40-) English Literature

40-) English Literature

George Herbert 

George Herbert was born on April 3, 1593 at Black Hall in Montgomery, Wales  , died March 1, 1633, Bemerton, Wiltshire, Eng.).He was an English religious poet , and priest of the Church of England , a major metaphysical poet, notable for the purity and effectiveness of his choice of words. His poetry is associated with the writings of the metaphysical poets, and he is recognised as "one of the foremost British devotional lyricists."

He was born in Wales into an artistic and wealthy family and largely raised in England. He received a good education that led to his admission to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1609. He went there with the intention of becoming a priest, but he became the University's Public Orator and attracted the attention of King James I. He sat in the Parliament of England in 1624 and briefly in 1625.His family on his father's side was one of the oldest and most powerful in Montgomeryshire, having settled there in the early 13th century and improving and consolidating its status by shrewd marriage settlements and continuous governmental service. The surviving stories about the patriarchs focus, not surprisingly, on their bravery and valor as they fought to civilize the countryside, administer justice, and keep peace in an area that had a well-deserved reputation for wildness. Herbert no doubt grew up with these tales but could not have had much contact with the men themselves: his grandfather, evidently a remarkable courtier, warrior, and politician, died the month after Herbert was born; and his father, also an active local sheriff and member of Parliament, died when Herbert was three and a half years old.His mother, Magdalen, from the Newport family of Shropshire, was by all accounts an extraordinary woman, fully capable of managing the complex financial affairs of the family, moving the household when necessary, and supervising the academic and spiritual education of her ten children. There is evidence of Herbert's deep attachment to, and even identification with, his mother throughout his works: his earliest surviving poems, which attempt to outline his direction as a poet, were written and sent to her as a gift; he mourned her death (and celebrated her life) with a collection of Latin and Greek poems, Memoriae Matris Sacrum (1627); and The Temple is filled with images of childlike submissiveness and maternal love, devotion, and authority. John Donne, with whom Magdalen was well acquainted, delivered her funeral sermon.

After the death of King James, Herbert renewed his interest in ordination. He gave up his secular ambitions in his mid-thirties and took holy orders in the Church of England, spending the rest of his life as the rector of the rural parish of Fugglestone St Peter, just outside Salisbury. He was noted for unfailing care for his parishioners, bringing the sacraments to them when they were ill and providing food and clothing for those in need. Henry Vaughan called him "a most glorious saint and seer". He was never a healthy man and died of consumption at age 39.

Magdalen did not keep the family long in Wales. Shortly after the birth of her last child, Thomas, in 1597, she moved the family first to Shropshire, then to Oxford—primarily to oversee the education of the oldest son, Edward—and then finally to a house at Charing Cross, London. This last move also facilitated the education of the other children. George was tutored at home and then entered Westminster School, probably in 1604, a distinguished grammar school that not only grounded him in the study of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and music, but also introduced him to Lancelot Andrewes, one of the great churchmen and preachers of the time. From Westminster, Herbert went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1609 and began one of the most important institutional affiliations of his life, one that lasted nearly 20 years.

At Cambridge, Herbert moved smoothly through the typical stages of academic success: he earned a BA then an MA; obtained a Minor fellowship then a Major fellowship, which involved increasing responsibilities as a tutor and lecturer; and was made university orator in 1620, a position of great prestige within the university that was often a stepping-stone to a successful career at court. The orator was the spokesperson for the university on a variety of occasions, making speeches and writing letters, and the little evidence that survives of Herbert's activities as orator indicates that he served in this capacity with both ceremonious wit and independent boldness. He was well able to offer the required fatuous compliments to the king: in a letter thanking King James I for the gift of his Latin works to Cambridge, he compared these volumes themselves to a library far grander than that of the Vatican or the Bodleian Library at Oxford. But he was also willing to dare to offer some unwanted advice when it was needed: in an oration on 8 October 1623 capping the university's celebration of the safe return of Prince Charles (later Charles I) and George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, from Spain, Herbert made a forceful plea for the value of keeping the peace, even though it was clear that the failure to marry off the prince to the Spanish Infanta made war with Spain more desirable and likely. It is unclear whether Herbert helped or hurt his chances for secular advancement by being both witty and principled.

Biography

Early life and education

George Herbert was born 3 April 1593 in Montgomery, Montgomeryshire, Wales, the son of Richard Herbert (died 1596) and his wife Magdalen née Newport, the daughter of Sir Richard Newport (1511–1570). He was one of 10 children. The Herbert family was wealthy and powerful in both national and local government, and George was descended from the same stock as the Earls of Pembroke. His father was a member of parliament, a justice of the peace, and later served for several years as custos rotulorum (keeper of the rolls) of Montgomeryshire. His mother was a patron and friend of clergyman and poet John Donne and other poets, writers and artists. As George's godfather, Donne stood in after Richard Herbert died when George was three years old. Herbert and his siblings were then raised by his mother, who pressed for a good education for her children.

