Letters to Severall Persons of Honour

by John Donne

The Aurum Reginae is the Queen Consort’s share (one-tenth) of all fines exacted by the King, which under the old law was due to her. Mr. Hakewill was Queen Anne’s Solicitor-General.

XXI

To Sir Henry Goodyer, and written after Sir Henry had entered the service of the Earl of Bedford and before Donne’s removal from Mitcham to Drury House, therefore in 1609 or 1610. The reference to “the new astronomy” is interesting. In 1609 Keppler announced his discovery of some of the laws governing planetary motion, although it was not until the following year that the Copernican System was, by the discoveries of Galileo, firmly established. Donne’s mind seems to have been open to the new knowledge, when Bacon’s was firmly closed against it.

XXII

The reference to “my day” for payment of “this duty of letters,” enables us to identify Donne’s correspondent as Sir Henry Goodyer, to whom Donne was in the habit of writing every Tuesday. (Cf. the first sentence of XVIII.) When the present letter was written Donne was employed in assisting Thomas Morton, Dean of Gloucester, and the leader of the Anglican theologians in the all but interminable controversy with the Jesuits which involved so many of the ablest churchmen of the period. The “Apology” was probably Robert Parson’s “confused and worthless work,” the Treatise tending towards Mitigation, in reply to which Sutcliffe published his Subversion in 1606, and Morton, two years later, his Preamble unto an Encounter, which, happily belying its name, went far toward closing the debate.

XXIII

The loss of her ladyship’s verses on Donne, which are the subject of this letter, is the more to be regretted as none of her composition survives, though verses in her honour are found in the works of Donne, Ben Jonson, Daniel, Drayton, and other poets. This letter belongs to the same period as XXI.

XXIV

The postscript enables us to date the letter near the end of Donne’s residence at Mitcham, when he was engaged in the politico-theological studies which resulted in the composition of the Pseudo-Martyr in 1609.