartening eye on those who have added most celebrity to her name[10].

We do not find that Ben expressed any regret at the change of his situation: companions whose minds and pursuits were similar to his own, are not always to be found in the gross atmosphere of the muddy Cam, though easily met with on the more genial banks of the Isis:

Largior hic campos æther.

In 1616 he was recommended by the Convocation as a proper person to be elected to the college which Dr. Matthew Surtclyve, dean of Exeter, had lately erected at Chelsea, for maintaining polemical Divines to be employed in opposing the doctrines of Papists and Sectaries. Whether he obtained his election I have not learned: nor is it of much moment; for the establishment, as might be naturally foreseen from the circumstances of the times, soon declined from its original purpose[11].

Being now in a situation to indulge his inclinations, he in 1618 made a trip to France, from whence he wrote an “epistle to sir Thomas Aylesbury,” in which he gently laughs at his friend’s astronomical fondness; and composed a metrical description of his journey, from which we may conclude that he returned less disgusted with his native country, and less enamoured of the manners and habits of his new acquaintance, than is usual with the modern visitors of our transmarine neighbours.

He was now in holy orders; and, in the language of Antony Wood, “became a quaint preacher, and therefore much followed by ingenious men.” None of Corbet’s sermons are, I believe, in existence: the modesty that withheld his poems from the press, during his life, prevented his adding to the multitude of devotional discourses with which the country was at this period infested[12]. Those who are at all acquainted with the ecclesiastical oratory of James’s reign, will be at no loss to comprehend “honest Antony’s” description; but to those who are not, it may be sufficient to observe, that, of its peculiar excellencies and demerits, the sermons of bishop King, his contemporary, (which have been republished) are a complete “picture in little.”

About this time he appears, from the following characteristic letter[13], to have solicited promotion at the hands of Villiers duke of Buckingham:

“May it please your Grace

“To consider my two great losses this weeke: one in respect of his Majesty to whom I was to preach; the other in respect of my patron whom I was to visit. Yf this bee not the way to repare the later of my losses, I feare I am in danger to bee utterly undon. To press too neere a greate man is a meanness; to be put by, and to stand too far off, is the way to be forgotten: so Ecclesiasticus. In which mediocrity, could I hitt it, would I live and dy, my lord. I would neather press neere, nor stand far off; choosing rather the name of an ill courtier than a sawsy scholer.

“I am your Grace’s most humble servant,

“RICHARD CORBET.”

Christ’s Church, this 26 Feb.

“Heer are newes, my noble lord, about us, that, in the point of alledgeance now in hand, all the Papists are exceeding orthodox; the only recusants are the Puritans.”

Of the nature of the object thus supplicated, my inquiries have not informed me: he was now dean of Christ-Church, vicar of Cassington near Woodstock in Oxfordshire, and prebendary of Bedminster secunda in the church of Sarum: it was, perhaps, the appointment of chaplain to the King, which he received about this time; and if to this period may be assigned the gratulatory poem at page 83, it should seem that Buckingham was not solicited in vain.

In 1619 he sustained a great loss in the decease of his amiable father, at a very advanced age; whose praise he has celebrated in the most honourable terms, and whose death he has lamented in the language of rational and tender regret.

When James paid a second visit to Oxford in 1621, Corbet, in his office of chaplain, preached before the monarch[14], who had presented him (as it seems) with a token of his favour, such as flattered in no small degree the vanity of the dean. The progress of the court and its followers is thus ludicrously described in an anonymous poem transcribed from Antony Wood’s papers[15] in Ashmole’s Museum:

The king and the court, Desirous of sport, Six days at Woodstock did lie; Thither went the doctors, And sattin-sleev’d proctors, With the rest of the learned fry;

Whose faces did shine With beere and with wine, So fat, that it may be thought University cheere, With college strong beere, Made them far better fed than taught.

A number beside, With their wenches did ride, (For scholars are always kind) And still evermore, While they rode before, They were kissing their wenches behind.

A number on foot, Without cloak or boot, And yet with the court go they would; Desirous to show How far they could go To do his high mightiness good.

The reverend Dean, With his band starch’d clean, Did preach before the King; A ring was his pride To his bandstrings tied, Was not this a pretty thing?