A younger brother of Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury, a notable secular metaphysical poet, George in 1610 sent his mother for New Year’s two sonnets on the theme that the love of God is a fitter subject for verse than the love of woman, a foreshadowing of his poetic and vocational bent.

Educated at home, at Westminster School, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was in 1620 elected orator of the university, a position that he described as “the finest place in the university.” His two immediate predecessors in the office had risen to high positions in the state, and Herbert was much involved with the court. During Herbert’s academic career, his only published verse was that written for special occasions in Greek and Latin. By 1625 Herbert’s sponsors at court were dead or out of favour, and he turned to the church, being ordained deacon. He resigned as orator in 1627 and in 1630 was ordained priest and became rector at Bemerton. He became friends with Nicholas Ferrar, who had founded a religious community at nearby Little Gidding , and devoted himself to his rural parish and the reconstruction of his church. Throughout his life he wrote poems, and from his deathbed he sent a manuscript volume to Ferrar, asking him to decide whether to publish or destroy them. Ferrar published them with the title The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations in 1633.

Herbert's eldest brother Edward (who inherited his late father's estates and was ultimately created Baron Herbert of Cherbury) became a soldier, diplomat, historian, poet, and philosopher whose religious writings led to his reputation as the "father of English deism". Herbert's younger brother was Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels to Kings Charles I and II.

Herbert entered Westminster School at or around the age of 12 as a day pupil, although later he became a residential scholar. He was admitted on a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1609, and graduated first with a Bachelor's and then with a Master's degree in 1616 at the age of 23. Subsequently, Herbert was elected a major fellow of his college and then appointed Reader in Rhetoric. In 1620 he stressed his fluency in Greek and Latin and attained election to the post of the University's Public Orator, a position he held until 1627.

In 1624, supported by his kinsman the 3rd Earl of Pembroke, Herbert became a member of parliament, representing Montgomery. While these positions normally presaged a career at court, and King James I had shown him favour, circumstances worked against Herbert: the King died in 1625, and two influential patrons also died at about the same time. However, his parliamentary career may have ended already because, although a Mr Herbert is mentioned as a committee member, the Commons Journal for 1625 never mentions Mr. George Herbert, despite the preceding parliament's careful distinction. In short, Herbert made a shift in his path away from the political future he had been pursuing, and turned more fully toward a future in the church.

Herbert was presented with the prebend of Leighton Bromswold in the Diocese of Lincoln in 1626, whilst he was still a don at Trinity College, Cambridge, but not yet ordained. He was not present at his institution as prebend, and it is recorded that Peter Walker, his clerk, stood in as his proxy. In the same year his close Cambridge friend Nicholas Ferrar was ordained Deacon in Westminster Abbey by Bishop Laud on Trinity Sunday 1626 and went to Little Gidding, two miles down the road from Leighton Bromswold, to found a small community. Herbert raised money (and contributed his own) to restore the neglected church building at Leighton.

Marriage

In 1628 or 1629, Herbert lodged at Dauntsey House in the north of Wiltshire, the home of his stepfather's brother Henry Danvers and Henry's elderly widowed mother Elizabeth. A day's ride to the south, at Baynton in Edington, lived the family of Henry's cousin Charles Danvers (died 1626) who is said to have had a desire for Herbert to marry his daughter Jane. It was arranged for Herbert and Jane to meet, and they found mutual affection; Jane was ten years younger than George. They were married at Edington church on 5 March 1629.

Priesthood

Late in 1624 Herbert was preparing to take holy orders. Doing so would preclude any further service in Parliament and cut him off from many types of secular employment, but would be necessary for him to remain at Cambridge. (Fellows and other officials at the universities were required to take holy orders, normally within seven years of obtaining a master's degree, a vestige of the medieval origin of the university as primarily a training ground for church service.) But at this time Herbert was leaving both Parliament and Cambridge behind. He was largely absent from Cambridge and delegated most of his duties to others. He did not return even to deliver the funeral oration commemorating the death of King James on  March 27, 1625, and though he was not officially replaced as the university orator until January 1628, he had basically begun his removal from the Cambridge community by late 1623.

