Mistress Bridget White, to whom the first four letters are addressed, is not otherwise known. Mr. Edmund Gosse is inclined to identify her with the Lady Kingsmill of the fifth letter. This lady, the daughter of Thomas White, Esq., of Southwick, Hants, married Sir Henry Kingsmill in 1612, and lived until 1672. If Mr. Gosse’s conjecture is correct, Mistress White was in her teens when the first four letters were written, and Donne about twenty years her senior. He writes from his lodgings in the Strand, between which and his house at Mitcham, near Croydon, Surrey, he divided his time from 1605 to 1610.
II
The allusion to the illness of Sir Edward Herbert, afterward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, fixes the date of this letter. He sailed from Dieppe for Dover in February, 1609, and came at once to London. In his Autobiography (ed. Sidney Lee, 2d edition, London, n. d., p. 60) Herbert writes,
“I had not been long in London, when a violent burning fever seized upon me, which brought me almost to my death, though at last I did by slow degrees recover my health.”
This and the preceding letter appear to have been written on the same day.
IV
Perhaps Mistress White’s brother accompanied Sir Edward Herbert, who writes (loc. cit.),
“The occasion of my going hither was thus: hearing that a war about the title of Cleves, Juliers, and some other provinces betwixt the Low Countries and Germany, should be made, by the several pretenders to it, and that the French king [Henry IV] himself would come with a great army into those parts; it was now the year of our Lord 1610, when my Lord Chandos and myself resolved to take shipping for the Low Countries, and from thence to pass to the city of Juliers, which the Prince of Orange resolved to besiege. Making all haste thither we found the siege newly begun; the Low Country army assisted by 4000 English under the command of Sir Edward Cecil.”
Juliers surrendered on August 22, 1610.
V