The ring, without doubt, Was the thing put him out, And made him forget what was next; For every one there Will say, I dare swear, He handled it more than his text.

With poetical badinage of this complexion the wits of the University of Oxford, with Corbet at their head, “who loved this boy’s play to the last,” abounded. While many of the pasquinades are lost, many, however, are still preserved among Ashmole’s papers: on most occasions Corbet was at least a match for his opponents, but this misfortune of the ring became a standing jest against him: it is alluded to at page 233; and it is demanded in another poem[16], if

He would provoke court wits to sing The _second_ part of bandstrings and the ring.

Upon the evening of the same Sunday, the students of Christ-Church, willing to show their respect for the royal visitor, obtained leave to present a play before the King; and they chose, with no great display of taste, Barten Holyday’s ΤΕΧΝΟΓΑΜΙΑ, or “The Marriage of the Arts,” which had been acted in Christ-Church hall the 13th of February, 1617. The play was so little relished, that the king was with difficulty persuaded to sit till its conclusion: the “enactors” became subjects of ridicule to the University; and, though Corbet and King rhymed in their favour, the laugh went against them.

Indeed the Oxonians were not more unfortunate in their theatrical representations on this than on former occasions. Upon the visit of James, in 1605, two out of three dramatic exhibitions, prepared at great expense and performed by the students, were, according to the testimony of an eye-witness, received with tædium, and rewarded with unconcealed disgust[17].

The writers of the poet’s life are silent as to the period of his marriage; and if I am unable to communicate any information on this point, it will not, I trust, be attributed to any parsimony of research, or indifference as to fact when conjecture can be substituted. Those who have made literary biography their study, know that it is frequently much easier to write many pages than to ascertain a date, and hence but too frequently ingenuity supplies the place of labour and inquiry: in the present instance, every record that suggested a probability of containing any memorial relative to the family of the subject of this biography has been inspected personally; but before the passing of the Marriage Act, nothing is more uncertain than the probable place of the celebration of that ceremony[18].

In this dearth of fact as to dates, I shall presume to suppose he married about 1625 Alice the only daughter of his fellow-collegian Dr. Leonard Hutton, a man of some eminence in his day as a divine and an antiquary, and whose character is thus drawn by Antony Wood with a felicity that rarely accompanies his pencil: “His younger years were beautified with all kind of polite learning, his middle with ingenuity and judgment, and his reverend years with great wisdom in government, having been often subdean of his college.”

This union of wit and beauty was not looked upon with indifference, nor was their epithalamium unsung, or the string touched by the hand of an unskilful master:

Come, all ye Muses, and rejoyce At this your nursling’s happy choyce; Come, Flora, strew the bridemaid’s bed, And with a garland crown her head; Or, if thy flowers be to seek, Come gather roses at her cheek. Come, Hymen, light thy torches, let Thy bed with tapers be beset, And if there be no fire by, Come light thy taper at her eye: In that bright eye there dwells a starre, And wise-men by it guided are[19].

The offspring of this marriage were a daughter named Alice, and a son born the 10th of November, 1627, towards whom the beautiful poem at page 150 is an undecaying monument of paternal affection.

Of these descendants of the bishop I lament that I have discovered so little: if this volume should be fortunate enough to excite attention to its author, the loss may at some future period be supplied: they were both living when their grandmother, Anne Hutton, made her will in 1642, and the son administered to the testament in 1648.

In 1628 Corbet suffered a severe privation in the loss of his patron Villiers duke of Buckingham, assassinated by Felton on the 23d of August, who, whatever were his political crimes, was, like his amiable and indulgent master, a liberal promoter of literature and science, and to his death an encourager of Corbet’s studies. If, however, this event checked his hopes of promotion for a season, it did not leave him without a patron; for, upon the translation of Hewson to the see of Durham, (to make way for Dr. Duppa to be dean of that church,) he was elected bishop of Oxford the 30th of July, was consecrated at Lambeth the 19th of October, and installed the 3d of November, 1629; “though,” in the opinion of Wood, “in some respects unworthy of such an office[20].”

Warned by the many petulant remarks on the poetical character scattered throughout the account of Oxford writers, one is little surprised at this churlish remark on the part of honest Antony, who seems to have considered all poetry as

... inopes rerum, nugæque canoræ,

and its indulgence inconsistent with the clerical profession. Corbet was certainly no “precisian,” and perhaps his only fault was possessing a species of talent to which Antony had no pretension.