Ordination as a deacon, which Amy M. Charles suggests occurred in late 1624, by no means resolved the major problems of Herbert's life and in fact may have coincided with a heightening of them. He was presented by Bishop John Williams with several church livings, one at Llandinam in his home county of Montgomeryshire in 1624 and another at Lincoln Cathedral in Huntingtonshire near Little Gidding in 1626, and these brought him at least modest income and required only a minimal effort of supervising some church functions and preaching once a year at Lincoln Cathedral. But this was not enough to support him, and between 1624 and 1629, with no house of his own, he stayed with a succession of friends and relatives: with "a friend in Kent," his stepfather and mother at Chelsea, his brother Henry at Woodford, and Henry Danvers, Earl of Danby (John Danvers's brother), at Dauntesey House in Wiltshire.

In 1629, Herbert decided to enter the priesthood and the next year was appointed rector of the rural parish of Fugglestone St Peter with Bemerton, near Salisbury in Wiltshire, about 75 miles south-west of London. He was responsible for two small churches: the 13th-century parish church of St Peter at Fugglestone, near Wilton, and the 14th-century chapel of St Andrew at Bemerton, closer to Salisbury at the other end of the parish. Here he lived, preached and wrote poetry; he also helped to rebuild the Bemerton church and adjacent rectory out of his own funds. His appointment may have again been assisted by the Earl of Pembroke, whose family seat at Wilton House lay close to Fugglestone church.

While at Bemerton, Herbert revised and added to his collection of poems entitled The Temple. He also wrote a guide to rural ministry entitled A Priest to the Temple or, The County Parson His Character and Rule of Holy Life, which he himself described as "a Mark to aim at", and which has remained influential to this day. Having married shortly before taking up his post, he and his wife gave a home to three orphaned nieces. Together with their servants, they crossed the lane for services in the small St Andrew's church twice every day. Twice a week Herbert made the short journey into Salisbury to attend services at the cathedral, and afterwards would make music with the cathedral musicians.

Poetry was not all that was on Herbert's mind at Cambridge. He was worried about money: not for any extravagant purposes, but simply to live on. His university position paid him modestly, and the yearly portion assigned him in his father's will was administered by his brother Edward and usually sent late and begrudgingly. He sought and probably got help from his stepfather, but, especially for someone who, as Ferrar describes him, valued his "independencie," financial insecurity was a great source of frustration. And he worried about his health. In several of his letters he tells of being sick, restricted to a very careful (and expensive) diet, and too weak to fulfill his daily duties. "I alwaies fear'd sickness more then death," he wrote to his mother, "because sickness has made me unable to perform those Offices for which I came into the world."

Ill health troubled him for his entire adult life, and although many of the "afflictions" he describes in The Temple are spiritual, his intimate knowledge of the precarious state of the human body makes such poems as "Church-monuments" and "The Flower" particularly moving. However, Herbert's primary concern during the 1620s, more than health or money, was choosing his vocation, a recurrent theme in "The Church." In a letter to John Danvers, dated March 18, 1618, he mentions his plans for a spiritual vocation as a long-acknowledged fact, not an agonizing crisis: "You know, Sir, how I am now setting foot into Divinity, to lay the platform of my future life." But this did not keep him from other pursuits: his public position as orator, which he defended as having "no such earthiness in it, but it may very well be joined with Heaven," and friendships with ambitious and powerful men at court and such as Francis Bacon and John Williams. These two men bolstered Herbert's hope that secular and sacred interests could be fruitfully reconciled: Bacon was lord chancellor and translator of Certain Psalmes (1625), dedicated to Herbert; and Williams was a holy bishop and a formidable power broker and patron at court and for a time Herbert's greatest benefactor.

After many early successes Herbert's chances for advancement began to falter. His highly placed friends died (Ludovick Stuart, second Duke of Lennox, in 1624 and James Hamilton, second Marquis of Hamilton, in 1625) or tumbled as a result of political infighting. (Bacon's fall into disgrace after going to trial for accepting bribes may have taught Herbert a great deal about the vagaries of power and the difficulty of reconciling morality and public greatness; and Williams went into retreat after losing battles with first Buckingham and then Laud.) His stepfather and his good friend Ferrar struggled in vain to save one of their pet projects and investments, the Virginia Company, formed to both colonize the New World and help spread the Gospel. After the king dissolved the corporation, Ferrar removed himself to a life of devotion at Little Gidding, while Danvers, much more volatile and angry, intensified both his gardening at his house in Chelsea and his political agitating. Two decades later he was actively fighting against Charles I and ultimately became one of the regicides, directly responsible for the king's execution.

The power and reputation of some of Herbert's influential friends and family members were thus certainly being challenged and weakened at this time, but Walton drastically oversimplifies Herbert's character by identifying thwarted ambition as his primary motivation in moving closer to the priesthood. Although we cannot know for sure, it is just as likely that Herbert was deeply influenced by firsthand experience of the world of business, political intrigue, and court maneuvering and discovered not so much that it did not offer him a place as that it did not suit him. His youthful confidence that the sacred and the secular could be harmonized was not confirmed by the lives of those around him, and his attendance at the particularly tumultuous Parliament of 1624 more likely stifled than fanned any desire for a public political career. Years later, in The Country Parson, he recommended political service as a necessary part of the education of a gentleman: "for there is no School to a Parliament." But the lesson he learned there may be one stated simply in his poem "Submission," where he finds that worldly success and divine service are not easily blended: "Perhaps great places and thy praise / Do not so well agree."

