There is in the British Museum a copy of Donne’s Poems, 1633, which belonged to Charles I, and which contains MS. notes in his hand. “The Bishop” here is Laud; “My Lord Duke” is Buckingham.
CXXV
This letter, and CXXVII, below, which should precede it, relate to the occasion of the delivery of the first of the Two Sermons Preached before King Charles, upon the xxvi verse of the first Chapter of Genesis, which stand at the head of Donne’s published Sermons. James I died on March 27th, 1625. One week later, Donne, at the command of the new King, preached at the Court. His extreme nervousness and almost painful diffidence are clearly implied in these two letters to Sir Robert Ker.
CXXVI
I am unable to give any satisfactory account of this letter. The form of the address indicates that it was written not earlier than 1625 when Ker became Master of the Privy Purse. “My great neighbour” may possibly be “the B” of CXXVIII.
CXXVIII
“The B” to whom allusion is here made, is George Montaigne, Bishop of London since 1621, and a prominent member of the party of which Laud, now Bishop of Bath and Wells, was already the leader. In 1628 Montaigne’s witty suggestion that the King had power to throw “this mountain” into the see of York was rewarded by his appointment as Archbishop of York, Laud succeeding him as Bishop of London. Montaigne warmly defended Montagu against the attacks of Archbishop Abbot. (See note to CXXII, above.)
CXXIX
This letter, written less than two weeks before his death, is addressed to one of the most intimate of the friends of Donne’s later life. Mrs. Thomas Cokain, or Cokayne, had been abandoned by her husband, who left her with a houseful of children, at Ashbourne, the Derbyshire estate of the Cokaynes, and went to London where the rest of his life was spent in the compilation of an English-Greek lexicon, which was finally published in 1658, twenty years after his death.
Donne lived long enough to perform the Lenten service of which he writes. On February 12th, 1631, he preached at Court the last and most famous of his sermons, Deaths Duell, or, A Consolation to the Soule, against the Dying Life, and living Death of the Body, Delivered in a Sermon at White-Hall, before the KINGS MAIESTIE, in the beginning of Lent, 1630[1], By that late Learned and Reverend Divine, John Donne, Dr. in Divinity, and Deane of S. Pauls, London.