The bishopric of Oxford he held but a short time, being translated to a more active see, that of Norwich, in the month of April 1632; when a dispute arose as to his right of claim to the glebe sown previous to his vacating the vicarage: the opinion of the attorney-general, (Noy,) which is preserved in the Harleian collection of manuscripts[21], was in his favour, _in as much as the translation was not his own act merely_.

On the 9th of March, 1633, he preached before the king at Newmarket[22].

Scarcely was he seated in the episcopal chair of Norwich when Abbott died, and Laud, who had long exercised the authority of metropolitan, was two days afterwards (August 6th, 1633) preferred to the see of Canterbury. Having now “no rival near his throne,” in the warmth of his zeal he immediately applied himself to reform abuses and exact a conformity to the established church, the discipline of which had exceedingly relaxed during the ascendancy of his calvinistic predecessor. For this purpose Laud issued certain orders and instructions to the several bishops, insisting upon a strict examination into the state of religion and its ceremonies in their several dioceses; the result of which was transmitted to that prelate, and by him laid before the King. These representations, many of which are curious, are printed in the nineteenth volume of Rymer’s Fœdera. On his part, Corbet certified that he had suppressed the lectures of some factious men, and particularly that he had suspended one Bridges, curate of St. George’s parish, Norwich; but, upon submission, he had taken off his suspension. Among others, he had heard complaint of Mr. Ward[23], of Ipswich, for words in some sermons of his, for which he was called before the High Commission.

From the following conciliating epistle I conclude that Ward submitted, and was restored to his cure:

“Salutem in Christo.

“My worthie friend,

“I thank God for your conformitie, and you for your acknowledgment: stand upright to the church wherein you live; be true of heart to her governours; think well of her significant ceremonyes; and be you assured I shall never displace you of that room which I have given you in my affection; proove you a good tenant in my hart, and noe minister in my diocese hath a better landlord. Farewell! God Almightie blesse you with your whole congregation.

“From your faithful friend to serve you in Christ Jesus,

“RICH. NORWICH[24].”

Ludham Hall, the 6 of Oct. 1633.

The zeal of Laud did not rest here: he set sedulously about suppressing the Dutch and Walloon congregations, of which there were several in London, Norwich, and other places.

It will be perhaps necessary to observe, that the Dutch, the Walloons, and the French, who had continued to refuge in England from the reign of Edward the Sixth, had obtained many privileges from former kings, and among others, the liberty of celebrating divine service after their own, that is, the presbyterian, manner. Their congregations were scattered over the kingdom; and at this period there was at Norwich one of the Dutch, and one of the Walloons, the latter of which carried on an extensive manufacture of woollen cloths, for the vending of which, they in 1564 obtained a lease of the chapel of St. Mary the Less, which they fitted up as a hall or market-place for that purpose. Where they performed divine service before the year 1619 I know not, but in that year Samuel Harsnet licensed the Walloon congregation to use during his pleasure the Bishop’s chapel, or chapel of the Virgin Mary[25]. This indulgence was continued during the government of his successor, Francis White. But the intolerance of Laud would be content with nothing short of conformity; Corbet consequently prepared to dislodge them by the following characteristic letter:

“To the minister and elders of the French church, in Norwich, these:

“Salutem in Christo.

“You have promised me from time to time to restore my stolen bell, and to glaze my lettice windows. After three yeeres consultation (bysides other pollution) I see nothing mended. Your discipline, I know, care not much for a consecrated place, and anye other roome in Norwiche that hath but bredth and length may serve your turne as well as the chappel: wherefore I say unto you, without a miracle, _Lazare, prodi foras!_ Depart, and hire some other place for your irregular meetings: you shall have time to provide for yourselves betwixte this and Whitsontide. And that you may not think I mean to deale with you as Felix dyd with St. Paul, that is, make you afraid, to get money, I shall keepe my word with you, which you did not with me, and as neer as I can be like you in nothinge.

“Written by me, Richard Norwich, with myne own hand, Dec. 26, anno 1634.”

The congregation remonstrated to Laud, in the February following, against the commands of their poetical pastor; but the archbishop insisted that his instructions should stand, and obedience be yielded to his injunctions[26].