His financial condition improved substantially when in July 1627 a Crown grant made him part owner (with his brother Edward and Thomas Lawley, a cousin) of some land in Worcestershire, which was then sold to his brother Henry. The grant, about which little is known, may have assured Herbert that his family was not completely neglected (perhaps his estimate of his own current fate) nor out of royal favor (the frequent state of Edward, whose life as a courtier and diplomat oscillated between royal grace and disgrace), and the money he gained from the sale of the land was certainly welcome. Charles suggests that it allowed him to resign his position at Cambridge and gave him the wherewithal to turn toward one of the favorite projects of his later life, rebuilding churches, an activity he undertook not only at Leighton Bromswald but also at Bemerton. But the fact remains that at this time Herbert was still without a settled vocation.

For Herbert, Roman Catholics and Puritans are brothers, twin dangers like Scylla and Charybdis between which the British church must navigate: the via media is best, a theme that he returns to in one of the poems in The Temple, "The British Church." Musae Responsoriae is filled with comic caricatures of abrasive Puritan preachers and disorderly worshipers; respectful addresses to King James, Prince Charles, and Lancelot Andrewes as custodians of the peace threatened by the Puritans; and satiric analysis of Melville's ridiculous desire to create a church of nakedness and noise to replace one of visual beauty and music. It is a witty volume aimed to tease and please, but it is also an integral part of Herbert's lifelong attempt to define his church—no mean feat, since neither Scylla nor Charybdis can or should be banished—and his place within it, as defender and worshiper.

Izaak Walton, who wrote the first extensive biography of Herbert, follows the lead of Ferrar and Oley in shaping Herbert's life. Walton's Life of Mr. George Herbert, first published in 1670 and then revised in 1674 and 1675, does not have Ferrar's austerity nor Oley's urgency: by 1670 the king had been restored, the Anglican church was reestablished as the official religious institution of the country, and—despite inevitable exceptions—there seemed to be a growing respect for the advantages of toleration and accommodation rather than confrontation. Herbert was still needed, but not so much for reproof in perilous times as for gentle guidance in times of relative calm. For Walton, Herbert was not only a "primitive Saint"—that is, a throwback to the church of a simpler era—but a prefiguration of the ideal Restoration clergyman: wellborn but socially responsible, educated but devout, experienced in the ways of the world but fully committed to the ways of the church, and knowledgeable about both the pains and joys of spiritual life.  In Walton's hands Herbert comes alive, but it is safest to approach Walton's biography as one of the great works of 17th-century prose fiction.

Death

The death of his mother was followed by decisive changes in Herbert's life. He separated himself finally from Cambridge (another of his mothers, alma mater) and went to stay at Dauntesey House in the countryside, where he recovered his health, probably wrote and revised some of the poems that would be gathered in "The Church." Herbert and Jane Danvers (his stepfather’s cousin) married on March 5, 1629.  The marriage consolidated his relationship with the Danvers family, with whom he seemed to be very attached; eased his transition to life in Wiltshire, where he seemed to be gravitating; and allowed him to make practical plans for setting up his own household and accepting the vocation at which he had long aimed. By the end of 1630, Herbert he was an ordained priest settled in the small parish of Bemerton, where he spent the few remaining years of his life. His long-awaited ordination as a priest occurred September 19, 1630, three years before his death on March 1, 1633. He is remembered as a pivotal figure: enormously popular, deeply and broadly influential, and arguably the most skillful and important British devotional lyricist of his or any other time.

By 1652, the time of the next major biographical statement about Herbert, the tensions of the 1630s had erupted into a devastating civil war: the army of King Charles I had been decisively defeated, and the king himself executed; the bishops had been disenfranchised from their high place in both church and state government; and the maintenance of peace depended on a coalition of parties —old and new landowners, merchants, religious enthusiasts, army commanders, and soldiers—with conflicting interests. Little wonder, then, that Barnabas Oley, a Royalist divine, envisioned Herbert as a "primitive ... holy and heavenly soul" who could instruct a later generation living in much-deserved chastisement and exile. Herbert seemed to be a fit subject for nostalgia, one who lived and died in peace.

Herbert's time at Bemerton was short. Having suffered for most of his life from poor health, in 1633 he died of consumption, only three years after taking holy orders. Jane died in 1661.