In the state of the language, and the polemical temper of these early opposite systems of church, and indeed of civil government, it was hardly to be expected that the vindication of the ruling party should be the work of an elevated genius. The vernacular style was yet imperfectly moulded, the ear was not yet touched by modulated periods, nor had the genius of our writers yet extended to the lucid arrangement of composition; moreover, none had attained to the philosophic disposition which penetrates into the foundations of the understanding, and appeals to the authority of our consciousness. On a sudden appeared this master-mind, opening the hidden springs of eloquence—the voice of one crying from the wilderness.
It had been more in the usual course of human affairs, that the whole controversy of ecclesiastical polity should have remained in the ordinary hands of the polemics; the cold mediocrity of the Puritan Cartwright might have been answered by the cold mediocrity of the Primate Whitgift. Their quarrel had then hardly passed their own times; and “the admonition,” and “the apology,” and all “the replies and rejoinders,” might have been equally suffered to escape the record of an historian.
But such was not the issue of this awful contest; and the mortal combatants are not suffered to expire, for a master-genius has involved them in his own immortality.[1]
The purity and simplicity of Izaak Walton’s own mind reflected the perfect image of Hooker; the individualising touches and the careful statements in that vital biography seem as if Hooker himself had written his own life.
We first find our author in a small country parsonage, at Drayton-Beauchamp, near Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire; where a singular occurrence led to his elevation to the mastership of the Temple.
Two of his former pupils had returned from their travels—Sir Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer, men worthy of the names they bore; for the one became his ardent patron, and the other the zealous assistant in his great work. Longing to revisit their much-loved tutor, who did not greatly exceed them in age, they came unexpectedly; and, to their amazement, surprised their learned friend tending a flock of sheep, with a Horace in his hand. His wife had ordered him to supply the absence of the servant. When released, on returning to the house, the visitors found that they must wholly furnish their own entertainment—the lady would afford no better welcome; but even the conversation was interrupted by Hooker being called away to rock the cradle. His young friends reluctantly quit his house to seek for quieter lodgings, lamenting that his lot had not fallen on a pleasanter parsonage, and a quieter wife to comfort him after his unwearied studies. “I submit to God’s will while I daily labour to possess my soul in patience and peace,” was the reply of the philosophic man who could abstract his mind amid the sheep, the cradle, and the termagant.
The whole story of the marriage of this artless student would be ludicrous, but for the melancholy reflection that it brought waste and disturbance into the abode of the author of the “Ecclesiastical Polity.”
According to the statutes of his college he had been appointed to preach a sermon at Paul’s-cross: he arrived from Oxford weary and wet, with a heavy cold; faint and heartless, he was greatly agitated lest he should not be able to deliver his probationary sermon; but two days’ nursing by the woman of the lodgings recovered our young preacher. She was an artful woman, who persuaded him that his constitutional delicacy required a perpetual nurse; and for this purpose offered, as he had no choice of his own, to elect for him a wife. On his next arrival she presented him with her daughter. There was a generosity in his gratitude for the nursing him for his probationary sermon, which only human beings wholly abstracted from the concerns of daily life could possibly display. He resigned the quiet of his college to be united to a female destitute alike of personal recommendations and of property. As an apology for her person, he would plead his short-sightedness; and for the other, that he never would have married for any interested motive. Thus, the first step into life of a very wise man was a folly which was to endure with it. The wife of Hooker tyrannized over his days, and at last proved to be a traitress to his fame.
The mastership of the Temple was procured for the humble rector of Drayton-Beauchamp by the recommendation of his affectionate Edwin Sandys. But not without regret did this gentle spirit abandon the lowly rectory-house for “the noise” of the Temple-hall. Hooker required for his happiness neither elevation nor dignities, but solely a spot wherein his feeble frame might repose, and his working mind meditate; solitude to him was a heaven, notwithstanding his eternal wife Joan!
Hooker might have looked on the Temple as a vignette represents the greater picture. The Temple was a copy reduced of the kingdom, with the same passions and the same parties. What had occurred between the Archbishop Whitgift and the Puritan Cartwright, was now opened between the lecturer and the master of the Temple.